Boston Tea Party - Dec. 16, 1773

American colonists in Boston protested British rule with the Boston Tea Party incident on this day in 1773.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past, one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hi there, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Christopher Haciotis. Today

(00:21):
it's December six, and the Boston Tea Party took place
on this day in seventeen seventy three. Now we have
to go back to Boston in the colony of Massachusetts
in the seventeen sixties, so a little bit before the
Tea Party. This is before the United States was a
country or a political movement. Really, everyone was still a
British subject. And to understand the context of what became

(00:42):
the Tea Party, what led to the event, you need
to know about the Stamp Act of seventeen sixty. Now,
many goods had to be stamped in order to prove
taxes were being paid back to Britain. This isn't just
about postage stamps. It's a playing cards, all sorts of goods.
And the colonists responded that these internal taxes were two owners.
It's too much of a pain. It was a contentious issue.

(01:03):
The people who are actually in charge of overseeing the
stamps resigned and left their posts. Britain responded that, okay,
we won't do that, but will instead tax imports to
the colonies. And all this talk of tax may conjure
thoughts of the saying no taxation without representation. This is
the sort of thing that is hammered into the heads
of people in American history classes in middle school and
high school. And what it means is that no specific

(01:26):
members of Parliament back in Britain were elected by the
colonists or represented their interests directly. Parliament, on their hand,
responded that essentially the colonists did have representation because everybody
in Parliament represented them sort of. This was known as
virtual representation. The colonists didn't really see eyed eye with
the Parliament on this and it led to some more conflict.

(01:47):
And that brings us to t now. Tea was super
popular in the colonies. Colonists consumed one point two million
pounds of tea per year, which is more than half
a million kilos. The imports, however, were controlled exclusively by
the British East India Company, and the import tax could
be increased or decreased as necessary by Parliament. One justification

(02:08):
that Parliament gave for setting up this monopoly and levying
these taxes was they had to spend money and resources
on the French and Indian War, which they claimed benefited
the colonists, but it also benefited Parliament and the British
Empire as well. Again, a series of events leads up
to the Tea Party. It's it's not just one isolated event.
Laws and acts come into play. The seventeen sixty nine

(02:29):
Indemnity Act repealed the tea tax, but then the Townshend
Acts restore that tax, and then those were repealed in
seventeen seventy and then in seventeen seventy three we have
the Tea Act that comes along. Now at this point,
the people of Boston felt unrepresented. There was discontent. The
whole population of the city was about fifteen thousand, but
there had been meetings of up to five thousand people

(02:52):
to talk about the problems. That's the third of the
population of the city. And on November seventeen seventy three,
word got out among one of these meetings a shipment
of tea was coming in. Now the ships arrived in
Boston Harbor and wanted to unload their tea, but the
colonists particularly didn't want them to do that because then
they'd have to pay the duty. And the way it
worked is once the tea hit the docks and left

(03:13):
the boat, that's when the duties had to be paid.
So folks whose names you may have heard if you're
familiar with American history, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Sam Adams,
folks like this and a hundred and thirteen other Boston
towns people were at the old South Meeting House in Boston.
Now that's at the corner of Washington and Milk Streets
today and the building still stands. You can see it.

(03:34):
It's directly across from the Irish Famine Memorial. A little
bit of a hubbub grows up in the crowd, you know,
people get a little agitated, and everyone marches down to
the docks and they dump what today would be nearly
one million dollars worth of tea into the harbor. This
is generally a peaceful protest. There was destruction of property, obviously,
and probably some shouting, some kicking and shoving, but nobody

(03:55):
was killed. There were no serious attacks In fact, of
the one and sixteen people who dissipated in this act,
only one was arrested. Now, word of what became known
as the Boston Tea Party didn't reach England until January
of seventy four. The British reacted angrily. They closed the
port of Boston. They insisted the British East India Company
be reimbursed for their lost goods. They reinstated the Quartering Act,

(04:18):
which meant that British soldiers could stay in the houses
of colonists for free. They restricted meetings, and they also
decreed that British officials who were accused of major crimes
in the colonies couldn't be tried in the colonies that
would have to come back to England. So the Boston
Tea Party didn't kick off the American Revolution per se.
It's often shorthanded that way in history classes, but the

(04:38):
first draft of the Declaration of Independence didn't come into
existence until about ten months later. But if we can
agree that a country is a set of ideals and goals,
that there are no real borders on the ground, it's
just a way that people think about themselves and the
groups they belong to, and what they value. The Boston
Tea Party really did codify some of what America today

(05:01):
believes about itself. If you want to learn more about
the Boston Tea Party, then search for the December eighth,
two eight episode of our companion podcast, Stuff You Missed
in History Class that's titled how the Boston Tea Party Worked.
I'd like to thank Casey Pegram and Chandler Mais for
their audio work on this show. You can subscribe to
This Day in History Class or Stuff You Missed in

(05:21):
History Class on Apple Podcasts. You can find them on
the I Heart Radio app, or pretty much anywhere else
you find your podcasts. Now please make sure to listen
to tomorrow's episode when host Tracy V. Wilson returns, and
she will regale you with a history behind a certain celebration.