Revolting Acts—
the beginning of revolution

If what we know today about the “Boston Tea Party” is what we learned in fifth grade, we have missed the story. It only got that name in the 1830s after nearly everyone involved was dead. For 60 years it was known as “the destruction of the tea,” and not everyone was proud about having done it. Moreover, seven ships carrying tea were sent to four American colonies during that fall, each port deciding separately how to deal with the arriving problematic tea. Only Boston resorted to violence and only some of the people there did so, but many more than those few suffered for their actions. Not the story you remember?  

This December 16 is the 250th anniversary of the beginning of what Cornell University history professor Mary Beth Norton calls, “the long ’74.” Indeed, the 16 months from the destruction of the tea in Boston to the “shot heard round the world” in mid-April 1775 include “the real revolution” in America. During those months, many proud subjects of the colonies of Great Britain became staunch advocates for independence and equality and also adversaries of a monarch and a presumptuous Parliament. All that remained afterward was the fighting, the seven-year drama of a war to secure independent citizenship.   

During 1774, colonists became polarized in their political views, the term “loyalist” first appearing as a self-proclaimed label for those who resisted the idea of breaking away from the prestige and the protection of the most powerful country in the world. The revolution during “the long ‘74” was not a population-wide consensus. It was an internal contest for the hearts and minds of Americans about our collective future. We are about much the same today.  

After the costly Seven Years War of the mid 1700s, Parliament needed to replenish British coffers. Gleaning extra taxes from the American colonies with the Stamp Act and the subsequent Townshend Acts had not worked out well. But Americans were prodigious drinkers of tea, so taxing tea held continued promise. Meanwhile, the East India Company, suffering financially, convinced Parliament
to arrange a sweetheart deal to facilitate the collecting of the tea tax and channel those funds to pay the salaries of some colonial officials, whose pay was otherwise controlled by colonial assemblies. Colonists saw this arrangement, orchestrated by Parliament without any consultation or representation involving the colonists, as usurping colonial power. Think of it as if our Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly passed self-serving laws by which they grabbed control over elections, made inaccessible to the public all the records of their decision-making regarding the people’s business, set up an investigative process that operated like a CIA black site, and then gerrymandered the voting districts so they could never lose. What Parliament did was like doing that, and the colonists were incredulous at the arrogance and quickly angered.  

Due to the several-weeks-long delay of communications across the Atlantic and slow communications up and down the seaboard, the colonies were only learning in August of the Tea Act passed in May. Shipments of taxable tea were departing England in October 1773 to arrive in late November. Meanwhile, colonists discussed possible actions to thwart this grabbing of colonial power. After several town hall meetings, New York and Philadelphia refused to let the ships into their harbors. Charleston customs agents confiscated the tea and locked it up. One of four Boston-bound ships wrecked on Cape Cod and another was blown off course to Antigua. Only Boston, where Royal Governor Thomas Hutchison refused to allow the ships to leave without paying the tax, resorted to destroying the tea just before British soldiers would have taken control of it on December 17 after a 20-day waiting period would expire.  

Community firebrands, poorly disguising their identities as “Mohawks,” boarded the ships and took three hours to toss 342 opened chests of tea (valued over $1.7 million today) into Boston Harbor. They damaged no other cargo or the ships.  

Many colonial leaders decried the destruction of private property, arguing that East India Company should be compensated. As word of the destruction of the tea reached England, Parliament planned how to punish the British subjects of Boston.

Thus began “the long ’74.” (More to come.) ●