Tea Act

Parliament passed the Tea Act on May 10, 1773, intending to rescue the financially struggling British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies and allowing it to sell directly to retailers, bypassing the colonial merchants who had previously controlled the trade. The act actually lowered the price of tea for American consumers — even with the existing Townshend duty included, East India Company tea would cost less than smuggled Dutch tea. British officials expected the colonists to be grateful. They had fundamentally misread the situation.

The issue was never the price of tea. It was the principle: the Townshend duty, imposed without colonial consent, remained in place. Accepting cheaper tea that still carried an unconstitutional tax would amount to accepting Parliament's right to tax the colonies at will. Colonial merchants whose livelihoods depended on the existing trading system had their own reasons to resist, and the Sons of Liberty were ready to organize. On the night of December 16, 1773, approximately 116 men disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and threw 342 chests of East India Company tea — worth roughly £10,000, or about $1.7 million today — into the water.

The British response, the Coercive Acts of 1774 — which colonists called the Intolerable Acts — closed Boston Harbor, curtailed Massachusetts self-government, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The punishment was designed to isolate Massachusetts and break colonial solidarity. It had the opposite effect: the other colonies rallied to Massachusetts's defense, delegates convened the First Continental Congress, and the path to the Revolution became essentially irreversible. The Tea Act and the Tea Party it provoked compressed what might have been a decade of gradual escalation into two years.