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The Boston tea party

p The era of the American Revolution was marked by a series of violent outbreaks in town and countryside . A sequence of urban violence runs from the Stamp Act riots in 1765 through the Sons of Liberty violence the Boston Massacre , the burning of the Gaspee , and the Boston Tea Party to the incident that triggered the Revolutionary War--the fighting at Lexington and Concord . Behind the violence in Boston was the city 's remarkable patriot infrastructure of the 1760s and 1770s , headed by James Otis , Samuel Adams , and their colleagues . Richard Alan Nelson

, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States (Westport CT : Greenwood Press , 1996 ) 3

The infrastructure grew out of the convergence of a historical tradition with a contemporary situation . The historical tradition was the CookeCaucus heritage of popular politics in Boston , and the contemporary situation was the diversity and complexity of Boston 's social , economic , and political life in the 1760s , which formed a fertile seedbed for the growth of the anti-British movement

In 1773 the East India Company was on the verge of financial collapse Since the seventeenth century the company had traded in India as its private corporate enterprise . Many company officials had become rich through bribery and special privileges , but the company itself had suffered . One of its few remaining assets , seventeen million pounds of tea held in its London warehouses , remained unsold because of the American boycott , and also because heavy taxes made it too expensive in Britain itself . Why not , Lord North asked , drastically reduce the English tax ? With only three pence per pound to be paid on arrival in America , the tea would become so cheap that it would undersell smuggled Dutch tea . The tea would sell widely and the East India Company would be saved from ruin and the government would at last raise some much-needed revenue from the troublesome mainland colonies . This plan received legislative form in the Tea Act of 1773 . What North did not foresee was that Americans would perceive this scheme as an insulting bribe and a tax--even a three-penny one--they were opposed in principle to paying To make matters worse , he consigned the East India Company tea exclusively to colonial merchants who favored British policies and obeyed the trade laws . Frank W . Thackeray and John E . Findling , eds Events That Changed the World in the Eighteenth Century (Westport , CT Greenwood Press , 1998 ) 117 A wiser statesman would have seen the consequences of the Tea Act . But North , though witty and energetic , was a hardliner on America who had supported the Stamp Act and opposed its repeal , and had endorsed the Townshend Duties . Such a man could not have anticipated what would now take place

News of the new British affront enraged the radicals . In New York City ,most of the merchants resolved that the tea would not be sold . The patriot citizens of Philadelphia met and adopted resolutions declaring that since "the duty imposed by Parliament upon tea landed in America is a tax...

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