The Boston Tea Party was one of many of confrontations from Charleston, South Carolina, to York, Maine, in 1773 and 1774 to prevent shipments of East India tea from entering the Colonies.

Since 1767, boycotts and non-importation agreements in opposition to the Townshend Revenue Acts had promoted political networks and personal connections across the colonies. Perhaps most importantly, regardless of their success or failure, these early resistance actions created a growing sense of common cause among colonists that began to trump local insularity and economic, social, and geographic differences.

The British underestimated extent of colonial political mobilization and the adamancy of colonial commitment to "no taxation without representation," even though colonial opposition had influenced Parliament's repeal of the Townshend Acts in 1770 (with the exception of the tax on tea). In 1773, Britain then imposed the Tea Act, in an attempt to bail out the financially-ailing British East India Tea Company. The Act allowed the company to sell directly to America, thereby bypassing competitors, circumventing British taxation, and generating sufficient corporate income to avoid bankruptcy. The Act actually lowered the price of tea in America; colonists, however, perceived it as another scheme to circumscribe what they had come to define as their rights.

Colonists acted swiftly toward nullification, generating newspapers and broadsides urging colonists once again to refuse to buy imported goods. A strongly-worded article in the Pennsylvania Packet stated,". . . revenue acts are opposite to the very idea and spirit of liberty . . . whenever Tea is swallowed, and pretty well digested, we shall have new duties imposed on other articles of commerce."

In 1773, colonists consumed an estimated 1,200,000 pounds of tea annually, much of it smuggled from Holland. It was perhaps reasonable that the East India Company believed colonial resistance to buying their tea would dissolve if they could get tea to land and offer it for sale. They engaged ships scheduled to arrive simultaneously in November 1773 in Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and made arrangements to find American brokers for their cargo—generally merchants whose personal loyalties lay with the Crown.

All these pre-arrangements made for a poorly-kept secret: American political activists were well apprised beforehand when and where the tea ships were going to try to make port and unload their cargo and news of activities at each port was immediately sent to the others so that all their actions could be coordinated.

Nowhere in the American Colonies was the East India Company able to sell its tea. Outside of Boston, colonists, merely by persuasion or by bullying the shippers and consignees, were able to prevent the landing of the tea into port—or at least its sale. In Boston too, more than a month before the Tea Party, a body of men gathered in the street outside the store of tea merchant Richard Clarke, demanded that the proprietor vow not to receive any tea shipments. One merchant wrote that the crowd, "not receiving such an answer as they demanded, they began an attack upon the store and those within, breaking down doors, flinging about mud, &c., for about an hour, when they began to disperse, and a number of gentlemen, friends of those agents coming to their assistance, they left the store and went upon change, but met with no further insult, tho' there is much threatening."

In Lexington, the inhabitants met and resolved not to use tea of any sort, no matter where it had come from, and to show their sincerity, "they brought together every ounce contained in the town, and committed it to one common bonfire." Boston, perhaps, was unique among the other major American ports insofar as its Colonial Governor, Thomas Hutchinson, was relatively eager to demonstrate to the "troublemakers," with whom he had already had a series of confrontations, that he was the supreme authority in the affairs of the Colony of Massachusetts. This certainly contributed to why events played out in Boston as they did. (Visit this Ask a Historian response for details of events in the Boston Harbor.)

Events that happened elsewhere, after the Boston Tea Party on December 14, 1773, were also later styled tea parties, linking them to the momentous action in Boston. Like the Boston Tea Party, they were efforts to reject tea shipments and to enforce a boycott of the East India Company's product.

On December 3, 1773, Alexander Curling, the captain of the London, had brought a cargo of tea to port in Charleston, but its consignees had refused delivery. On December 22, a week after the Boston Tea Party, a committee of colonists told Curling to return the tea to England, but the captain balked. The customs collector then had the 257 tea chests seized for non-payment of customs duties, unloaded, and stored in a locked room in the Exchange building (they were sold in 1776, with the proceeds going to finance the Revolutionary cause).

In late June of 1774, Captain Richard Maitland brought tea into Charleston harbor aboard the British ship Magna Carta. When local officials confronted him, he told them he would return the tea to England, but local men boarded the ship after hearing rumors that he intended to sell the tea. Captain Maitland took refuge on board the 100-gun British man-of-war HMS Britannia. That ship landed seven chests of tea in Charleston on November 3, but local officials ordered the merchant consignees to dump it in the Cooper River "as an Oblation to Neptune," and in order to avoid mob violence, they did.

On Christmas Day, 1773, three days after the tea from the London was seized in Charleston, the British ship Polly, laden with 698 cases of tea, sailed up the Delaware River toward Philadelphia and landed at Chester, Pennsylvania. Its captain, Samuel Ayres, was escorted into the city where he was met by a committee of hard men representing a mass meeting of perhaps 8,000 citizens who told him that he had better return the tea to England. They may have offered to pay some of his expenses and may also have drawn his attention to a broadside that promised to tar and feather him if he attempted to unload the tea. The broadside promised the same treatment to any river pilot who tried to bring the ship into Philadelphia and to any consignee who attempted to accept the shipment. The Polly sailed away without putting into port.

On December 10, just before the Boston Tea Party, the brig William, which had been headed to Boston along with the other tea-laden ships, wrecked off Provincetown. The ship's captain, Joseph Loring, off-loaded the 58 chests of its tea cargo before abandoning the ship, and sent it along to Boston for safe keeping, by agreement with the consignee, the son of Boston tea merchant Richard Clarke. Jonathan Clarke, who had rushed to Wellfleet to make the transfer, allowed his cousin there, David Greenough, to have two cases to sell on Cape Cod, a small amount of which he sold to a Colonel Willard Knowles, who also happened to be in charge of the town of Eastham's stock of ammunition. When their neighbors discovered what had happened, both men were brought into disrepute. Action erupted on March 7, 1774, when about 80 people unsuccessfully tried to "wrest the Towns Ammunition out of the Hands of Col. Knowles." Knowles's neighbors eventually forgave him, and Greenough apparently destroyed the rest of the tea from his two cases.

That left 56 chests of the William's cargo that had been sent to Boston. The Sons of Liberty quickly discovered where it was being kept and raided the place, but found only half of it, 28 cases, which they smashed and emptied into the harbor.

On March 7, 1774, as Colonel Knowles confronted his Eastham neighbors, and a day that Colonial Governor Thomas Hutchinson had proclaimed a day of public fasting, a band of men, evidently believing they had located some of the William's tea that remained, entered the Boston shop of tea merchant Davison, Newman, & Company (whose tea had been destroyed in the Boston Tea Party) and took 16 chests of tea down to the harbor, broke them open, and dumped the contents into the water. This has been referred to as the second Boston Tea Party.

Again, on the same day, March 7, 1774, King George III sent a message to the British Parliament, asking it to exact retribution for the destruction of tea in Boston. Parliament obliged him by passing the Boston Port Act, which would close the port to commerce, beginning on June 1.

On April 18, 1774, the Nancy, commanded by Captain Benjamin Lockyer, having been blown far off course by storms, finally anchored at Sandy Hook, "having on board something worse than a Jonah, which, after being long tossed in the tempestuous ocean, it is hoped, like him, will be thrown back upon the place from whence it came," according to the New York Journal. Its cargo consisted of 698 chests of tea. The consignees sent a note to him, saying they would not accept the tea because it would "expose so considerable a property to inevitable destruction." They advised Lockyer that, "for the safety of your cargo, your vessel, and your persons, it will be most prudent for you to return" to England. Members of the New York chapter of the Sons of Liberty took charge of the Nancy at Sandy Hook, and prevented its crew from deserting the ship, and escorted Lockyer into New York City, where he agreed to return to England with the tea and began procuring supplies to do so.

Meanwhile, on April 22, the ship London (which had been in Charleston in December) arrived, now under the command of a Captain Chambers. Although Chambers protested that he had no tea aboard, the Sons of Liberty had received word from Philadelphia that he was smuggling 18 chests, for his own profit, hidden among the ship's blankets. Chambers was taken into custody and members of the Sons of Liberty searched the ship, discovered the tea chests, broke them open, dumped the tea into the river, and brought the busted chests back to the city, where they were used to ignite bonfires in the streets. Chambers was threatened with his life, but he managed to escape, and made his way to the Nancy. A few days later, the ship sailed back to England with both Lockyer and Chambers aboard.

One night in late January, 1774, Princeton College students from all the colonies broke into the College's storeroom, and then, as described by student Charles Beatty, "gathered all the steward's winter store of tea and having made a fire on the campus we there burned near a dozen pound, tolled the bell, and made many spirited resolves." They also made an effigy of Massachusetts Governor Hutchinson, tied a tea canister around its neck, and burned it in front of Nassau Hall. Students subsequently continued their agitations, including paying nocturnal visits in groups of 40 "drest in white," to local townspeople rumored to be tea drinkers, seizing their stock of tea, and burning it.

On May 23, 1774, the local chapter of the Sons of Liberty, having heard that the Port of Boston was to be closed, and having passed a series of "resolves" against buying, selling, or drinking tea shipped from England, heard that the brig Geddes (which was possibly owned by the local customs inspector, William Geddes, who was also a merchant) had put into port in Chestertown with tea in its cargo. They boarded the brig by force and dumped its tea into the Chester River.

Some of the facts in this instance are a little spare—such as who owned the tea and where it had come from. Nevertheless, the city of Chestertown stages an enthusiastic reenactment of the "Chestertown Tea Party" every Memorial Day weekend.

In the summer of 1774, Thomas Charles Williams, the London representative of an Annapolis merchant firm, tried to smuggle tea across the Atlantic into Annapolis by disguising nearly a ton of it in 17 packages labeled as linen, and loading it among the rest of the cargo on the brig Peggy Stewart. The captain of the brig, Richard Jackson, only discovered the true nature of the "linen" while at sea. A few years before, an Annapolis precedent had been set when its customs officer refused to allow any ships to unload any portion of their cargo until the tax on all of it had been paid. This now alarmed Captain Jackson because most of the rest of the Peggy Stewart's cargo consisted of 53 indentured servants.

The ship reached Annapolis on October 14, 1774, and Williams's business partners decided they wanted nothing to do with his attempt at smuggling. They could not think of risking the lives of the indentured servants by sending the ship back across the Atlantic during the storm season which had just begun. They paid the customs tax due and quickly got the human cargo ashore, leaving the tea onboard. The presence of tea aboard ship had inflamed public opinion in Annapolis. Williams and his business partners were threatened with lynching; their store and their homes, with destruction. To avoid that, the business partners offered to burn the Peggy Stewart, which they owned, along with its cargo, which they did, on the night of October 19. This came to be called the Annapolis Tea Party. The city of Annapolis marks this each year with a ceremony.

On September 15, 1774, the sloop Cynthia sailed into harbor at York, Maine, from Newfoundland with a cargo that included 150 pounds of tea for its owner, local judge and Tory sympathizer, Jonathan Sayward. The local Sons of Liberty noted its arrival and called a town meeting on September 23. Meeting participants voted to seize the tea, which was done against the objections of the ship's captain, Sayward's nephew, James Donnell. The tea was placed in a storeroom, "until further Discovery could be made." That night, "a Number of Pickwacket Indians" (so it was said) broke into the storeroom and made off with the tea. Two days later, however, it was mysteriously returned, so perhaps Sayward was able to drink his tea after all, without having to pay customs duty on it (because it had been stolen). This was later called the York Tea Party.

In the summer of 1774, the captain of the small ship, Greyhound, loaded with East India Company tea, was reluctant to try to unload his shipment in Philadelphia, so just before the Delaware Bay, he put into Cohansey Creek, and anchored at the little hamlet of Greenwich, New Jersey. There he unloaded his cargo, and it was put into the cellar of a Loyalist, Daniel Bowen, who intended to have it eventually carried overland into Philadelphia and to sell it there.

On the night of December 22, 1774, after planning in secret for several months, 40 locals dressed as Indians broke into Bowen's house, carried the cases of tea into a field, dumped the tea in a large pile, and set it all on fire. Those who participated in this tea party were arrested but were not convicted because the jury was in complete sympathy with them.

The founders pondered this question from the very beginnings of the republic. Although the Articles of Confederation directed each state to contribute money voluntarily in proportion to the land values within the state, there was no provision compelling the states to pay. Many states initially contributed little or nothing toward the federal government’s operations. Raising revenue became much easier after Americans ratified the U.S. Constitution, but taxation continued to present challenges.

One potential revenue source involved the sale of western lands. In his plan to organize the Northwest Territory—that area north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi—Thomas Jefferson proposed that Congress give the land away rather than selling it, because future taxes would provide a return on the new nation’s investment. However, when legislators laid out the process by which the territories became states in the Northwest Ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787, they directed that the land be sold. Although land sales helped to raise some revenue, it was not enough to make the new nation solvent.

Fortunately, the United States Constitution gave Congress the teeth to compel states and individuals to pay taxes. There was no income tax, so most federal revenue came from customs duties, land sales, and taxes levied on goods such as distilled spirits, slaves, and tobacco. In 1789, Congress created the Department of Treasury to manage the nation’s money, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed innovative ways to collect revenue. Some of his ideas, such as granting subsidies to domestic manufacturers and imposing tariffs on imported goods to encourage “buying American,” were too controversial for Congress to implement. However, Congress enacted some of his other proposals, such as a Bank of the United States, which held all federal money. The federal government owned 20% of the bank’s stock, and private investors purchased the rest of the stock.

Congress also approved Hamilton’s suggestion to levy a 25% tax on whiskey, placing the payment burden on farmers, who paid the tax when they delivered grain to the distillery. Starting in 1791, farmers on the western edge of several states petitioned Congress for relief. After winning only small concessions, they mounted increasingly aggressive demonstrations against the tax. Unrest escalated in July of 1794, when 7,000 farmers marched toward Pittsburgh to protest the whiskey tax. President Washington and Secretary Hamilton led 13,000 soldiers to Western Pennsylvania to quell the rebellion. When forces arrived in September of 1794, the demonstrators were gone. Two men were convicted of high treason but Washington later pardoned them. Even after the government put down the rebellion, the whiskey tax proved difficult to collect, and Congress repealed it after Jeffersonian Republicans came to power in 1800.

Taxes, custom duties, and many other means of generating revenue bred resentment among citizens long before the Revolution, yet Congress had to find ways to collect the revenue required for the government’s operation. Despite the best efforts of Congress and others, however, Americans have never embraced taxes. In fact, most still look upon them as, at best, a necessary evil.

After British victory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Parliament attempted to better organize the British Empire. Among other things, Parliament, led by the ministry of George Grenville, enacted the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, and so for the first time taxed the British North American colonies. The Sugar Act amended the Molasses Act of 1733 by lowering the duty on French West Indian molasses from 6d per gallon to 3d. Reducing the duty made purchase affordable and so encouraged what the higher duty had discouraged.

The colonists denounced the Sugar Act. They reasoned that British subjects had a sacrosanct right to have their property protected. The power to tax threatened property unless the taxing body was chosen by the tax payers and also had to pay the same taxes it required others to pay. The British House of Commons met neither requirement when it taxed the colonies, and so the colonists concluded that taxation without representation violated property rights.

The colonists made the same argument in response to the Stamp Act. But the Sugar Act was enforced primarily on the oceans and by the navy, meaning that the colonists could not physically prevent the tax from being assessed. The stamp tax required that to be legal most paper products—newspapers, court documents, marriage licenses, wills, even playing cards and dice—carry an official stamp. To work the tax depended on colonists within colonial communities selling the stamps, making suspected stamp distributors vulnerable to the pressure of their neighbors. The Grenville ministry announced the stamp tax in February 1765 to go into effect in November. In the intervening months the colonists protested, rioted, and intimidated anyone suspected of taking the office of stamp distributor. Led by the Sons of Liberty, the colonists made the Stamp Act unenforceable before it even began. In 1766 the new Rockingham ministry repealed the Stamp Act but only amended the Sugar Act lowering the duty to 1d per gallon. The experience showed that the colonists opposed all parliamentary taxation but that they could much more easily prevent internal taxes than external ones.

The Chatham ministry came to power in 1767 and enacted new taxes, the Townshend Acts, that year. These external taxes taxed lead, glass, paint, and especially tea. The Townshend Acts provoked the same ideological criticism and led colonists to have grave concerns that British liberty was not safe within the empire. Because the taxes were external they were much harder to prevent but by 1769 the colonists had organized a boycott movement. Growing tensions caused troops stationed on the western frontier to be reassigned to Boston, which led to the famous Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. The new first minister, Lord North, had already decided to repeal most of the Townshend Acts, which were threatening to tear apart the empire.

In 1770 North repealed all of the acts except for the tax on tea, the most lucrative of the taxes. The remaining tax kept relations tense and suspicious. Finally in 1773 North sought to resolve the impasse. He replaced the last Townshend Act with the Tea Act of 1773. The act was meant to bail out the East India Company, make clear Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies, and make the price of tea cheaper for colonists than it had been before. North reasoned that no colonists could fear an act that made them drink cheaper tea. He was wrong and the Boston Sons of Liberty threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. The Boston Tea Party destroyed tea worth £11,000 or about $1.5 million today. That was the last tax Parliament ever imposed in the colonies. The Tea Party caused the passage of the Coercive Acts of 1774, which were punitive laws meant to punish Massachusetts, but were not taxes. The Coercive Acts led to the first and second Continental Congresses and, ultimately, to the declaration of independence. So taxes did not cause the American Revolution, but taxation without representation did create a climate of suspicion and fear that provoked the events which did.

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.