Boston Tea Party Organizers The famous Boston patriots who were members of the Children of Freedom included John Adams, John Hancock, James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Paul Revere and Dr.
in Boston
Harbor, a group of Massachusetts settlers disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and unload 342 boxes of tea in the harbor. A controversy between Britain and the colonies arose in the 1760s when Parliament first tried to impose a direct tax on colonies in order to increase revenues. Some settlers, known in the colonies as Whigs, objected to the new tax program, arguing that it was a violation of the British Constitution.The British and British Americans agreed that, according to the constitution, British subjects could not be taxed without the consent of their elected representatives. In Britain, this meant that taxes could only be collected by Parliament. However, the settlers did not elect members of parliament, so the American Whigs argued that colonies could not be taxed by that body. According to Whigs, settlers could only be taxed by their own colonial assemblies.
Colonial protests resulted in the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766, but in the Declaratory Act of 1766, Parliament continued to insist that it had the right to legislate for colonies in all cases. It was not a question of giving up tax revenues for the nearly 1.2 million pounds of tea that settlers drank each year. Traders organized a no-import agreement and many settlers pledged to refrain from drinking British tea, and activists in New England promoted alternatives, such as domestic Labrador tea. Therefore, the company could sell the tea at a lower price than usual in the United States or Great Britain; it could sell less than to anyone else.
In May 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea to the colonies tax-free and much cheaper than other tea companies, but still tax tea when it reached colonial ports. From the modern perspective, the Tea Party may seem like a powerful but largely symbolic protest. Parliament responded in 1774 with intolerable laws or coercive laws, which, among other provisions, ended local self-government in Massachusetts and shut down Boston trade. The passage of the Tea Act (177) by the British Parliament gave the East India Company exclusive rights to transport tea to the colonies and empowered it to undermine all its competitors.
He expressed his strong disapproval of “his conduct in the destruction of tea and claimed that the Bostonians “were crazy. Coercive laws closed Boston to merchant ships, established a formal British military government in Massachusetts, rendered British officials immune from criminal prosecution in the United States, and required settlers to quarter British troops The protesters, some disguised as Indians Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company. It was an act of protest in which a group of 60 American settlers threw 342 boxes of tea into Boston Harbor to agitate both against a tea tax (which had been an example of taxation without representation) and against the perceived monopoly of the East India Company. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the “tea party” with some 60 members of the Sons of Freedom, his underground resistance group.
Meanwhile, the meeting assigned twenty-five men to guard the ship and avoid tea, including several chests from Davison, Newman and co. The Tea Party was the culmination of a resistance movement throughout British America against the Tea Act, a tax that had been passed by the British Parliament in 1773.
