Taxes, Terror, and Tea: Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Brett Lange (1:10)

Hi, Historyfeels listeners, welcome back to the podcast. In the dark of night on April 18th, 1775, one of the most iconic moments of the American Revolution began. A common silversmith from Boston named Paul Revere took off on his horse, rode through the night to give warning of an imminent invasion. It was around 11 o'clock when Revere left on horseback to deliver his famous warning to the nearby town of Lexington. Only a few hours earlier, a pair of lanterns had been hung in Boston's Christ Church. This was the signal that troops of British regulars were taking a route by water across the Charles River. But what has mostly been lost in the poems and stories, remembering Paul Revere's legendary ride through the night, is exactly who was the original target of his warning. On that April evening, a pair of men stood at the center of all the events in Boston, and they were who Revere was seeking that night. Revere's task was not a mission to deliver his warning to hundreds of ready militiamen, but instead to give a warning to these two figures that the British troops were marching out specifically to arrest them. That night, it was believed across Boston that hundreds of British troops had been rallied for the express purpose of bringing to justice a pair of revolutionaries that had set the entire city on fire. These two men were Samuel Adams and John Hancock. These two men were the architects of an almost three year long crisis that had driven the citizens of Boston into outright rebellion against their colonial masters, leading the charge in what would soon become the American Revolution. Just like their role in Revere's iconic midnight ride has become largely forgotten, so has the role of the men who called themselves the Sons of Liberty. But who the British saw is nothing more than outright terrorists. In our episode this week, we'll honor the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, which came on December 16th, 1773 And we'll do this by looking at the story of how the spark of rebellion began in Boston, how the secret work of Adams, Hancock and the Sons of Liberty culminated in a moment where the destruction of a common man's beverage became a symbol of outright rebellion against the most powerful empire on earth.

A Tea Time Addiction To understand how the Boston Tea Party managed to spark an entire continent into rebellion, you have to first begin with the items behind the madness, and that's tea. In our modern day, there are very few cultural items as closely associated as the British are with tea. In America, we stereotypically picture English afternoon tea time to be an activity as intrinsically linked with the British aristocracy. But in the years leading up to the American Revolution, tea had a very different reputation in both Britain and her American colonies than it does today. By the mid-18th century, drinking tea was not a habit that had centuries of cultural practice behind it. But over the course of only a few decades, a nationwide obsession was born. Connections between the British and tea only date back to the 1650s when Dutch traders brought the drink over to Europe from China. In Asia, drinking green tea had been a staple for thousands of years. But at first, Europeans didn't know exactly what to make of the strange heated drink. But as we mentioned, over the course of the 18th century, the whole tea became an obsession, especially in Britain. 1699, the British imported around 6 pounds of tea from China. By the time the end of the century, they were importing nearly 11,000 tons. It is the type of explosion in popularity that only comes when a nation gets totally addicted to a product. Such addictions are always fertile ground to financial abuse and malpractice. In the case of British tea, an entire industry of smugglers were born to get cheap tea in the hands of the most common men and women. Increasing availability and falling prices because of smuggling led tea to become incredibly popular with the lower classes in the 18th century. Back in England, even the poorest of citizens began to see tea as an affordable luxury. Because of how much tea was being imported, it became cheaper for common people to drink than anything but water. As an interesting side note, one of the reasons it was so popular with the destitute population of Britain was that the hot drink could accompany cold food and thus give the illusion of eating a warm meal. Naturally, this popularity of tea with the masses caught fire in England didn't take long to spread to the British colonies in the New World. To fully understand the connections between the tea trade, the colonies, the act of unrest that kicked off the American Revolution, there's one more historical Goliath from the time period to quickly discuss, and this is the East India Company. The East India Company, which was founded in 1600 and grew to become the financial backbone of the entire British Empire, owed much of its power to tea. British control over the trade of tea coming from China became an increasingly crucial tool that kept the entire empire afloat. At the height of the company's power, when it was bringing in more revenue each year than the entire British government, tea represented 60% of the company's total trade. Tax on this tea added up to more than 10% of the entire revenue of the British Crown. It's hard to overstate how crucial this made the products, and the taxes generated by its sale, to the entire operation of the empire. Entire separate industries relied on tea to keep them afloat. Everything from the sugar plantations of the West Indies to the factories making crockery and tableware depended on the tea obsession for their markets. There are even fascinating theories that British tea habits were one of the driving forces behind the entire English Industrial Revolution, as the caffeinated factory workers had the focus and stamina to withstand long tedious shifts operating machinery. Basically, the situation of the empire was this. If the tea didn't sell or if the revenue the drink generated dried up, it would be like cutting the gas line from a car engine while it is speeding down the highway. Both the operators of the East India Company and the political leaders in Britain had plenty of incentive to make sure that there was no interruption in the flow of tea and coin to the British people scattered across the expanding empire. Of course, like the rest of history, there were plenty of men in the empire who saw tea as an avenue for personal enrichment, didn't care about the economic ramifications of the drink in the wider empire. One such man was a smuggler from Boston whose desire to keep a hold of his own black market would eventually strike a match that would lead to revolution. That man was Samuel Adams.