The brutality behind the Boston Tea Party

The horde tore apart Hutchinson’s mansion, from room panelling to roof tiles, drinking his wine and stealing silverware and money. By the following day, he wrote, “nothing remained but bare walls and floor”.

The rampage that wrecked Hutchinson’s home on 26 August 1765 was the culmination of months of unrest among colonists protesting the wildly unpopular Stamp Act, passed by the British parliament in March 1765.

This act, which would take effect the following November, imposed a tax on legal and official papers and publications circulating in Britain’s 13 North American colonies. Heated opposition had flared in cities including New York, Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, with strident objections published in pamphlets and newspapers.

And just 12 days before the attack on Hutchinson’s mansion, an effigy of Boston’s stamp tax agent had been hanged, stamped on, decapitated and burned.

Hutchinson himself believed that the Stamp Act should be repealed; rather than condemning colonists’ protests outright, he had merely advocated moderation. But, with his record of enforcing government levies, Hutchinson was branded a supporter of the tax, and became a focus of colonists’ ire.

So on that August night, a mob incited by a clandestine organisation called the Sons of Liberty surged into action. Having marched on the homes of court officials and customs controllers, the throng made Hutchinson’s mansion its prime target.

In the days that followed, those actions were widely condemned. The Boston Gazette – which itself nurtured ideas that later fuelled the American Revolution – declared that the attack was “utterly inconsistent with the first principles of government, and subversive of the glorious cause”.

But for the group behind the attack, the destruction was a necessary means of sending a strong message to Britain’s government: the colonies would not accept the tax. Days earlier, Samuel Adams – a Bostonian Son of Liberty and later a founding father of the US – had written that the group was “animated with a zeal for their country then upon the brink of destruction, and resolved, at once to save her”. Eight years later, in December 1773, the Sons of Liberty instigated one of the United States’ foundational events: the Boston Tea Party.

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That group’s moniker was likely inspired by a quote from Irish MP Isaac Barré, who in early 1765 had warned that taxation of the American colonies “caused the blood of these sons of liberty to recoil within them”. Disparate protesters quickly united under the name, reciting a phrase that encapsulated colonial anger at Britain’s attempts to enforce various taxes after the Seven Years’ War: “No taxation without representation.”

In the wake of that conflict, which ended in 1763, Britain’s national debt had nearly doubled, from £76.5m to £136m. In the eyes of many in Britain, taxation was a natural means of raising funds to support colonial subjects in North America. Charles Townshend, chancellor of the Exchequer, described Americans as “Children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence… and protected by our arms”, who should be willing to “contribute their mite”.

Many American colonists, though, felt that their tax burden was not reflected in meaningful representation in parliament. The Stamp Act spurred the formal organisation of the Sons of Liberty, with branches in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. The names of many early members are now familiar in the story of American independence, among them John Hancock, Benedict Arnold and Paul Revere.

The Sons of Liberty quickly evolved from being a loose confederation of independent local outfits to a coordinated body organising intercolonial boycotts of all British goods.

These were “very delicate arrangements”, explains Benjamin Carp, professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “It required a lot of cooperation to make sure that the merchants of Boston, Newport, New York and Philadelphia were all working with one another to prevent British merchants from doing business.”

Those behind the boycotts sponsored pamphlets and adverts. One verse, published in a Boston newspaper, exhorted women to buy only locally produced linen: “No more ribbons wear, nor in rich dress appear; Love your country much better than fine things.” The poet also suggested that young men would find women taking such a patriotic approach more attractive.

But another, darker tactic was adopted by the Sons of Liberty to enforce the boycotts – the painful, humiliating punishment of tarring and feathering. This involved pouring or brushing hot pine tar, usually used for sealing sails and ships’ hulls, over the subject’s body.

Then the victim – perhaps a customs official, or someone who had broken a boycott – would be covered with feathers and often paraded on a cart or tied to a rail. An unlucky few suffered further agony and indignation when the feathers stuck to them were set alight, searing their skin. Between 1766 and 1776, more than 70 incidents of tarring and feathering were recorded across the American colonies.

Both boycotts and violent tactics seem to have had an effect: the Stamp Act was repealed in March 1766. New York’s Sons of Liberty celebrated by erecting a Liberty Pole in City Hall Park.

Battleground for liberty

That victory proved short-lived. Further division was sown by the Quartering Act 1765, which required colonists to “quarter and billet” royal troops, and the Townshend Acts passed in 1767 and 1768, which levied indirect taxes on imported goods such as glass, lead and paint.

In New York, the Liberty Pole became a focal point of tensions between colonists and government. Destroyed by British forces in the wake of the repeal of the Stamp Act, it was replaced and torn down four more times in rapid succession.

The dispute escalated through mocking broadsides published by both sides, including one that attacked the Sons of Liberty for acting as though freedom depended upon “a piece of wood”.

On 19 January 1770, Sons of Liberty protesters attempted to stop British soldiers distributing yet another broadside on Golden Hill, in what’s now downtown Manhattan. Weapons were drawn, and injuries were sustained on both sides.

A New York Gazette report in February 1770 described how soldiers “madly attacked every person that they could reach, and their companions on Golden Hill were more inhuman, for, besides cutting a sailor’s head and finger [who] was defending himself against them, they stabbed another with a bayonet, going about his Business, so badly that his life was thought in danger”.

Meanwhile, following violent protests against the Townshend Acts, in October 1768 the British government sent troops to occupy Boston.

“In New York, Philadelphia, Connecticut, the Sons of Liberty held their own,” explains Carp. “But, for a variety of reasons, Boston got the reputation of being the ringleader of all violence. This is how the British regarded them.”

One reason is that, for the most part, the population of Boston was united in its resistance to the taxes. And there was also a higher number of customs officials in that trading hub. “You had officials such as Governor Francis Bernard and his successor, Thomas Hutchinson, writing constant complaints back to parliament,” says Carp.

By March 1770, some 2,000 British soldiers occupied Boston – at the time, a city with a colonial population of 16,000.

“Once the British troops were quartered in Boston, that raised the temperature of the whole resistance movement,” says Sarah Purcell, professor of history at Grinnell College, Iowa.

Along with resentment at what was seen as imposition of the despotic will of the British parliament, labour disputes between locals and the army were rife. Off-duty soldiers – known derisively as “lobsterbacks” for their red uniforms – were permitted to take odd jobs in the city, and did so at low wages. They were thus perceived as taking jobs from Bostonians.

Blood on the streets

Episodes of violence – such as the fatal shooting in February 1770 of an 11-year-old boy, Christopher Seider, by customs official Ebenezer Richardson as he tried to disperse a crowd protesting outside the shop of someone loyal to the British government – set local resentment soaring further still.

When rope workers and British soldiers started to scuffle outside Boston Custom House on 5 March 1770, the altercation quickly snowballed into a tragedy. Five men were killed when British soldiers fired on the crowd. The question of whether the British soldiers received an official order to fire before the first deadly shot remains in doubt.

But in the eyes of many colonists, the Boston Massacre, as it became known, was clear evidence that British methods of enforcement were disproportionate and brutal. The event was immortalised in an engraving by silver- smith Paul Revere, depicting British redcoats gunning down innocent colonists.

“It accelerated the vision of the violence being only on the part of the British soldiers,” says Purcell. “Actually, there was violence on both sides in 1770. But in this case, Americans were the ones who were killed.”

In 1773, the resentments of many New England colonists – now well accustomed to mobilisation against taxes perceived as unfair – coalesced over the issue of tea.

Among the colonies’ growing population, tea had shifted from being “a luxury good to something that even the middling sort and poor people could have access to”, says Purcell. “Men and women both built a lot of their sociability around tea. You can see this in the proliferation of tea tables, cups, teapots and all kinds of material culture that was extremely refined.”

Colonial discontent

In May 1773, the British parliament passed the Tea Act, granting the financially ailing East India Company an effective monopoly on tea sold directly to the colonies. This intensified colonial discontent at British control of access to consumer goods.

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“‘If we’re going to be forced to accept direct trade with a monopoly on tea, what prevents Parliament from setting up other monopoly companies for all the other goods that we import from Great Britain?’ That was the fear of many Americans,” explains Carp. They questioned what might happen if other monopolies followed – perhaps on ceramics or certain kinds of textiles.

Colonists were further aggrieved that revenue raised from the tea tax was going to pay the salaries of certain judges and government officials – including the much-resented Governor Hutchinson.

Purcell describes the act as a “perfect storm of symbolism”. “You couldn’t have chosen a product to provoke people more than this,” she says. “It had a lot to do with the way people related with one another – much more so than other products, such as lead or paper. Tea had this person-to-person connection, and a way of speaking of people’s relationships within the empire.”

Into this febrile atmosphere sailed three ships: the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver. They docked in Boston harbour in November and early December 1773, each carrying more than 100 chests of British East India Company tea.

Prior to the ships’ arrival, the Sons of Liberty had tried to pressure British merchants receiving these goods to resign. They also continued intimidation tactics against merchants – two of whom were Hutchinson’s sons – designated as agents by the East India Company to receive and sell the tea.

Determined that the tea should not reach dry land, Sons of Liberty patrolled the wharves, and town meetings were arranged to negotiate the ships’ removal back to London.

During a climactic meeting of “the body of the people” at Boston’s Old South Meeting House on 16 December, it was made clear by Francis Rotch, one of the ships’ owners, that Hutchinson would not yield and allow the ships to leave the harbour with the tea still on board. In response, Samuel Adams rose from his pew and announced: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.”

Some – including George Bancroft, a 19th-century American historian who later chronicled this meeting – suggest that the words spoken by Adams were a signal to begin destroying tea. Others remain unconvinced of the link between his declaration and the events that followed.

Whatever Adams intended to mean by those words, a few moments later voices could be heard from the western end of the meeting house. “People were shouting: ‘Boston harbour, a teapot tonight, hurrah for Griffin’s Wharf ’,” explains Carp.

A group spilled out towards the wharf, and around 100 men dressed as Mohawks boarded the three ships – where they proceeded to dump 46 tonnes of the company’s tea into Boston harbour.

It was an orderly protest rather than a menacing attack. Those involved took care not to touch any other goods on the ships, and the only violence meted out was inflicted on one of their own number who was caught pocketing tea.

Evidence even suggests an air of merriment. The tide was out, and the dumped tea began to clump up above the waterline. “They had to send a number of apprentice boys out in a boat,” explains Carp, “to take some oars and whack at these piles so that they would disperse in the water and flow out to sea.”

Distant destruction

It remains unclear to what extent this event were prearranged, or how much it was incited by senior figures in the Sons of Liberty. Adams, for example, pointedly stayed behind at the Old South Meeting House, a move often characterised as deliberately distancing himself from the destruction.

One reason for his stance may be that, though the destruction was peaceful, it was far from simply symbolic. The financial value of the dumped tea was vast: at that time, a tonne of tea was worth the same as Paul Revere’s house in the North End of Boston.

“If you think of the cost of a middle-class house in a very dense part of a city,” says Carp, “and multiply that figure by 46, you get a sense of the value of the tea that was lost.”

As for the perpetrators, no individual was ever prosecuted for the destruction of the tea. No one came forward to provide names to colonial or British authorities, and many involved kept their identities secret for decades afterwards. As a result, the event quickly took on a mythological quality. It was an act of peaceful protest, carried out by a faceless group loyal to the cause and to each other, that caused shock waves throughout the colonies and across the Atlantic.

In the wake of the destruction of the tea, parliament’s response was decisive. In early 1774, it passed a series of laws named the Coercive Acts. These imposed severe restrictions on the colonists, shutting down any sense of self-governance in Massachusetts.

Boston harbour was closed until the city paid for the wasted tea; further troops were installed on Boston Common; and the number of town hall meetings that could be held in a year was reduced, along with other restrictions on local freedoms.

These oppressive acts sparked even stronger colonial resistance, including more violence. In January 1774, customs official John Malcolm was dragged from his home by a Boston crowd, stripped and covered with tar and feathers.

The mob then placed a noose around his neck and threatened to hang him from the Liberty Tree, a famous old elm known as a gathering point for protesters. The event was amplified by newspapers in London, which highlighted the rebel colonists’ brutality. One doctor noted how, while removing the tar from Malcolm, the “flesh comes off his back in stakes”.

In response to the Coercive Acts, the colonies became further united. In September and October 1774, delegates from 12 British North American colonies gathered for the First Continental Congress to discuss joint colonial interests and to coordinate resistance to British rule, increasingly seen as zealous and unfit.

Less than a year after the destruction of the tea – an event that didn’t become known as the Boston Tea Party until the 1820s – the fallout from the protest had blazed a path towards revolution. That began in earnest in April 1775 when British troops, attempting to seize a cache of the colonists’ weapons, clashed with American militiamen at Lexington and Concord. This “shot heard around the world” heralded eight years of conflict and the birth of the United States.

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Forgotten violence

In the 250 years since the Boston Tea Party, it has become enshrined as a peaceful milestone on the road to American independence from Britain. But the violence that preceded and followed the event is often forgotten.

“I think there are two reasons why violence got written out of the story,” says Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature at the University of London. “It’s a very gratifying story that this was a non-violent protest – that, when Boston’s people were pushed to their ultimate point, when they had no other recourse, they didn’t harm a single human. They boarded these ships and only destroyed tea.

“That’s a nice story for people to tell themselves about their ancestors, and about the origins of American independence,” Churchwell adds. “But it’s not true.”

It’s also wrong, Churchwell argues, to portray the violence that led up to the Boston Tea Party as being discrete. “It was mob actions. It was threats. It was people throwing stones,” she says.

There are those in politics who even today try to co-opt the event to invoke a particular idea of resistance. A notable recent example is the conservative Tea Party movement within the Republican party that mobilised around 2009, during the administration of President Barack Obama.

“Given that there was violence around the Boston Tea Party in the run-up to the revolution, as well as in the revolution itself,” Churchwell observes, “it’s important to note that invoking the Tea Party is not necessarily a non-violent kind of invocation. No independence was ever gained without violence from both sides – and violence that could be objected to on both sides.”