Boston Tea Party 250th anniversary

Boston Tea Party 250th anniversary: City to re-enact key moment in history
Story by By Forrest Brown, CNN  •
12/15/23

They were fed up with a British tax on tea in particular and consumed by resentment of British authority in general. So on the night of December 16, 1773, a group of rebellious colonial Americans called the Sons of Liberty decided to make a statement.

They sneaked onto ships docked in Boston Harbor and proceeded to toss 342 chests of imported Chinese tea into the water. This act of mercantile defiance impressed the heck out of future US President John Adams.

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“This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History,” he wrote in his diary.

Adams certainly hit the bullseye in his prediction that this night would echo through history. And now the city is set to re-enact the Boston Tea Party on its 250th anniversary. Here’s what they have planned:
What will happen at the Tea Party re-enactments
Live, historical re-enactments will start at 4 p.m. Saturday, December 16, at Faneuil Hall, according to a representative of the December 16th 1773 organization, which is putting on the event. Tickets are sold out for viewing inside the hall, but people can still gather outside and watch screenings of what’s going on inside.

At 6 p.m. at Downtown Crossing (Reader’s Park at Milk and Washington streets), a town crier will deliver news to the crowds of Patriots and Loyalists gathered outside of re-enacted events simmering inside the Old South Meeting House (also sold out).


At 7:30 p.m., a rolling rally led by fife and drum corps will march toward Harborwalk. The procession is free and open to the public.

At 8 p.m., re-enactors will be on two replica ships, ready to throw tea off the vessel. The December 16th group said “more than 2,000 donations of loose tea have been received from all 50 states and from all around the globe in addition to 250 pounds from London’s East India Company, the same company where the tea came [from] 250 years ago.”

At the waterfront, bleachers will be available first-come, first-served for people to sit and watch the destruction of the tea. Parts of the reenactment will be live-streamed.

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Crowds will be able to follow re-enactors down to the harbor. - Caroline Talbot
Crowds will be able to follow re-enactors down to the harbor. - Caroline Talbot
© Provided by CNN
Is this tea dump going to be safe for the harbor and the animals in it?

“We have always made it our goal to leave the smallest environmental impact on the Fort Point Channel.” the organizing team of the 250th Boston Tea Party Anniversary & Reenactment said in statement to CNN Travel. “The tea itself is a biodegradable plant as it is just dried leaves. All other materials are retrieved from the harbor. The chests themselves are retrieved from the water and there are no other substances left in the water.

“Additionally, while we have seen a large amount of participation in the tea donation project, the amount of tea that we are throwing pales in comparison to the original amount thrown in 1773.  In 1773, the Sons of Liberty threw over 92,000 pounds of tea. We will not be throwing anywhere close to the number.”

Types of tea at the Party and other tidbits
Five different blends of tea were thrown into the water during the Boston Tea Party, the December 16th group said. And they haven’t faded into history – you can still sample and buy them in case you’d rather sip than sling your tea.

Check them out at Abigail’s Tea Room at Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. They are:

• Bohea: One of the first teas imported by the East India Company in the 18th-century.

• Congou: A black tea quite prestigious in Colonial America.

• Hyson: A spring green tea that was a favorite of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

• Singlo: A term for Chinese green tea that encompasses several varieties that are harvested later than early spring hysons.

• Souchong: A black tea from Fujian province of China with a distinctive smoky aroma.

The museum also features the Robinson Tea Chest, “the only known tea chest still in existence from the Boston Tea Party,” and a vial of tea on loan from Old North Foundation of Boston believed to be from the Tea Party.

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The Undying Spirit of the Boston Tea Party
Story by The Editors  •

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The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor by N. Currier, 1846
© Library of Congress
Two hundred and fifty years ago today, in the dark of night in Boston Harbor, 50 Americans crossed a fateful line. The result would bring the rest of the colonies with them, leading to revolution — and to the America we know today.

The fundamental question that led to the Boston Tea Party was taxation without representation. Seeking to recoup the costs of the Seven Years War (known here as the French and Indian War), which had begun on the western Pennsylvania frontier, the British Parliament between 1765 and 1770 made successive efforts to tax the American colonists. The amounts involved were hardly oppressive, and the colonists were among the most lightly taxed people in the Western world at the time — but they liked it that way, and grasped immediately the menace to their freedoms in the principle that they could be taxed by a faraway body in which they had no voice. They were also alarmed that new taxes would finance a larger and more intrusive colonial government.

The result was protests, boycotts, and worse — including riots that terrorized anyone who cooperated in collecting the taxes. This struck the British as unreasonable, but being unreasonable in devotion to liberty and self-government turns out to be an excellent basis upon which to found a nation.

Parliament repeatedly backed down and repealed most of the taxes. The most conspicuous exception was the tax on tea, which Americans then consumed in vast quantities, all of it imported from China. The tax was widely evaded, with some historians estimating that anywhere from 75 percent to 90 percent of the tea consumed in the colonies was “Dutch” — i.e., smuggled to avoid taxes.

The trigger for a renewed crisis lay at the intersection of corporate bailouts and international trade — already topics with the potential for explosive controversy in the 1770s. In 1773, Parliament engaged in an unprecedented and controversial bailout of the British East India Company, the private corporation that was then coming to rule large portions of India. As a part of that notorious exercise in crony capitalism, Parliament gave the EIC for the first time the right to sell tea directly in America. This would eliminate one of the rounds of taxation levied at the point of the tea’s sales to middlemen within Britain.

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The British hoped that this would make EIC tea more competitive on the American market. But its entry threatened the livelihoods not only of smugglers but of everyone in the distribution chain. More alarmingly, it was received by Americans as a renewed effort to establish the principle that Britain could lay taxes in the colonies without consent — a reaction Parliament failed to foresee. Adding insult to injury, colonists denounced the EIC as a corrupt monopoly and abusive colonial master in India that should not be unleashed upon Americans.

In Philadelphia and New York, colonists refused to allow the EIC’s tea ships to enter their harbors, and in Charleston, customs officials impounded the tea. Boston was later to respond, and efforts to intimidate the consignees of the tea were unsuccessful. Royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, his family deeply invested in the EIC and the consignment of the tea, dug in his heels. His behavior confirmed the fears of those who felt that the EIC would corrupt America just as it corrupted London and Bengal.


So, at a signal from Samuel Adams, 50 Sons of Liberty, wearing implausible Native American disguises as Mohawks, broke onto the tea ships on the night of December 16, 1773. It was the last night before Hutchinson’s royal customs officials would begin processing the tea for taxation and sale. From the efficiency of their efforts, we can assume that many of them were longshoremen familiar with unloading shipborne cargo. In the course of a few hours of work, they dumped 342 chests of tea, 90,000 pounds of it worth ;10,000 (millions in today’s money), into the harbor. They did no other damage, even replacing the one padlock they broke. Most of the participants, sworn to an oath of secrecy, took their identities as Tea Partiers to their graves.

The methods of the Tea Party in destroying private property, and the extremity of their provocation of British authorities, dismayed and divided American patriots just as John Brown’s acts did to Republicans in 1859. Benjamin Franklin, then in London, bemoaned “the act of violent injustice on our part.” John Adams, by contrast, found “a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this the last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire.”

More important, as Adams immediately recognized, “the Dye is cast: The People have passed the River and cutt away the Bridge.” He was right: this was a revolutionary act, and the British authorities responded with punitive measures that would lead, 16 months later, to the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord.

The Boston Tea Party acquired its storied name in the 19th century. It has remained an icon ever since of resistance to encroachments on liberty, especially those that emanate from an unholy and mutually corrupting alliance of big government and big business. Not for nothing was it the namesake of the Tea Party movement of 2008–15, which protested bank bailouts and mandates to buy health-care policies from private insurers.

The Boston Tea Party also symbolizes something obstreperous in the American character. The American Revolution, bloody as it was, was accompanied by far fewer civil horrors and disorders than revolutions in France, Russia, or China. The destruction of the tea and the threats to businessmen and government officials are not the best model for a civil society resolving its disputes peaceably in normal times. For that, we have recourse to representative institutions, courts of law, and a free press. The spilling of the tea propelled the dissolution of the bonds between Britain and her colonies, and to seven years of destructive war. But it also sent a message that comes down to us through the ages: Push Americans too far, deny them their liberties and their access to the political process, and they will not stand for it.