The Boston Tea Party
The era of the American Revolution was marked by a series of violent outbreaks in town and countryside. A sequence of urban violence runs from the Stamp Act riots in 1765 through the Sons of Liberty violence, the Boston Massacre, the burning of the Gaspee , and the Boston Tea Party to the incident that triggered the Revolutionary War--the fighting at Lexington and Concord. Behind the violence in Boston was the city's remarkable patriot infrastructure of the 1760s and 1770s, headed by James Otis, Samuel Adams, and their colleagues. The infrastructure grew out of the convergence of a historical tradition with a contemporary situation. The historical tradition was the CookeCaucus heritage of popular politics in Boston, and the contemporary situation was the diversity and complexity of Boston's social, economic, and political life in the 1760s, which formed a fertile seedbed for the growth of the anti-British movement. In 1773 the East India Company was on the verge of financial collapse. Since the seventeenth century the company had traded in India as its private corporate enterprise. Many company officials had become rich through bribery and special privileges, but the company itself had suffered. One of its few remaining assets,
The closing of the port of Boston was the first in a series of parliamentary measures of 1774, known collectively as the Coercive or Intolerable Acts. Only the extremists approved of it, and throughout the colonies, for the moment at least, it injured their cause. The British saw the Boston Tea party as an outrage and they determined not to let it go unpunished. The Boston Tea Party didn't cause the American Revolution, but it was one of several significant events that served to widen the gap between the colonies and Great Britain. " In Charleston, patriot pressure also frightened off tea importers. This plan received legislative form in the Tea Act of 1773. Until Massachusetts had paid for the tea destroyed, a naval force would close Boston Harbor to shipping. In Parliament William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, and the eloquent Irish member Edmund Burke warned that punitive measures would lead to revolt. But, though he was American born, as governor of a British colony he felt bound to enforce the law, and when three tea-carrying cargo ships arrived in Boston harbor he determined that they must unload, come what may. , carried on and perfected the organization to the extent that the historian of the Cooke political tradition, G. It is significant that the father of patriot Samuel Adams was a leading member of the Caucus and that the young Samuel Adams was literally raised in the CookeCaucus tradition. seventeen million pounds of tea held in its London warehouses, remained unsold because of the American boycott, and also because heavy taxes made it too expensive in Britain itself. The Virginia House of Burgesses convened in the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg after the Tory governor refused to let it sit at the capitol, and there it called for a continental congress to meet to consider united action. The Massachusetts Government Act struck a severe blow at self-government by taking away from the provincial legislature many of its powers of appointment and giving them to the royal governor.
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