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Tea
By Shougun Shaiya
A Tea Party To Remember
This is the most magnificent moment
of all! There is dignity, a majesty, a sublimity,
in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly
admire. The people should never rise without
doing something to be remembered-
something notable and striking. 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 can't but consider it as an
epocha in history!
From The Diary Of John Adams
December 17, 1773
Tea came to America with the English settlers who emigrated to the
13 colonies. Not suprisingly, the warm beverage was as popular in
the New World as in the Old.
During the middle of the 18th Century, "No taxation
without representation! became the rallying cry of American patriots.
The colonists were angry at the British Parliament for imposing levies
on stamps, rum, and other commodities including tea- without the approval
of America's elected assemblies.
In 1773, Parliament responded to American public
sentiment and repealed all of these taxes, save the one on tea. Parliament,
in retaining the tax on tea as a symbol of its right to tax the American
colonists, badly misjudged the patriots' growing independence and their
impatience with British rule.
When three ships laden with tea landed in Boston
harbor in late 1773, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a British
appointee, refused to let the vessels unload their cargo before paying
the tea tax. Led by John and Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and others,
a group of angry American colonists, disguised as American Indians, boarded
the ships on the night of December 16. The large bales of tea were
hoisted overboard into Boston Harbor, and America's most famous tea party
had begun.
Parliament, angry at the insolence of the colonists
(and perhaps upset that its members had not been invited to the party),
closed Boston Harbor and set in motion the events that led to the American
Revolution.
Source: The Book Of Tea, John Beilenson, 1989 |
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