Posted by The Huggy Merchant on December 16, 2000 at 05:38:22:
If Virtue & Knowledge are diffus'd among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security.
(Samuel Adams, 1772-1803)
This day in 1773.......
In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships, and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor. The midnight raid, popularly known as the "Boston Tea Party," was in protest of the British Parliament's Tea Act of 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly on the American tea trade by greatly lowering its tea tax. The low tea taxes allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled out of America, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation without representation. When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbor, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the "tea party" with about sixty members of the "Sons of Liberty." The destroyed tea was valued at approximately ten thousand pounds. Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, the following year. The colonists responded by calling the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance against the British.