Boston Tea Party: Fun and Interesting Facts

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Over three hundred cases of English tea were thrown into the harbor in Boston on December 16, 1773. Three ships that were docked at the harbor had the tea on board when a group of American colonists decided to dump the tea as a protest for their independence. Some of the colonists dressed up as Indians and sneaked on board to carry out this act of protest against taxes. The colonists were supposedly dressed as Mohawk Indians. According to one participant memoirs, they never dressed as Indians. This participant was Ebenezer Stevens who was about twenty- years-old at the time. The governor of Boston, also British, decided that until taxes were paid on the tea; the ships with the tea on board would sit in the harbor.

The first published account of the Boston Tea Party (BTP) was from Joshua Wyeth who was 16 at the time of his participation.

Here are some facts that you may not have known about the Boston Tea Party:

1. The Americans relied on smuggled goods during their boycott of British goods. They also used any substitutes they could find such as Labrador tea that was made from plants that grew in the colonies. They refused to be taxed on goods from Britain. The also had a problem with Britain deciding how the tax money should be used.

2. Instead of the three ships that reported to be coming to Boston, there were four. Beaver, Dartmouth and Eleanor arrived at the Harbor, but the fourth ship, William, never arrived because it had run aground near Cape Cod and was stranded there.

3. The location previously thought to be where the tea party incident occurred, the official Boston Tea Party ship museum, has been changed to the intersection of Congress and Purchase streets. This was because of the landfill projects that had been going on in the Boston Harbor. Finding out that the projects were so huge, it brought about the thought that it could not possibly have been where the Tea Party had happened.

4. The original list that had been put together held Thomas Young as one of the participants in the dumping of the Tea. But historic documents have Thomas Young lecturing an audience on the medicinal risks of drinking tea when the incident occurred, so even though he was a suspect, it could not be proven that he planned or participated.

5. Tea smuggling became a growing business in Britain also. This came about because of the same problems with East India being the only legal importer of tea so many of the British citizens turned to tea smugglers to purchase their tea also.

6. After the dumping, protesters swept the docks clean. Even though the protest sounded to be a violent one, it was not. It took a while for anyone to realize what had been done because nothing had been destroyed except the tea being dumped. The realization came that something had happened when a new lock was sent to the captain to replace one that had been broken.

7. The tea that was destroyed did not come from India as originally thought, but from China and was a Bohea type of tea.

8. The Suns of Liberty had a British spy as one of it main leaders, so most of the protesters had to leave Boston after the dumping.

9. The Beaver and the Dartmouth once thought to be British ships were, in fact, ships owned by a family name Rotch from Nantucket. Their offices were located where what is now called the Pacific Club.

10. The last known survivor of the Boston Tea Party lived to be 115 years old and was photographed. His name was David Kinnison.

In a biography of Thomas Crafts, who was a Boston Tea Party participant, there was a meeting of the North End Caucus on October 23rd where members voted to oppose any tea that was sent there for sale by East India. The Caucus Pro Bono Publico to be more exact were suspects of this protest as well as John Adams, who was not a member of this organization, but the leader of the Sons of Liberty. The Sons of Liberty had more members participating in the Boston Tea Party than any other group.

The bibliography for Thomas Crafts was written by his grandsons. The Caucus Pro Bono Publico was a club formed within the Masons’ Club, but not of the club itself. John Hancock was also a suspect because of his smuggling business benefiting from any destruction of the tea imported from India.

Approximately two-thirds of those who participated were supposedly under the age of 20. Nine protesters was age forty and over, and there were 16 teenagers. The biggest portion of participants of the BTP was from around the Boston vicinity, and some had come from such places as Maine and Worcester.

The evidence for placing blame is so conflicting, that no one could actually be held personally responsible for the planning of the activities that bought about the actual event of the Boston Tea Party. Members of Congress wrote to King George to ask him to remove war ships he’d placed in the Harbor because of the protesters.

There are many accounts of the story of the Boston Tea Party. There are accounts from actual participants of the Boston Tea Party stating their story for the newspaper of that time (Boston Gazette, Boston Evening Post). The remaining accounts are from surviving relatives, new paper clippings and memoirs. There was an account by a traveler who arrived for a visit the day before a meeting of the Body of The People and was allowed to attend. His name is not given, but the story was written as “Account by an Impartial Observer”.

I hope you have enjoyed reading these little known facts about the Boston Tea Party as much as I enjoyed writing about them. There is also a British accounting of details of the BTP; look it up.

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