The Boston Tea Party

The American Revolution--like everything before the twentieth century--is popularly believed to have been a cut-and-dried affair, a simple matter of momentous decisions and memorable epigrams. The Boston Tea Party demonstrates, in plentiful detail, how perplexingly "modern" the world had become 200 years ago. This excellent narrative explores every facet of the highly complicated events which moved the British colonies toward independence from 1767 to 1774. Harvard has all the more reason to welcome it because the author, Benjamin Labaree, now Dean of Williams College, was once Senior Tutor of Winthrop House.

Although the book reads as fluidly as most popularizations, it is primarily a piece of thorough, balanced scholarship. In writing it Professor Labaree compiled material from thousands of original sources--public records, company ledgers, state documents, newspapers, broadsides, private letters and diaries. Such abundant documentation could easily swell into pedantry: here, however, it serves to reconstruct the subtlety and complexity of issues as contemporaries saw them, a fascinating exercise in painstaking historicism.

Professor Labaree asserts that the Boston Tea Party marked the point of no return in deteriorating British-colonial relations during the 1770's. When George III's ministry rashly retaliated with the Coercive Acts, the colonies united in their sympathy for Boston and their distrust of London.

The Tea Party was not a freak explosion of radical patriotism. Rather, it climaxed a long, uneven series of national differences and emotional misunderstandings ignited by the passage of the Townshend duties in 1767. The colonists resisted these duties so effectively that parliament soon had to repeal them, but the tax on imported tea was left in force. By 1770, however, efforts to organize a boycott of the wicked brew had failed. The prosperous colonies had grown too fond of the beverage to give it up, enabling smugglers to carry on a thriving trade in untaxed Dutch tea.

At this point, Professor Labaree contends, colonial resentment of domineering imperial policies might have wilted and died. The crisis revived only when Parliament resolved to dump the tea of the ailing East India Company on colonial markets. Seizing on this pretext, a minority of determined patriots rekindled the excitement of 1767, made bolder and bolder claims of American rights, and threatened accomplices of the East India Company with mayhem. Finally, on the night of December 16, 1773, a group of "Mohawks" tossed 340 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.

"This Destruction of the Tea," wrote John Adams, "is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid, and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an Epoch in History. . ." In London William Pitt was one of the few men who shared the clarity of Adams' vision; in opposing the Boston Port Bill, one of the Coercive Acts, he prophesied that "if that mad and cruel measure should be pushed. . . England has seen her best days." Most Englishmen disagreed: "They will be Lyons whilst we are Lambs, but if we take the resolute part they will undoubtedly prove very meek." The "resolute part" was taken, making the Revolution inevitable.

The story of the Tea Party enters prominently into Professor Labaree's interpretation of the Revolution, but it also illuminates the mind and moods of colonial America before the war. He uses it to typify situations and attitudes found throughout the colonies and Great Britain, and the book is certain to become a standard work not only on the Tea Party, but on the whole pre-Revolutionary period, as well.