What Really Happened at the Boston Tea Party

On December 17, 1773, John Adams sat down with his diary and began with the news.

"Last Night 3 Cargoes of Bohea Tea were emptied into the Sea."

A few lines later he added his verdict: "This is the most magnificent Movement of all."

Adams did not call it a party. The surviving accounts from that winter call it the destruction of the tea. The schoolbook version gets the spirit right and a good many of the details wrong, starting with the price.

The schoolbook version

Britain raised the tax on tea. Angry colonists dressed up as Mohawk warriors. Samuel Adams stood up in a packed meeting and gave the signal. A band of patriots rushed to the harbor and threw the tea overboard.

Some of that is true. Some of it came much later.

What the record shows: legal tea got cheaper

Parliament passed the Tea Act on May 10, 1773. It did not raise the tax on tea. It helped the East India Company sell tea in America by letting it ship directly to the colonies and sell through a few merchants it chose, called consignees.

The result, as the National Park Service explains, was legal tea that cost less than the Dutch tea smugglers brought in.

So what was the problem? The tax that already existed stayed in place. Paying it, even on cheaper tea, meant accepting that Parliament could tax Americans who had no vote in it. And the Company's handpicked consignees threatened to cut out the local merchants who had been selling tea all along. The fight was about principle and power, not the price of a cup.

Three ships and a deadline

The first tea ship, the Dartmouth, reached Boston on November 28 with 114 chests aboard. Two more, the Eleanor and the Beaver, followed and were tied up at Griffin's Wharf by mid-December. A fourth, the William, never made it. It was wrecked on Cape Cod in a storm on December 10.

For the Dartmouth, the deadline to land the tea and pay the duty was December 17.

On December 16, thousands of people crowded into the Old South Meeting House. The Park Service says as many as 5,000. A merchant named John Andrews, writing two days later, put it at five or six thousand.

The Dartmouth's owner, Francis Rotch, had spent the day going from office to office trying to get permission to sail the ship back to England with the tea still aboard. Late that afternoon he returned from the governor, Thomas Hutchinson. The answer was no. Hutchinson would not give the ship a pass until customs had cleared it, and customs would not clear it with the tea aboard.

You may have read that Samuel Adams then rose and said, "This meeting can do nothing more to save the country." That line is attributed to him in later accounts, but no word-for-word record from that night survives. What the Massachusetts Historical Society can say is that the meeting broke up and a group of men in disguise headed for the wharf.

Blankets and soot

The disguises were rough. Eyewitnesses described blankets, ragged clothing, and faces blackened with lampblack or soot. Some accounts say the men were dressed as "Indians" or as Mohawks. The feathered headdresses in later paintings were added by the artists.

How many men boarded the ships is uncertain. The Massachusetts Historical Society gives 30 to 60. The Park Service describes about 150.

They worked for about three hours. Andrews wrote that "Before nine O Clock in ye eveng, every Chest, from on board the 3 vessells, was knocked to pieces and Flung over ye sides."

How much tea

A Boston newspaper and the Park Service count 342 chests. The East India Company's own invoice, filed when it asked to be paid back, lists 340. Either way, it was more than 92,000 pounds of tea. The Company valued it at £9,659 6s 4d.

It was five kinds of tea: Bohea, Congou, and Souchong, which are black teas, and Singlo and Hyson, which are green. The tea came from China, not India.

The men were careful about everything else. A Boston paper reported a week later that no other property was harmed. When a padlock on one of the ships was broken, "another was procured and sent to" the captain. "The town was very quiet during the whole Evening and the Night following," the paper said.

Andrews also wrote that one man, a "Capt Conner," was caught stuffing tea into the torn lining of his coat.

Where the name came from

The phrase "Boston Tea Party" came along decades later. It shows up in the 1830s memoir of George R. T. Hewes, who had been there, based on interviews given when he was in his 90s. The National Archives says the event was not known by that name for about 50 years.

What came next

Britain answered in 1774. Parliament passed what it called the Coercive Acts and the colonists called the Intolerable Acts. The first of them closed the port of Boston on June 1, 1774, until the tea was paid for.

Even Benjamin Franklin thought Boston should pay. "I did once wish the destroy'd Tea to be voluntarily paid for, before this or any compulsory Act should be formed," he wrote in September 1774. The records that survive show no payment.