Intolerable Acts

Context

In May 1773 the British ministry piloted through Parliament the Tea Act, intended to rescue from imminent collapse the East India Company and its many investors. The legislation exempted the company from the import duties on tea brought into England and reexported to America. To British imperial policy makers, as well as America's friends in Parliament, the measure seemed neither novel nor politically dangerous. To help the East India Company dispose of its massive surplus of tea, then moldering in warehouses throughout London, the bill substantially lowered the commodity's price while retaining a small duty. It also gave the East India Company the authority to choose the American merchants to whom it would consign the tea. With one negligible bill, British ministers believed that they would save the company and increase revenues to the treasury through the reduced duty and the increased consumption by Americans of a more affordable product, while at the same time subtly reinforcing Parliament's right to lay external taxes on the colonies.

No one in London foresaw, however, the enemies the Tea Act would create. British policy makers failed to appreciate the degree to which radical American politicians would exploit the bill as a thinly veiled attempt to secure colonial submission to the principle of parliamentary taxation. They also failed to recognize the political hazard created by a measure that would undercut and possibly drive out of business those merchants who made fortunes by smuggling cheap Dutch tea into the colonies. In ports up and down the Atlantic coast, radical politicians and angry merchants found common cause in opposing the Tea Act.

In the summer of 1773 the East India Company put the plan into action when it dispatched shipments of tea to four major colonial ports—Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. When the ships reached New York and Philadelphia, they were turned back by colonists who refused to allow the tea to land. In Charleston the tea was unloaded, but the tax was not paid. In Boston, however, Massachusetts Bay's governor, Thomas Hutchinson, believed that the landing of the tea was a necessary demonstration of parliamentary sovereignty. Once it became clear that Boston's radicals would not allow the tea off the company's three ships, Hutchinson intended to invoke a law that authorized him forcibly to unload the cargo of any ship in the harbor that failed to pay the import taxes within three weeks. At the same time he refused to grant permission for the company's three ships to leave. On the evening of December 16, when Samuel Adams learned of Hutchinson's final refusal to release the ships, he turned to the large crowd that had gathered at the Old South Meeting House and declared that they could do nothing more to save the country. Almost immediately, a group of men disguised as Mohawk warriors assembled outside and proceeded to Boston Harbor, where they boarded the ships and systematically dumped overboard 352 casks of tea worth 10,000.

When news of the destruction of the tea reached Britain, the actions of the Boston radicals were almost universally condemned. Even among America's friends in London, there were few who would condone the blatant ruin of private property, especially in response to a law that had actually made tea more affordable for Americans. Some colonial leaders, such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, thought that the Bostonians had gone too far. In no other American city had radicals acted with such harmful consequences.

The people of Boston and Massachusetts Bay, therefore, were clearly isolated as the driving force of American resistance to British authority. Imperial policy makers were eager to settle the issue of sovereignty underlying the claims of American radicals that Parliament had no right to rule for them. When an effort by moderate British ministers to find a way to enforce the laws and punish Boston under existing authority failed, the cabinet decided that the matter should be settled by Parliament. The shift in focus from the Crown to the legislature of the kingdom dramatically transformed the issues at stake, making a collision between British and American perceptions of constitutional supremacy inevitable.