# 1301.3e - Taxation and Tea (1767-74) **Channel:** Chad Tomaselli **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hS68ADPuqI **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/5hS68ADPuqI ## Chapters - 0:00 — Townshend Acts and Colonial Resistance - 3:45 — Boston Massacre and Its Aftermath - 8:11 — Tea Act and Boston Tea Party - 15:55 — Intolerable Acts and Continental Congress ## Transcript **[0:00]:** With the first several acts of British taxation having been a failure, or rather having been repealed, Parliament is going to change tactics yet again. Remember, the Sugar act tried to make a certain foreign good more expensive to drive the colonists towards the British version. The Stamp act was a tax, not even necessarily a large tax on one product alone. In 1767, after the repeal of those first two acts by the Declaratory act, which also answered the no taxation with that representation argument, Parliament will pass the Townshend Acts. Parliament had tried taxing one product two different ways with the Sugar and Stamp Acts. And with how poorly that went, they decided to try something new. The Townsend Acts were a series of low or reasonable taxes on on the most imported products for the colonies, in particular glass, lead, paper, paint and tea. To reiterate, the taxes on these products were much lower than the tax on paper from the Stamp Act. **[1:12]:** Basically instead of one big tax on one product, this was a series of smaller taxes on many products. So the tax burden is essentially the same but dispersed among multiple products. **[1:26]:** You could really see Parliament trying here to find something the colonists would not throw a fit over. Government is basically high stakes trial and error. The colonial response was as expected. More protests, boycotts and violence. They reiterated their previous arguments including no taxation without representation. **[1:45]:** They ignored Parliament's response to that. In the Declaratory act the colonial legislatures convened and condemned the acts. Within a year all of these various taxes will be repealed except for one, and that was the tea tax. **[2:09]:** You see other images that aren't weird, although they still have a person who's leashed of tarring and feathering and you can see the, the oil being hot oil poured into their mouths which could likely was a death sentence if ingested because it would burn your esophagus. It's a whole thing. **[2:35]:** The tea tax was the only one of the Townshend Acts to be kept. It was kept to demonstrates Parliaments demonstrate Parliament's right to levy taxes in the colonies. Tea was also the most lucrative product of the five. **[2:51]:** The five being glass, lead, paper, paint and tea. **[2:57]:** The British also increased army presence in the colonies in 1768 to keep order and protect tax collectors. But protests and violence continued into 1770. Remember I told you that when we talked about the problems of in the aftermath of the French Canadian War that the continued military presence would dovetail into the other aftermath problem of debt. And here we see this in particular and I'll also say here there were other acts of taxation that the British did. These are, I'm just spotlighting some of the major ones, but there were other ones here, but to a much smaller degree and with a much lesser reaction from the colonists, which is why we're focusing here. **[3:45]:** So the protests continued into 1770, which leads to one of the most famous events in Boston. Now, you may think from the slide that I'm about to say Boston Tea party, but I am not. Boston Massacre. On the 5th of March, 1770, tensions were high in Boston, and of all the colonial cities regarding the taxes, they were highest in Boston, as it was the biggest port for importing tea into the colonies. **[4:14]:** In a square. ON Once again, the 5th of March, 1770, British soldiers and a young adult or teenager started to trade some words, trade some insults, know jaw back and forth. A crowd forms around this. The. The soldier who calls for help and his seven more soldiers arrive to help him. **[4:40]:** The. The crowd continues to grow as word gets out of. Of this, whatever this is. There's yelling and shouting from the crowds. **[4:52]:** The soldiers are lined up, Not quite surrounding the crowd because that wouldn't make sense. If you have a gun, you're firing under a crowd. You could shoot your buddy on the other side. **[5:07]:** But they started to at least try to do some crowd control. **[5:13]:** The soldiers were eventually pelted with snowballs, which by some accounts had rocks in the middle of them. It's one thing to have a snowball fight. I know we don't have many here in Texas. It's one thing to have a snowball fight, but it's another when the start of your snowball is a rock. So you get hit with the snow, but there's a rock in the middle of it. **[5:35]:** That's a couple of reports. Accounts said that. And once those snowballs started flying, a shot was fired, though we do not know by who. It could have been someone in the crowd. It could have been one of the soldiers. We don't know who fired first. Accounts are witness testimony, and witness accounts are notoriously inaccurate. And this is true now. It was true then. So we have a variety of different accounts. As to who fired first, we don't know. And again, we'll likely never know. Five civilians were killed. The first of them was a man of African descent named Crispus Attucks. But five civilians were killed. **[6:20]:** One soldier was arrested, but acquitted in a trial. Interestingly, the soldier's lawyer was John Adams, the future first vice president of the United States, the second president of the United States and cousin of one of the leaders of the Sons of Liberty here in Boston, Samuel Adams. John Adams was the lawyer for the Soldier Samuel Adams, his cousin and Son of Liberty founder, tried to convince John to throw the trial and let the soldier be convicted. But John refused and gave an honest defense. And the soldier, as I said, was acquitted. There was nothing to prove that he had done anything. And this is a theme for John Adams, one that we'll see primarily in unit two, early unit two, he made mostly, or he made principled but unpopular decisions. **[7:18]:** The massacre was used as propaganda by the Sons of Liberty, arguing that the soldiers were not needed, that they were here to oppress the colonists and nothing more. And if you needed proof of that, look what happened in Boston where they fired on an innocent crowd. Of course, the truth is not. Not quite there. **[7:39]:** So despite all of this, though, the T tax remained. **[7:46]:** What this did do though, is that the loss of life caused everyone to take a step back, at least for a little bit. There was still unrest regarding the T tax, the last of those pieces of the townsinacs. But the loss of life, the shedding of blood right, in this manner did settle things down for a while. **[8:11]:** So we jump a couple years forward. **[8:19]:** To the T act. The British East India Company was nearing bankruptcy despite T tax income. The British East India Company, if you watch the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I realize for most of you, especially if you're in my dual credit classes, no matter when you're watching this, may have been around the. This is mid. Early mid 2000s, maybe a little late 2000s. **[8:45]:** So. Yeah, so it's an old movie for you now, which I feel like I just got a few more gray hairs saying that. Good movies, the first three good movies, particularly the first one. But the bad guys in the second and third one, those two gentlemen right there are the British East India Company. They, their big commodity was tea. **[9:09]:** So they were nearing bankruptcy. The British East India Company, despite the tea tax income, Parliament passed the Tea act to prevent the British East India Company from going bankrupt. The equivalent to a modern day bailout for a corporation. What the Tea act actually specifically did was it created a monopoly for the East India Company in the colonies. It removed all restrictions on them as far as sale and anything like that. **[9:44]:** It made East India Company T very cheap, but it was still subject to the separate T tax. **[9:55]:** It also included much stricter enforcement of the Navigation Acts through the writs of assistance. So this also hit smugglers very hard. **[10:06]:** So remember, the T act is a bailout. The T tax is. It's in the name. It's. It comes from the Townsend Acts. But the Tea act was something separate. **[10:20]:** Now, East India Company tea was the most popular tea in the colonies by far. But people still want a choice. I mean, imagine if your favorite cereal was the only cereal that existed in a grocery store. No matter how much you love something, you can have too much of it. Eventually you're going to want something different. **[10:37]:** So if you have Frosted Flakes every morning for weeks and months, eventually you're going to want Cheerios or whatever else, right? Also, if the colonists pay the tax, then they essentially have accepted Parliament's right to tax them. The reaction here was even stronger than the previous acts and it did lead to another famous event. But again, I'll say this did cause more uproar. But again, that uproar, the reaction was throughout most of the colonies was a minority. **[11:15]:** Most people just wanted to pay the tax and go on with their lives. But this did in particular, the tea act, lead to a. **[11:29]:** Very famous event, the Boston Tea Party. Actually, it was originally called the Destruction of the Tea. The, the term Boston Tea Party was not popular until the 1830s. You know the story though. The sons of Liberty dressed as native natives you see on the boat here in the painting board an East India Company ship that it was docked in Boston Harbor. **[11:57]:** They will dump three hundred and forty cases of tea into Boston Harbor. Around $1.7 million worth of tea in Modern Money. $1.7 million. So it was actually said that the, the harbor was brown for months after this. **[12:30]:** And just, just to explain why, how that was so much tea, not just the, the cost of it and the lost tax revenue and all of that, but the way that tea existed was not as it is today, at least the way it was sold and transported. It wasn't in the, like the little baggies that you can buy, like a Lipton iced tea or whatever. It was in a brick, a solid brick, like a, like a, like a brick of gold or something like that. And the way that you would make your tea is that you would heat your water and then you would just carve off a little sliver of tea from the brick and you would then put that in and it would dissolve and flavor the tea. So it was much more concentrated form of tea, which is partially why $1.7 million, still a lot of money back then. **[13:32]:** This was not the only tea party. It was the largest and most famous. Most other tea parties were simply boycotts. But I do want to point one out. There's another depiction of it. I forgot I had this other picture also. I had a meme here. **[13:51]:** Yeah, I'll Just leave that there. The Edenton Tea Party. The Edent and Tea Party. **[14:06]:** Hang on, I'm sorry, I have the wrong date on here. The date should be 25-10-1774. Sorry about that. This happened in North Carolina, 25-10-1774. The Eden Tea Party was a statement of protest and boycott of multiple British products. **[14:28]:** Right. So a group of people got together, wrote a statement saying that because of the Tea act, the monopoly of tea, that they and anyone who was willing to join them were going to boycott not only East Indy Company tea, but a whole other list of British products. What makes this one worth noting is that this statement, this protest and this boycott was organized, written and conducted solely by women. 51 women were involved. And this is one of, if not the first instance of political action in the colonies overseen by women. **[15:11]:** Women were largely not allowed to participate in politics. They would not have the vote for another 146 years. And some places even barred them from engaging in public speaking. So this was a major first. It did not lead to much in particular. **[15:31]:** Right. It wasn't any different in the effect than the other tea parties, but it certainly attracted attention. So much so that there were cartoons as the one here on the slide from England deriding this. But the involvement of women here in a major way was a big significant step. **[15:55]:** The Boston Tea Party and other tea parties like it were a final straw for the English and they now believed it was time to clamp down on the rowdy and insolent colonists. **[16:11]:** So Parliament here in 1774 will pass the Intolerable Acts, or as it was actually known in Britain, the Coercive Acts. The Intolerable act was the name for it in the colonies. Coercive act was the name for it in the coercive. In Britain. **[16:33]:** Parliament and the King were furious over the destruction of the tea and of property and retaliated to the. To that and other tea parties. This concerned almost exclusively with Massachusetts and Boston in particular. Multiple acts here, but we're going to focus on the four major ones. **[16:53]:** The first is the Boston Port Act. Boston harbor was closed until the destroyed tea was paid for. It's going to make it hard for them to pay it back because most of Boston's income was through trade. But the point wasn't just for them to pay it back, but also to punish them. So that's the Boston Port act, the Justice Act. **[17:13]:** Any trial of a British soldier would now need to be held in a London courts martial, in a London military court, not in the colonies, this is done to protect against the persecution of British soldiers. And you may say, well, why is that a concern? Well, what did I tell you about the aftermath of the Boston Massacre? Right. The, the Samuel Adams tried to convince his, the soldier's lawyer, his cousin John, to throw the trial. **[17:46]:** They were concerned about soldiers being persecuted or jailed for crimes they didn't commit. So the justice act, all trials of soldiers must take place back in England or London in a military court there. Third is the Second Quartering Act. We didn't talk about the first one. Don't worry about it. **[18:04]:** This act, British officers were given the right to quarter soldiers in private homes. As more soldiers come into Massachusetts and Boston, the British don't have necessarily enough housing for them. So this gave them the right to force private citizens to take in house and feed soldiers. Do we have protection against that today? Yes. The third Amendment. **[18:31]:** Fourth of these is the Government Act. Fourth and final. The basic rights of all citizens were stripped in Massachusetts, particularly the rights of assembly, press, journalism and speech. Legislative power shifted to a Crown appointed royal governor. **[18:51]:** So the Massachusetts assembly lost its governing power. And that was now vested solely in a colonial governor specifically appointed by the king. **[19:05]:** So the colonial assembly loses most of its power. Democracy was undone in favor of a powerful Crown appointed governor. And so the rights were limited as well to try to get the people to fall in line. The response to these acts, these four acts that are part of the coercive or intolerable Acts, Massachusetts essentially begins a war with the passage of these acts. Other colonies viewed this as a precedent for how they will be treated if they did not like what Parliament was doing. **[19:40]:** You can see how that early separation of an American identity and King Phillips war has now come to fruition. Right. They're seeing it as an us versus them. **[19:55]:** So while Massachusetts is going to start preparing for war, the sons of Liberty in particular, again, not the colony as a whole, but, but the elements of resistance there start preparing for war. The rest of the colonies are not. And they're going to do something else. They're going to convene a meeting called the first Continental Congress. Colonial representatives met in Philadelphia to discuss the coercive acts. 12 of the 13 colonies attended. The one that did not was Georgia. Simply too far. By the time the meeting was called, they couldn't get there in time. This was the fall of 74. **[20:27]:** There was unanimous outrage. They drafted a document of grievances and a demand for the repeal of the Coercive Acts. They simply restated the arguments they had made since the Stamp Act. They agreed to begin training a militia for self defense. They were not thinking about revolution yet. **[20:47]:** They simply wanted their rights as Englishmen restored. They're adopting a wait and see approach. Well, what do they see? Well, that's what we'll discuss next.