Tea act what was taxed

In Charleston, the consignees had been forced to resign by early December, and the unclaimed tea was seized by customs officials. The tea ship bound for New York City was delayed by bad weather. By the time it had arrived, the consignees had resigned, and the ship returned to England with the tea. In every colony except for Massachusetts, protesters were able to force the tea consignees to resign or to return the tea to England. In Boston, however, Governor Hutchinson was determined to hold his ground.

He convinced the tea consignees, two of whom were his sons, not to back down. British law required the Dartmouth to unload and pay the duties within 20 days, or customs officials could confiscate the cargo. The mass meeting passed a resolution, introduced by Adams and based on a similar set of resolutions promulgated earlier in Philadelphia, urging the captain of the Dartmouth to send the ship back without paying the import duty. Meanwhile, the meeting assigned men to watch the ship and prevent the tea from being unloaded.

Governor Hutchinson refused to grant permission for the Dartmouth to leave without paying the duty. Meanwhile, two more tea ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver , arrived in Boston Harbor. While Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House to prepare to take action.

On the evening of December 16th, a small group of colonists, some dressed in Mohawk warrior disguises, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all chests of tea into the water.

Whether or not Samuel Adams helped plan the Boston Tea Party is disputed, but he immediately worked to publicize and defend it. He argued that the Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but was instead a principled protest and the only remaining option the people had to defend their constitutional rights.

This act soon inspired further acts of resistance up and down the East Coast. However, not all colonists, and not even all patriots, supported the dumping of the tea. The wholesale destruction of property shocked people on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, this act united all parties against the colonies.

The Coercive Acts were meant to reverse the trend of colonial resistance but actually provoked higher levels of resistance. Four of the acts were issued in direct response to the Boston Tea Party of December By making an example of Massachusetts, the British Parliament hoped these punitive measures would reverse the trend of colonial resistance to parliamentary authority that had begun with the Stamp Act. Many colonists, however, viewed the acts as an arbitrary violation of their rights.

In , they organized the First Continental Congress to coordinate a protest. As tensions escalated, the American Revolutionary War broke out the following year. This law closed the port of Boston until the East India Company had been repaid for the destroyed tea and the king was satisfied that order had been restored. Colonists objected that the Port Act punished all of Boston rather than just the individuals who had destroyed the tea. They also contended that they were being punished without having been given an opportunity to testify in their own defense.

The Massachusetts Government Act provoked even more outrage than the Port Act because it unilaterally altered the government of Massachusetts to bring it under control of the British government. Under the terms of the Government Act, almost all positions in the colonial government were to be appointed by the governor or the king. The act also severely limited the activities of town meetings in Massachusetts to one meeting a year, unless the governor called for one.

Colonists outside of Massachusetts feared that their governments could now also be changed by the legislative fiat of Parliament. The Administration of Justice Act allowed the governor to move trials of accused royal officials to another colony, or even to Great Britain, if he believed the official could not get a fair trial in Massachusetts. Although the act stipulated that witnesses would be paid for their travel expenses, in practice, few colonists could afford to leave their work and cross the ocean to testify in a trial.

The Quartering Act applied to all of the colonies and sought to create a more effective method of housing British troops in America. In a previous act, the colonies had been required to provide housing for soldiers, but colonial legislatures had been uncooperative in doing so. The new Quartering Act allowed a governor to house soldiers in other buildings if suitable quarters were not provided.

Although many colonists found the Quartering Act objectionable, it generated the least amount of protest of the Coercive Acts. Many colonists saw the Coercive Acts as a violation of their constitutional rights, their natural rights, and their colonial charters. They viewed the acts as a threat to the liberties of all of British America, not just Massachusetts. The citizens of Boston viewed the Coercive Acts as unnecessary and cruel punishment that inflamed outrage against Britain even further.

The direct sale of tea by agents of the British East India Company to the American colonies undercut the business of colonial merchants. Prior to the Tea Act, colonial merchants purchased tea directly from British markets or smuggled from illegal markets. They then shipped it back to the colonies for resale. Outraged that American merchants were undercut, colonists initially in Philadelphia and New York refused the British East India Company tea to be offloaded and sent the ships back to England.

In many colonial ports to protest the Tea Act, the shipment of British East India Company tea was unloaded and left untouched on the docks to rot. Lieutenant Governor and Chief Justice of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, refused to let the ships return to England and held the Beaver, Dartmouth, and Eleanor in Boston Harbor until matters could be resolved and the tea offloaded.

Ask about our Virtual Tour programming! Tour Hours: 10am - 4pm. English French German Italian Spanish. Join Our Cast. Shop Merchandise. Search for: Search. Instead it simply gave a tax break to the East India Tea company. With the existing tax still on the books from the Townshend Duties, East India Tea company was loosing money because its legitimately imported tea could not compete with the tea being illegally smuggled by the colonial merchants.

Obviously the British government preferred to help the struggling East India Co. The new measure was also supposed to win the minds of tea consumers in America by driving down the market price of tea. In , Lord North had repealed four of the five Townshend Duties, keeping only the tax on tea. The American colonists had refused to buy the commodity, which had resulted in financial difficulties for the East India Company. The government also took measures to help the East India Company to increase its sales by passing the Tea Act.

Initially the East India Company had suggested that the 3d per lb tax should be removed to encourage the colonists to buy the tea. North could not do this on principle, since the Declaratory Act passed by Rockingham's ministry did say that the British government could legislate for the colonies, and Britain needed in his eyes to maintain the right to legislate. The Tea Act taxed the tea at source i.