Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moss, Marissa.
America’s tea parties : not one but four! : Boston, Charleston, New York, Philadelphia / by Marissa Moss.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4197-1874-8
eISBN 978-1-6131-2915-9
1. Boston Tea Party, Boston, Mass., 1773—Juvenile literature.
2. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Causes—Juvenile literature.
3. Tea tax (American colonies)—Juvenile literature. I. Title.
E215.7.M68 2016
973.3'115—dc23
2015014051

Text copyright © 2016 Marissa Moss
Book design by Jessie Gang
For illustration credits, see this page.

Published in 2016 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS.
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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To Adam and to Julius Lester,
in gratitude for his help

Contents

It all started . . . 

Author’s Note

Timeline

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index of Searchable Terms

t all started with seven ships and 2,202 chests of tea. (Divide 2,202 by 7, and you’ll discover the average number of chests per ship.) That’s almost 550,000 pounds of tea, worth around 5 million dollars. (For extra credit, divide 5 million by 7 and you’ll see what the average cargo was worth per ship.) Take all those numbers and divide them by the pride and determination of the thirteen American colonies, and you get a mountain of tea dumped into the ocean.

Not all the tea was destroyed. A small amount was smuggled into merchants’ homes, and most was sent back to England, untouched and untaxed. That still left 426 chests of tea steeping in colonial harbors for the fish to drink. This is the story of all those chests and the welcome they received from four tea parties. That’s right—not just the one in Boston that everyone still talks about but four!

Before the tea parties, though, came the tax, and before the tax came the East India Company. Despite the name, this was an English corporation, one that was closely tied to the government. Established as a major importer of spices and goods from India, the East India Company had been granted special license by the British Crown to mint money, acquire territory, maintain a standing army, enter into wars, and negotiate peace. The Company ruled India like a private estate—a government within the British government. Imagine a company today being allowed to make money and control territory with its own military!

With all that freedom and power, the East India Company should have been wealthy. And indeed it had been. But with great wealth comes great temptation. And great temptation often leads to gross corruption. That’s what happened to the Company. Like robbers entrusted with guarding a bank, its greedy directors filled their own pockets, thereby starving the corporation of cash. Since the Bank of England (a privately owned bank that handled most of the government’s finances) was always ready to lend the Company more money, that wasn’t a problem. Whenever the Company ran low on cash, the bank happily provided large loans . . .  which put the Company even deeper into debt.

And then things got worse with the bank recession of 1772, when a credit scare caused a run on banks. People withdrew their money because they were afraid the banks would collapse . . .  and all these withdrawals caused the very collapse the public feared. (It was like what happened nearly two centuries later during the Great Depression in the United States: So many people rushed to get their savings that many banks were emptied out, ruined.) The Bank of England survived, propped up by the government, but it was teetering so much that it couldn’t risk giving any more large loans to the East India Company.

By then, the Company owed the Bank of England 300,000 pounds sterling (the equivalent of approximately 30 million dollars today) and owed the British government more than a million pounds in taxes and annual payments. The Company should have declared bankruptcy. It should have failed. But King George III couldn’t let that happen. Not only would it have been horribly embarrassing, but who would then run the colony of India? So Parliament came up with a plan—something the American colonists called “a ministerial plot,” which sounds much more evil.

The only way for the East India Company to get out of its huge mountain of debt was to sell more of its principal product: tea. And the biggest market it could expand into was the American colonies, where tea was the most popular hot drink and the fourth-largest British import (the first three were cloth, sugar, and salt). But it could be even bigger. Although the colonists drank 1.2 million pounds of tea a year, most of that tea—about 925,000 pounds of it—was smuggled from Holland. The bulk of tea sales happened on the black market because the majority of colonists refused to buy tea from the British. Buying British tea meant paying a tax that the colonists felt was unfair so long as they were denied a vote in Parliament: No taxation without representation! When the Townshend Acts imposed a tax on tea in 1767, Americans turned to smugglers, paying a premium to avoid the detested tax while still drinking tea. Even after Parliament repealed most of the Townshend Acts in 1770, it left in place the tax on tea.

Hoping to discourage the colonists from buying tea from anyone else, Parliament passed the Tea Act in May 1773. The new law granted the East India Company the complete monopoly on tea exportation to the colonies and even excused the Company from paying the usual export taxes to the government. Instead, the colonists would pay the import tax, small though it was. To make sure the Company had the money it needed to go ahead with this venture, the Bank of England lent it an additional 1.4 million pounds. So it wasn’t only a tea exporter that had a lot at stake in getting the colonies to buy tea; it was also the British government and the Bank of England! The East India Company had become the first “too big to fail” corporation in the world. If it collapsed, the cost to Britain would be enormous. It would be a very bitter cup for the king to swallow!