Primary Sources

IN PROGRESS: A list of primary sources regarding the Tea Crisis.

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The Tea Act: Full Text with Annotations

The Tea Act (13 Geo. 3, c. 44) On May 10, 1773 the so-called Tea Act received royal assent and became law. The following is the full text of the act, with annotations to provide further understanding. You can find the full text here as well. I have maintained the original spelling and punctuation, but have modernized capitalization. I have changed the emphasis of the original, so that the text is entirely in regular upright text, with the following exceptions: I have italicized the titles of acts and I have added bold text to highlight the key point of each section. My commentary is in blue text. First, a little background. At this time all tea consumed in Great Britain was being produced in China and the East India Company was the only entity allowed to legally import it from there. When they did they had to go straight to London with it and pay a 25% import duty. They then had to offer the tea for sale at a public auction (usually in small lots of a few chests at a time), where othe...
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The Second Boston Tea Party: Part I

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  The Second Boston Tea Party: Part I Detail of Philip Dawe's mezzotint "The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man or Tarring and Feathering" (October 1774). This corner detail is the first known depiction of the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor. Who's to say if Dawe is depicting the first or the second, or both? On March 7, 1774 a cargo of tea was destroyed in Boston Harbor. The event—now known as the Second Boston Tea Party—is often relegated to no more than a footnote in American history (if even that). Even Joseph Cummins' book "Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests that History Forgot" gives it no more than two paragraphs in the appendix. [1] While the Second Boston Tea Party certainly lacked the scale and notoriety of its namesake on December 16, 1773, it was nonetheless an important moment in the increasing tensions between Great Britain and the American Colonies. I'd like to offer here what I believe to be the most thorough telling of the story ...
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Memorial of the East India Company to the Earl of Dartmouth

Let's start off with a look at one of the most important documents related to the Boston Tea Party. After receiving news of the destruction of their cargo of tea in Boston Harbor, the directors of the East India Company asked the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for American Affairs, to petition King George III to pursue measures for securing compensation for the lost cargos. The memorial they submitted was dated February 16, 1774—two months after the destruction of the tea—and contained a detailed invoice of the lost cargos. This invoice provides crucial data for understanding what took place. A handwritten contemporary copy of the memorial survives and is held by the Parliamentary Archives in London. The reference is: "Parliamentary Archives, London, HL/PO/JO/10/7/408. Memorial of the East India Company to the Earl of Dartmouth, 16 February 1774." I wish I could share the image of the memorial, but I do not have permission to do so. A very grainy version of it can ...
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