Moss - America’s tea parties : not one but four! : Boston, Charleston, New York, Philadelphia

Unloading Tea-Ships on the East India Docks, London, England (1867), wood engraving.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moss, Marissa.
Americas 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., 1773Juvenile literature.
2. United StatesHistoryRevolution, 17751783CausesJuvenile literature.
3. Tea tax (American colonies)Juvenile literature. I. Title.
E215.7.M68 2016
973.3'115dc23
2015014051

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

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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in gratitude for his help

Contents

A map of the original thirteen colonies and territories (detail on next page). The colonies are Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts (which included what later became the state of Maine), New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Virginia and are hand-drawn by the author over an original 1799 map.

New Hampshire
Massachusetts
New York
Rhode Island
Connecticut
Pennsylvania
New Jersey
Delaware
Maryland
Virginia
North Carolina
South Carolina
Georgia

Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, a lithograph published in 1846 by Sarony & Major, showing colonists dressed as Indians.

Sealing wax and a stamp, like those used to seal official papers and authenticate documents.

t all started with seven ships and 2,202 chests of tea. (Divide 2,202 by 7, and youll discover the average number of chests per ship.) Thats almost 550,000 pounds of tea, worth around 5 million dollars. (For extra credit, divide 5 million by 7 and youll 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. Thats rightnot 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 estatea government within the British government. Imagine a company today being allowed to make money and control territory with its own military!

Symbol of the East India Company.

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. Thats 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 governments finances) was always ready to lend the Company more money, that wasnt 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 couldnt 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 couldnt 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 plansomething the American colonists called a ministerial plot, which sounds much more evil.

Shah Allum in Distress. This political cartoon from 1773 shows the East India Company on the verge of bankruptcy. Shah Allum refers to Sir George Colebrook, a director who was faulted for steering the company into a financial shipwreck.

A coffee house in colonial America. Coffee drinking was viewed as a rejection of the English tax on tea.