THE TEA PARTY, INTOLERABLE ACTS

“We cannot make events,” Sam Adams observed.  “We can only patiently wait to improve them.”  Hutchinson had provoked the colonists into constitutional arguments that propelled them further toward unity and independence.  It took the East India Company’s plummeting fortunes to activate America’s forceful resistance and accelerate both sides toward war.  Parliament conferred the Company a monopoly on exporting tea to the American colonies, at the same time allowing them to drop prices but still embedding a customs duty to maintain the constitutional principle.  Radicals refused to allow the tea to be unloaded at Boston, while Hutchinson refused to allow the ship containing the tea to leave port.  American protestors ended the standoff by dumping all the tea into Boston Harbor, leaving the remainder of cargo untouched.  One person seen stuffing some tea into his pockets was stripped naked and sent into town humiliated: This limited forcible resistance must be principled resistance, not theft.

An enraged Parliament passed the Coercive Acts to punish Boston and prevent further resistance.  The British Navy shut down the Port of Boston which collapsed the Town’s entire economy.  The Administration expected to divide Massachusetts, “sow jealousy and disunion within”:  Nearby smaller ports in Massachusetts could be counted upon to capture Boston’s trade – “enjoy the benefits from Boston’s misfortunes.”  Boston, now impoverished and isolated would be brought to its knees, learn its lesson, pay for the tea and thereafter obey. 

But the British badly miscalculated.  Nearby Massachusetts towns shut their ports to British trade in sympathy.  “The other colonies, instead of abandoning, clung the closer to their devoted sister as the danger increased.”  But in some constitutional respects it was even tighter than siblings.  Aid poured in from other colonies suffering with Boston in a common injury.  It became “the cement of a close union.”  The great ancient law giver Solon once declared:  “Citizens, like [limbs] on the same body should feel and resent each other’s injuries.”  With a common but distinct constitutional consciousness, increasingly America felt as one.