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Tea Act Dbq

Decent Essays

Tea Act

On May 10 of 1773, the Tea Act was passed by the British Parliament. The act did not place a new tax on tea, but it did help the Parliament and one tea company improve their revenue. The East India Tea Company was losing their profits to other companies who illegally sold tea from other countries. The East India Tea Company had too much unsold tea, which caused them to almost go bankrupt. The British Parliament was upset that the British company was losing money because of other companies from different countries smuggling tea, so Parliament passed the Tea Act. After the Tea Act was passed, the East India Tea Company controlled the trade of tea. Illegal and legal tea companies lost money because of the East India Tea Company. Even …show more content…

The name, the Boston Tea Party, didn’t come along until the 1820s, so its original name was “the destruction of tea”. During the night of December 16, 1773 the Sons of Liberty organized a protest. The protests’ location was Griffin’s Wharf which is on the Boston Harbor. There were over 100 colonists who participated in this protest. The colonists were upset about the Tea Act and strongly believed in the phrase, “no taxation without representation”. To not be punished, the colonists dressed up as Mohawk Indians. George Robert Twelves Hewes was part of the protest said, “To prevent discovery we agreed to wear ragged clothes and disfigure ourselves, dressing to resemble Indians as much as possible, smearing our faces with grease and lamp black or soot, and should not have known each other except by our voices…I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet…after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith.” Those who participated threw 342 chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. The chests held more than 90,000 pounds of tea which caused this event to take about three hours. In today’s money, the cost of the damage was $1,000,000, but in 1773 currency it cost £9,659. The three ships that the tea were on were the Dartmouth, Beaver, and the Eleanor. The next day, colonists who were in boats saw chests of tea that were still floating in the water,

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