Why was the Boston Tea Party an important part in the story of the American Revolution?

0:05The tea becomes the symbol of oppression. Don't drink British-taxed tea. There's a huge Dutch tea smuggling operation. DrinkThe compromise with death Dutch tea to show the British you're not going to drink British-taxed tea. As much as they can, they're trying to maintain the boycott of the tea, but it's wrong because the way that merchants worked is they'll intend to [inaudible] . A merchant will deal with all kinds of things. If a ship comes in, and it's got lots of barrels, and lots of casks, some of it maybe tea, but other maybe [inaudible] .

0:31That's perfectly fine. It's hard to know what is [inaudible] tea, what ships have it. It's not already [inaudible] . Tea is seen as a badge and as a sign of ultimate oppression. Then all the way possible, a huge company called the East India Tea Company, which is a major corporation, think quite as big today as, say, Google, so if any which corporation invests in government funds, it runs into trouble immediately. It says I'm sure you all know people who will stay, and it's kind of a bailout. You want to save the East India Company. At the same time, they also want to beef up the fact that they do have the right to tax and can tax tea. The result of this is a final amendment to that last Townshend Acts on tea in

1:121773 that we called the Tea Act of 1773. What's amazing about the Tea Act is that it actually lowers the price of tea in colonial America because what the Tea Act says is it's going to give this British East India Tea Company, the exclusive right to market tea in colonial America. For the right of that privilege, East India Company will have to pay a tax on the tea, but they say, given that you're going to have a huge monopoly on selling tea in continental America and the huge volume of tea consumption in colonial America, even though you're going to have to pay a tax on the tea, we're going to require you to undercut previous tea prices, charge lower prices on the tea, and you'll still make a profit because the amount of tea we'll

1:54be signing for [inaudible] is so much. This is about as cleverly conceived the facts as you can get. What the British Parliament is saying is no colonial American can really be angry about drinking cheaper tea. Yeah, it's taxed, but it's going to be actually a tax on [inaudible] company thousands of miles away. When they sell it to colonial Americans, it will be even be cheaper than it was before. Surely they can literally swallow that. They can, because, again, it's about a constitutional concern.

2:23What they're saying is, if you can bring a tax to [inaudible] colonial America, and so when we didn't assess ourselves, that's you saying you can assess taxes in colonial America. Then once you have the power to tax, you could then use it to do things than what [inaudible] with taxes at higher levels that would tax a [inaudible] . We can even a tax [inaudible] a fool. Even a tax that lowers prices cannot be assessed by a body we don't have the authority over, that we don't send representatives to, that we don't choose, and it doesn't pay the tax in [inaudible] . What's interesting is that the tea is cheaper, and people like cheap.

2:59In a lot of places that tea comes in, and some of it's met by delegations that have been at work saying, no, don't ship it, don't bring it in, the one thing this does is it actually makes it easier to [inaudible] tea because the British East India Company tends to deal exclusively tea [inaudible] . You don't have to worry about all the other ships in [inaudible] . There is only one company, and it's only bringing in tea, so you know who it is, but what the organizers resisting this tea worried about is, will colonial Americans buy if they get access to it, so what they're trying to do is prevent it from being landed at all because they're not confident that all the people won't say, hey, cheaper tea. I'll drink that, how bad can that beat, and maybe go on and say, maybe

3:36parliamentary taxation isn't such a [inaudible] . Where this comes to a head is in Boston where the governor of the colony, namely Thomas Hutchinson, who incidentally his family goes back to the 16th [inaudible] . John Adams, he's actually been [inaudible] , but he's just, like, what [inaudible] ? I'm thinking he's taking this off own hands and not allowing [inaudible] . What he does is when the ships come into the Boston Harbor in December of 1773, he refuses to let [inaudible] . Give them papers and allow them to [inaudible] . You have to have permission to come in here, and you have to have permission to leave.

4:11Once cargo is coming to a harbor, shipped in, it then is required by law to be landed within 15 days or be confiscated and sold at auction. What you're saying is, I'm starting to process that in guaranteeing the team has to come [inaudible] . I'm betting no matter what John and Sam Adams said, the good people will buy cheaper tea. When they buy cheaper tea, that will expose the Sons of Liberty who don't have the support that [inaudible] . Taxed tea will work, and we can get beyond this and expose the Sons of Liberty is not representative of the people. What's interesting is I think Sam Adams worries about it too. I don't want that tea, he said. We got to destroy it before it lands, and that's the Boston Tea Party.

4:51Let's throw that tea overboard so that we don't even have to worry about the possibility we'll get expenses, maybe not having much [inaudible], and so they [inaudible] threw 342 chests of tea, [inaudible] which today will have a value of about $15 million. This is a lot of tea they destroyed