36 a short history of the united states
to sell its tea in America, where the tax of threepence per pound of tea
would be collected. Under this arrangement the company could under-
sell American merchants and smugglers and create a monopoly for it-
self, a situation the colonists fiercely resented. The Sons of Liberty
condemned the act and called for a boycott of tea.
Governor Hutchinson was determined to enforce the collection of
the tax when three ships arrived in Boston with a large cargo of tea.
His two sons and a nephew were among the agents assigned to sell the
shipment. Resistance and determination reared on both sides of the
issue. Finally, on the night of December 16 , 1773 , colonists dressed as
Mohawk Indians boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea
worth £ 90 , 000 into the harbor.
The British reacted sharply to this “Boston Tea Party” and labeled it
an act of rebellion. They chose to believe that a conspiracy had been
hatched in Boston to initiate a rebellion against the crown and win in-
de pendence for the colony. Angrily, in the spring of 1774 Parliament
enacted the Coercive Laws, or, as the colonists called them, the Intol-
erable Acts, by which the port of Boston was closed to all trade until
the tea was paid for; it forbade town meetings; it altered the voting for
members of the Massachusetts assembly; and it included a new quar-
tering of soldiers that applied to all colonies. Parliament had gone be-
yond simple punishment for the Tea Party, according to the colonists.
It had now abridged their fundamental freedoms as Englishmen.
Following the Intolerable Acts came the Quebec Act, which was
passed on May 20 , 1774 , and extended the boundaries of Quebec to
include the territory west of the Allegheny Mountains. In an effort to
conciliate French-speaking Roman Catholic Canadians, Parliament
had unwittingly roused fears among Protestant colonists about a “pop-
ish” plot to gain greater control of government. More troubling, how-
ever, was the fact that it annulled the territorial claims of New York,
Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
At this juncture, in August 1774 , Thomas Jefferson published a
pamphlet titled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, in
which he defended the Boston Tea Party as the action of a “desperate
people” struggling to protect their basic rights as citizens. So powerful,
so well crafted, and so direct were the arguments in this pamphlet that
Jefferson overnight became the leading spokesman for colonial rights.