Colonial resistance intensified until, three years after Parliament passed the Tea Act, the colonies declared their independence as the United States of America.
The Coercive Acts convinced more moderate Americans that the radicals’ claims had merit. Since the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, radical colonists had warned that new British taxes heralded an attempt to overthrow representative government in the colonies and to subjugate the colonists to British tyranny. Parliament also appointed General Thomas Gage (1719-87), the commander in chief of British forces in North America, as the governor of Massachusetts.
The series of measures, among other things, repealed the colonial charter of Massachusetts and closed the port of Boston until the colonists reimbursed the cost of the destroyed tea. Parliament responded with the Coercive Acts of 1774, which colonists came to call the Intolerable Acts. The Boston Tea Party caused considerable property damage and infuriated the British government.
The Coercive Acts and American Independence The men smashed open the chests of tea and dumped their contents into Boston Harbor in what later came to be known as the Boston Tea Party. The most spectacular action occurred in Boston, Massachusetts, where on December 16, 1773, a well-organized group of men dressed up as Native Americans and boarded the company ships. In several towns, crowds of colonists gathered along the ports and forced company ships to turn away without unloading their cargo. Patriot mobs intimidated the company’s agents into resigning their commissions. The act also made allies of merchants and patriot groups like the Sons of Liberty. The fact that the agents commissioned by the company to sell its tea included a number of pro-Parliament men only added fuel to the fire.The Tea Act revived the boycott on tea and inspired direct resistance not seen since the Stamp Act crisis. Other colonists viewed the act as a Trojan horse designed to seduce them into accepting Parliament’s right to impose taxes on them. By allowing the East India Company to sell tea directly in the American colonies, the Tea Act cut out colonial merchants, and the prominent and influential colonial merchants reacted with anger. If Parliament expected that the lowered cost of tea would mollify the colonists into acquiescing to the Tea Act, it was gravely mistaken. The act retained the duty on imported tea at its existing rate, but, since the company was no longer required to pay an additional tax in England, the Tea Act effectively lowered the price of the East India Company’s tea in the colonies. The act granted the company the right to ship its tea directly to the colonies without first landing it in England, and to commission agents who would have the sole right to sell tea in the colonies. In an effort to save the troubled enterprise, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773. A glut of tea and a diminished American market had left the company with tons of tea leaves rotting in its warehouses. Although it was a private concern, the company played an integral role in Britain’s imperial economy and served as its conduit to the riches of the East Indies. Although many colonists continued to refuse to drink tea out of principle, many others resumed partaking of the beverage, though some of them salved their conscience by drinking smuggled Dutch tea, which was generally cheaper than legally imported tea.The American consumption of smuggled tea hurt the finances of the East India Company, which was already struggling through economic hardship. The repeal of the majority of the Townshend Act took the wind out of the sails of the colonial boycott. Parliament responded with a series of harsh measures intended to stifle colonial resistance to British rule two years later the war began. Their resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, in which colonists boarded East India Company ships and dumped their loads of tea overboard. The colonists had never accepted the constitutionality of the duty on tea, and the Tea Act rekindled their opposition to it. The British government granted the company a monopoly on the importation and sale of tea in the colonies. The act’s main purpose was not to raise revenue from the colonies but to bail out the floundering East India Company, a key actor in the British economy. The Tea Act of 1773 was one of several measures imposed on the American colonists by the heavily indebted British government in the decade leading up to the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). The Coercive Acts and American Independence.