The Boston Tea Party

Cost was never the problem. The Tea Act of 1773 made East India Company tea cheaper in Boston, but it still carried a duty set by Parliament, and buying it meant accepting that Parliament could tax people with no vote in it.

Three ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver, lay at Griffin's Wharf with the cargo, and Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to let them leave without unloading. On December 16, 1773, thousands packed the Old South Meeting House. When word came that he would not budge, a party of men disguised as Mohawk Indians, faces darkened with soot, headed for the waterfront.

In under four hours they split open more than 340 chests, roughly 90,000 pounds of tea, and dumped it into the harbor. They touched nothing else. John Adams called it the grandest event since the controversy with Britain began. Parliament answered by closing the port of Boston, and the road to Lexington ran straight from that wharf.

The painting is all torchlight and motion. At the ship's rail a man in a blue coat and feathered cocked hat, hatchet in hand, shoves a split chest over the side as tea pours into black water. Behind him a crowd fills the deck under burning torches, and townspeople line the wharf below Boston's lit steeple.