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The tea just didn't appear in Boston to get thrown into the harbor
By adamg on Mon, 12/16/2019 - 10:30am
With today the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, J.L. Bell has been taking a look at some of the people involved, including a Bostonian who happened to be in London when the 1773 Tea Act was passed and so was able to secure his family one of the contracts to import East India Company tea, and some of the other Boston merchants who'd secured what they thought would be lucrative contracts as tea wholesalers.
Even before the tea party itself, though, things were going south in Boston.
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Comments
Revolutionary Coffee
The Tea Party was a very clever business move by one of the lesser-known Sons of Liberty, Samuel Dunkin.
Duncan Mac Duncan
Duncan Mac Duncan hated being called "Samuel". He arrived from Scotland in 1725 with nothing but the clothes on his back and his grandmother's haggis recipe in his pocket. His dreams of franchising a chain of haggis restaurants in the Massachusetts colony ended in dismal failure, but the scrappy lad picked himself up, dusted himself off, and began anew, with a bakery. One item was a circular pastry with a hole in the middle, which anti-royalist residents would use to taunt British soldiers by waving the O-shaped pastry, implying that the soldiers were "a bunch of big zeros." As revolutionary fervor grew, the pastry, which had become known as "Duncan's dough noughts" became wildly popular both as a delicious treat and as a potent symbol of rebellion against authority. The rest, of course, is history, and, to this day, "Hie thee to the dough nought shoppe" remains a frequent taunt shouted by miscreants at sheriffs, bailiffs, and other enforcers of the law.
This...
...is fantastic.
Samuel was so opposed
to any ideas other than his own that he was called "Do Not Do That" Dunkin and eventually "Do Not" Dunkin.
I recently learned that
I recently learned that Lexington was there first
https://lexington.wickedlocal.com/photogallery/WL/20191212/NEWS/12120998...
The tea from that burning was salvaged ...
and used in Starbuck's Tea And Coffee Shoppe.
I've burned some tea on the
I've burned some tea on the Battle Green in the spring in opposition to the authorities.
I didn't dress up for it, though.
The current tax rate seems oppressive, but my motivation to protest has evaporated.
The Tea Party Was Astroturfed....
The Boston Tea Party was astroturfed. A thing you may not have learned in school is that John Hancock financed the Tea Party so he could make more money selling smuggled tea. John Hancock made his fortunes through smuggling Dutch tea, which was, historically, cheaper than Britain's East Indian tea. In May of 1773, the British government passed The Tea Act, which allowed for tea to be shipped by British companies duty-free to the North American colonies, thus allowing the struggling East Indian Tea Company to sell it's tea, even with the Townsend Act Tea Tax, cheaper than Hancock’s tea. John Hancock slipped a few bucks to his buddy Sam Adams to get the Sons of Liberty to stir up some trouble for the British tea importers and the rest, as they say, is history.
I remember it well...
I remember it well...
The Massachusetts Bay Tea Authority kept promising that things would better when they unveiled the new & improved Orange pekoe (product) line - sourced from China.
We waited and waited, but the price was steep.