On Thursday, December 16, 1773, at 7 PM 116 people went to Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, divided into three companies and boarded the ships Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver.

Over the next 3 hours they dumped 90,000 lbs (45 tons) of tea overboard.  The destroyed tea was worth an estimated £10,000, which in today’s money is just over a million dollars.

Why?

The war cry we learned in school was “Taxation without representation!”

But what does that mean?

The Boston Tea Party, and open rebellion that followed, was triggered largely by a system that supported a powerful transnational corporation to dominate and drive small business owners out of business.

Tea.

Tea was being transported and traded around the world.  England tried at first to control the trade of tea, helping the East India Company become the largest and most powerful corporation in the history of the world, up to that time.

When small business entrepreneurs in America attempted to bypass the monopoly of the East India Company, they were labeled smugglers, and subject to seizure by the English navy.

The Tea Act of 1773 was not a new tax.  The Tea Act gave a massive tax break to the near bankrupt East India Company, so that the East India Company could sell its massive stockpile of tea in America at cut rate prices, undercutting their colonial small business competitors.  This would enable the East India Company to restore profits for the benefit of its shareholders, which, of course, included many wealthy English elites and the King, while destroying their competition, which were largely small businesses in America.

George Hewes, a participant at the time reported:

“It was no longer the small vessels of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity, which by the aid of the public authority, might, as they supposed, easily be landed, and amassed in suitable magazines. Accordingly the Company sent its agents at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, six hundred chests of tea, and a proportionate number to Charleston, and other maritime cities of the American continent. The colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast the dye, and determine their course…”

American colonists recognized this for what it was: an attempt by the world’s largest corporation to destroy small business competition.

Tea traders in New York and Philadelphia successfully boycotted the East India Company Tea, and a gathering of somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 in Boston voted unanimously to block all East India Company Tea from being offloaded in their harbor.

A pamphlet distributed at the time called “The Alarm” spoke of the feelings toward the East India Company:

            “Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. … Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.”

It was government sponsorship of one corporation over all competitors, plain and simple.

Perhaps the war cry of the Boston Tea Party should be remembered as “No huge tax breaks for monopoly corporations against the interests of the people!”

I guess it got shortened a bit.

Another pamphlet by the same Sons of Liberty read “I shall therefore conclude with a proposal that your watchmen be instructed, as they go on their rounds, to call out every night, half-past twelve, “Beware of the East India Company.””

That was largely the drive behind the Boston Tea Party and the revolution.  It was rebellion against the King’s efforts to perpetuate monopoly control over commerce through the world’s largest corporation.

After American patriots drove British soldiers out of the colonies, and a new Constitution for the United States of America was drafted, Thomas Jefferson, who later served as the third President under the new Constitution, wrote “I will now tell you what I do not like,” about the Constitution. “First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.”

Make note:  One of the fundamental issues Thomas Jefferson felt needed to be included in the Constitution was “restriction of monopolies”.  This was because of the memory of what the East India Company had done and a desire to encourage a fairer competitive climate for small entrepreneurs to succeed.

This nation was not founded for the benefit of large multinational corporations.  In fact, the opposite is true.  This nation was founded AGAINST the interests of large multinational corporations.

A participant in the Boston Tea Party, George Hewes, reported that when he, acting as boatswain for his party of boarders, demanded the keys to the hatches from the Captain of the ship, “the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.”

The purpose of the Boston Tea Party was not to vandalize the property of the ship owner, or even to protest taxation in general, but to stop the monopoly commerce of the world’s largest corporation which had been granted an unfair advantage over small business owners through the 1773 Tax Act.

When today’s “Tea Party” activists protest against taxes of all kinds, they should be reminded of the true origin of the Boston Tea Party, and focus their outrage against the multinational corporations that are destroying small business, the middle class and working families.