Boston Tea PartyOn December 16, 1773, a band of angry colonists gathered at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, disguised as native American Indians.
They boarded three East Indian Company ships and threw their tea cargoes into Boston Harbor, as a protest against the unfair taxation.
These acts and others ultimately led to the Revolution War. For a while, drinking tea was seen as unpatriotic, and citizens showed support by switching from tea to coffee or other substitutes.
Following the Boston Tea Party, young ladies of Boston signed the following pledge:
We the daughters of those patriots who have, and so now appear for the public interest and in that principally regard their posterity, as such do with pleasure engage with them in denying ourselves the drinking of foreign tea, in hopes to frustrate a plan that tends to deprive a whole community if all is valuable to life.
After the war, people resumed drinking tea and eventually the United States sent ship to China and began importing tea directly.
Tea never became the national obsession in America that it is in England – coffee seems to fill that role in the US – but the United States has been very involved in the tea trade since the early nineteenth century.
Further reading: history of tea
