Boston Tea Party

Boston Tea Party
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Boston Tea Party was an act of protest by the American colonists against Great Britain in which they destroyed many crates of tea bricks on ships in Boston Harbor. The incident, which took place on Thursday, December 16, 1773, has been seen as helping to spark the American Revolution.

Background

The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies despite a lack of representation in the Westminster Parliament. One of the protesters was John Hancock. In 1768, Hancock's ship Liberty was seized by customs officials, and he was charged with smuggling. He was defended by John Adams, and the charges were eventually dropped. However, Hancock later faced several hundred more indictments.

Hancock organized a boycott of tea from China sold by the British East India Company, whose sales in the colonies then fell from 320,000 pounds (145,000 kg) to 520 pounds (240 kg). By 1773, the company had large debts, huge stocks of tea in its warehouses and no prospect of selling it because smugglers, such as Hancock, were importing tea without paying import taxes. The British government passed the Tea Act, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea to the colonies directly and without "payment of any customs or duties whatsoever" in Britain, instead paying the much lower American duty. This tax break allowed the East India Company to sell for lower prices than those offered by the colonial merchants and smugglers.

American colonists, particularly the wealthy smugglers, resented this favored treatment of a major company, which employed lobbyists and wielded great influence in Parliament. Protests resulted in both Philadelphia and New York, but it was those in Boston that made their mark in history. Still reeling from the Hutchinson letters, Bostonians suspected the new Tea Tax was simply another attempt by the British Parliament to squash American freedom. Samuel Adams, wealthy smugglers and others who had profited from the smuggled tea, called for agents and consignees of the East India Company tea to abandon their positions; consignees who hesitated were terrorized through attacks on their warehouses and even their homes.<1>

The first of many ships carrying the East India Company tea was HMS Dartmouth arriving in late November 1773. A standoff ensued between the port authorities and the Sons of Liberty. Samuel Adams whipped up the growing crowd by demanding a series of protest meetings. Coming from both the city and outlying areas, thousands attended these meetings; every meeting larger than the one before. The crowds shouted defiance not only at the British Parliament, the East India Company, and HMS Dartmouth but at Governor Thomas Hutchinson as well, who was still struggling to have the tea landed. On the night of December 16, the protest meeting, held at Boston's Old South Meeting House, was the largest yet seen. An estimated 8,000 people were said to have attended.

On Thursday, December 16, 1773, the evening before the tea was due to be landed, the Sons of Liberty thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, left the massive protest meeting and headed toward Griffin's Wharf, where lay Dartmouth and the newly arrived Beaver and Eleanour. Swiftly and efficiently, casks of tea were brought up from the hold to the deck, reasonable proof that some of the "Indians" were, in fact, longshoremen. The casks were opened and the tea dumped overboard; the work, lasting well into the night, was quick, thorough, and efficient. By dawn, 90,000 lbs (45 tons) of tea worth an estimated £10,000 had been consigned to waters of Boston harbor.<1> Nothing else had been damaged or stolen, except a single padlock accidentally broken and anonymously replaced not long thereafter. Tea washed up on the shores around Boston for weeks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

on a dark night. The lodge of St Andrew,

http://www.paulreverehouse.org/bio/bio.shtml

Also he was the son of a French protestant huguenot,

"the son of Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot (Protestant) immigrant, and Deborah Hichborn, daughter of a local artisan family. Rivoire, who changed his name to Paul Revere some time after immigrating, was a goldsmith and eventually the head of a large household."

When you think of religious freedom in America, remember that the French Catholics tried to kill off the Huguenot's during the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, under advisement of the Jesuit who had the ear of the French king.

Freemasonry (decended from the Knights Templar, also persecuted by the Catholic heirarchy and aristocracy) became an enemy of the Catholic church's authoritarianism. This is ironic considering Boston's heavy Irish Catholic immigration after the Revolutionary War.

In any event, the unseen ideological war between the morphed Knights Templar (now Freemasons) and the equally morphed Knights Hospitaler (now known as the Knights of Malta) has now been mostly finished, with the Knights Hospitaler winning out along with their authoritarianism.

The country badly needs a new brand of Freemasons, IMHO.

tour is to be believed, many of the participants in the Boston Tea Party were drunk as hell.

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy !

The early Freemasons had it about right. What happened ?

just think what would have happened to them if they were caught. I think I would have drank quite a bit before I tossed the tea as well.

cheers! :beer:

Those patriots exercised their freedom of speech.

And they did not have to do it in a "First Amendment Zone".