YORKTOWN — Often overshadowed by its Boston counterpart, The Yorktown Tea Party took place 250 years ago, one in a series of tea parties across the county that sparked a revolution. But what was the beverage’s place before this historic moment?
According to Colonial Williamsburg, in the years before members of the Sons of Liberty in Boston disguised themselves as “Mohawk” warriors and destroyed British East India Company tea in their town’s harbor and similar events elsewhere in the colonies, a tea crisis had taken hold.
In the early 1770s Americans had become avid consumers of tea. While some of that tea was purchased from the East India Company, much of it was from other suppliers, not all of which were not legal. By buying large quantities of Dutch tea, for example, Americans could ignore the laws that required them to pay duties on imported consumer products.
In 1767, Parliament taxed tea as part of the Townshend Act. Later, when the act was repealed, the taxation on tea was left in place as a statement to the colonists. Additionally, in 1773, Parliament worked to bail out the East India Company, which had fallen into deep financial trouble.
Officials saw an opportunity to bring together the American love for tea with the Company’s need to dispose of its excess supply by including provisions in its bailout that gave the East India Company an exclusive market in the North American colonies. Many colonists objected to these measures, and the result was the Tea Crisis.
And tea wasn’t the only thing that was being taxed through tariffs. Since the 1760s, there had been tension developing between the British Parlament and the colonists.
“[Colonists] abided by the civil right of no taxation without representation,” said Sarah Meschutt, the senior curator at the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown. “British colonials did not have adequate representation in parliament to resist Parliament so the way they could show their grievance was to organize a boycott or embargo against any of the imports, particularly tea, since that was the most recent tax imposed by the British government.”
According to the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, the Virginia boycott of British goods went into effect on Nov. 1, 1774, one month before the Continental Association boycott went into effect. Most merchants agreed to stop imports, but a few continued to import items from Britain.
And so it was that a ship called the Virginia arrived in Yorktown from England, carrying two half-chests of tea that had been imported by John Hatley Norton, the Yorktown agent of John Norton and Sons of London, for a Williamsburg merchant named John Prentis.
On the morning of Nov. 7, some citizens of Yorktown boarded the ship and waited throughout the morning while a committee of burgesses (colonial representatives) in Williamsburg debated what to do about the tea and the ship.
Hearing nothing from the committee by noon, the men hoisted the tea out of its hold and threw it in the river, just as had been done in Boston, another of the sparks that touched off the American Revolution.
