Team 8-1 2013-14

On this day in 1773, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships moored in Boston Harbor and dump 342 chests of tea into the water.

The Tea Act The Tea Act (1773) once again inflames the radicals, in spite of the fact that it will lower tea prices. If the Americans accept the lower tea prices, they also accept the duties (taxation without representation), and put many of the founding fathers out of business smuggling tea. An interesting point of view can be found on the Georgia History site

As a result to this so-called harassment the soldiers fired on the crowd. The first to die was an African-Amercan man named Crispus Attucks. He was a native of Frainghan, Massachusetts. He escaped from slavery in 1750 and had become a sailor. Crispus Attucks is considered the first martyr of the American Independence. The four others who died were Samuel gray, a rope maker; James Caldwell, a sailor; Samuel Maverick, a seventeen year old apprentice and Patrick Carr, a leather worker and Irish immigrant. All in which were unarmed and brutally murdered. The soldiers killed three, mortally wounded two others, and wounded six. How much harassment could they have done to deserve to be shot? The most the protesters should have gotten is to be arrested

To please the crowds Governor Hutchinson arrested the soldiers and promised the people that there would be a trial. John Adams and Josiah Quincy took the defense of the soldiers and Preston. The soldiers went to trial in September and they and captain Preston pleaded innocent. The eight men and Preston were tried separately and only two were found guilty. The others were acquitted while the two found guilty were branded on the hand and released, an easy penalty for murder. Preston was found innocent. Adams was successful in proving the soldiers fired in self-defense. The soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre were proven innocent. “Adam proved that the soldiers fired in self-defense”

In a today’s court system I believe them British soldiers would have been guilty and been convicted with murder. “Adams said, the killing were justified and blamed the violence of the immigrant Patrick Carr and Crispus Attucks”

If Parliament expected that the lowered cost of tea would mollify the colonists into acquiescing to the Tea Act, it was gravely mistaken. By allowing the East India Company to sell tea directly in the American colonies, the Tea Act cut out colonial merchants, and the prominent and influential colonial merchants reacted with anger.

Highly burdened by taxes them-selves, the British were merely asking the colonies to bear the expense of their own administration