The schoolboys' tea bonfire

What happened

Tea drinking, a favorite pastime of Americans, was the hardest part of the boycott to enforce. South Carolina's Continental Association had teeth anyway: the General Committee in Charleston, radical to the core, added its own ban on tea from November 1, 1774, going beyond what Congress had asked. Then it sent the town's schoolboys door to door. The South Carolina Gazette said young gentlemen from several schools made a considerable collection, and found that three houses in four had no tea at all. On Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, the boys burned what they had gathered in a public bonfire. Two days earlier merchants had emptied seven chests of tea into the river, and Rothbard says the committee induced them to it. He laughs at the petty absurdities this zeal sometimes reached, such as Gadsden's ultras calling a returning traveler's furniture and two horses an illegal import, but he says nonimportation was enforced in Charleston with great efficiency and zeal.