The monopoly's tea hits the mud

What happened

On the evening of 16 December 1773, after Governor Hutchinson refused to let the Dartmouth sail home with her tea, a party of Bostonians boarded the three tea ships at Griffin's Wharf. In about three hours they hoisted 340 chests of East India Company tea out of the holds, split them with hatchets and emptied them over the side. It was nearly low tide, so the leaves piled up on the mud against the hulls until apprentices waded in and beat them down with barrel staves. Most of the disguises were crude: soot or lampblack on the face, a blanket, an old frock. A thousand people stood on the wharf and watched without a sound. Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren stayed at the Old South Meeting House, well away from the wharf. The moon was a thin crescent that set at about eight; the light came from candles, lamps and torches. Rothbard reads the Tea Act as a bailout. Parliament rescued a near-bankrupt East India Company by letting it sell straight to America through a few favored consignees, and he writes that "opposition to a governmentally privileged monopoly is itself a high principle" (CiL, p. 1027). The crowd destroyed only the monopoly's tea and left the ships and the rest of their cargo as they found them, and afterward not one Bostonian would help the governor name a single man.