Boston Tea Party Analysis

Madison’s Federalist Paper number 51, and more specifically the passage we were given, is a powerful way of framing the history of the United States from 1763 to 1789. It succinctly describes the underlying concerns of the colonists for revolution and as they formed a new government. In particular, Madison states that “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” In the first part Madison recognizes that a government must secure the country against lawlessness and disorder. In the second Madison identifies that the government can grow distant from its need to check itself …show more content…
The resulting response was the Boston Tea Party, which can be seen as an example of the Crown not sufficiently controlling the governed. This, in turn, led to an exaggerated response by Parliament that only served to antagonize and unite revolutionary New England with the rest of America against the perceived tyranny of the Crown, yet another instance of the government failing to control itself. The Tea Act in 1773 lowered the price of tea by removing duties on tea imported by the East India Company in order to save them from bankruptcy. Parliament thereby allowed the East India Company to sell directly to American retailers, allowing them to price their tea more competitively than the Dutch smugglers, who had previously been undercutting them. However, Parliament’s logic was flawed because the tax on tea collected in American ports remained in effect, making the Tea Act seem like a devious scheme to win popular support for Parliament’s right to tax the colonists without representation, and it threatened to destroy the business of powerful colonial merchants who had profited off of the smuggled tea. While many major port cities reacted negatively, both New York and Philadelphia turned the tea ships back before they could unload, Boston was by far the worst; Governor Hutchinson would not allow the vessels to return to England, while the colonists refused to let them unload, leaving the ships to sit in the harbor and wait for either party to make a decision. A small group of patriots finally made up their minds on December 16, 1773 when they threw three hundred forty chests of tea into Boston Harbor, in what is now known as the Boston Tea Party. The destruction of a British corporation’s private property caused Parliament to lash out at the colonists with

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Analysis: The Boston Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party: An Analysis