page_title: Boston Tea Party
section_title: Resisting the Tea Act
hierarchical_section_title: Boston Tea Party / Resisting the Tea Act
caption_attribution_description: "A Society of Patriotic Ladies at Edenton in North Carolina", a 1775 satirical depiction of a London caricaturist's idea of what an American women's boycott meeting might have been like. Several of the women have pretensions to extreme high fashion (with small caps perched on huge "big hair" headdresses), the woman chairing the meeting and holding the gavel is rather ugly (in 1775, just the very idea of women holding political-type meetings with public speaking and rules of debate would have been humorous to many), one of the women holding a quill is flirting with a man, the woman sitting next to the chairwoman looks like she would like to flirt with men if they would pay attention to her (note the body-language of the way she holds her fan), flasks of alcohol are much in evidence, and underneath the table a child holding a tray of food is harassed by a urinating dog (this implies an accusation that the women are not good mothers). The text of the resolution reads "We the Ladys of Edenton do hereby solemnly Engage not to Conform to that Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea, or that we the aforesaid Ladys Promote the use of any Manufacture from England, until such time that all Acts which tend to Enslave this our Native Country shall be Repealed." Bibliographic information found on LoC site: TITLE: A society of patriotic ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina CALL NUMBER: PC 1 - 5284B (A size) [P&amp;P] REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZC4-4617 (color film copy transparency) LC-USZ62-12711 (b&amp;w film copy neg.) LC-USZCN4-208 (color film copy neg.) No known restrictions on publication. SUMMARY: Print shows satire of American women from Edenton, North Carolina, pledging to boycott English tea in response to Continental Congress resolution in 1774 to boycott English goods. MEDIUM: 1 print&#160;: mezzotint. CREATED/PUBLISHED: London&#160;: Printed for R. Sayer &amp; J. Bennett, 1775 March 25. CREATOR: Robert Sayer and John Bennett (Firm), publisher. RELATED NAMES: Dawe, Philip, artist. NOTES: Plate V. Attributed to P(hilip?) Dawe, BMC no. 5284B. Catalogue of prints and drawings in the British Museum. Division I, political and personal satires, v. 5, no. 5284 Forms part of: British Cartoon Collection (Library of Congress). Published in: The American Revolution in drawings and prints; a checklist of 1765-1790 graphics in the Library of Congress / Compiled by Donald H. Cresswell, with a foreword by Sinclair H. Hitchings. Washington&#160;: [For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off.], 1975, no. 681. Published in: Eyes of the nation&#160;: a visual history of the United States / Vincent Virga and curators of the Library of Congress&#160;; historical commentary by Alan Brinkley. New York&#160;: Knopf, 1997. Published in: American women&#160;: a Library of Congress guide for the study of women's history and culture in the United States / edited by Sheridan Harvey ... [et al.]. Washington&#160;: Library of Congress, 2001, p. 183. SUBJECTS: Women--Political activity--North Carolina--Edenton--1770-1780. Tea--North Carolina--Edenton--1770-1780. Boycotts--American--North Carolina--Edenton--1770-1780. United States--History--Revolution, 1775-1783--Women. FORMAT: Cartoons (Commentary) British 1770-1780. Mezzotints British 1770-1780. REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA DIGITAL ID: (digital file from color film copy transparency) cph 3g04617 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g04617 (digital file from b&amp;w film copy neg.) cph 3a15070 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a15070 CARD #: 96511606
context_page_description: The Boston Tea Party was a political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773. The target was the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts. American Patriots strongly opposed the taxes in the Townshend Act as a violation of their rights. Demonstrators, some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company.
  They boarded the ships and threw the chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. The British government responded harshly and the episode escalated into the American Revolution. The Tea Party became an iconic event of American history, and since then other political protests such as the Tea Party movement have referred to themselves as historical successors to the Boston protest of 1773.
  The Tea Party was the culmination of a resistance movement throughout British America against the Tea Act, which had been passed by the British Parliament in 1773.
context_section_description: In September and October 1773, seven ships carrying East India Company tea were sent to the colonies: four were bound for Boston, and one each for New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In the ships were more than 2,000 chests containing nearly 600,000 pounds of tea. Americans learned the details of the Tea Act while the ships were en route, and opposition began to mount. Whigs, sometimes calling themselves Sons of Liberty, began a campaign to raise awareness and to convince or compel the consignees to resign, in the same way that stamp distributors had been forced to resign in the 1765 Stamp Act crisis.
  The protest movement that culminated with the Boston Tea Party was not a dispute about high taxes. The price of legally imported tea was actually reduced by the Tea Act of 1773. Protesters were instead concerned with a variety of other issues. The familiar "no taxation without representation" argument, along with the question of the extent of Parliament's authority in the colonies, remained prominent. Samuel Adams considered the British tea monopoly to be "equal to a tax" and to raise the same representation issue whether or not a tax was applied to it. Some regarded the purpose of the tax program—to make leading officials independent of colonial influence—as a dangerous infringement of colonial rights. This was especially true in Massachusetts, the only colony where the Townshend program had been fully implemented.
  Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business. Legitimate tea importers who had not been named as consignees by the East India Company were also threatened with financial ruin by the Tea Act. Another major concern for merchants was that the Tea Act gave the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade, and it was feared that this government-created monopoly might be extended in the future to include other goods.
  In New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, protesters successfully compelled the tea consignees to resign. In Charleston, the consignees had been forced to resign by early December, and the unclaimed tea was seized by customs officials. There were mass protest meetings in Philadelphia. Benjamin Rush urged his fellow countrymen to oppose the landing of the tea, because the cargo contained "the seeds of slavery". By early December, the Philadelphia consignees had resigned and the tea ship returned to England with its cargo following a confrontation with the ship's captain. The tea ship bound for New York City was delayed by bad weather; by the time it arrived, the consignees had resigned, and the ship returned to England with the tea.
caption: This 1775 British cartoon, A Society of Patriotic Ladies at Edenton in North Carolina, satirizes the Edenton Tea Party, a group of women who organized a boycott of English tea.
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