Episode Details

In the spring of 1773, the most powerful corporation on earth was going bankrupt, and Parliament’s plan to save it was a shipload of cheap tea. The Tea Act would make British tea cheaper than the smuggled Dutch kind, and London was sure the colonists would buy it, pay the small tax hidden inside the bargain, and concede at last the principle they had fought over for eight years. It was a bribe, and an insult, and the Americans refused it.

This is the story of how that refusal came to a head in Boston, where Governor Thomas Hutchinson, with two of his own sons among the tea agents, swore the tea would land. It runs through the twenty-day deadline, the immovable standoff at Old South Meeting House, Samuel Adams’s quiet signal, and the disciplined three hours in the freezing dark when a hundred men in Mohawk disguise destroyed 342 chests of tea and nothing else. A dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, John Adams wrote the next morning, and then asked the only question left: what would London do now?