1773 - Political Events

Political Events

The Virginia House of Burgesses appoints a Provincial Committee of Correspondence March 12 to keep Virginia in touch with the other colonies. The Boston Gazette publishes The Defeat, an anonymous drama by propagandist Mercy Otis Warren that continues the theme begun last year in The Adulateur.

The Tea Act passed by Parliament May 10 lightens duties on tea imported into Britain to give relief to the East India Company, whose warehouses on the Thames contain 7 years' supply and are running up storage charges. The legislation raises a furor in the American colonies by permitting tea to be shipped at full duty to the colonies and sold directly to retailers, eliminating colonial middlemen and undercutting their prices. "There never was a good war or a bad peace," writes Benjamin Franklin September 11 in a letter from London to Josiah Quincy, but the anger of many colonists is not easily assuaged, and Sons of Liberty gangs organized by agitator Samuel Adams riot in the streets, tarring and feathering some crown officials.

"Two Letters on the Tea Tax" by John Dickinson is published in November.

The East India Company ships Beaver, Dartmouth, and Eleanor arrive at Boston in November with 114 chests of Chinese tea, whose price is lower than that of tea smuggled into the city in violation of the Tea Act. More tea arrives on later ships.

The "Boston Tea Party" December 16 demonstrates against the new English tea orders. Samuel Adams has organized the action with support from John Hancock, whose smuggling of contraband tea has been made unprofitable by the new measures (see commerce, 1768). Adams speaks from the pulpit of the Old South Church, preys upon fears of further taxation, and gives a prearranged signal to the Sons of Liberty by saying, "There is nothing more we can do for our country." Led by Lendall Pitts, scion of a Boston merchant family, men who include silversmith Paul Revere disguise themselves as Mohawks, board the East India Company ship Dartmouth at Griffen's Wharf, and throw 342 chests of Chinese tea from the London firm of Davison and Newman into Boston Harbor (the tea is valued at more than £9,650). Tea is left to rot on the docks at Charleston, while New York and Philadelphia send tea-laden ships back to England, but men of "sense and property" such as George Washington deplore the "Boston Tea Party."

Boston Tea Party
Boston's "tea party" provoked London, but harsh measures by the crown provoked some colonists to demand independence. (The Library of Congress.)

Prussian general Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz dies of paralysis at Ohlau August 27 at age 52.

Denmark cedes the duchy of Oldenburg to Russia.

Egypt's Ali Bey sustains wounds in a skirmish with Ottoman rebels and dies May 8 after 12 years of increasingly autocratic rule (see Napoleon, 1798).

Wahhabi fundamentalists in Arabia annex Riyadh (see religion, 1744; 1788).

The Ottoman sultan Mustapha III dies December 25 at age 57 after a 16-year reign. His 48-year-old brother inherits the throne and will reign until 1789 as Abdul Hamid.

Parliament passes a Regulating Act in May in an effort to bring the East India Company under government control (see Hastings, 1772). The company has become far more than a commercial enterprise and according to Whig leader Edmund Burke, now 44, it is "in reality a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of this nation sent into the East." The Mughal emperor Shah Alam has ceded Allahabad and Kora to the warlike Marathas in return for their support, and the British governor of Bengal Warren Hastings cedes Allahabad and Kora to Oudh's Shuja-ud-Dawlah under terms of the (first) Treaty of Benaras, promising him military support in return for monetary compensation (see Rohilla War, 1774).