How History Unfolds on Paper: Important Americana from the Eric C. Caren Collection, Part X

The Pennsylvania Gazette
(Philadelphia: Hall and Sellers), January 5, 1774. No. 2350. Bifolium, (4 pp.) 16 x 10 in. (406 x 254 mm). Printed newspaper. Split at centerfold repaired with archival tape; toned, scattered stains; small closed tears or chips to extremities.

Rare issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, the paper formerly printed by Benjamin Franklin, containing an early contemporary report on the Boston Tea Party. The issue relays a report from a writer of the Boston Gazette, "that the People, tho unanimously determined that the East-India Company's Tea should not be sold nor landed, nor remain in Harbour long enough, to be liable (according to an Act of the British Parliament) to the Payment of the Duty imposed by that Parliament, for the Purpose of raising a Revenue in America...the People, deprived of any other Way to get rid of it, were obliged to destroy it in their own Defence; so that all the Damage the owners owe, &c. sustain by its Destruction, is wholly chargeable upon the Governor, Collector, Owner, &c."

On December 13, 1774, a large group of the Boston Sons of Liberty, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded three merchant vessels anchored in the harbor. Over the course of three hours, the group dumped over 340 chests of tea owned by the British East India Company overboard, destroying the monetary equivalent of almost two million dollars in today's currency.

The action was in response to the passage of the British Tea Act of 1773, one of a string of legislative duties passed by Parliament that increased financial burdens on American colonists. The Tea Act, along with the Townsend and subsequent Intolerable Acts, were seen by American colonists as violations of their rights as Englishmen, since they represented "taxation without representation." The Boston Tea Party proved a key incident of escalation of hostilities between Great Britain and the American colonies, which culminated two years later with the Battles of Lexington and Concord, officially starting the Revolutionary War.