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239 years ago last night, one of the most famous events in American history took place, the Boston Tea Party

While most people can scrape together an outline of the revolutionary act of rebellion or at least recognize that it had nothing to do with Washington sharing a cuppa with the redcoats, Christopher Klein has ten pieces of trivia you may not have known about this political protest.

1. The “tea partiers” were not protesting a tax hike, but a corporate tax break.

The protestors who caffeinated Boston Harbor were railing against the Tea Act, which the British government enacted in the spring of 1773. Rather than inflicting new levies, however, the legislation actually reduced the total tax on tea sold in America by the East India Company and would have allowed colonists to purchase tea at half the price paid by British consumers. The Tea Act, though, did leave in place the hated three-pence-per-pound duty enacted by the Townshend Acts in 1767, and it irked colonists as another instance of taxation legislation being passed by Parliament without their input and consent. The principle of self-governance, not the burden of higher taxes, motivated political opposition to the Tea Act.

2. Commercial interests, perhaps more than political principles, motivated many protestors.

The Tea Act was a government bailout for a company on the brink of financial collapse, the flailing East India Company, which was deemed to be, in modern terms, “too big to fail.” The legislation gave the East India Company a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade, allowing it to bypass colonial merchants as middlemen and to even undercut the price of smuggled Dutch tea, which was widely consumed in the colonies. Thus, the Tea Act directly threatened the vested commercial interests of Boston’s wealthy merchants and smugglers, such as John Hancock, who fomented the revolt.

Full story at History.com.

Know your American history.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons