Assignment 6: Primary Source Document Reflection Post

Eyewitness account of the Boston Tea Party .

Whenever I thought about the Boston Tea Party, I imagined a bunch of people throwing a riot dressed up as Indians. In elementary school, we had a field trip to Boston Harbor where they have a ship with packages of tea and they would allow us to throw it into the harbor. The packs of course had ropes to pull them back up from the water and now I know that it probably was not real tea. But, they never really went into detail on how it happened. When I read the eyewitness account, I discovered that it was not a riot at all. The colonists had set in their minds what they wanted to get out of the event without causing any harm of any kind. I learned that they were actually pretty orderly and it was not chaos as I imagined. The fact that they were given instructions to specifically not harm the ships surprised me a lot. The colonists did not even try to get to know who participated with them in the event. Basically they just walked up to the ships, dumped the tea, and walked back to their homes. I was a little shocked though that some of the ones who participated in the act of rebellion were trying to take advantage of the situation and sneak some tea into their jackets. I think it was a great way to rebel with no violence.