December 16 · This Day in America
Nearly five thousand people pack the Old South Meeting House waiting for one answer: will the governor let the tea ships leave without unloading their taxed cargo? At a quarter to six the answer comes back — no. Within the hour, roughly a hundred and fifty men, faces darkened, some in Mohawk dress, move down to Griffin's Wharf, board the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, and split into three crews. For three hours they haul up 342 chests of East India Company tea and break them open into the dark water. They take nothing else. They damage nothing else. One participant remembered "the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months." It was not a riot. It was a statement, made in the open, that there is a limit to what a people will be made to pay without their consent. The empire answered with the Intolerable Acts. The colonies answered the empire. The road to Lexington starts at this wharf.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1811
Before dawn near New Madrid, in the Missouri country, the ground convulses with one of the most violent earthquakes in American history. The land heaves, fissures open, whole stretches of forest sink. For a few minutes the Mississippi River itself appears to flow upstream as the riverbed buckles and water surges back over the falls the quake had just made. Settlers ran in the dark not knowing where the ground would be solid. The continent had reminded everyone exactly whose it was.
Source: www.usgs.gov
“The stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.”George R. T. Hewes, Tea Party participant, recalling December 16, 1773