History DBQ -

I will be posting document based questions on American history on a regular basis. Here is the first:

The reception accorded the Tea Act in 1773-74 is replete with paradox. For the previous two years the American had drunk tea, much of it legally imported and they had paid the duty…yet within the year a year of the passage of the Tea Act…anyone who bought the tea was branded an enemy to his country…Why we may ask did this convulsive reaction occur?

The answer has much to do with how the colonists understood the Tea Act…it expressed still another claim by Parliament of the right to tax them. This claim meant, as far as they were concerned, that the English plot to enslave them had been revived. If they went on paying the duty now that the government’s intentions were laid bare, they would be cooperating with the enslavers.

Who did the actual work of jettisoning the tea cannot be known. The crowd may have included a fairly broad spectrum of Boston’s population and probably farmers from nearby villages. For the resistance to the Tea Act drew on the ‘people’ in a way that nonimportation had not…Destruction of property left men from all of these groups [merchants, lawyers and professionals] uneasy, but they had seen the matter through. They were called the ‘rabble’…

- historian Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause (2005)

1. What is Middlekauff’s point of view in the passage? Cite ONE sentence to support your answer?

2. Why does Middlekauff describe the response to the Act as a ‘paradox’? What evidence is given in the passage to support this notion?

3. What does Middlekauff’s assertion that the resistance of the Act “drew on the ‘people’” signify about the protest movement from 1764-1773? Give ONE example of support this assertion from 1764-1773 and ONE example to challenge this assertion.