In a bid to rescue the floundering British East India Company, Parliament passed the Tea Act on May 10, 1773. Rather than taxing tea directly, the act allowed the Company to sell tea in the American colonies without colonial merchants, undercutting competition—even as it retained the hated Townshend duty. Though tea would actually cost less, colonists recognized the deeper threat: economic coercion paired with political subjugation.
The response was swift in Boston, where resistance to British overreach was already simmering. The Tea Act became a flashpoint—not just about taxation, but about who held power in the colonies.
One teenager in Boston was watching closely: Thomas Porter, then just 17 years old. That spring, he witnessed how the act inflamed tensions across New England. By the year’s end, Porter would be one of the 116 patriots who boarded ships at Griffin’s Wharf and dumped 342 chests of British tea into the harbor in an act of defiance that would echo across the world.
Porter later moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he became a respected merchant, Common Council member, and civic leader. He helped found the Bank of Alexandria, supported education and insurance initiatives, and remained active in the city’s public life. A dedicated Mason, he was a member of Masonic Lodge 22, and when he died of fever in 1800 at the age of 44, three Masonic lodges—No. 22, No. 47, and Brooke Lodge—joined in a united ceremony to lay him to rest.
Porter was buried with Masonic honors in the Old Presbyterian Meeting House Burial Ground, where his name is listed on the Revolutionary War Patriot plaque. However, like so many 18th-century burials, his exact resting place is no longer known.
His revolutionary spirit was born in 1773, with a law passed in a distant Parliament—and a teenager’s conviction that liberty was worth fighting for.
To see what happened next, read about the Boston Tea Party and how another future Alexandrian, Samuel Cooper, helped ignite a revolution. → The Boston Tea Party