The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773, when American colonists protested British taxation by throwing tea into Boston Harbor.
The protest followed the Tea Act of 1773, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea directly in the colonies. Although the act lowered the tea’s price, many colonists opposed the company’s special privileges and the principle of taxation without colonial representation.
That night, men associated with the Sons of Liberty boarded three ships: Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver. They destroyed 342 chests of tea, an act valued at about £10,000 at the time. Participants attempted to damage only the tea and not the ships or other cargo.
British officials responded with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. Those measures helped intensify resistance and contributed to the meeting of the First Continental Congress in 1774. The Boston Tea Party was therefore not the beginning of the war, which started at Lexington and Concord in 1775, but it became one of the Revolution’s best-known acts of protest.