The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773, an American Revolution protest remembered in America250 history.
That night, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded tea ships in Boston Harbor and threw hundreds of chests of East India Company tea into the water. They were protesting the Tea Act and the broader principle of taxation without representation.
The protest followed a mass meeting at the Old South Meeting House. Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to let the ships leave without unloading the tea and paying the required duty, intensifying the confrontation.
The British government responded with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. These measures tightened control over Massachusetts and helped turn colonial resistance into a wider revolutionary movement. The Boston Tea Party was not the start of the war; the Battles of Lexington and Concord followed in April 1775.