What 1773 event saw American colonists dump tea into Boston Harbor?

The Boston Tea Party was the 1773 event in which American colonists dumped tea into Boston Harbor.

On the night of December 16, 1773, colonists boarded ships carrying East India Company tea and threw 342 chests into the harbor. The protest opposed the Tea Act, which allowed the company to sell tea more cheaply while retaining a tax that many colonists viewed as an example of taxation without representation.

The participants were associated with the Patriot movement, and some disguised themselves as Indigenous people. The destruction of the tea was deliberate political property damage, not a general rejection of tea as a beverage. The protestors wanted to challenge Parliament’s authority and the special commercial privileges granted to the East India Company.

Britain responded with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. These measures restricted Massachusetts self-government and closed Boston Harbor until compensation was paid. The backlash helped prompt the First Continental Congress in 1774 and intensified the conflict that led to the American Revolutionary War.