The Boston Tea Party was the 1773 protest in Boston remembered in the revolutionary history highlighted by America250.
On December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and destroyed a shipment of East India Company tea by throwing it into the water. The protest opposed the Tea Act and Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies without elected colonial representation.
Historical sources differ slightly on the amount of tea destroyed, reporting either 340 or 342 chests. The commonly cited account says the tea was dumped during a nighttime action by people disguised, at least in part, as Mohawk figures.
The British government responded with the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. Those measures closed Boston Harbor and altered Massachusetts’ colonial government, helping push the colonies toward the First Continental Congress in 1774. The Boston Tea Party is distinct from the Boston Massacre of 1770, an earlier confrontation that also intensified colonial opposition to British rule.