The Boston Tea Party 1773
The Boston Tea Party, a protest against tea duties in December 1773, was the catalyst that started the American War of Independence , leading to the United States of America becoming an independent nation and no longer a collection of British colonies.
In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbour.
The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny.When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbour, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the “tea party” with about 60 members of the Sons of Liberty, his underground resistance group. The British tea dumped in Boston Harbour on the night of December 16 was valued at some $18,000.
Parliament, outraged by the blatant destruction of British property,enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774.
The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping,established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. This Tea Party sparked off other protests: tea being shipped to New York and Philadelphia was sent back to London, while tea off-loaded at Charleston was left to rot in the warehouses. In retaliation, the British government passed five laws in early 1774 that became known as the Intolerable Acts. Although intended primarily to punish the people of Massachusetts (the Acts included closing the port of Boston until the tea was paid for, restricting town meetings and giving the British-appointed governor more power), in the event the Acts played a key role in uniting the 13 American colonies against British rule. In September 1774, representatives of the colonies, including Samuel Adams, one of the Bostonian resistance leaders, met at the First Continental Congress to plan common measures of resistance against the Acts. The united resistance of the colonies would lead to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, which was signed in July 1776, just three years after the Boston Tea Party.
