On This Day: American Patriots Carry Out Boston Tea Party

Tea was an important trade export for the British Empire, and consequently, by the early 1770s, American patriots had come to call it “the beverage of traitors.” Unwilling to contribute to British tax revenues, they only purchased tea that was smuggled into the country.

At the time, the East India Company, which trafficked in tea and was an important tool of Britain’s colonial expansion, was close to bankruptcy. The British government responded by excusing the East India Company from customs duties on tea shipped to the American colonies.

The move made imported British tea less expensive than smuggled tea, creating an unfair advantage for British merchants. It followed other acts—the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts—designed to raise money among the colonists; the acts were greeted with protests and served to further alienate America from Britain.

“The Tea Act of 1773 was the last straw,” writes the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum Web site, also saying that, “it proved to be the spark that revived American passions about the issue of taxation without representation.”

Three British ships—the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver—arrived in Boston Harbor with a cargo of tea on Nov. 28, 1773. Colonists would not allow the ships to be unloaded and the Sons of Liberty, a secret revolutionary organization led in Boston by Samuel Adams, felt compelled to act.

On the evening of Dec. 16, members of the organization dressed as Mohawk Indians and boarded the ships. Shouting “The Mohawks are come!” and “Boston harbor a teapot tonight!” the patriots split tea chests open with tomahawks and threw 35,000 pounds of leaves overboard. The tea was piled so high that it spilled back onto the decks and had to be shoveled over the side again.

Their work complete, the disguised patriots marched away to the tune of a fife. News of the Boston Tea Party spread, and other towns set about destroying the East India Company tea or otherwise preventing its importation.

King George III and British Parliament reacted angrily to the Tea Party; “Hardliners in the British government, looking for reasons to clamp down on the Bay colony, found their cause,” writes PBS. Boston Harbor was shut down immediately and Benjamin Franklin, Massachusetts' agent to the British government, was lambasted by Parliament.

In 1774, Britain passes a series of acts—known as the Intolerable Acts or Coercive Acts—in response to the Tea Party. Four of the five acts were designed specifically to punish Massachusetts. The hostility created by the Tea Party and Intolerable Acts put Britain and the colonies on the road to war. A year later, in April 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

The History Place provides a detailed, six-part account of the American War of Independence that details the conflict's origins dating back to the early 18th century.

Samuel Adams was “an American patriot, one of the leaders of resistance to British policy in Massachusetts before the American Revolution,” writes iBoston, which also notes that he “orchestrated the Boston Tea Party.”

Adams was the head of the Boston chapter of the Sons of Liberty, a secret organization dedicated to chieving independence from Britain. The Sons of Liberty dined at the Liberty Tree Tavern in Dorchester, now part of Boston, in 1769, where their names were taken down. The document is available at the Massachusetts Historical Society; prominent names include Samuel and John Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere.

Many of those men participated in the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party Historical Society provides a partial list of participants, who were men of all different backgrounds.