What was the Boston Tea Party?

On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of colonists organized by the Sons of Liberty, some loosely disguised as Mohawk men, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and threw 342 chests of East India Company tea into the water, destroying a cargo worth an enormous sum. The immediate target was the Tea Act, passed earlier that year, and the frequently misunderstood detail is that the Act reduced the price of legally imported tea. The objection was not cost but principle: accepting cheaper taxed tea would concede Parliament's right to tax colonists who had no representation in it, and it also threatened the business of colonial merchants including smugglers.

The British response escalated the conflict decisively. Parliament passed the Coercive Acts in 1774, known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts, closing the port of Boston until the tea was paid for, restructuring the Massachusetts government, restricting town meetings, and allowing officials accused of crimes to be tried in Britain. Rather than isolating Massachusetts, the punishment unified colonial opinion and led directly to the First Continental Congress in September 1774 and to armed conflict at Lexington and Concord the following April.

Two points of accuracy. The event was not called the Boston Tea Party at the time and did not acquire that name until decades later. And the participants were careful to destroy only the tea, reportedly repairing a broken padlock and punishing a participant who attempted to take some for himself, which was consistent with framing the act as principled protest rather than looting. Similar tea destruction occurred in other ports including New York and Charleston, though Boston's became the emblematic one.