Boston Tea Party

On December 16, 1773, men organized through Boston's patriot network boarded the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into the water. Samuel Adams presided over the mass meeting at Old South Meeting House, where thousands of Bostonians heard Governor Thomas Hutchinson refuse to let the tea ships leave without landing their cargo. Disguised participants then destroyed the tea rather than allow the Tea Act and Parliament's tea duty to be enforced in Massachusetts.

The destruction of the tea turned a tax dispute into a test of whether Parliament could use a monopoly and a token duty to secure obedience from the colonies. Hutchinson insisted that imperial law had to be carried out in Boston, while Adams and other opponents argued that any parliamentary tax collected without colonial consent violated the rights of Englishmen. The episode also pushed resistance beyond pamphlets and petitions, because men in Boston acted directly against property tied to imperial policy and forced London to decide whether coercion would replace compromise.

Parliament answered with the Coercive Acts of 1774, especially the Boston Port Act and the Massachusetts Government Act, which helped bring the First Continental Congress together in Philadelphia. The Tea Party therefore stood on the direct road to the Suffolk Resolves, the Continental Association, and the chain of events that ended in Lexington and Concord.