In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts settlers disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 boxes of tea into the harbor. On Sunday, November 28, the Dartmouth, which carries 114 boxes of tea, arrives at Boston Harbor. A meeting, open to all Bostonians and anyone from neighboring cities who choose to attend (a group identified as the Corps), is convened at Faneuil Hall. When the crowd swells up, it is transferred to Old South Meeting House.
The Corps speaks, demanding that tea be returned, and the assembly appoints a 25-man guard to protect Griffin's Wharf. Protesters had successfully prevented tea unloading in three other colonies, but in Boston, royal governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the tea to be returned to Britain. The incident had a similar effect in the United States when news of the Boston Tea Party reached London in January and Parliament responded with a series of acts collectively known in the colonies as the Acts Intolerable. To help the bankrupt company, thwart Dutch tea smuggling and reaffirm its authority to collect taxes from colonies, Parliament authorized the Tea Act on May 10, 1773. In April 1774, the British Parliament passed coercive (or intolerable) laws, which punished Massachusetts for the Tea Party incident.
That morning, as thousands of settlers gathered on the pier and surrounding streets, a meeting was held at the Old South Meeting House, where a large group of settlers voted to refuse to pay taxes on tea or allow tea to be unloaded, stored, sold or used. Tea sent to the colonies was to be transported only on East India Company ships and sold only through its own agents, bypassing independent colonial shippers and merchants. In New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, protesters managed to get the tea recipients to resign. This event, which became known as the Boston Tea Party, was one of the major events that led to the American Revolution.
Therefore, the company could sell the tea at a lower price than usual in the United States or Great Britain; it could sell less than to anyone else. Leaders of other major cities in the colonies canceled their orders in protest, but the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony allowed tea to reach Boston. John Adams and many other Americans considered drinking tea unpatriotic after the Boston Tea Party. As Europeans developed a taste for tea in the 17th century, rival companies were formed to import the product from China.
Boston Tea Party (December 16, 177), an incident in which American patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians threw 342 boxes of tea belonging to the British East India Company from ships into Boston Harbor. Led by Adams, the Children of Freedom held meetings against the British Parliament and protested the arrival at Griffin's Wharf of Dartmouth, a ship of the British East India Company carrying tea. No one was injured and, apart from the destruction of the tea and a padlock, no property was damaged or looted during the Boston Tea Party. It was not a question of giving up tax revenues for the nearly 1.2 million pounds of tea that settlers drank each year.
