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 Harbor, 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 Harbor 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. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental
Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.
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