In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts settlers disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three British tea ships and dumped 342 chests of tea in the harbor.
The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston Tea Party,” was a protest against the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, a bill to save the East India Company by drastically lowering its tax. on tea and granting it a virtual monopoly on tea. American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to reduce even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many settlers saw this law as yet another example of fiscal tyranny.
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When three vessels of tea, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, When they arrived in Boston Harbor, the settlers demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the “tea party” with around 60 members of the Sons of Liberty, his underground resistance group. British tea poured into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16 was valued at around $ 18,000.
Parliament, outraged by the blatant destruction of British property, enacted Coercive Laws, also known as Intolerable Acts, in 1774. Coercive Laws closed Boston to merchant shipping, established a formal British military rule in Massachusetts, immunized British officials from criminal prosecution. in America, and demanded that the settlers quarter the British troops. The settlers subsequently called on the first Continental Congress to consider united American resistance to the British.
