On a cold December night, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded three ships docked in Boston Harbor and threw 342 chests of East India Company tea into the water, an act of defiance against the Tea Act. The destroyed tea, worth roughly £10,000, provoked Parliament's punitive Coercive Acts and pushed the American colonies further toward revolution.
Roughly 100 to 200 men, many with soot-blackened faces and blankets meant to evoke Mohawk dress, rowed out to the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver as thousands of Bostonians watched from the wharves. Working through the evening by lantern light, they hoisted 342 chests onto the decks, split them open with hatchets, and heaved the leaves into the harbor, careful to avoid personal looting or damage to the ships themselves.
Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty had organized the protest after royal governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to let the tea ships leave without paying duty. The tea was so plentiful that witnesses said the harbor smelled of it for weeks, and tea leaves reportedly washed up on shorelines miles away.
King George III and Parliament responded not with concession but with the Coercive Acts of 1774, closing Boston's port and stripping Massachusetts of self-governance. Rather than cowing the colonies, the crackdown united them, helping spark the First Continental Congress and, within two years, open rebellion.
Key people: Samuel Adams, Thomas Hutchinson