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The Boston Tea Party was a rebellion against British taxation without representation in the American colonies. Samuel Adams planned for a ship to unload tea and return to England duty-free, but the governor refused. Tea smugglers and Boston merchants dressed as Indians and dumped the tea overboard. The act was used by Adams to further the cause of independence.
Before the United States of America was an independent sovereign nation, it was a collection of colonies under British rule. During the 1770s, the colonists began to grow increasingly agitated about the way Parliament imposed taxes and other regulations on the colonies, especially considering that the colonies were not represented in Parliament at all. The Boston Tea Party was one consequence of this taxation without representation, and was a direct act of rebellion against a new tea tax imposed by the British government. The event is so named because the Boston Tea Party took place in Boston, Massachusetts and involved a ship full of tea.
The ship in question entered the port with orders to unload crates full of tea and pay the relevant duty required by British law. American politician and influential revolutionary Samuel Adams hatched a plan to have the ship unload the tea and return to England duty free. The governor of Massachusetts refused to let the ship leave port without paying dues, and so the ships remained in port while Adams arranged meetings to address the situation. When the governor again refused to release the ships without the duty being paid, the events leading up to the Boston Tea Party had set in and the colonists began making their way to the ships in the harbor.
The real identities of the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party are unknown, but it is widely speculated that tea smugglers and Boston merchants boarded the ship to dump the tea crates overboard. Many of these protesters dressed as Indians to disguise their identities. All tea aboard the vessel was destroyed, as it was dumped into the waters of Boston Harbor. The number of men who boarded the ship is also unknown.
After the Boston Tea Party, Samuel Adams publicly defended the act and used it as a tool to further the cause of independence. The act itself was not a demonstration against the new tax or higher prices – the price of tea actually went down because of the tea tax – but instead against the management of imposing regulations on the colonies while they were not represented in Parliament. In the eyes of protesters, the new tax set a dangerous precedent for British rule in the colonies, and was the latest in a long line of perceived crimes against the colonies.
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