One of the most famous and notorious events that took place in the time period between the French and Indian War and the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party. It was an act that American colonists did in protest of British government policies.
The Boston Tea Party was committed by a group called the Sons of Liberty on the night of December 16, 1773 (BostonTeaPartyShip.com). It was done after the British government had imposed a series of taxes on the American colonies in 1767 called the Townshend Revenue Act (BostonTeaPartyShip.com). After boycotts and protests, all of the taxes were repealed by 1770, except for the one on tea (BostonTeaPartyShip.com). This was done to show the colonists that the British retained the right to tax. In 1773, the British government enacted the Tea Act, which had granted the British East India Company a monopoly on selling tea in the colonies, which was a bailout policy for the debt-ridden company. (BostonTeaPartyShip.com).
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As the days led up to the protest, three ships had landed in Boston Harbor, but the tea was not unloaded. Governor Hutchinson had ordered the ships not to leave until they had a pass (BostonTeaPartyShip.com). At a meeting at Old South Church on December 16, over 5,000 people attended, and the colonists found out that the ships were still not permitted to leave (BostonTeaPartyShip.com). Some members of the Sons of Liberty, along with the crowd, left the meeting hall, went down to the ships and, in three hours, dumped out 340 chests of tea into the Harbor (BostonTeaPartyShip.com).
Afterward, Paul Revere sped the news of the protest to Manhattan,and weeks later, news of it went to Britain (BostonTeaPartyShip.com). The British responded with the Intolerable Acts, which, among other things, closed the port of Boston, outlawed town meetings, and allowed the British to force citizens to quarter soldiers in their homes (BostonTeaPartyShip.com).
This event, and the British reaction to it, pushed both sides further apart from each other, and eventually sparked the American Revolution. Rather than be cowed by the Intolerable Acts, the colonists took more action, including calling their own Continental Congress and began training militia to fight the British. In 1775, the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, and the war began.
- Boston TeaPartyShip.com (n.d.), “The Tea Act”, Retrieved from http://www.bostonteapartyship.com/
