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What was the Boston Tea Party? You probably think it was a bunch of Britain's sitting around having a very big tea party... wrong. The Boston Tea Party was revolt against tax on tea. The British Parliament and the American colonist before the Revolution, Parliament, when repealing the Townsend Acts, had retained the tea tax, partly as a symbol of its right to tax the colonies, partly to aid the financially embarrassed East India Company. The colonists tried to prevent the consignees from accepting taxed tea and were successful in New York and Philadelphia but it was those in Boston that made their mark in history. Still reeling from the Hutchinson letters, Bostonians suspected the new Tea Tax was simply another attempt by the British Parliament to squash American freedom. Samuel Adams, wealthy smuggler, who had profited from the smuggled tea, called for agents and consignees of the East India Company tea to abandon their positions; consignees who hesitated were terrorized through attacks on their warehouses and even their homes. The first of many ships carrying the East India Company tea was HMS Dartmouth arriving in late November 1773. A standoff ensued between the port authorities and the Sons of Liberty. Samuel Adams whipped up the growing crowd by demanding a series of protest meetings. Coming from both the city and outlying areas, thousands attended these meetings; every meeting larger than the one before. The crowds shouted defiance not only at the British Parliament, the East India Company, and HMS Dartmouth but at Governor Thomas Hutchinson as well, who was still struggling to have the tea landed. On the night of December 16, the protest meeting, held at Boston's Old South Meeting House, was the largest yet seen. An estimated 8,000 people were said to have attended. On Thursday, December, 1773, the evening before the tea was due to be landed, the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, they boarded the ships on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, and threw 342 chests of the tea into the harbor. In reply, Parliament passed the Boston Port Bill. Tea washed up on the shores around Boston for weeks. This act brought criticism from both colonial and British officials. For example, Benjamin Franklin exclaimed that the destroyed tea must be repaid, and he offered to repay with his own money. The British government responded by closing the port of Boston and put in place other laws that were known as the "Intolerable Acts," also called the Coercive Acts. However, a number of colonists were inspired to carry out similar acts, such as the burning of the Peggy Stewart. The Boston Tea Party eventually proved to be one of the many causes that led to the American Revolution. At the very least, the Boston Tea Party and the reaction that followed served to rally support for revolutionaries in the thirteen colonies who were eventually successful in their fight for independence. As far as tea drinking itself was concerned, many colonists, in Boston and elsewhere in the country, pledged to keep away from the drink as a protest, turning instead to "Balsamic Hyperion" (made from raspberry leaves), other herbal infusions and coffee. This social protest movement away from tea drinking was not, however, long-lived.

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