The Boston Tea party was held on December 18, 1773 as a way of
protesting the raised taxes on tea in the American colonies. All
of the colonists had taken tea to the level of a mad obsession, as had
the British. Three
British ships arrived, and the colonists refused to let the ships
unload their cargo of 342 crates of tea because of the newly imposed
taxes from Parliament, the British legislature, on the tea. The
governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, wouldn't let the
tea ships go back to Britain until they had dropped off their
load. That evening, a few citizens of Boston boarded the British
ship in disguised as Indians, or Native Americans, and dumped
the 342 chests of tea into the harbor. After this, the Bostonian
government refused to pay for the tea, which had been dumped into
the harbor by "Indians." The British government was
infuriated by this, and closed the Boston port. This was known
as the "Boston Port Act." The closing bill for the Boston
port was on June 1, 1774. To keep the colonists from using the
port, British troops came into Boston and blocked the harbor.
Other towns in New England compensated for this by shipping an
increasing amount of goods into Boston. The "Boston Port
Act" was one of the several events which lead to the assembly
of the First Continental Congress.
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