In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists
disguised as Mohawk Indians board three tea ships
and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston
Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s
Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering
East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax
and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American
tea trade.

The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut
even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and
many colonists viewed the act as another example of
taxation tyranny.

The term ‘Tea Party’ was not actually used at the time
and was coined in the 1830s when the Revolutionary
generation looked back with nostalgia fifty years later.