British

The Townshend Acts, named after Charles Townshend, British chancellor of the Exchequer, imposed duties on British china, glass, lead, paint, paper and tea imported to the colonies.

The colonists protested, “no taxation without representation,” arguing that the British Parliament did not have the right to tax them because they lacked representation in the legislative body. They asserted that only colonial assemblies elected by themselves should have the power to impose taxes.

In simplest terms, the Boston Tea Party happened as a result of “taxation without representation”, yet the cause is more complex than that. The American colonists believed Britain was unfairly taxing them to pay for expenses incurred during the French and Indian War.

Boston Tea Party All the colonists dressed up as Indians and snuck on-board the British ships in the harbor. Then they threw all the tea on the ships into Boston Harbor. Cause: The colonists were upset by the Tea Act. Effect: The Intolerable Acts were passed to keep the colonists under control.

340 chests of British East India Company Tea, weighing over 92,000 pounds (roughly 46 tons), onboard the Beaver, Dartmouth, and Eleanor were smashed open by the Sons of Liberty armed with an assortment of axes and dumped into Boston Harbor the night of December 16, 1773.

After throwing the chests into the lake, the raiders abandoned ship and paddled back to land. In addition, no ships were burned during the actual Boston Tea Party in December 1773.

342 chests

The damage the Sons of Liberty caused by destroying 340 chests of tea, in today’s money, was worth more than $1,700,000 dollars.

It’s estimated that the protestors tossed more than 92,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. That’s enough to fill 18.5 million teabags. The present-day value of the destroyed tea has been estimated at around $1 million.

The story of tea begins in China. According to legend, in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting beneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water.

The Boston Tea Party was the first significant act of defiance by American colonists and is a defining event in American history. The implication and impact of the Boston Tea Party were enormous ultimately leading to the start of the American Revolution which began in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775.

The British response to the Boston Tea Party was to impose even more stringent policies on the Massachusetts colony. The Coercive Acts levied fines for the destroyed tea, sent British troops to Boston, and rewrote the colonial charter of Massachusetts, giving broadly expanded powers to the royally appointed governor.

The causes of the Boston Tea Party were the passing of the Tea Act in 1773. This granted the British East India Company the right to sell tea to the colonies free of the taxes that colonial tea sellers had to pay. This cut colonial merchants out of the tea trade.

Their action of throwing the tea overboard into the Boston harbor was meant to show the British and the Parliament that they could no longer use the colonies to their advantage through unjust means. The Boston Tea Party affects our lives today because it played a key role in leading to American Independence.

Boston Tea Party, (December 16, 1773), incident in which 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company were thrown from ships into Boston Harbor by American patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians.

The Boston Tea Party was a significant event in the growth of the American Revolution. Parliament responded in 1774 with the Intolerable Acts, or Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, ended local self-government in Massachusetts and closed Boston’s commerce.

If the Boston Tea Party hadn’t happened the Intolerable Acts may never have been made. if this had occurred, the war may have stayed at a civil and non-violent level. History would have changed drastically. If the revolutionary war never really started, the colonists wouldn’t have won.

On September 5, 1774, delegates from each of the 13 colonies except for Georgia (which was fighting a Native American uprising and was dependent on the British for military supplies) met in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress to organize colonial resistance to Parliament’s Coercive Acts.

For the colonists to give up their tea was a very important part of this rebellion. Many colonists gave up something important to them, to help move their purpose forward. This was a turning point in the Revolution as a whole because it allowed people to realize that rebellion was acceptable.

The Boston Tea Party was the key-event for the Revolutionary War. With this act, the colonists started the violent part of the revolution. It was the first try of the colonists, to rebel with violence against their own government. Then they (the government) passed taxes on lead, paint, paper and tea.

The passing of the Tea Act imposed no new taxes on the American colonies. Besides the tax on tea which had been in place since 1767, what fundamentally angered the American colonists about the Tea Act was the British East India Company’s government sanctioned monopoly on tea.