The Boston Tea Party is part 5 of my American Revolution refresher, and the real meaning behind the Fourth of July. Today I’ll talk about the motivation and what happened at the Boston Tea Party. Previous parts of this ongoing saga include the French and Indian War, Quest for Independence, and Boston Massacre.

After protests by the colonists, the British government repealed the Townsend Act removing taxes and duties on all goods, except for tea. As a result, the colonies refused to buy British tea, and instead, smuggled tea in from Holland. The British government was going to force the colonists to buy their tea. In protest, on the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of men calling themselves the "Sons of Liberty" went to the Boston Harbor dressed as Mohawk Indians. They boarded three British ships, the Beaver, the Eleanor and the Dartmouth, and dumped forty-five tons of tea into the Boston Harbor.

To learn more about the Boston Tea Party, see the Kidport Boston Tea Party reference materials.

http://www.kidport.com/RefLib/UsaHistory/AmericanRevolution/TeaParty.htm

You may also be interested in our Boston Tea Party video collection.

http://www.kidport.com/RefLib/UsaHistory/AmericanRevolution/Video/BostonTeaParty.htm

In the next section I’ll talk about the “Intolerable Acts.”

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