On December 16, 1773, in response to the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, a group of 130 men boarded three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped 340 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.

The Sons of Liberty was founded by Samuel Adams to fight taxation by the British government. Their motto became "No taxation without representation."

When tea became popular in the British colonies, Parliament sought to eliminate foreign competition by passing an act in 1721, 52 years before the Boston Tea Party, that required colonists to import their tea only from Great Britain. As a result, companies could not export foreign tea to the colonies without first selling it at auction in England. British firms bought the tea and resold it (at higher prices) to merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

The governors of Pennsylvania, South Carolina and New York had already forced ships to return to England without unloading their tea. But Thomas Hutchinson, whose two sons were tea merchants, took a hard line, refusing to allow the ships to leave the harbor without unloading their cargo.

Though led by Samuel Adams and his Sons of Liberty and organized by John Hancock, the names of many of those involved in the Boston Tea Party remain unknown. Thanks to their Native American costumes, only one of the tea party culprits, Francis Akeley, was arrested and imprisoned.

The tea didn't belong to King George. It was private property owned by the East India Company and transported on privately contracted shipping vessels. At one point, the East India Company accounted for half of the world's trade, particularly in basic commodities such as cotton, silk, salt, spices, opium, and tea.

In the fall of 1773, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, the Beaver, and the William were all bound for Boston with shipments of tea. On November 28, the Dartmouth arrived in Boston Harbor, followed by the Eleanor and the Beaver a couple of weeks later. The William, however, hit bad weather and ran aground near Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The three tea ships contained 240 chests of Bohea, 15 of Congou, 10 of Souchong (all black teas), 60 of Singlo, and 15 of Hyson (both green teas).

340 chests of tea, some weighing 400 pounds, were smashed open and dumped into Boston Harbor. According to the Boston Tea Party Museum, the tea was worth $1.7 million in today's dollars, and modern estimates indicate that the destroyed tea could have brewed approximately 18.5 million cups of tea.

In a letter to George William Fairfax, George Washington wrote, "in short the Ministry may rely on it that Americans will never be tax'd without their own consent [and] that the cause of Boston, the despotic measures in respect to it ... now is, and ever will be, considered as the cause of America (not that we approve their conduct in destroying the tea)."