Parliament Passes Tea Act: Seeds of the Boston Tea Party Planted
The British Parliament passed the Tea Act on April 27, 1773, granting the struggling East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies and allowing it to sell directly to consumers, bypassing colonial merchants. The Act actually lowered the price of legal tea below the cost of smuggled Dutch tea, but colonists saw it as a trap: accepting cheap tea meant accepting Parliament's right to tax them without representation. The crisis came to a head on December 16, 1773, when members of the Sons of Liberty, some disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea worth roughly $1.7 million in today's dollars. Britain responded with the Coercive Acts, which the colonists called the Intolerable Acts.
April 27, 1773
253 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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