The Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, took place when a group of Massachusetts Patriots, protesting the monopoly on American tea importation recently granted by parliament to the East India Company, seized 342 chests of tea in a midnight raid on three tea ships and threw them into the harbor. Under the pressure from the patriot groups, the consignees in Charleston, New York, And Philadelphia refused to accept the tea shipments, but in Boston, the chosen merchants refused to concede. The first tea ship, Dartmouth, reached Boston November 27, and two more arrived shortly after. Meanwhile, several mass meetings were held to demand that the tea be sent back to England with the duty unpaid. Tension mounted as the Patriot groups led by Samuel Adams tried to persuade the consignees and then the governor to accept this approach. On December 16, a large meeting at the Old South Church was told of Hutchison’s final refusal. About midnight, watched by a large crowd, Adams and a small group of Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the ships and dumped the tea. To parliament, the Boston Tea Party confirmed Massachusetts’s role as the core of resistance to British rule. The Intolerable Acts of 1774 were intended to punish the colony in general and Boston in particular, both for the Tea Party and for the pattern of resistance it exemplified. Was the Boston Tea Party an act of patriotism or terrorism? Many people have discussed the Boston Tea Party as being an act of patriotism. The people believe that since the Boston Tea Party was for a good cause and the fight for independence, that their acts were condoned. The Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism. The Sons of Liberty damaged property that wasn’t theirs. They threw over 300 crates of tea that wasn’t their property, (they didn’t pay for it) into the Boston Harbor without a second thought. They