Today marks the 246^th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, from which the Tea Party movement gets its name. We owe much to those original patriots and heroes. A legacy that has lasted almost three centuries, and will continue on for countless more. On this anniversary, a review of the events that took place that night is in order, so that we might remember and act in the same spirit of duty and patriotism in our own struggles against tyranny.

History has a well-documented retelling:

In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny.

When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbor, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the “tea party” with about 60 members of the Sons of Liberty, his underground resistance group. The British tea dumped in Boston Harbor on the night of December 16 was valued at some $18,000.

The cause of the Tea Party was overarching tyranny of the British, and brutal taxation of the colonies. It is interesting to note that the value of the tea was $18,000 for that time period. Adjusting for inflation, that’d be roughly $538,342 in 2019. No wonder the Boston Tea Party was such a memorable event!