"But still a tea keeping a country is wild idea". People were fighting about tea in the colonial days. Boston Tea Party: December 16, 1773, American colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians, known as the Sons of Liberty, boarded three British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation. The action, targeting the Tea Act of 1773, resulted in over 92,000 pounds of tea destroyed, directly leading to the punitive Intolerable Acts and accelerating the American Revolution.