The Patriot Post® · The Sons of Liberty Hosted a Tea Party!

Several of our Patriot readers participated in the reenactment of the Boston Tea Party last weekend, celebrating the 250th anniversary of an event that forever changed the course of American history.

Beyond the December 16th anniversary acknowledgement on our site, there was little fanfare on other national conservative media platforms, and of course virtually no notice by the Leftmedia talkingheads and scribes. Likewise, there was no mention by Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, though both did post statements on the 16th regarding the death of “His Highness Amir Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, the Amir of Kuwait.” That is fitting, but no mention of the Boston Tea Party on its 250th anniversary?

Obviously, today’s socialist Democrat Party cadres don’t know much about our history or civics, as evidenced by their failure to abide by their sacred oaths “to support and defend” our Constitution. For those who do know some history, they certainly would not want to remind you that the spark that ignited the fires of American Liberty was a simple three-cent tax on tea.

And so it was on December 16, 1773, that Bostonian “radicals” and members of a secret organization of American Patriots called the Sons of Liberty boarded three East India Company ships at Griffin’s Wharf. They threw 342 chests of British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor. This iconic event foretold the coming revolution against oppressive taxation and tyranny, immortalized as the “Boston Tea Party.”

Resistance to the British Crown had been mounting since King George III imposed the Writs of Assistance, giving British authorities power to arrest and detain colonists for any reason. He also imposed oppressive bills of attainder, targeting colonists for punishment without a trial. The Quartering Act of 1765 even authorized troops to use the homes of his colonial subjects as barracks. The spirit of protesting had intensified over previously enacted taxes, including the 1764 Sugar Act, 1765 Stamp Act, and 1767 Townshend Acts.

The mounting colonial resistance came to bloodshed in March 1770, when British troops fired on civilians in Boston, killing five colonists. This event, widely known as “The Boston Massacre,” gave credence to the slogan, “No taxation without representation.”

But it was the 1773 Tea Act, under which the Crown collected a three-pence tax on each pound of tea imported to the colonies, that instigated many Tea Party protests and seeded the American Revolution. News of the Tea Party protest in Boston galvanized the colonial movement opposing onerous British parliamentary acts that were a violation of the natural, charter, and constitutional rights of the British colonists.

In his commentary on the Boston Tea Party, James Madison wrote, “The people of the U.S. owe their Independence and their Liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of three-pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent.”

A “three-pence on tea.”

Three years later, this rebellion had grown to such extent that our Founders were willing to give up their fortunes and lives, attaching their signatures to a document that declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Of the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Of those unwilling to fight for Liberty, Samuel Adams, a leader of Boston’s “radical” Sons of Liberty, wrote: “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!”

I wonder how, on July 4th, 2026, Democrats will frame the United States’ semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence? Spoiler alert — “RACISTS.”

(For more on our extraordinary legacy of freedom, read the Patriot’s Primer on American Liberty.)