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“Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested tea, shipped for this port by the East India Company, is now arrived in the harbor.”
The day the colonists dumped thousand of pounds of tea into Boston Harbor turned out to be one of the most important in American history. Dubbed the Boston Tea Party, this act of protest was both defiant and illegal. It sent a message to the British government that the colonists were fed up with unfair treatment — and it lit the fuse that ignited the American Revolution.
