Increase Carpenter an organized group using the formal name "Sons of Liberty", leading to a pattern for future resistance to the British that carried the colonies towards 1776. The Boston Tea Party was a political and mercantile protest by the Sons of Liberty in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 16, 1773. The target was the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts, thus undercutting local tea merchants: Demonstrators, some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of
No taxation without representation 1760s, the Americans were being deprived of a historic right. The English Bill of Rights 1689 had forbidden the imposition of taxes without the consent of Parliament. Since the colonists had no representation in Parliament, the taxes violated the guaranteed Rights of Englishmen. Parliament initially contended that the colonists had virtual representation, but the idea "found little support on either side of the Atlantic". John Dunmore Lang wrote in 1852, "The person who first suggested the idea [of Parliamentary representation for the colonies] appears to have been Oldmixon, an American annalist of the era of Queen Anne or George I.