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 too impractical on the footing that "local and other circumstances, cannot properly be represented in the British parliament". The British Government, similarly, does not appear to have formally requested discussions with the Americans concerning the issue of Parliamentary seats until 1778. In that year "the commissioners of the king of Great Britain," known as the Carlisle Peace Commission of 1778, made an offer to the Congress of "a reciprocal deputation of an agent or agents from the different states, who shall have the privilege of a seat and voice in the parliament of Great Britain". In Britain, representation was highly