In 1773, on this day the Brotherhood of Liberty carried out its most dramatic pre-Revolutionary War act of defianace against British rule: the Boston Tea Party.

Double Jeopardy Part 6
Boston Tea PartyJust after 7:00 PM that evening Brotherhood members stormed three British merchant ships docked in Boston Harbor and threw hundreds of tea chests overboard in protest of the increasingly heavy taxes American colonists were being forced to pay to the British crown. Most of the participants in the Tea Party would go on to fight in the Revolutionary War, with some of them playing a significant role in the liberation of Boston by the Continental Army in 1775.

Despite British colonial authorities' most diligent efforts to locate and arrest the Tea Party's organizers, no one was ever caught; in fact one Brotherhood partisan actually suceeded in infiltrating the very British Army regiment deployed to apprehend him. In the post-Revolution era the tavern where the Tea Party plan had first been conceived would become a shrine to the struggle for American independence; around 1900 the U.S. Department of the Interior would declare it a national historic landmark.

In the early 21st century the phrase "Tea Party" would come into vogue as a metaphor for the emergence of a political movement sparked by what some Americans considered excessive spending and taxation by their government.