On December 16, 1773, a group of eighty or so colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships in Boston Harbor, broke open 342 tea chests, and dumped the contents overboard. That sounds like a fairly moderate act of vandalism. In fact, it was a year’s supply of tea for Boston, with a value of £18,000, and so it was a grave and capital offense, and everyone involved knew so. Nobody at the time, incidentally, called it the Boston Tea Party; that name wasn’t first used until 1834.
