The tea was on three privately owned merchant ships. One hundred and fourteen chests were on board the Dartmouth, the first ship to arrive in port. The other two ships, the Eleanor and the brig Beaver carried 228 chests between them, along with other cargo. As the ships sailed into Boston Harbor, they each passed by Castle William to the south, which was under the command of a British officer and had upwards of a hundred cannon. When the ships came into the harbor, but before they docked, port officials boarded them. That meant that they had officially reached port and that their movements were now under the command of port officials instead of their captains.

Behind the tea-laden ships, British Admiral John Montagu brought a squadron of warships to prevent the colonists from forcing the ships back out to sea before they were unloaded. This put the captains (and the ships' owners) in a bind. If the tea wasn't unloaded, customs weren't paid. And if the ships tried to sail back out of port, Montagu would stop them and charge them with failing to pay customs on their cargo that was due, according to him, because they had already entered port.

After a few days, the colonists had the ships come in close to Griffin's Wharf. The Sons of Liberty organized a continuous watch of the vessels. Twenty-five men on each shift ensured that the ships were not unloaded under the cover of darkness, or at least to sound an alarm if there was an attempt. The ships' captains came ashore and left the mates on board. The situation remained the same for more than two weeks.

Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of colonial Massachusetts, clearly understood that the colonists were angry, but he did not anticipate that they would damage the cargo. He was counting on the fact that after 20 days without having paid customs, the customs authorities—with the assistance of British sailors and soldiers—could legally impound the tea from the ships, and then, from Castle William, disburse it in small amounts to a few merchants who could resell it. This would circumvent the colonists' effort to make sure that the tea did not enter Massachusetts. Hutchinson and the apprehensive merchants who were willing to receive the tea had holed up with the troops in Castle William.

Boston was not under martial law, so soldiers were not policing the city, although Hutchinson could have brought a detachment of soldiers in, had he known beforehand the particulars of a threat. He did not post a military guard at the wharf, however, perhaps to avoid provoking a confrontation with the crowds keeping watch there.

On December 14th, when the 20 days of waiting were almost up, Hutchinson wrote his brother Elisha about the excited Bostonians, "I hardly think they will attempt sending the tea back, but am more sure it will not go many leagues: it seems probable they will wait to hear from the southward, and much may depend on what is done there." (Hutchinson, 96) Yet Hutchinson also believed the colonists might take some form of direct action if an attempt was made to land the tea onto the wharf.

Just after six o'clock on the night of December 16, 1773, a group of about 60 men daubed their faces with burnt cork, coal dust, or donned other makeshift disguises, armed themselves with hatchets, and formed a raiding party. Some of them styled themselves "Indians."

They made their way to the wharf. The Sons of Liberty's watch was already there, and still others joined them, either to assist or simply to see what was happening. The raiding party formed three groups of 50 each, and boarded all of the nearly deserted ships at about the same time. They met no resistance.

Lendall Pitts, the commander of the group that boarded the brig Beaver, "sent a man to the mate, who was on board, in his cabin, with a message, politely requesting the use of a few lights, and the brig's keys—so that as little damage as possible might be done to the vessel;—and such was the case. The mate acted the part of a gentleman altogether. He handed over the keys without hesitation, and without saying a single word, and sent his cabin-boy for a bunch of candles, to be immediately put in use." (Thatcher, 181–2).

The moon shone brightly too, so their work was well lit. The night was very quiet and neither the crowd on the wharf nor the raiding party spoke much. Onlookers at the wharf, as well as the men on some of the closer British ships, however, quite distinctly heard the sounds of the chests being staved in.

The party quickly brought the 342 chests of tea (a total of 90,000 lbs.) onto the deck. They split them open and threw the tea and the chests overboard into the harbor. The party took care that no other property on board the ships was harmed, and that none of the raiders took away any of the tea. They even swept the decks clean of loose tea when they were done. They worked quickly, apprehensive of a possible attack from Admiral Montagu's squadron, part of which was only a quarter of a mile away.

Montagu watched the affair from the fleet, but he took no action because of the cargo ships' position next to the wharf. "I could easily have prevented the Execution of this Plan," he wrote the following day in a report, "but must have endangered the Lives of many innocent People by firing upon the Town." (Labardee, 145) Instead, he rowed ashore and watched from a building nearby, even briefly exchanging taunts with the Indians.

The tea party lasted three hours, finishing around nine o'clock. The raiding party then formed in rank and file by the wharf, and, shouldering their hatchets, marched, accompanied by a fifer, back into town, dispersed, and went home.

The next morning a large, winding mound of loose tea still floated in the harbor, and a party of colonists rowed out in boats and sank it down into the waters with their oars. The British fleet witnessed this, too, but did not interfere.

The disguised men's identities were kept secret by their fellow Bostonians, and Governor Hutchinson was unable to charge the members of the raiding party, but Parliament responded five months later (news traveled back and forth across the ocean very slowly then) with a series of measures meant to force Boston to heel.

Soldiers had been brought to Boston in 1768 to help enforce the Townshend Acts and keep the peace in the restive city. They were under orders not to use their weapons against the citizenry. The soldiers found themselves the object of Boston's hatred. The workers on the docks and at the city's ropewalk were particularly belligerent. They taunted and insulted the soldiers and brawled with individuals or small groups of them, sometimes using cudgels.

On the evening of March 5, 1770, on King Street, a soldier guarding the Customs House sent word for reinforcements because he was being confronted by a group of rowdy men and boys, some of whom had armed themselves with staves. A small detachment of soldiers appeared as the crowd in the street also increased. Taunting and jeering led to physical fighting and some of the soldiers then fired into the crowd, killing five people.

The following day, a town meeting was held in Boston's Faneuil Hall and a committee of 15 men was formed, among them Samuel Adams. Adams had already addressed the crowd, although what he said was not recorded. Accounts of the events of the few days after the affair described Adams as the "controlling mind" of the committee, even though he was not always officially in its front rank. The committee immediately met with the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson, and demanded that the troops be removed from the city.

The town meeting did not dissolve, but instead adjourned, giving a warrant to a committee—formally consisting of James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton but also consisting of four others, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams—that they investigate the affair and report back to the reconvened meeting on March 12. The committee's warrant read, "What steps may be further necessary for obtaining a particular account of all proceedings relative to the massacre in King-street . . ." This is the first evidence of the mention of the word "massacre," but newspaper accounts a week after the incident said that on the day following the incident, as people in the surrounding regions heard news of the "massacre," they began streaming into Boston.

The committee's report, delivered to the reconvened meeting on the 12th, gave an account of the affair. It contained the sentence, "An inquiry is now making into this unhappy affair; and by some of the evidence, there is no reason to apprehend that the soldiers have been made use of by others as instruments in executing a settled plot to massacre the inhabitants." The members of the committee, including Samuel Adams, signed the report.

The committee may have admitted that there was no evidence that the affair was the result of a premeditated "plot to massacre the inhabitants," but it did not hesitate to characterize it as a "massacre." Newspaper and broadside accounts, dated from the day of the committee report, called it "this horrid Massacre." Paul Revere's well-known and somewhat inaccurate colored engraving of the affair, which was labeled, "The Bloody Massacre," was issued on the same day.

The town meeting's committee, of which Samuel Adams was a member, then wrote a longer account, called "A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre," and submitted it a week later under the signatures of the formal heads of the committee, Bowdoin, Pemberton, and Warren. The meeting accepted it and had it printed, and copies of it were immediately sent to England in order to give an account of the events that would help shape the reporting of the event there. Calling it a "massacre," rather than a "riot," a "tragedy," or a "disturbance," as the soldiers and colonial officials were inclined to do, went far toward absolving the residents of Boston of blame for the incident and indicting public opinion against the soldiers. In addition, calling it a "massacre," rather than a "murder," suggested that it might have been organized, and not a spontaneously unfolding event.

Aside from that, however, the word "massacre" had a particular resonance that was well understood on both sides of the Atlantic. Calling the event in Boston a "massacre" evoked an event that had occurred two years earlier, in 1768, in a section of London known as St. George's Fields. A crowd of almost 15,000 people gathered there to protest the imprisonment of John Wilkes, a radical member of the House of Commons convicted of libeling the King and his ministers. Soldiers had been guarding the prison, and under provocation, fired into the crowd, killing 7 people, including one young man mistaken for a rioter by several soldiers who pursued, cornered, and shot him in a stable. The St. George's Fields riot was quickly termed the St. George's Fields "massacre" by some of the London press.

From prison, Wilkes had corresponded with the Sons of Liberty in Boston, who were inspired by his radicalism. He had written them a letter referring to the "horrid Massacre," meaning the affair in St. George's Fields. In another letter, he suggested that the massacre had been planned in advance by the government, and that, for this reason, forces of a standing army were brought in to use against civilians. The members of the Boston Committee, in reporting that they found no evidence that the event in Boston had been premeditated by the government or the soldiers, may have been primed by Wilkes to consider that possibility.

After the St. George's Fields massacre, Dr. John Free, Chaplain of Christ Church, Oxford, preached a fiery sermon, denouncing the deaths as murders. The sermon was printed as a pamphlet and quickly found its way across the Atlantic. London broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets also rapidly appeared in the American colonies, where they were reprinted in local papers. Essentially, many Americans believed that they were one in a cause with Wilkes and other English radicals who were being oppressed by arbitrary laws and an oppressive "ministerial conspiracy."

Historian Pauline Maier points to the reporting in the Boston Gazette of March 12, 1770, which said, "A more dreadful Tragedy has been acted by the Soldiery in King-Street, Boston, New-England, than was sometime since exhibited in St. George's Field, London, in Old England, which may serve instead of Beacons for both Countries." Some London papers also linked the two events.

After the Boston Massacre, John Lathrop, Pastor of the Second Church in Boston, preached a sermon entitled "Innocent Blood Crying to God from the Streets of Boston," which very deliberately echoed Dr. Free's earlier sermon.

Bostonians interpreted the events in their city as an eerie repetition of the "St. George's Fields Massacre," and their labeling of the affray in Boston as a "massacre"—and even "this horrid Massacre," echoing Wilkes' description of St. George's Fields—cemented that connection.

It is fascinating to consider what might have happened had the American patriots lost their war against Great Britain. Certainly British victory in the conflict was entirely plausible. Indeed, given the significant disparities in resources between the British and the colonists, such an outcome seemed not just possible but likely early on, and at numerous points during the conflict. The Patriots lacked a professional army, a central government, and a navy; the 13 colonies were geographically dispersed and lacked Britain’s political unity. The Patriots waged their war for independence against the world’s premier military and its most powerful empire, only a decade and a half removed from its great triumph over France in the Seven Years’ War.

It is impossible to know with certainty what would have happened if the colonies had lost the War of Independence. Historians refer to such “what if?” as counterfactuals—because they occur in an imagined world where a different sequence of events took place, there is by definition no factual evidence on which to base historical analysis. Without documentary sources to work with, answers to these questions are speculative by nature. Nevertheless, it is possible to make some educated guesses about the nature and probability of different outcomes.

Certainly the timing of the Patriot defeat would have had an important effect on the events that followed. The War of Independence was a protracted struggle (it remained America’s longest war until the Vietnam War in the 1960s), and throughout the conflict the British alternated between coercive policies and conciliatory policies. At moments, the British seemed intent on punishing the rebelling Patriots so harshly that they lost the will to continue their military struggle; at other moments, the British pursued far more generous policies intended to pacify the colonists and persuade them to willingly give up their struggle for independence. (Several historians have suggested that the vacillation between the two policies itself undermined the royal cause. When pursuing a policy of coercion, they appeared cruel; when pursuing policies of conciliation, they appeared weak. Refusing to commit fully to either strategy since it made the British seem indecisive and weak-willed.) Some historians have argued that the consistent application of either of these policies might well have resulted in British victory in the war’s first few years. Instead, their alternation between carrot and stick dragged out the war and contributed to the colonists’ growing resolution.

Whether the Patriots surrendered during a period of British conciliation or during a period of more punitive British policy would have had significant impact on the terms of the peace that followed. Had the British prevailed during one of the periods in which Parliament took a more severe approach to prosecuting the war, it is not difficult to imagine fairly harsh treatment for many of the rebellious colonists. Certainly some of the most influential instigators and leaders of the independence movement would have received unforgiving treatment from their conquerors: in the eyes of Parliament, of course, the Patriot cause was not an independence movement but blatant treason against the crown.

Surrender during one of these punitive phases would have had some serious consequences for the defeated. At least some key figures in the rebellion would have been tried and imprisoned if not executed outright. Larger numbers of Patriot supporters would likely have been stripped of their land or possessions; some may have been forced to flee. Here the real-life experience of British loyalists in the colonies following the British defeat at Yorktown is instructive. British surrender forced many of those families to forfeit their land and businesses; finding the newly-independent colonies an extremely unwelcoming place for those who had supported the losing side, many fled to British-controlled Canada to avoid further persecution.

Had the British defeated the colonists during a more conciliatory phase, it seems likely that their treatment of most of the Patriots would have been substantially more generous. Many of Parliament’s attempts to persuade the rebelling colonists back into the empire rather than force them militarily were, after all, predicated upon fairly liberal terms: in many cases, Patriots who surrendered their arms and took oaths of loyalty to the crown would be spared the most harsh punishments. Because failure to abide by those promises could have been politically disastrous for the British, it is plausible to imagine much more forgiving terms at particular junctures in the war.

Speculating as to the long-term results of a British victory in the War of Independence is necessarily even more vague. It is somewhat difficult to imagine the British ruling the expanding colonies indefinitely; as Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the notion of a relatively tiny island ruling a land so great in both territory and population in perpetuity was a difficult one to reconcile. Here again the real-life experience in North America may provide some useful insight: it is not difficult to imagine that, like Canada, the colonies might ultimately have broken away, gradually and peacefully, to become an independent political entity several generations later.

Given that it took enormous determination, military aid from the French, and more than a little luck for the colonists to defeat the British in the War of Independence, it is perfectly reasonable to speculate as to what might have happened if the colonists’ military fortunes had stumbled. By definition, counterfactual questions can never be answered with precision; in this case, the combination of historical guesswork and real-life examples can lead us to a number of plausible outcomes depending on the nature of the Patriots’ defeat.