The people who could not make their own tea, had simply switched to coffee. For some reason, in about 1773, the people were no longer satisfied with the coffee and homemade tea. They decided to take action. In 1773 the people got angry. They were tired of the way they were being treated. So with a little persuasion from Samuel Adams, they devised a plan to rebel. The plan was to go to the Boston Harbor, and wait for the whistle, most likely given by Sam Adams. Then somewhere near one hundred men known as the Sons of Liberty would board the ship disguised as Indians. They would then proceed to tear open the chests of tea and dump them overboard. That Sunday night, December 16th, 1773, the plan was put into action. It worked just as they had wanted it to. The near hundred men, all dressed as Indians, boarded the ship and with their tomahawks, they broke the chests of tea open and succeeded in dumping 342 chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. This was later named The Boston Tea Party, but for the British it was called a disaster. .
As soon as King George III heard of the tea party, he was furious. In 1774, the British government passed many laws in order to punish the colonists for their act of rebellion. Some people called these laws the Punitive Acts, and some called them the Coercive Acts. However to most, they were known as the Intolerable Acts. There were five Intolerable Acts all together. The first of these was called the Boston Port Act. This law closed down the Boston port until the East India Company was reimbursed for the tea that was ruined in the Boston Harbor. This upset the people greatly, since this was the only port in Boston and the people of Boston thrived on commerce. The bad thing about this law was that it punished the innocent as well as the guilty. The second of the laws was a modification to the Massachusetts charter of 1691. It took away many of the rights of self-government that the province had enjoyed.