down to the wharves, rowed out to the three vessels in which a large
consignment of tea had been sent across the ocean, hoisted it out of
the holds to the decks and scattered the contents of three hundred and
forty chests in Boston Harbor.

[Footnote 1: _John Adams's Diary_, August 31, 1774, quoting Lynch.]

The Boston Tea Party was as sensational as if it had sprang from
the brain of a Paris Jacobin in the French Revolution. It created
excitement among the American Colonists from Portsmouth to Charleston.
Six more of the Colonies enrolled Committees of Correspondence,
Pennsylvania alone refusing to join. In every quarter American
patriots felt exalted. In England the reverse effects were signalized
with equal vehemence. The Mock Indians were denounced as incendiaries,
and the town meetings were condemned as "nurseries of sedition."
Parliament passed four penal laws, the first of which punished Boston
by transferring its port to Salem and closing its harbor. The second
law suspended the charter of the Province and added several new and
tyrannical powers to the British Governor and to Crown officials.

On September 5, 1774, the first Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia. Except Georgia, every Colony sent delegates to it. The
election of those delegates was in several cases irregular, because
the body which chose them was not the Legislature but some temporary
body of the patriots. Nevertheless, the Congress numbered some of
the men who were actually and have remained in history, the great
engineers of the American Revolution. Samuel Adams and John Adams went
from Massachusetts; John Jay and Philip Livingston from New York;
Roger Sherman from Connecticut; Thomas Mifflin and Edward Biddle from
Pennsylvania; Thomas McKean from Delaware; George Washington, Patrick