Boston Tea Party
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50 free Boston Tea Party trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Boston Tea Party is one of the best-known protests in history, and one of the most misunderstood. On a cold December night in 1773, a crowd of colonists boarded merchant ships in Boston Harbor and destroyed a fortune in tea, setting Britain and its American colonies on the road to war. This quiz covers the whole story: the tax dispute and trade rules behind the standoff, the people who planned and carried out the raid, what really happened on board, how Britain struck back, and the ways the protest has been borrowed and retold ever since. It suits students revising the road to the American Revolution, teachers who want ready-made questions, and anyone who enjoys the surprising details behind a famous date. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up a fun fact even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Many men who raided the ships at the Boston Tea Party dressed as warriors of which Native American nation?
Mohawk
Mohawk dress was a symbol as much as a mask: the raiders were signalling that they saw themselves as Americans rather than British subjects.
Q 02The tea thrown into the harbor at the Boston Tea Party had been grown in which country?
China
China supplied every chest: the cargo was mostly cheap black tea, with some finer leaf from the province of Anhui.
Q 03What did the Tea Act of 1773, the law that provoked the Boston Tea Party, do to the price of legal tea?
Lowered it
Lowered it: the act let the tea's owners undercut even the smugglers. Protesters objected to the tax tucked inside the bargain and to the monopoly, not to the price.
Q 04Which Indian leader showed the Viceroy some duty-free salt in 1931 and joked that it recalled the Boston Tea Party?
Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi had just led a mass campaign against Britain's salt tax, and a British newspaper had already likened one of his protests to the Boston raid back in 1908.
Q 05After the Boston Tea Party, many Americans shunned tea as unpatriotic and made which hot drink their favorite instead?
Coffee
Coffee became the patriotic cup as tea drinking fell away during and after the Revolution, and one future president told his wife in 1774 that he was giving tea up.
Q 06Apart from the tea, what was the only item reported damaged aboard the ships during the Boston Tea Party?
A padlock
A padlock belonging to one of the captains was broken, and the raiders replaced it the next day. They took care to harm nothing but the tea.
Q 07At the Boston Tea Party's 200th anniversary, protesters dumped oil drums into the harbor and hanged whom in effigy?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was the target in 1973: a mass meeting in Boston called for his impeachment and blamed the oil companies for the fuel crisis.
Q 08Once the tea was overboard, what did the Boston Tea Party raiders reportedly do before leaving the three ships?
Swept the decks clean
Swept the decks clean, by the usual account, and put back anything they had moved. The crews confirmed afterwards that only the cargo had been touched.
Q 09Which Patriot leader called the mass meetings over the tea ships and later defended the Boston Tea Party in print?
Samuel Adams
Samuel Adams tried to keep the last meeting going as the crowd left, and the tale that he gave a secret signal to begin the raid first appeared nearly a century later.
Q 10Which rider carried news of the Boston Tea Party to New York, 16 months before his more famous ride?
Paul Revere
Paul Revere set off as an express rider the day after the tea was destroyed, and Patriots in New York cheered what Boston had done.
Q 11Which Patriot group, founded in 1765 to fight an earlier British tax, organized the Boston Tea Party?
Sons of Liberty
Sons of Liberty came from every walk of colonial life: artisans, shopkeepers, apprentices and laborers all belonged to the Boston branch that planned the raid.
Q 12The tea destroyed at the Boston Tea Party belonged to which British trading firm, then close to bankruptcy?
East India Company
East India Company warehouses were piled with tea nobody would buy, and Parliament's scheme to sell the surplus in America is what sent the cargo to Boston.
Q 13Parliament punished Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party with a set of 1774 laws that colonists gave which name?
Intolerable Acts
Q 21Thousands of colonists packed which Boston building, the largest in town, on the day of the Boston Tea Party?
Old South Meeting House
Old South Meeting House drew a crowd of 5,000 or more, close to a third of Boston's population, and the raiders set out as the meeting broke up.
Q 22Which royal governor of Massachusetts refused to let the tea ships sail home before the Boston Tea Party?
Thomas Hutchinson
Thomas Hutchinson sailed for England less than six months later expecting a short visit, and spent the rest of his life there in exile.
Q 23Days after the Boston Tea Party, Patriots in which city forced the tea ship Polly to sail back to England?
Philadelphia
Intolerable Acts ended self-government in Massachusetts, and colonists elsewhere feared their own assemblies could be rewritten from London next.
Q 14The Boston Tea Party took place about 16 months before which battles opened the American Revolutionary War?
Lexington and Concord
Lexington and Concord are both in Massachusetts, and the fighting there in April 1775 began a war that lasted eight years.
Q 15Roughly how many chests of tea were broken open and dumped overboard during the Boston Tea Party?
340
340 is the count on the owners' own invoice, though many books say 342. Together the chests held more than 92,000 pounds of tea, roughly 46 tons.
Q 16Which Founding Father, then a colonial agent in London, said the tea lost at the Boston Tea Party should be paid for?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was not alone: a New York merchant and three colleagues offered the prime minister payment for the losses, and were turned down.
Q 17Which British king told Parliament after the Boston Tea Party that the colonists were out to injure British commerce?
George III
George III made the charge in a speech in March 1774, and before that month was out Parliament had passed the act closing Boston's port.
Q 18Which Virginia planter disapproved of the Boston Tea Party because it destroyed private property?
George Washington
George Washington backed the colonial cause all the same, and by July 1775 he was commanding the American army camped outside Boston.
Q 19Which tools did the Boston Tea Party raiders carry aboard to smash open the heavy wooden tea chests?
Axes and hatchets
Axes and hatchets did the work, and one participant recalled that he and his companions called their small hatchets tomahawks.
Q 20Months after the Boston Tea Party, the Edenton Tea Party of 1774 was a boycott pledge signed entirely by whom?
Women
Women signed it, 51 of them from around a single Carolina port, making it one of the earliest protests organized by women in the American colonies.
Philadelphia had a self-styled Committee for Tarring and Feathering, whose broadside warned the Polly's captain what awaited him if he tried to unload.
Q 24Anger at Britain's response to the Boston Tea Party led twelve colonies to send delegates to which 1774 gathering?
First Continental Congress
First Continental Congress delegates petitioned the king for repeal and agreed a colonies-wide boycott of British goods; only Georgia stayed away.
Q 25Which Newbery-winning novel by Esther Forbes follows a Boston apprentice silversmith who joins the Boston Tea Party?
Johnny Tremain
Johnny Tremain won the 1944 Newbery Medal and reached cinemas as a 1957 Disney film, and its tea-raid scenes were also released as a classroom short.
Q 26What did two congressmen put in a chest marked tea and dump into Boston Harbor in 1998, echoing the Boston Tea Party?
The federal tax code
The federal tax code went overboard as a stunt by two conservative lawmakers, one of many later protests to borrow the imagery of 1773.
Q 27Besides wrapping themselves in blankets, what did many Boston Tea Party raiders smear on their faces as a disguise?
Soot
Soot and coal dust were the usual choice, and one raider recalled blacking his face and hands in a blacksmith's shop on his way to the waterfront.
Q 28The first mass meeting about the tea ships, weeks before the Boston Tea Party, overflowed which Boston landmark?
Faneuil Hall
Faneuil Hall could not hold the thousands who turned up, so the meeting moved to a larger building and posted 25 men to watch the first ship.
Q 29A fourth tea ship, the William, missed the Boston Tea Party after a storm drove it aground where?
Cape Cod
Cape Cod wrecked the William, but 58 chests were salvaged, and when some of that tea reached Boston in 1774 it was hunted down and destroyed as well.
Q 30Which British prime minister kept the tea duty that led to the Boston Tea Party and then pushed to punish Boston?
Lord North
Lord North would not drop the duty because it paid the salaries of colonial governors and judges, despite a warning that Americans would refuse the tea.