The Boston Tea party, if you’re unfamiliar, was not a tea party of any kind. It was the result of particularly angry upset Bostonians, whose tensions with England passed the point of no return with the 1773 imposition of the Tea Act. The Boston colonists (they weren't Americans yet) were upset with the Act because it was a tax imposed by the British Parliament- a governing body which they had no representation in. The colonists would have preferred to only pay taxes towards the American government, which they actually elected, and had control over. However, the British saw the colonies as being first and foremost a form of income for themselves. This was, obviously, less than agreeable to the colonists.
Thus, on December 16th, 1773, several members of the Sons of Liberty, a rebellious political organization, boarded a ship full of tea from the British East India Company. The governor had already decided that the tea would not be allowed into the city to be sold, because then the tax would be collected. However, the Sons of Liberty decided that the tea would not be sent back to England, either. Somewhere between 30 and 130 men, dressed as Mohawk warriors, to show that they identified with American culture more than Britain, boarded the ship, and dumped all of its contents into the harbor. All of its contents, by the way, was 342 crates of tea. It took the men 3 hours to carry it all up from the cargo holds, and toss it overboard. That they were not caught, or stopped, shows either than colonists all went to bed early, and slept heavily, or that everyone who noticed decided not to do anything.
After the destruction of an entire shipment of tea, there was pretty much no stopping the collapse of the British relationship with its colonies. The revolution itself commenced just three years later.
How much do you care about your tea? Enough to fight a war over it?