On March 28, 1774, the British Parliament adopted the Coercive Acts, a series of four acts aimed at restoring order in Massachusetts and punishing Bostonians for the Tea Party, in which the Sons of Liberty boarded three British ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 crates of tea—valued at nearly $1 million in today’s money—into the water to protest the Tea Act. Rather than abandon Bostonians to a kind of martial law, the other colonies rushed to the city’s defense and began to discuss British misrule, leading to the First Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774.
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