I'm not sure what I think about this myself and am curious to hear your opinions.
Here is an account from Paul Johnson's A History of the American People.
Ginny
The origins of the Boston Tea Party had nothing to do with America. The East India Company had got itself into a financial mess. To help it extricate itself, [Lord] North passed an Act which, among other things, would allow the company to send its tea direct to America, at a reduced price, thus encouraging the 'rebels' to consume it. Delighted, the harassed company quickly dispatched three ships, loaded with 298 chests of tea, worth £10,994, to Boston. At the same time, the authorities stepped up measures against smuggling. The American smuggling interest, which in one way or another included about 90 percent of import-export merchants, was outraged. John Hancock (1737-93), a prominent Boston merchant and political agitator, was a respectable large-scale smuggler and considered this maneuver a threat to his livelihood as well as a constitutional affront. He was one of many substantial citizens who encouraged the Boston mob to take exemplary action.
When the ships docked on December 16, 1773, a crowd gathered to debate what to do at the Old South Meeting House. It is reported 7,000 people were jammed inside. Negotiations were held with the ship-masters. One rode to Governor Hutchinson at his mansion on Milton Hill to beg him to remit the duties. He refused. When this news was conveyed to the mob, a voice said: 'Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?' Sam Adams, asked to sum up, said 'in a low voice,' 'This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.' The doors were then burst open and a thousand men marched to the docks. There had been preparations. An eyewitness, John Andrews, said that 'the patriots' were 'cloath'd in blankets with the heads muffled, and copper color'd countenances, being each arm'd with a hatchet or axe, and a pair of pistols.' The 'Red Indians' ran down Milk Street and onto Griffith's Wharf, climbed aboard the Dartmouth, chopped open its tea-chests, and then hurled the tea into the harbor, 'where it piled up in the low tide like haystacks.' They then attacked the Eleanor and the Beaver. By nine in the evening all three ships had been stripped of their cargo. Josiah Quincy (1744-75), one of the leading Boston pamphleteers and spokesman, said: 'No one in Boston will ever forget this night,' which will lead 'to the most trying and terrific struggle this country every saw.' John Adams, shrewdly noting that no one had been injured, let alone killed, saw the act, though one of force, as precisely the kind of dramatization of a constitutional point that was needed. As he put it: 'The people should never rise without doing something to be remembered, something notable and striking. This destruction to the tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I can't but consider it an epoch of history.'
Adams was quite right. The episode had the effect of forcing everyone on both sides of the Atlantic to consider where they stood in the controversy. It polarized opinion. The Americans, or most of them, were exhilarated and proud. The English, or most of them, were outraged. Dr. Johnson saw the Tea Party as theft and hooliganism and produced his maxim: 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' In March 1774, on the invitation of the government, parliament closed the port of Boston to all traffic and two months later passed the Coercive Acts. These punitive measures, paradoxically, were accompanied by the Quebec Act, a highly liberal measure which gave relief to the Canadian Catholics and set Upper and Lower Canada firmly on the road to self-government and dominion status. It was designed to keep the Canadians, especially the French-speaking ones, loyal to the crown, and succeeded; but it infuriated the American Protestants and made them suspicious that some long-plotted conspiracy was afoot to reimpose what John Adams called 'the hated despotism of the Stuarts.' In the current emotional atmosphere, anything could be believed. At all events, these legislative measures, which included the compulsory quartering of troops on American citizens in Boston and elsewhere, were lumped together by the American media under the term 'Intolerable Acts.' They mark the true beginning of the American War of Independence.