 Good afternoon. We are here courtesy of the National Archives to discuss the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party with the world's foremost expert on the Boston Tea Party. Benjamin L. Karp, who's the author of this phenomenal book, Defiance of the Patriots, Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, which wasn't published yesterday, but holds up incredibly well. And I'm very excited to be here with my friend and colleague, Ben Karp, to talk about his book and some of the larger issues around the Tea Party, which continues to be an iconic event to everyone who knows anything about American history and the revolution. And also one that historians continue to agree was of tremendous consequence in the unfolding of events in the longer story of the American Revolution. So Benjamin Karp is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. And he's also the author of a newer book, a new book, on the Great Fire of New York in 1776. And I'll leave further. I could go on, but we have a limited amount of time, so let's get right into it. I thought we might start with something that Ben says in the introduction to Defiance of the Patriots, which is one I think the way he carries through on this observation is one of the things that makes his book so original and of such lasting value. He writes that the Boston Tea Party was not just a local story but a global story. So I thought that would be a good place for us to start today because I don't think that's as well known because we think of it as such a Boston thing and such a local thing and such an on-the-ground thing. What way is it a global story and not just a local one? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think we're most used to thinking about the Boston Tea Party as a national event because it's what creates the country. But in thinking about it as a global event, what I often say to audiences is take the British East India Company, which has a monopoly on all British trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. They are increasingly becoming a territorial power ruling over South Asia, over Bengal. One of their principal crops is tea, which at that time is exclusively farmed in East Asia. It's becoming a more popular drink in Europe, but when Europeans drink tea, unlike the Chinese, they insist on putting sugar in it, which is farmed by Afro-Caribbeans. And then when the Bostonians dump the tea on December 16th, 1773, they dress as Native Americans. So here you have this story that has all these different global dimensions to it. And it ends up creating the United States, but it's coming from a world in which you have these trans-oceanic connections to different parts of the globe. Do you think that that's one of the reasons why it turned out to be the Boston Tea Party that seems to set the revolution or the revolution, it's not yet the revolution, but the protests, the patriot movement, the imperial controversy on a collision course, on a path that can't seem to be, or another way to put it is, as the former president would say, why couldn't they just make a deal at that point? Or is there something about that global nature of it? Or are there other factors that explain why no compromise can be reached over something which is essentially had been a set of taxes and economic relationships that had been gerry-rigged and sort of broken down and fixed repeatedly over the past 10 years? Yeah, I mean, you pointed this out in the article that you co-wrote with Ston Lind, right? Is that a free trade is a big factor here, right? The American colonists are increasingly thinking, hey, we might like to trade with the French Caribbean islands on our own every once in a while, or we might like to continue to develop this trade with Portugal that is technically illegal, et cetera, right? The American colonies feel like they've grown big enough that they wanna be able to do things on the American continent and on the high seas that the British Empire doesn't necessarily want them to do. And that's one of the reasons why they keep objecting to the various laws that parliament keeps on passing, right? The Tea Act was not gonna raise new taxes on the Americans. What it was gonna do was give the East India Company, which was already a privileged monopoly company. It was gonna give the East India Company the ability to sell tea to American colonists at a lower rate that no one else would be able to compete with. And so the Americans were like, well, gosh, if the British can set up the East India Company to sell ST in this way, what's to prevent them from establishing more monopolies? And so the Americans believe that, as you say, this gerry-rigged arrangement is gonna become completely lopsided and all in favor of the British Empire. And so the American colonists begin to think, hmm, we'd better either keep pushing back on these laws or we're gonna have to get out of here. And so the fact that it happens in Boston is a little bit of an accident. I mean, in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, they're all supposed to be receiving tea ships in November of 1773. But in New York and Philadelphia, they come up with arrangements to send the tea back to London. Okay, we'll put this whole arrangement on pause. But in Boston, the authorities won't let them do that. And so their choices are either to land the tea, which would then allow this law to be in effect and it would kind of give up this principle of trying to boycott the tea instead. They can either land the tea, or if they can't send it back, they're left with no choice except to destroy it. And so in Boston, the merchants are really concerned about these issues of the taxes and also this issue of British monopolies. But I think the Bostonians would rather have sent the tea back peacefully the way New York and Philadelphia did. But instead, because of stubbornness in their opinion, on the part of the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchinson, the Bostonians, the Sons of Liberty felt like, oh, we have no choice but to destroy the tea. And so they do in this big statement that destroys thousands of pounds worth of private property. And that really ends up giving parliament no choice about what to do next. They can't just keep rolling over and repealing any laws that the colonists don't like, because if they keep doing that, then what authority do they really have over the American colonies anymore? I'm glad this came up, and not just because I'm sitting here in Philadelphia and you're sitting there in New York, that we rightly think of Boston at the forefront of the patriot movement. And yet there's something very performative about this whole set of events because they're having to prove to the New Yorkers and Philadelphians who they helped bring in and cultivate and teach how to do intercolonial protest and do it effectively and theatrically, they're having to prove to the New Yorkers and Philadelphians that they're not backsliding and that they're gonna stand up to their governor. Yeah, I mean, this was in doubt. I always say that peer pressure was one of the big causes of the Boston Tea Party because prior to the Boston Tea Party, the New Yorkers and the Philadelphians were like, hey, you know what? It was the Bostonians who had backed out of the non-importation agreements in these boycotts in 1770. The New Yorkers and Philadelphians are saying, we don't really trust that Boston is gonna hold up its end. We don't really trust that the Bostonians will only smuggle tea and not bring in any British tea because the Bostonians had been bringing in British tea prior to the Tea Party. And so one of the big documents that I made use of in the book were the papers of William Palfrey who was a Boston merchant and an associate of John Hancock's. And he was traveling in New York and Philadelphia in the weeks leading up to the Boston Tea Party. And he sends a letter, probably to Hancock, it's not clear, but he sends a letter back to Boston saying, hey, Sons of Liberty in Boston, we really have to stand firm on these resolutions that we've made not to land the tea because if we don't, New York and Philadelphia, Sons of Liberty will completely lose confidence in us and we will never be able to recover their confidence. So in other words, the message that was being sent to Boston was, you better stand strong and not allow this tea to land or any hope of inter-colonial unity is gonna be lost. So there was really a lot of pressure on Boston that they were gonna be the ones that would have to step up. One of the things that's really makes your book an important one in the evolution of the scholarship on the revolution is your insistence on looking at the Boston Tea Party, as you say, from the top down and the bottom up. There are a lot of ways we can get at that, but one, it occurs to me now that one way we might is for me to ask, what did you discover that was new or surprising to you or interesting about the merchants like Paul Frey and how to think about them? Because to some historians, they have been the heroic leaders of the patriots, but to other historians, they demonstrate that they have demonstrated at various times that either that actually the merchants weren't, a lot of them weren't the opposition to the patriots or that really its self-interest and business interests that determine how all this falls apart and how it all turns out, which is really a less heroic way of thinking about this than even we get from those who stress what a wonderful moment this is of ordinary people participating in politics and insisting on their rights, which I'm sure we'll get to. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's funny, a surprising number of people believe that it was smugglers operating behind the scenes who were responsible for everything that happens in Boston, right? Like pulling the strings behind, using Samuel Adams maybe as their mouthpiece, but kind of manipulating everything for their own narrow self-interest and that that's who the Sons of Liberty essentially were. A lot of people really believe this. I don't think that that's quite true because I just don't think their power is that total. The truth is they have to negotiate with the ordinary people of Boston, right? Like whose interests do not always align with theirs, but really, I mean, I don't know, maybe the exemplary merchant figure for Boston is John Rowe, who's a bit of a trimmer. He leaves this wonderful diary that has all this great gossipy information about politics and events in Boston, but his political position is very unclear. Sometimes it seems like he's backing the Patriots. Other times he's like, I'm really not sure about what the Patriots are doing here and sort of maybe going where the wind blows to a certain degree. I mean, look, what I learned from reading Kathy Mattson's book on New York or Thomas Dorflinger's book on Philadelphia is that at the end of the day, first of all, not all merchants have the same interests. Some of them trade primarily with the West Indies, others trade primarily with Britain, right? They're gonna have different viewpoints on politics because of what their mercantile interests are. So, but really, I mean, merchants are trying to protect their bottom line and what they can forecast about their bottom line, but there's no such thing as a kind of universal merchant interest because some of them are coast-wise traders, some of them are wholesalers, some of them are retailers, some of them primarily trade with Britain, some of them have interests in continental Europe, like some of them smuggle, right? Like they're different. They're gonna take on different viewpoints and even Boston, where people have relatively speaking, pretty good homogeneous political allegiance with one another, even in Boston, you can see a lot of disagreement and even foot-dragging from Boston's merchant community. I mean, another diary keeper or letter writer, who is it Joseph Andrews or John Andrews? John Andrews, yeah. John Andrews, right? In 1774, he seems a little bit reluctant to kind of take the kinds of steps that the radical politicians wanna take in 1774. So merchants are not necessarily the ones you wanna count on when it comes to leading a political movement because they are really, a lot of them are one failed voyage away from bankruptcy and so they're doing everything they can to kind of keep their businesses afloat. I noticed that when I was researching Phyllis Wheatley and the Wheatleys, and John Wheatley and his son Nathaniel Wheatley were merchants, I noticed that even historians were very discerning about merchants were very eager to put the Wheatleys in the Tory column on very little evidence that we want them to have clearer politics than most of them could afford to have and they all have relatives who are on both sides. Well, maybe not all of them, but most of them do. So, the governor is a merchant too and his son's are merchants. And as you point out that the perception and reality about interests, economic interests and political interests, that's what they're all debated. That's what they're all arguing about all the time. They're like, they're all trying to shift reality and to say we're the good guys and look, look, there's a bad merchant over there who's only self-interested when it's a lot more complicated. And maybe we should point to that, right? And that raises these. Sorry, I was gonna say, we probably are obligated to point out that the merchants who were appointed by the East India Company to receive the tea, right, included one firm that were Thomas Hutchinson's sons, the governor's sons, and another firm, Richard Clark and sons, who were kind of related to the Hutchinson's by marriage. So there were these kind of basically loyalist merchant firms who were appointed to be the ones to receive the tea and land it. And they are the ones who are attacked by the crowds in Boston at their homes and places of business and pressured into giving up their mercantile commissions so that the tea won't be landed. Right, and the other side of the family relations being complicated and making economic interests complicated is that the way those family connections shaped actual governmental power in Boston and Massachusetts had been controversial for decades and that's part of what makes James Otis a radical as has been pointed out many times and that there are real issues of corruption and bias that come with all that kind of mushroom aristocracy and sometimes it was called so that, and that's one of the issues about patriot identity was one way we could look at, especially these upper class guys is that they're all trying to figure out how to get by or how to make it but also feel and be virtuous at the same time and that means drawing these lines that may look different from the other side of some family or economic relation and we don't have to, then you read about Otis and Hutchinson looks like a terribly venal figure and then you read Bernard Baillen on Hutchinson and you feel like, well, Hutchinson meant well. He's kind of honest in his way except when he's saying one thing to the people in London and another thing to people in Boston and so the human drama of this is like, is both on the top and at the bottom and that's something I've gradually come to appreciate and that is also very much present in your version of the story. I feel like this is the most Steve Innis conversation ever, the idea that everybody's trying to pursue both virtue and profit and how they're working that out in New England. Oh, I didn't even know that I was channeling one of our teachers at the University of Virginia, the late Stephen Innis who really gave me my start in early American history and he wrote about these questions as Ben says about the internal and external dimension to the economic life in New England as a centuries-long drama. So yes, I guess it's still always on my mind. And it's on my dissertation committee too, so. So why don't we talk a little bit about the people in the streets and how they become actors and maybe even the main actors in the drama. There's always been a question, if not debate, about who are the moving figures who make things happen at these moments when there are crowd actions which as there had been since 1765 in response to things that the administration in London or the governor or other authorities are doing. And one of the oldest issues in the figuring out how we end up, how these people who say they want things to remain the same end up being revolutionaries in Boston is who's really running the show? Who is really passionate? Who is really passionate and why? Who's coming up with these strategies? And one of the things that complicates matters is that when things go a little too far for some of the lawyers like John Adams or the people who aren't as radical, sometimes like John Adams, they say, oh, it's the rabble. It's the Jack Tars and the sailors and the other young men and the Africans and they took it too far. But like we reasonable men of property didn't mean for it to get out of hand. And but just let's rain it in a little bit and make sure that things are still orderly. So where do you come out on this question of how to think about the fact that the Boston Tea Party was an action taken by hundreds of people and it could, nothing like it could have happened without the coordination of hundreds of people in a destruction of property that as you say is not intentionally violent against persons and really doesn't lead to the loss of life as some crowd actions did. Yeah, I mean, right. We don't know who planned the Tea Party or what the plan was, but it seems very reasonable to assume that it was planned ahead of time and that it was very disciplined, right? Like they break a lock on one of the hatches and they replace it. No one's allowed to pocket any tea for themselves. Nobody's allowed to touch anything on board the ships except for the tea, right? There are all these rules that they follow. There's a coded language that they supposedly spoke in, all these things. So it's definitely disciplined, but that doesn't really answer the question of who planned it. I mean, a lot of people look at the figure of Samuel Adams and think, oh, he's just the guy who snapped his fingers and the crowd jumped to be at his beck and call. And I just don't think that's right. I mean, I think that the different social levels of people in Boston each have their own function. If you're a wealthy elite guy like John Adams or John Hancock or Samuel Adams who might not be wealthy but is at least politically very powerful, right? If you're in that circle, there's all sorts of things you can do. You can be on the legislature, you can write to parliament, you can petition, you can hand down laws, you can hand out court decisions, right? You have all this influence and leverage. And that matters in colonial society, but it's not everything. Because what you also have is you have the people in the middle class, right? They are joining and being a part of all sorts of voluntary associations in Boston, the Sons of Liberty, the New England Caucus, the Boston Committee of Correspondence, right? The Freemasons, right? They're involved in all these volunteer organizations who get together in taverns and are trying to do stuff. They also can come up with petitions or pass resolutions of this is what we think we wanna do. They can help to enforce boycotts and pressure merchants and do all these other things. And then you have the working class of Boston or even the paupers of Boston, right? Where they are best able to express their voices in the streets. That can take the form of parades and street theater, perfectly harmless stuff, but it can also turn to violence. And there are gonna be some moments where all three of these groups, the rich, the middling and the poor, where their goals align and they're all doing things that are kind of rowing in the same direction. But there might be other incidents where the rich and the poor don't see eye to eye, where the rich can pat themselves on the back by saying, oh, the poor, the people of the streets, they went too far this time. But when it came to tea, everyone seemed to agree that the landing of the tea was a bad thing. And the truth is, I've seen two different kinds of evidence. One piece of evidence that I found is that there was a merchant and son of liberty and a deacon in his church named Caleb Davis. And his merchant papers are there at the Massachusetts Historical Society. See, we're bringing this to archives. And in his paper, you can see all sorts of people who were said to have participated in the Boston Tea Party working for him in the years leading up to the Tea Party. So one thing, a conclusion that we could draw from that is, oh, Caleb Davis, who's an influential merchant and son of liberty, he went to the contractors, the shipbuilders and stuff who worked for him. And he said, you, you and you, you guys have strong backs and I know your politics, we're gonna be destroying the tea, show up when you're requested and I'll have some action for you to do. That's one model, right? A very top-down model. But the other model I found from this kind of obscure 19th century literary journal is that the working-class people got together on their own, voted their own resolutions and consulted with the rich and said, hey, should we be showing up to dump the tea? And the rich weren't willing to lead them and said, we can't tell you what to do, but if you show up on the 16th, you'll probably find friends there. And that the working-class people went ahead, voted on their own and said, we will be there. This idea that the working-class had their own ability and their own motivations for wanting to destroy the tea. And a lot of these ideas, as you know, were inspired by Alfred Young and his book, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, which focused on this very poor shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hughes, yeah, who did a couple of as-told-to memoirs in the 1830s because he was one of the last, or thought to be one of the last surviving participants in the Boston Tea Party. He was living in upstate New York at the time and was still a poor man. But he talked about all the ways that he became radicalized and became involved in Boston politics, despite not really having any influence at all of his own. He was at the Boston Massacre. He participated in the Boston Tea Party. He helps to precipitate the tarring and feathering of a customs officer named John Malcolm. So, but he's one among many. And one thing I really wanna talk about, I had this wonderful experience a few days before the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party back on December 16th, 2023. A couple of days before that, a curator at the National Archives invited me to take a look at the featured document display that the National Archives was gonna put out right outside the rotunda where they have the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And so she took me on a tour of that because I hadn't been there in the rotunda since I was a kid. And I was like, yeah, okay, I've seen those documents on versions of them on the web like a million times. I almost have them memorized. Like I've seen these before. Okay, I know there are lots of copies of them out there in the world. But what she took me into the back room because this exhibit hadn't been mounted yet, but it is mounted in there now on the room dressed off of the rotunda. What she showed me were three US pension applications from guys who were ordinary, very ordinary poor men in 1773 who had survived into the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, Samuel Noel, Joshua Wyeth and George Pillsbury. And these three men lived long enough to submit pension applications to the US government to say, oh, I had served in the Revolutionary War either in the, and I would like a pension from the US government, please. Because the US government was very late in giving any kind of relief to these veterans. And so some of them were in old age and were in poverty and they said, hey, I stepped up for the United States when it counted. Could the United States now step up for me? And so you would think like, why would there be anything in the National Archives about the Boston Tea Party, which happened before? There was a United States. But these guys, even though they were only gonna get pension on the basis of their military service, they still, in order to establish their bona fides as ordinary working class patriots, they said, hey, and in addition to that, I was one of the men who had participated in the Boston Tea Party. And Joshua Wyeth and Samuel Noel in particular, and actually George Pillsbury too, they all give very vivid accounts of themselves and what they had done. And they had done it like after swearing an oath before a judge that this wasn't just some family story that got passed down or kind of exaggerated in a newspaper. These were, this was their testimony before the US government. So if any of the people in the audience live in the Washington DC area, take a look at those documents or take a look at the webpage that the National Archives has put up, because it's really a great testament to there were ordinary guys who felt motivated to destroy the tea on December 16th, 1773. And they weren't just doing it because Samuel Adams told them to. Yeah, we can't emphasize enough how important those pension applications have become for recovering the experience of ordinary men, especially in the Revolutionary War, though they talk about how they got into service too. So it's really, in many cases, people have spun whole biographies out of these stories. And I think it's partly in looking, it was partly in looking at those sources that Al Young got the idea to write about, to look at other memoirs and write about George Robert 12th, who's the shoemaker. But one of the ironies here is that even in that recovery and claiming of that in Fellows' account for his pension application, he refers to it as the destruction of the tea, which on also the lithograph that's on display and on the website from 1846 is also called the destruction of the tea. And according to Al Young, that's the polite way of referring to it. They didn't say, usually say in the early Republic, the tea party because there was an attempt to kind of tamp down and make it respectable. They didn't want it to seem like this raucous thing. They didn't talk about the dressing as Indian part of it very much. And there was a kind of the sort of the scholars that say carnival-esque or riotous aspects of it really weren't emphasized or highlighted in the 19th century. Even when it was recovered and even when the veterans of the revolution were being recovered and some of them were being given their pensions again in the 1820s and 30s, which is where these applications come from that moment. And my favorite is one that I may have first saw it seen in one of Ben's footnotes when a family member of the Wheatleys wrote an as-told-to memoir. One of the first things he put in it was hearing the story about his uncle Benjamin Walcott coming home. I'm gonna dwell on this a little bit because it's illustrative of the process of remembering and forgetting. Coming home from the tea party and the women in the family noticing that he's got his shoes are wet and they've got tea leaves in them, but he won't say anything about it. Nobody ever said anything about it because they weren't supposed to say anything about it because it was illegal. It was or potentially get them in trouble. So there was this kind of, so that sort of, it wasn't always clear how to talk about it from the moment it happened. They weren't, we weren't always celebrating it. In fact, for it to work, you couldn't celebrate it because it was another one of these things of the potentially could get out of control and might be interpreted differently by authorities. But on the other hand, it had the moment in which the whole thing started was at the Boston Town meeting, Sam Adams saying, I think we need to know what we like. I think we've done as much as we can do here. Wink, wink, let's go. And so that really like it in that sense when everyone roared and said yes and rushed out of the building, it had the approval of the town meeting. So on the one hand, it couldn't have been more a more consensual act and political act and approved by the town. On the other hand, it's secret. They can't say what they're doing and partly because of the very nature of the thing they don't know how it's gonna turn out and how it's gonna be spun. So you have this sort of, so the myth-making process and the silencing of certain aspects of it are really there at the beginning. And that's something that you can get from both Ben's book and from Al Young. But it sort of raises this issue of the role of myth and memory ever since. And when you were up in Boston, you wrote in your wonderful piece on HNN recently that one of the students you met with from Carlton College asked this great question about what are the myths you wish you could kill? And I love this student asked this because these are the things that like historians, we always talk about this like at the bar but not in public usually. But the student sort of said, okay, tell us what you really don't like about the way we talk about Boston Tea Party. So that student sort of licenses me to put you on the spot about that. Because I'm wondering exactly what you said or what you might add to it. Yeah, sure. I mean, now I can't remember actually what my first answer was. I mean, I have an article somewhere on the Journal of the American Revolution where I talk about seven myths of the Boston Tea Party. And some of them are kind of small bore, right? Like everybody thinks that the British government owned the tea, but that in fact, it was private, the tea ships and the tea were both under private ownership or the idea that it wasn't even called the Boston Tea Party until the 1820s and really the 1830s in a widespread way. I mean, one of the more important ones is, a lot of people think, oh, the Boston Tea Party was so inspiring and galvanizing that that's what led the Americans to revolt against Great Britain, which is not true, right? It's the response to the Boston Tea Party, the British response, the coercive acts that really starts galvanizing Americans and saying, we gotta declare our independence and get out of here. And then, but really the one that I think Americans need to play with the most is the idea that it was a nonviolent act of civil disobedience and something that should always be inspiring to us because I think the Boston Tea Party is a lot trickier than that. I think the Boston Tea Party followed weeks of menace and violence and was part of a longer history of violence and raucousness and disobedience. And while it seems patriotic to us now, I don't think any of us want to live in a society where anytime people don't like what the law decides that they can just kind of take matters into their own hands. I think all of us can think of examples in recent years when the perception is that people in the streets were doing that or people on the steps of government buildings were doing that. And using the Tea Party to justify it. Yeah, and the Tea Party is often cited as precedent. But I mean, what's really interesting is if you look at the whole history of people mentioning the Boston Tea Party as an inspiration, it's the extreme right wing, it's the extreme left wing, it's people in the middle, it's pro-temperance, anti-temperance, pro-slavery, anti-slavery, pro-women's rights, anti-tax, pro-marijuana, all the legalization, all sorts of different examples. And to use the more recent examples, it's been used to kind of justify Black Lives Matter protests. And there were people who came back from the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol who said, I feel like I just participated in the Boston Tea Party 2.0. So that's the real myth is that the Boston Tea Party belongs ought to be part of a comfortable legacy of the origins of our great country, right? I mean, it is part of that story. We can tell the story that way, but there is also a kind of a more uncomfortable part of it that can be used for both good and for ill. It can be used to push for more civil rights and voting rights, right? That's something that I think most of us, I hope, would admire, but it can also be used in the service of some really ugly impulses in American history. So could we say that the Boston Tea Party, in terms of its place in the coming of the revolution and the nature of the American Revolution, is that it's a culmination of a series of developments that bordered on or turned violent on both sides because really, so we have the coercive acts, but before that we have the occupation and the Boston Massacre, and so that we have, and which had been justified by the tearing down, the tarring and feathering and the tearing down of Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson's house, so that really the path to the revolution, we sometimes hear more about the pamphlets and the ideas, but we don't always realize just how violent it became on both sides and even focusing on one moment of it, like the Boston Massacre of the Tea Party, underestimates how this is 10 years of something verging on civil war in Boston that like the amazing thing that one could then say, well, the amazing thing is that it actually was relatively orderly given how like Boston was a tinderbox, but nevertheless, that is the acceleration, that is the pattern that gets us to this place that we then call the American Revolution, but like in a cleaned up way that separates it from anything that sounds like a civil war. Yeah, well, this is John Adams' fault, right? Cause he says, what was the revolution? Was it the war? No, no, it was the transformation that happens in people's hearts and minds and that's how Balin opens ideological origins is with that quote. And so for that reason, too few historians, I think we're looking at the violence both before the war and the war itself, right? I mean, why do wars happen? It's because peaceful negotiations break down and because people on both sides feel that they have something they really wanna scream about and that can take societies or nations into pretty ugly places. So as we can also see on the basis of contemporary events, so yeah, I really think, I think people understand this on some level but they also don't wanna think about it on some level too. I mean, so few people like when they've read my recent book, in particular on the burning of New York City, they're like, gosh, I never thought of it from the loyalist's perspective, right? Where at least 20% of the people who lived in the 13 colonies in North America wanted no part of the American Revolution or even actively fought against it. I mean, probably more than half wanted no part of the revolution, but at least 20% were willing to actively try and repress the American's drive for independence. And so that meant that there was gonna be a lot of brother versus brother conflict. And I mean, there's nothing new about calling the American Revolution a civil war, right? The first generation of historians in the 1790s were in the early 1800s called the American Revolution a civil war. They had lived through it. They knew that it had unfolded on American soil and that Americans were on both sides of the conflict, just as British people were on both sides of the conflict. So, but for whatever reason, we don't like to think about the American Revolution that way. And I think it's a theme across all of my books to like kind of see how order breaks down and the men and women who really decide to push the envelope and bring things to a more violent place. I think that happens with the Boston Tea Party and it happens with the burning of New York City in September of 1776 after the war had begun. I'm sure you often get questions about why they dressed as Indian. So maybe we should cover that before we forget to order to anticipate that question from the audience. Yeah, I mean, I've got a whole chapter on it. It's not an easy answer because of course nobody, you know, fessed up. I mean, one thing that's clear to me is that nobody thought these disguises were actually working. I mean, Boston is only 16,000 people and fewer than a quarter of those are adult men. So everybody knew who these guys were because how many people could it even been? It's, you know, a hundred out of the, you know, less than 4,000 adult men that were in town. You knew how your neighbor walked or how your cousin carried himself. Everybody knew who these guys were. So the disguises were meant to kind of send a message. Like, if called to testify, you had better not say who we are because we are in disguise. But even then, why choose Native Americans? Was it to scapegoat them and make people think that actual Indians had done this? No, again, everybody remembered that these were white guys underneath. I mean, the book to read on this, of course, is Phil Doloria's Playing Indians. That book was really inspiring for me. He has a really interesting, you know, coming from an American studies perspective has this really interesting argument that white people dressing as Native Americans in 1773 sends a double message. It sends the message, we are not British because here we are dressing as Native Americans, but we are also not Native Americans. We represent the kind of like, you know, colonizing, you know, colonizing slash civilizing white influence on the American colonists. So in other words, the Americans, the Bostonians are saying, we are something new. We are American colonists, you know, a new American nation. But I do think that there's a sort of mix of kind of scapegoating and a sort of racist taking on of another racial identity, but also a sort of admiration, like who's more fearsome and independent than the Mohawks? Let's dress as them in order to kind of say, we won't be pushed around. And so that's another reason why they do it. It's a way of kind of saying we are outsiders. This is not the Boston town meeting doing this. Let's all cooperate with the fiction that strangers came in and destroyed this tea. Everyone knows that that's not true, but you're supposed to pretend that it is true. But also a way of kind of saying like, we want to adopt this identity because we see this identity as something that's, you know, that won't be pushed around by Great Britain. I'll just throw in not something that Ben knows very well and that is also in his chapter and that there's been more thinking about since, which is that, well, two things really. One is the way that dressing as Indian was a way of sort of claiming that ambiguity about the tea coming from India, right? And that they're being okay. Like, you know, we're the people who are in charge of tea. We are the real Indians, but even more so that there's an awareness that Native Americans in their negotiations with Europeans and settlers had been sharp dealers and hagglers and consumers of various products and that sometimes they resisted the terms on which it was offered to them and sometimes refused to consume the things or the things that they were being offered or the prices at which they were being offered. So basically, like the boycott is not invented in 1774, there are, and Quakers also had done things like this so that there is a tradition of refusing violently and peacefully the goods that merchants and traders and authorities offer, sometimes offer to make peace, right? So and that in acting like Mohawks, one of the most powerful groups that people in Massachusetts knew well from the proximate frontier, they were signaling we are not only being as bold as Indian warriors, we are doing the kind of politics that Native Americans have done for quite some time here nearby. Yeah, I mean, there's some evidence that Native Americans drank tea during this period, but also plenty of incidents of Native Americans having sort of revival movements and saying, we won't take white people's goods on these terms anymore because what we really care about is retaining our rights to the land and so on, yeah. Right, and Gregory Dowd in his work pointed out that some of these revival movements not only relied on traditional older Native practices that were, but also invented some new rituals, one of which meant what involved brewing a black, something that was called the black drink and using it as a purgative, throwing up with it. And so that's kind of, we could think of that as a kind of refusal of the more commercialized or purchased drinks like tea and rum that were so much a part of the trade. So even like not like refusing any product, but maybe particularly brood or liquid products coming from that could then like could be corrupting. And it is basically the same argument that the New England boycotters were making about tea was really quite similar to the ones that Native activists and leaders had been making about the way alcohol could be corrupting. Yeah, I mean, so yeah, tea is about politics and it's about economics, but it's also a cultural one. So maybe this is a good time for us to see if there are some questions coming in from the audience. I see one, which I'll read, to what degree did the Boston Tea Party contribute to the development of the revolutionary tactics and the evolution of protest methods within the broader context of resistance movements globally and also beyond the overt act of protest, what intricate societal shifts and enduring social transformations resulted from the Tea Act and the consequential act of tea destruction in Boston Harbor. Yeah, that's, I mean, it's a very sophisticated question. I mean, it's so tricky. Historians know that some of the methods of protest had been around for a long, long time. It's not as if the Americans invent crowd action in the 1770s. There were strong English and European traditions of protest, of publicly shaming or beating people up and all sorts of other things. Because there was such a consumer revolution in the 1700s of people having more consumer goods than they ever did, than their great grandparents ever did, that the idea of making consumer goods into a focus of those protests, that might have been new. I mean, bread riots were old. There have been bread riots for a long time because everybody needs bread. But the idea of having big protests around a luxury good like tea, that's new because this is maybe the first time in human history that so many people in the English speaking world could afford those kinds of exotic goods, even at relatively poorer levels of society. So that's something new. I mean, the Tea Act itself, I don't think creates any lasting cultural effect because it's never able to really be enforced by parliament because then immediately the Americans revolt, or fairly soon, the Americans revolt. But the Boston Tea Party definitely does leave a legacy. I mean, Martin Luther King mentions the Boston Tea Party in his letter from a Birmingham jail. When Gandhi is in South Africa encouraging Indians to burn their registration cards, somebody in a British newspaper points out, oh, this is just like the Boston Tea Party. So there is this sort of global understanding that like, oh, visible protests like this are destroying something publicly. That's a way to kind of show your displeasure for what your government is doing. I mean, people who blow up SUVs in parking lots as part of an environmental protest make similar sorts of claims. So there definitely is, because the Boston Tea Party is such an easy event to remember, I think it rattles around in a lot of people's minds as they get inspired to protest government. But I also think that the Boston Tea Party, I mean, it encapsulates something very singular, but it also had its own origins, much older origins of a long-standing British protest tradition. One of the ways it brings that protest tradition forward is the way in which while the Tea Party the dumping of the tea is done by men, the movement of refusing the tea was pushed and exemplified by women. And women are there in the crowd actions in early modern Europe and in Britain and bread riots and things like that. But one of the things that's so striking about the way that the tea protests worked in the early 1770s was that it took this thing that had made women seem like they were potentially not good citizens because they were doing the, they might be doing the consuming and in ways that might actually bring out class differences. Oh, look at these upper class people, right? They're not with the people because they are making money off of this or they are consuming despite the fact that we've decided it's not virtuous and it's not good politics to consume this. When women joined in and exemplified it, it actually tended to erase those class differences. Everybody can refuse to consume something, right? And if it's part of a domestic ritual, women can lead that process of bringing the upper classes and the lower classes together. That's something that I think that reverberates, it certainly reverberates in early republic politics in terms of the ways that women come into public view at times when political movements and social movements want to make a nonpartisan appeal that is supposed to cross class lines. And we see that again and again certainly in the early and mid 19th century. Yeah, I tried to remain really alert in the book for when I saw women participating in tea boycotts or helping their husbands get ready for the tea party or publishing poems about the tea party or helping to pass down the stories of their male relatives' participation in the tea party. So women are all over it. It's interesting, you have both women joining tea boycotts and being celebrated for that, but you also have women in 1774 kind of continuing to drink tea and this guy is sort of saying, oh, I can drink it home secretly. I just can't drink it publicly, right? And sort of women holding onto their consumer habits also represents a kind of rebellion, right? Like, who cares what dad says or who cares what my husband says? I'm gonna continue to do this. Right, so that they're very, they're increasing power in the domestic sphere actually, if not liberating at least is a kind of a political phenomenon. Yeah, I mean, and the reason we don't talk about this as much as the George Mason professor, Rosemary Zagari points out, is that there's a backlash against this sort of thing. Women's moment as revolutionary politicians in the 19th century, the kind of, the her invoke men of the Jacksonian era say, we can't have this. We can't have women participating in politics. Who knows what that might lead to? Free reverse, free divorce, sharing our history with women, free divorce, sharing our property, women being educated, right? All things that they start to try and push back against. And so women are kind of stuffed back into their domestic box for much of the 19th century. And it takes a very long time for the United States to grant them the right to vote. But they were there in the T-Boy Cots and they were there in the revolution. I'm hoping that as the 250th anniversary has come up that we remember women's contributions even to these seemingly male events like the Boston Tea Party. So one of the results of the Boston Tea Party and associated events is taking longer for women to get the vote. Well, I don't know, that's skipping over a few things, I think. Okay, we have another question is, Ben Franklin's autobiography suggests the British didn't want to pay for military supplies protecting the colonies from Native Americans. Do you think this is a reason why they dress as Native Americans? The answer, my answer to that is no, but it's so interesting, right? I do wanna talk about that because of course, Franklin is gonna say that, right? I mean, from the British Empire's perspective, right? They look at the Seven Years War, right? Which lasts in America from 1754 to 1763. It's sometimes called the French and Indian War but historians don't like that term anymore. But if you look at that war, right? Great Britain goes into huge debt and then they have to maintain continued troop presence in what's now the Midwest in the Great Lakes region, which is gonna cost thousands more, right? And so the British government has really just put a whole bunch of money into driving the French off of North America for the sake of the English-speaking American colonists. And so then Parliament after 1763 turns to the American colonists and it's like, okay, we went into a bunch of debt, we have these continuing expenses to protect you. Do you think you could pony up a little in tax money in order to pay for all this? And Parliament is flabbergasted that the Americans keep raising objections to the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act and the Townsend Act and the Tea Act. It's like, what the heck? Don't you want to contribute a little to your own protection? You guys pay way less in taxes than British people do. What is your objection exactly? And so I mean, it is quite possible that the Seven Years' War, which was in the living memory of the men of Massachusetts and the men of Massachusetts had gone off and fought in lots of wars against Native Americans. They had better military experience than most Virginians probably in the aggregate if you look at the minute men of 1775. Massachusetts men were used to going to war either against the French or against Native Americans whose lands they wanted. And so I do think that there's something psychologically they were starting to republish stories of their 17th century fights against Native Americans in 1773. So I do think that there is something psychologically to the Americans, to the Bostonians saying, we are gonna dress as Native Americans in order to show how tough we are, right? And how much we are thinking about the great contest for the American colonists, which has pitted English speaking whites against the various Native indigenous groups that lived in North America. So I do think there's something to that, but it would take a little bit longer to explain than we have in my answer here. So I think I try and get into that in my chapter in the book, but you'll have to see what you think if you read the book about how I address that issue. I mean, of course, I mentioned the Seven Years' War at the beginning of the book. And of course, I mentioned the kind of long history of the colonists versus Indians in my chapter on Indian disguises. I don't know that I would quite put it the same way that the questioner did, but I definitely think there's something to it. Okay, we have time for one more question and it's a big one and maybe the right one to end with. It brings us back to these questions of the contemporary legacies and images and myths about the Tea Party. In what ways do the ideological underpinnings and arguments witnessed during the era of the Boston Tea Party echo in contemporary debates on activism, civil disobedience, and the societal role of dissent? Yeah, I mean, I think that that is crucial. I mean, Representative Jim Clyburn, when he was House whip, when there were all these state laws being anti-protest legislation being passed in a lot of red states, right? He says, look, America started as a protest movement and he mentions the Boston Tea Party, right? But by the same token, right, there are many people on the right who also kind of say, I really object to what the government is doing, and who also invoke the Boston Tea Party or wave the Gadsden flag, don't tread on me, and kind of see this as crucial to who they are. I mean, look, some historians have said, look, Americans are just congenitally individualist. They don't like to be told what to do. That's part of who we are. And so whenever Americans are going to raise an objection, if they can get enough friends together, they'll start talking Tea Party one way or another. Maybe that's true, but I think that that's really only one strand of American thinking. I mean, at the end of the day, right? You take somebody like Samuel Adams, when Shays Rebellion happens in the 1780s, he says, hey, you guys can't do this. You can't suddenly start seizing arms from an armory just because you're in debt and don't wanna pay your taxes. We are a duly elected Republic now. You are supposed to keep order and defend the Republic and defend the idea of an elected legislature because if you don't and everything devolves into chaos, then a tyrant will emerge. And so I think that's really one of the civic challenges for us as Americans is, how do we balance our desire to resist and our quest for rights against the desire to have an orderly society in which we all agree to obey the rule of law? How do we find that balance? When does government become so oppressive that protest is gonna be needed? And when are protests either frivolous or downright dangerous to the ideas of the Republic where what we would wanna say instead is, no, let's uphold the Constitution, let's defend the law, let's make sure that the rules are the same for everyone. I think that that requires us to be really sophisticated about politics and it requires us to be really sophisticated about history. And I also think it requires us to take in many perspectives. When we look at an event like the Boston Tea Party, let's look at wealthy patriots like Samuel Adams or influential patriots like Samuel Adams or John Hancock, but let's also look at ordinary men like Samuel Noel or Joshua Wyeth or George Pillsbury. And let's also look at women. And let's also look at loyalists and the ones who wanted to uphold the law in the face of what these protesters were doing. And let's also look at Native American perspectives and the perspectives of enslaved black people like Phyllis Wheatley who published her work of poems in 1773, the same year as the Boston Tea Party. We just celebrated a big anniversary for her as well. And I would urge people to go out and buy Professor Wallstreicher's book, The Odyssey of Phyllis Wheatley, which also came out this past year and is making all sorts of lists as a really important and influential work of American history. I think our understanding of American history becomes richer if we can take these multiple perspectives. It's not about being woke or whatever. It's just about being human and understanding that there were different ways in to the big questions of 1773, just as there are many ways into the big questions that we're facing today. I think I'll just close with just another tease, which is that it's not very well known that when Phyllis Wheatley's book was published in London, it gets shipped back to Boston on the Dartmouth. And so Phyllis Wheatley is sitting in Boston while the T-Ship with her books in a crate or two or three in the hold is being held up for weeks. It's a great illustration of precisely this dynamic where the things that we sometimes segregate into separate histories that are for different, that are of interest to different people actually turn out to be quite materially as well as symbolically connected. So- And you can't have sugar without the labor to be enslaved in those days. Which is another chapter in defiance of the Patriots. Thank you to the National Archives for hosting us and continuing to do the varieties of good work that it does. And you can, this program will be available on YouTube shortly, if not immediately. And it's been a pleasure as always to chat with Ben. And until next time. Thanks to the audience too and for the great questions.