Background to the Boston Tea Party

If Parliament had enacted a tariff on tea in 1765 instead of a Stamp Act for North America, would colonists have resisted that new tax as strongly as they did? It’s impossible to answer a historical counterfactual question, but nonetheless I keep asking myself this one.

The tea supply was, after all, made possible by the might and spread of the British Empire. Taxing people who enjoyed that commodity to support the imperial government therefore might seem justified.

Many colonists would have paid the stamp tax directly, making it easy for American Whigs to show that new revenue laws affected everyone, even farmers (and most Americans were farmers). In contrast, only the merchants importing tea paid the tea tariff. They passed that cost on to their customers, to be sure, but it wasn’t so obvious.

Furthermore, unlike some of the actions taxed by the Stamp Act, such as court filings and marriages, no one was legally required to buy tea. And yet, because tea supplied that pleasant touch of caffeine, many Americans were in the habit of drinking it.

In 1765, therefore, Americans might well have grumbled about an imperial tea tariff, but not massively and energetically enough to render the new law unenforceable. Would that revenue have satisfied the ministry in London enough that successive administrations wouldn’t have tried new tax laws? Or would it have provided a precedent for more tariffs based on similar commodities?

As it was, the ideas that the British constitution rightly bars taxation without representation, that corrupt royal appointees were draining money from the colonies, and that these problems could affect even people in small towns far from the ports were widespread by 1773. That made the Tea Act loom larger than it otherwise would have.

In this Sestercentennial year for the tea crisis, many institutions are examining that conflict through events and exhibits. Of course, the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum focuses on the climax of that crisis every day. It’s got two events coming up exploring the background of the event and commemorations of it.

Thursday, 8 June, 7:00 to 8:30 P.M.
Canton to Boston: How Chinese Tea Steeped at American Revolution
Abigail’s Tea Room and online (registration required)

Tea historian Bruce Richardson was recently granted access to the vaults of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, where he searched for teas like those tossed into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. He will share news of his detective work and the fascinating journey of the Boston teas as they left Canton bound for London’s East India Company warehouses and Colonial America.

Sunday, 25 June, 7:00 P.M.
Rev War Revelry: The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum
Facebook Live

Join the hosts at Emerging Revolutionary War as they talk with staff of the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum on the history of the events leading up to and on December 16, 1773, learn more about their interactive museum and learn about all the events planned around this year’s 250th anniversary.

Call for Papers on “Empire and Its Discontent”

On 1–2 Dec 2023, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society will host a conference in Boston on the theme “Empire and Its Discontent, 1763-1773.” This conference is part of a series of scholarly meetings designed to ”re-examine the origins, course, and consequences of the American Revolution.”

This year sees the 260th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War and the Sestercentennial of the Boston Tea Party—two milestone events in workings of the British Empire.

The program committee is now inviting historians and scholars working in connected fields on questions of empire, revolution, and independence between 1763 and 1773 to submit papers for this conference. Possible topics include:

• Imperial rivalries and shifting power within North America
• The structures of empire within the metropole and on the peripheries
• Policy and practice in the 18th century
• The political, diplomatic, and military challenges of governing a diverse and far flung polity
• Global trade networks within and outside the empire and their influence on imperial policy and colonial practice
• The shifting nature of boundaries, borders, authority, and sovereignty and their role in the local and global geopolitics of the era
• The imperial origins of the outbreak of sustained unrest in British America after 1763 and the impact of that unrest on settler, native, and enslaved populations
• The Tea Party and its immediate aftermath

Applicants should submit a title and a 250-word proposal along with a c.v. by 1 May via this Interfolio link. All scholars invited to participate will be contacted by 30 May, and there will be travel subsidies and hotel accommodations available. Papers should be no longer than 20 double-spaced pages. Presenters must submit their papers by 1 November, a month before the conference, to be pre-circulated to registrants. There will be an edited volume of papers in their final form.

More information will appear on the American Philosophical Society’s website, and questions may be addressed to Adrianna Link, Head of Scholarly Programs there.

“Rebellion or Revolution?” from the U.K. National Archives, 3 Mar.

On the morning of Friday, 3 March, the National Archives of Great Britain will host an online discussion on the topic “Rebellion or Revolution?: Understanding the American Revolutionary War.”

This event is connected to the institution’s current exhibit “Treason: People, Power & Plot,” looking at documents and artifacts related to treason cases throughout British history.

The American Revolution presents a challenging case, given that modern British culture regards the U.S. of A. as generally a Good Thing, even if we do take things too far sometimes, and feels parental pride in the American republic. Nonetheless, there were a lot of laws broken.

The event description asks:

How do we define loyalty? Rebellion? Resistance?

And how were these concepts understood in the context of the American Revolutionary War?

Join 18th-century record specialists, Philippa Hellawell at The National Archives and Corinne Porter of the USA’s National Archive & Record Administration (NARA), for a unique collaboration discussing devotion and duplicity during the American Revolutionary War.

This talk uses highlights from both collections to help us understand both British and American perspectives, including the British reaction to the Boston Tea Party, George III’s Proclamation of Rebellion following Congress’ initial petition for independence, and the subsequent American Declaration of Independence accusing the British King of being the traitor.

A traitor to the natural rights of men and the constitutional rights of Britons, that is. Or was the royal government’s betrayal far outweighed by the Americans’ rebellion and secession?

I like the idea of sitting in on a discussion from the U.K. National Archives, where I’ve had some of my happiest archive moments finding documents that connect to stories I’d started researching in American libraries.

Still, there’s the time difference to bear in mind. This event is scheduled for 14:00 G.M.T., which I believe is 9:00 A.M. Boston time.

Pay-what-you-can tickets are available through this page. As of this evening, the British pound is worth $1.20.

2023 Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley, 9–11 June

On the weekend of 9–11 June, the Fort Plain Museum will host its annual Revolutionary War Conference in the Mohawk Valley.

This year’s session is called “Conference 250,” with several presentations looking back at events in 1773 and others looking forward to the Sestercentennial.

The lineup of speakers includes:

• James Kirby Martin in conversation with Mark Edward Lender, professor and former student discussing the Revolutionary War and its 250th anniversary
• Friederike Baer, “Hessians: The German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War”
• John “Jack” Buchanan, “The Battle of Musgrove’s Mill, 1780”
• Benjamin L. Carp, “The Boston Tea Party at 250: Reflections on the Radicalism of the Revolutionary Movement”
• Vivian E. Davis, ”Over 250 Years Ago!: The Battle of Golden Hill, January 19, 1770”
• Holly A. Mayer, “Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union”
• Steven Park, “250 Years of Remembering: The Changing Landscape of Gaspee History”
• Nina Sankovitch, “The Abiding Quest of a Forgotten Hero: How Josiah Quincy Battled Overwhelming Odds to Bring Together the Northern and Southern Colonies in 1773”
• Eric H. Schnitzer, “Picturing History: The Images of the American War for Independence”
• Sergio Villavicencio, “St. Eustatius and the American Revolution”
• Kelly Yacobucci Farquhar, “Jellas Fonda, a Letter, and the Boston Tea Party: A Look Back 250 Years Later”
• Terry McMaster, “A Revolutionary Couple on the Old New York Frontier: Col. Samuel Clyde & Catharine Wasson of Cherry Valley”
• “New York State and the 250th: Where Things Stand” presented by Devin R. Lander, New York State Historian; Phil Giltner, Director of Special Projects, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; and Lauren Roberts, Saratoga County Historian
• Norman J. Bollen, Fort Plain Museum board chairman, “The Fort Plain Museum & Historical Park’s Grand Enhancement Plan: Rebuilding the Blockhouse for the 250th”

Before the conference and under a separate registration, there will be a bus tour of “Forts and Fortified Homes of the Mohawk Valley” led by Bruce Venter, Wayne Lenig, and Norm Bollen. This is a new, in-depth tour of the historic forts, fortified homes, and other sites that formed the defensive perimeter around Fort Rensselaer (Fort Plain). Lunch will be included.

The conference will take place in the theater of Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, New York. Based on past events, I expect an excellent selection of Revolutionary history books to be on sale.

For the full schedule as currently planned, additional information, and registration forms, visit this website.

“I don’t want a major city to catch fire”

Via Yale University Press, Prof. Benjamin L. Carp of Brooklyn College blogs:

When you write a book, you have to promote it. When you promote a book, they ask you to pitch ideas to news outlets. When you pitch an idea to a news outlet, they say you should have a “hook” that relates to contemporary events.

I do not want there to be a hook for my book, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, because I don’t want a major city to catch fire.

My book is about an awful disaster—a fire on September 21, 1776, that burned about a fifth of New York City, which was then the second-largest town in the rebelling colonies that became the United States. I think the evidence shows that American rebels burned the city deliberately—and perhaps with George Washington’s blessing. The British had just occupied New York six days earlier, and the Americans had talked about depriving the British of headquarters for the winter. After the fire, however, the rebels insisted that Washington and his men had nothing to do with the fire, and they launched a campaign of correspondence and newspaper items to counteract any suggestion that the Americans were to blame. They succeeded, too: for years, most historians said the fire was either an accident or a mystery.

Our world is currently filled with destructive warfare, climate disaster, and disinformation. It shouldn’t be too difficult for me to connect a tragic event from the past to the catastrophes we face today. But I keep hoping the world won’t give me a hook.

As in Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Ben Carp spent part of his time researching this book digging below the standard history of this famous event to find early clues about which individuals were responsible.

The Tea Party was carefully controlled destruction while the New York fire was supposed to get out of control. The men who destroyed the tea were Boston Whigs no doubt selected for their reliability. Interestingly, some of the figures whom this book links to the Manhattan arson were people from well outside the American power structure, yet willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause.

Boston Tea Party Online Panel Discussion, 10 Jan.

On Tuesday, 10 January, Revolutionary Spaces will launch its commemoration of the Sestercentennial of the Boston Tea Party with an online panel discussion about the event: “‘To Save This Country’: The Boston Tea Party in History.”

The event description says:

Kicking off the 250th anniversary year of this iconic moment in history, this virtual panel will provide a nuanced basis for which to understand the The Boston Tea Party. . . . acclaimed historians will explore how the events preceding the Boston Tea Party led to this historic occasion. We will then move, moment by moment, through the meeting and the destruction of the tea, providing commentary and insight. We will also discuss the aftermath of December 16, 1773 and its legacy. The panel will conclude an audience Q&A.

The panelists are:

• Dr. Nathaniel Sheidley, president and CEO of Revolutionary Spaces, which operates the Old South Meeting House and Old State House.
• Prof. Joseph J. Ellis, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation and the National Book Award for American Sphinx, and author of many more books.
• Prof. Benjamin Carp, author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, and the new The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution.
• Prof. Sarah Purcell, the L.F. Parker Professor of History at Grinnell College and author of Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America.
• myself.

The questions prepared for this event are very wide-ranging, starting with the Seven Years’ War and ending with the upcoming commemorations. We’re supposed to both lay out the basic historical facts of the Tea Party and add nuance for people already familiar with those facts. So even at ninety minutes, this conversation could get rushed at the end. If you have burning questions, post them early!

Register to attend “‘To Save This Country’: The Boston Tea Party in History” through this page. The event will start at 6:30 P.M. and end about 8:00. It will be recorded for the WGBH Forum Network.

How Big Was a “Half Chest” of Tea?

Returning to the leafy details of the Boston Tea Party, earlier this month I quoted the Boston Gazette reporting that Ebenezer Withington had found “a half chest which had floated and was cast up on Dorchester point.”

Around the same time John Rowe wrote that people had confiscated “about half a Chest of Tea” from Withington.

Rowe’s report was almost certainly secondhand. The Gazette article could also have been hearsay, or could have come from an eyewitness to the tea confiscation and burning.

Withington’s own surviving statement said nothing about the quantity of tea or the size of the container it arrived in.

The phrase “a half chest” prompted local historian Charles Bahne to comment:

The East India Company's official inventory of the tea destroyed in Boston — which I discussed in these pages on December 17, 2009 — indicates that this particular cargo was shipped in full chests, weighing an average of 353 pounds each (net weight, not counting the chest itself); and in smaller chests that averaged 77 pounds net. Those smaller chests were about a quarter the weight of a full chest, so presumably they were "quarter chests". There don't seem to be any "half chests" on board.

So where did Withington's half chest come from?

Christopher Sherwood Davis, who researched the shipments for the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, then responded:

It's my theory that "half chest" functioned as a generic term for a smaller chest, while also being a more technical term for a chest one half the weight of a whole chest. Much like how "barrel" is both a generic term for a cask and a type of cask with a specific volume. Drake's Tea Leaves has the Polly's freight invoice for the tea, and it refers to the same 130 chests as both "half" and "quarter" in different places. The Dartmouth's logbook also calls the chests "half chests", but as you pointed out the average weights are more consistent with the quarter chests.

That accords with other reports of measurements I’ve seen from merchants and mechanics. It wasn’t yet a time of exactitude.

Another source on tea shipments that I’ve mentioned is Dan Du’s doctoral thesis, “This World in a Teacup: Chinese-American Tea Trade in the Nineteenth Century.” On page 42 Du transcribed a chart that Jonathan Donnison, captain of the General Washington, entered into his log in 1791. That chart shows different dimensions for chests of different types of tea.

According to the General Washington log, “Half Chests of Bohea Tea,” the basic kind of black tea, were 2'10" long, 2' broad, and 1'3.5" deep. That’s over 7 cubic feet.

In contrast, a “Chest of Souchong Tea,” which was more expensive, was 1'5" long, 1'4" broad, and 1'.5" to 1'3" deep. That's about 2 cubic feet.

A “Half Chest of Hyson” was listed as about the same size as a “Chest of Souchong.” Donnison set down two listings for a “Chest of Hyson,” differing by a full foot in length (at least as transcribed). Even at the higher length, the resulting container wasn’t as big as the “Half Chests of Bohea.”

Now those figures from the Du thesis might be in error, or they might apply only to chests from Capt. Donnison’s suppliers in 1791 and say nothing about the East India Company’s shipping containers two decades earlier. But they do suggest that a “chest of tea” or “half chest of tea” was far from a standard measurement. To understand what a “chest of tea” meant, one had to know the type of tea inside. The more precious the leaves, the smaller the standard container of those leaves.

None of the reports about Ebenezer Withington’s tea said anything about the type of tea he’d found. The Gazette’s use of “a half chest” suggests he hadn’t brought home one of the large containers of Bohea that made up the bulk of the East India Company’s shipment, but his box could have counted as a full chest of Souchon or Hyson. That in turns suggests that Withington had lucked out (for a while) in finding a supply of a more expensive variety.

“Another Vessel took the Tea on board”

Four ships carrying British East India Company tea set out for Boston in 1773, but only three made it.

The fourth was the William, captained by Joseph Loring, son of the man who built the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain.

As with the other three ships, tea was just part of the William’s cargo. It also carried hundreds of glass globes that Boston had ordered for its first street lamps.

On 2 December, Loring ran aground off the northern tip of Cape Cod near Provincetown. The next day, bad weather damaged the William, ensuring it wouldn’t complete its voyage. Most of the cargo, however, was still intact. Over the next couple of weeks, people took off as much as they could.

Jonathan Clarke salvaged most of the tea on behalf of his family firm, one of the original tea consignees. In his Journal of the American Revolution article, James R. Fichter calculated that Clarke managed to secure 54 of 59 chests of tea on the William.

Three or four containers wound up in other people’s hands. That situation set up a new tempest as Massachusetts Patriots tried to keep anyone from selling any surviving tea, even if it had bypassed the tea tax. Mary Beth Norton described those efforts in her book 1774. Peter Drummey covered a local angle in this talk for the Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

It took a while for Clarke to find a ship with a crew willing to carry his rescued tea chests into Boston harbor. We glimpse that situation in this 3 Jan 1774 report in the Boston Evening-Post:

Last Saturday [i.e., 1 January] a Vessel arrived here from Cape-Cod with Part of the Cargo of Capt. Loring’s Brig lately stranded there, among which are the Lamps for the Use of the Town.—Another Vessel took the Tea on board, which, we hear, is intended to be landed at the Castle.

Citing a document preserved in Britain’s India Records papers, Fichter explained what ultimately happened to those chests in his article “The Tea That Survived the Boston Tea Party.”

The 6 January Massachusetts Spy included a detail about the first ship’s arrival from the Cape that the Evening-Post left out:

Last Saturday arrived a vessel with the goods saved out of the Brig William, Capt. Loring, lately cast away at Cape-Cod; and the same evening was visited by a number of Indians, who made thorough search, but found no tea.

Again, this is evidence of Bostonians using “Indians” as a way to refer to locals enforcing the loyal tea boycott by force without acknowledging those men were locals enforcing the loyal tea boycott by force. I doubt these inspectors were disguised with paint and costumes. Instead, everyone knew they’d be better off keeping those men’s identities secret.

“Ebenezer Withington hath declared that he hath sold a Part of the Tea”

Yesterday I quoted the proceedings of the Dorchester town meeting as printed in the Massachusetts Spy on 13 Jan 1774.

They included:

• Ebenezer Withington’s public admission that he had picked up some tea left over from the Boston Tea Party and sold it, but was sorry.
• The town’s long declaration that selling tea like that was very wrong, for the most important political reasons, but Withington hadn’t meant any harm.

Now for some close reading of the details.

First, this one contemporaneous report is not evidence for locals finding Tea Party detritus along the Dorchester shore on the morning after.

Bostonians destroyed that tea on the evening of Thursday, 16 December. The next morning was Friday. Withington was clear he “found said Tea on Saturday, on going round upon the Marshes.” So it may have taken longer than a day for that half-chest to float across Boston harbor.

Not a big deal, but it does hint at how we like to compact details to make better stories. “The next morning” works better than “a day and a half later.”

Second, I wish I knew all the implications of the phrase “some Gentlemen belonging to the Castle,” the description in Withington’s statement of men who asked him about the tea he’d found. During the Tea Party, Castle William (shown above) was the home base of Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie’s 64th Regiment. It also served as a refuge for Boston’s top Customs officials and the tea consignees. And at least a few civilians worked on that island.

Whoever talked to Withington obviously knew that most of his “Neighbors” supported the strict tea boycott. What might they have said about a man salvaging tea for himself? Especially if they were friends of the royal government! No wonder Dorchester leaders expressed concern that people might insinuate “that the whole of the Tea said to have been destroyed was plundered.”

Finally, I was struck by the elevated language of these Dorchester documents. The statement Withington signed begins, “I found said Tea…” There’s nothing about tea before that in the printed proceedings, but the statement may have been written in response to a reference in the warrant for the town meeting, or in a letter from the selectmen. In any event, that “said” was the legal language of depositions.

Likewise, the four town resolutions that follow are in the most formal style. The first even uses “hath” instead of “has,” despite being about a poor man pulling a soggy chest of tea out of a swamp. Dorchester clerk Noah Clap clearly knew he was writing for public consumption and depicted his town at its most upright and proper.

TOMORROW: Inspectors.

“He hath been discovered selling said Tea”

On Monday, 3 Jan 1774, as I quoted yesterday, the Boston Gazette reported on men confiscating a supply of tea from a poor Dorchester man named Ebenezer Withington.

The same day, Dorchester had a town meeting about the matter. The community might have thought that would resolve everything.

But on Thursday, 6 January, the Boston News-Letter and Massachusetts Spy repeated the Gazette story. The next day, it appears, Dorchester’s clerk copied out the proceedings of the town meeting and sent them to Spy printer Isaiah Thomas.

It took a week for Thomas to put out his next issue. The proceedings appeared on 13 January, but with a 7 January dateline; with a decorative first initial, but without any introductory explanation.

At a Meeting of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the Town of DORCHESTER, January 3d, 1774, by Adjournment from December 28th, 1773.

EBENEZER WITHINGTON of this Town, Labourer, personally appeared and acknowledged in this Meeting and subscribed the following with his own Hand:
“I found said Tea on Saturday, on going round upon the Marshes; brought off the same thinking no Harm; returning I met some Gentlemen belonging to the Castle, who asked me if I had been picking up the Ruins? I asked them if there was any Harm? they said no except from my Neighbours.—Accordingly, I brought Home the same, part of which I disposed of, and the Remainder took from me since.
EBENEZER WITHINGTON”.

RESOLVED, That his Conduct therein proceeded from inadvertency, and it gives the greatest Satisfaction to this Town that he hath been discovered selling said Tea, otherwise the Conspirators against our Rights and Liberties might have taken Occasion to have insinuated, as their Manner is, that the whole of the Tea said to have been destroyed was plundered and privately sold contrary to the most notorious Facts:

And whereas the said Ebenezer Withington hath declared that he hath sold a Part of the Tea which he had taken up as before said to divers Persons,

RESOLVED, That the said Persons be and are hereby desired to deliver to the Committee of Correspondence for this Town the Tea thus purchased by them of the said Withington, to the intent that the same may be totally destroyed; and if said Persons or either of them shall refuse so to do, they shall be deemed as Enemies who have joined with the Ten Consignees and other Conspirators, to promote the use of the detested Article, and their Names shall be publicly posted accordingly, . . .

RESOLVED, That this Town, will by all Means in their Power, discountenance the use of Tea, while it is subject to a Duty, imposed on it by the British Parliament for the Purpose of raising a Revenue in America without our Consent, . . .

RESOLVED, That this Town on the most mature Deliberation highly approve of the Proceedings of the People who assembled in the Old South Meeting House in Boston on the 29th of November last and since. . . . it is the Opinion of this Town that the Destruction of the Tea proceeded entirely from the Obstinacy of the Consignees, and the Collector of the Customs [Richard Harrison] in refusing to grant a Clearance, and of the Governor [Thomas Hutchinson] in refusing to grant a Pass for Mr. [Francis] Rotch’s Ship.

A true Copy from Dorchester Records.
Attest. NOAH CLAP, Town-Clerk.

And that publicly put to rest the issue of the half-chest of tea that had floated away from the Boston Tea Party and ended up on Dorchester. The town got to present itself as committed to the tea boycott for all the right reasons. Withington got to declare he meant no harm. As for the people who had bought tea from Withington, they could keep their names quiet by giving up their stashes.

So does Ebenezer Withington’s story prove that people really did collect detritus of the Tea Party on the morning after the event, as much lore claims? Actually not.

TOMORROW: Reading the details.

“They found part of a half chest which had floated”

A natural question after hearing the stories of chests from the Boston Tea Party floating across the bay to the Dorchester shore is whether that was even possible.

The men and boys of the Tea Party worked hard to break open all the chests, pour out the tea leaves, and even then make sure those leaves got submerged in the salt water. Could a container of tea have escaped their attention?

In fact, there’s good evidence from 1773 for a small chest making it across the water with some drinkable tea inside.

Samuel Pierce of Dorchester wrote in his diary for 30 December:

There was a number of men came from Boston in disguise, about 40; they came to Mr Eben Withington’s down in town, and demanded his Tee from him which he had taken up, and carried it off and burnt it at Boston.

The merchant John Rowe recorded the same event from his Bostonian perspective the next day:

There was found in the House of One Withington of Dorchester about half a Chest of Tea—the People gathered together & took the Tea, Brought it into the Common of Boston & Burnt it this night about eleven of Clock

This is supposed to be part of the Tea that was taken out of the Ships & floated over to Dorchester.

On 3 Jan 1774, Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette laid out the story that the town’s Whig leaders wanted people to know:

Whereas it was reported that one Withington, of Dorchester, had taken up and partly disposed of a Chest of the East-India Company’s Tea: a Number of the Cape or Narragansett-Indians, went to the Houses of Capt. Ebenezer Withington, and his Brother Philip Withington, (both living upon the lower Road from Boston to Milton) last Friday Evening, and with their consent thoroughly searched their Houses, without offering the least offence to any one.

But finding no Tea they proceeded to the House of old Ebenezer Withington, at a place called Sodom, below Dorchester Meeting House, where they found part of a half chest which had floated and was cast up on Dorchester point. This they seized and brought to Boston Common where they committed it to the flames.

Pierce identified the men enforcing the tea boycott as “from Boston,” but the Gazette referred to them as “Cape or Narragansett-Indians.” This is an early example of the Whigs realizing that referring to the men who destroyed the tea as unrecognizable Natives let everyone maintain deniability.

There were many Withingtons in Dorchester, obviously. The Gazette emphasized how two Withingtons of the higher class—the militia captain and his brother—had done nothing wrong and were eager to cooperate with the searchers.

“Old Ebenezer Withington” didn’t come off as well. This is the only reference I’ve found to a place in eighteenth-century Dorchester being called “Sodom.”

On the same day that issue of the Boston Gazette appeared, old Ebenezer Withington had to answer to the Dorchester town meeting.

TOMORROW: The town takes a stand.

Taking the Measure of Tea Chests

In addition to the various samples of tea leaves I’ve discussed, relics of the Boston Tea Party include supposed remnants of the chests that tea came in.

One highly visible example is a lacquered tea chest donated by the Foster family to the Massachusetts Daughters of the American Revolution in 1902. Tradition said it was collected by Hopestill Foster on the Dorchester shore in 1773.

The state chapter loaned that box to the national organization’s museum in Washington, D.C. In 2006, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported that this tea chest was the most famous item in the museum’s Massachusetts Room, itself a replica of the Hancock-Clarke House in Lexington.

In Treasure Chests: The Legacy of Extraordinary Boxes (2003), Lon Schleining reported that the Foster chest was “quite small, about a foot high and wide by about a foot and a half long, made of 1/2-in.-thick wood and painted with red and black Oriental scenes.” He added, “Even full of tea, one of these chests would have weighed only a few pounds.”

In fact, the East India Company’s list of lost inventory, reproduced back here and analyzed by Charles Bahne, shows that full chests of Bohea tea “contained an average of 353 pounds per chest.” They were lined with lead and built to survive long sea voyages.

Bahne noted that the cargo also included four higher-priced grades of tea shipped in “quarter chests,” and those averaged between 68 and 86 pounds of tea.

Dan Du’s doctoral thesis, “This World in a Teacup: Chinese-American Tea Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” quotes another period source:

During the adventure to Canton in 1791, Jonathan Donnison, Captain of American ship General Washington, detailed the measuring of the tea chests for Hyson, Hyson [Skin], Bohea, and Souchong teas in his account book.

That account book is now in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum. It shows a half chest of Bohea tea was nearly three feet long, two feet wide, and over a foot tall. Chests of more expensive Hyson and Souchong teas were closer to the dimensions of the Foster family chest, but still larger.

Most important, the chests that the East India Company shipped to America were utilitarian containers meant to go to tea wholesalers. They were not decorative household objects like the Foster family chest. Which, incidentally, shows no signs of having been hatcheted or left soaking in saltwater for hours.

Interestingly, a 2013 issue of South Boston Today reports a completely different story of Hopestill Foster’s family and the tea destruction:

the Widow Foster became famous during the Boston Tea Party. While it seems far away today, in 1770 it was ocean from First Street to the British tea ships at anchor. When the “Indians” dumped the tea, at least one chest floated to the area around F Street. A workman on the Foster estate dragged the chest to a barn, lit a fire and tried to dry it. Widow Foster discovered him and made him burn the tea, chest and all.

(The Tea Party was, of course, in 1773.)

[ADDENDUM: As the comment from Patrick Sheary below reports, the museum has concluded that this chest dates from after the Boston Tea Party, and it’s no longer on display in the Massachusetts Room. Older sources still mention it as a Tea Party relic, but the latest study is more exact.]

“The little bottle of tea came from David Kennison’s pockets”

Moving further west, I arrive at another set of tea leaves linked to the Boston Tea Party, these in the collection of the Chicago History Museum.

They reportedly came from an old New Englander named David Kennison or Kinnison. He arrived in Chicago in the mid-1800s and recounted participating the Tea Party and other celebrated events of the Revolution. For a young but growing western city, he was a link back to America’s beginning.

The problem with that lore is that it’s quite clear David Kennison was a fraud. He exaggerated his age. He claimed people from New Hampshire had traveled all the way to Boston to destroy the tea. He told false and contradictory stories about military service during the Revolutionary War.

Furthermore, authors have debunked Kennison’s claims for over a century now. Every few decades through the 1900s, people rediscovered the same weak points and genuine records. But the artifacts, the original credulous accounts, and the wish for a link to the Boston Tea Party survive. Kennison’s stories therefore keep creeping back into view.

A very thorough examination of the tea leaves linked to Kennison appears at the “Hidden Truths” website. I particularly appreciate the rundown of all public mentions of this tea in Chicago:

1894: forty-two years after David Kennison's death, news of the existence of tea leaves in the possession of Fernando Jones is published in a Chicago newspaper. Jones mentions the affadavit, and explains the little bottle of tea came from David Kennison’s pockets. The leaves were purportedly left in the possession of Kennison's mother, who kept them in her cupboard until Kennison retreived them years later.

1901: Fernando Jones has two vials of tea.

1903: Jones's tea leaves came from David Kennison's boot, where they had accidentally fallen during the Boston affair.

1908: Chicago Historical Society acquires photo reproduction of a daguerreotype of Kennison.

1911: Fernando Jones dies.

1912: Chicago Historical Society acquires vial of tea and affadavit declaring its authenticity.

1939: CHS is acknowledged to have a daguerreotype of David Kennison.

1975: CHS has "2 ounce vial of tea sealed with red wax," accompanying affadavit, CHS also has a painting, and pictures of Kennison.

1982: CHS has vial of tea

1987: CHS has golden chest of tea

The artifact appears above in a photograph made by the Chicago Historical Society for that website.

The page concludes with the leaves’ most recent public appearance:

Chicago History Museum, June 2007, the exhibition, “Is It Real?”

For this exhibition, curated by Peter Alter, objects from within the museum’s collection were presented with thoughtful text panels questioning the objects’ claimed significance. . . .

When I inquired about the vial of tea sealed in red wax, he said he had never seen such an item. He showed me the tea leaves. They were contained within the same chest that was pictured in the 1987 “We the People” catalogue. Some time between 1982 and 1987, the vial of tea had become a chest of tea.

But what looks like a full container of tea leaves, is actually a falsely fashioned front containing a very small quantity of tea. In this last Hidden Truth mystery regarding David Kennison, the newer container for the tea leaves, is actually an item from from the 1893 Columbian Exposition. It is a replica of the golden chest that held the ashes of Christopher Columbus.

Peter Alter does not know how the tea ended up in this container.

I think the references to vials of tea sealed with red wax reflects the strength of the meme established by the Thomas Melvill tea starting in 1821. Relics of the Tea Party packaged or created after that became famous tended to fit the same mold, like the vial the Massachusetts Historical Society gave to Gov. William Seward in 1841. When sealing wax became less common, people resorted to sealing those vials with wooden corks.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the tea at the Chicago Historical Society was always packaged in that souvenir glass chest and people chose to refer to it as a bottle or vial since those seemed like proper terms for a relic of the Boston Tea Party. After all, those same people had also convinced themselves that David Kennison was a reliable storyteller.

“Governor, you might as well take half a dozen grains”

Here’s another sample of what’s reported to be tea from the Boston Tea Party on display in a museum.

Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 clued me into this little vial of tea leaves last week.

It’s at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York. This was the home of William H. Seward, U.S. senator and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln.

In 1841, when Seward was the governor of New York, he made a visit to Boston. Among the notable places he visited was the Massachusetts Historical Society, then located in the Provident Institution for Savings building on Tremont Street beside the King’s Chapel Burying-Ground.

Seward’s Memoir of His Life and Selections from His Letters, 1831-1846, edited by his son Frederick, described that visit:

…a morning passed in the State-House, and an afternoon at the Athenæum and Historical Society, with their Revolutionary relics, swords, and flags, letters of the colonial patriots, and a sealed bottle of tea.

The old gentleman who was pointing out the curiosities said: “Here is some of the tea which was thrown overboard in the harbor. A broken chest floated ashore near the residence of an old lady, who, though a patriot, thought it a great pity that so much good tea should be wasted, and so locked the ‘treasure-trove’ in her closet. She was forced to use it sparingly and privately, however, to avoid the observation of her neighbors. So it was not all gone before the event became historic and the tea a precious relic. This is some of it.”

That was most likely the tea that the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris donated to the M.H.S. before he died in 1842. However, the story the Sewards recorded is different. The label on Harris’s tea now says those leaves were “gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester Neck,” suggesting they were loose instead of in a chest, and thus probably undrinkable. No mention of an old lady or a broken chest.

The Seward account continues with the “old gentleman” at the M.H.S.:

Just as he was saying this, the bottle slipped from his hand and broke; the tea was scattered on the floor. Hastily gathering it up, and putting the parcel back upon the shelf, he remarked: “There is none lost, and it won’t be hurt by it, but since the bottle is broken, Governor, you might as well take half a dozen grains as mementos of Boston.”

The precious leaves were put into a diminutive vial and taken to Albany.

That seems like a gracious gift for a visiting dignitary, but hardly a good testament to how the M.H.S. of 1841 preserved its historical artifacts.

Talking about Tea

Last weekend I wrote about samples of tea supposedly from the Boston Tea Party preserved in New England museums.

On Tuesday I joined Prof. Robert Allison and Jonathan Lane of the Revolution 250 podcast to talk about those relics, as well as other pieces of Tea Party history and lore.

Was John Hancock really on the docks that night? Who was the man caught trying to sneak away some of the tea (later fictionalized as Dove in Johnny Tremain)? Who came up with the name “Boston Tea Party”? We talked about those questions and many more. Find that podcast episode here.

We also talked (on microphone and off) about some Tea Party relics that hadn’t made my postings, mostly because I hadn’t heard of them yet. Here’s another local purported sample of tea.

The Hingham Historical Society’s Old Ordinary museum is the present repository of loose leaves and a legend, as this blog post explains:

An antique tea caddy, donated to the Society by Mary Henrietta Gibson Hersey, the widow of Alfred Henry Hersey, shortly before her death in 1941, came with a small quantity of loose tea and a note capturing the history of the tea — as provided to the family by an Elizabeth Hersey (unclear which, of a number of Elizabeth’s in the family, this would have been):

“Tea from one of the vessels whose cargo was thrown overboard in Boston harbor by the Patriots at the beginning of the Revolution, December 16, 1773.”

No claim about who collected that tea, so nothing to check.

Finally, here’s another reminder that Revolutionary Spaces’ Old South Meeting-House is hosting a recreation of the “Meeting of the People” mass protests in November and December 1773, which led up to the destruction of the tea. That will start Friday, 16 December, at 6:30 P.M. You can purchase tickets here.

Tea Leaves and Traditions

Over the past three days I’ve discussed seven purported samples of tea from the Boston Tea Party. And we’re not done yet!

The Old South Meeting House displays a small corked vial of tea beside a paper label printed with Chinese characters. The panel says:

Tradition has it that these tea leaves, as well as the Chinese tea label, are souvenirs from the Boston Tea Party.

For more information we can go over to this webpage from the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum:

This 18th century tea chest label was donated to the museum in 1987 by the Wells Family Association. Genealogical researcher, author, and descendant of a Tea Party participant, Charles Chauncey Wells researched the connection of the label to his ancestor Thomas Wells, a blacksmith who lived from 1746 until 1810. Thomas Wells worked on the wharves and, like many other young laborers, was entrenched in Boston’s pre-revolutionary rebellion. Down five generations, Charles Chauncey Wells recalls how his grandfather would take the label out, protected under glass, from its hiding place on special occasions to discuss with pride the history of this infamous ancestor! . . .

When the tea label was donated to the Old South Meeting House, experts from Harvard University, Michigan State University, and The British Museum authenticated and translated the document. The label is block printed on rice paper in Old Chinese writing. The paper is of 18th century origin and comes from Canton.

Thomas Wells’s son was prominent in nineteenth-century Boston, but he wasn’t listed as a Tea Party participant in Francis S. Drake’s 1888 Tea Leaves. The family tradition seems to rest on these artifacts.

A similar corked vial, shown above, is in the collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum (formerly the Museum of Our National Heritage) in Lexington. In this blog post from 2012, the museum said:

In 1973, as the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts and other organizations in the commonwealth prepared for the American Bicentennial, Paul Fenno Dudley (1894-1974) donated this vial of tea to the Grand Lodge’s Museum. The Grand Lodge's collection is now housed at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library…

That article doesn’t say how this artifact came to Dudley. Drake did list Samuel Fenno in the Tea Party, “principally from family tradition,” but said nothing about the family preserving a sample of tea. And it’s not clear if this vial came to Paul Dudley Fenno through inheritance.

Up in Exeter, New Hampshire, the American Independence Museum displays a vial of tea that I discussed back in May. That’s not the tea collected by Thomas Melvill, as once thought—the Melvill tea is on display at the Old State House in Boston. Instead, this vial may have been modeled after the Melvill artifact. The museum’s webpage on this artifact suggests its label was written in the late 1800s by William Lithgow Willey of the New Hampshire Sons of the American Revolution.

Also in New Hampshire, the Mont Vernon Historical Society holds a small glass jar of tea leaves. Its website says “a lamplighter by the name of Elias Proctor…joined other colonists in salvaging the broken crates of tea that washed ashore,” keeping the salty leaves to dye cloth.

Over time, Proctor reportedly doled out those leaves to relatives:

When Elias gifted family members with his stash, we are told that he always proclaimed the great cause for which it had been sacrificed.

It was from just such a gift that the Horne Family of Dover, NH received some of Elias’s tea. There is a very good chance that it was Mary Horne Batchelder who put some of it in the small vial we have in the museum today. She thought the 117 year old tea would make a nice wedding gift to her children when they got married. She gave some to her son who went west with it and his bride, settling in Kansas. She also gave some to her daughter Marcia who married Frank Lamson on January 9, 1890. Mr. Lamson would bring his new wife and the old tea back to Mont Vernon to live on the farm that bears the family’s name to this day. It would reside there for another generation or two. In the 1970’s, the couple’s daughter, Ella M. Lamson, gave the now 200 year old tea to the Mont Vernon Historical Society where it has been treasured ever since.

As with the samples coming to us through Thaddeus Mason Harris, this story makes no claim that an ancestor participated in destroying the tea cargo. But there’s also a lot of uncertainty in that recreation of the tea’s provenance. Among other details, Boston had no street lamps until after 1773.

I suspect quite a few Americans grew up being told that a small pile of tea leaves came from the Tea Party, as in this family tradition I discussed in September. After all, by the mid-1800s Boston’s historical repositories were accumulating just such artifacts. Such a sight would have been a way to connect children to their family, to history, and to American patriotism.

Of course, one pile of loose black tea leaves looks much like another. During the Colonial Revival, families were eager to connect themselves to fabled moments of the Revolution. Parents wanted to inculcate their children with respect for their ancestors and their country. Why not turn a spoonful of old tea into a history lesson? Who outside the family would ever hear that tale?

A Vial of Tea with “a couple of provenances”

Yesterday I discussed three samples of tea that came to Massachusetts museums in the late 1800s, reportedly after men involved in the Boston Tea Party shook those leaves out of their shoes and clothing at the end of the night.

The day before, I discussed three samples of tea that the Rev. Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris distributed to Massachusetts historical organizations in the early 1800s.

Mason reported that those leaves had been collected from the Dorchester shore the morning after the event, though he didn’t record who did the collecting.

Another sample of tea now in this city comes to us with versions of both stories attached. It’s a vial of liquid tea reportedly brewed from leaves involved in the Tea Party of 1773. The Old North Church owns that artifact, but it’s on loan to the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum.

When the museum put that vial on display in 2018, it issued a press release that said:

The tea, believed to be from The Boston Tea Party, has a couple of provenances.

One allegedly stems from the family of Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768-1842), a Unitarian clergyman who lived in Dorchester, Mass., who, as legend has it, gathered tea as a five-year-old boy when the tea thrown overboard at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773 and was carried by the tide to the beaches of Dorchester Neck Flats. The family purportedly bottled tea in numerous glass vials. Years later, Reverend Harris’ mother, Rebecca Harris (1745-1801), passed a vial of the tea to her daughter Hannah Waite (1780-1845). Since then, the tea (curiously in liquid form) has been passed on numerous times ultimately landing with Old North Church. . . .

Another provenance of the tea, also stemming from the Harris family, was, as legend has it, shaken out of the boot of a participant of The Boston Tea Party on his return home.

Thaddeus Mason Harris’s father, William, died in 1778 while working as paymaster for Col. Henry Jackson’s regiment. His mother, Rebecca (Mason) Harris, married Samuel Wait, Jr., of Malden in 1780. It’s possible Hannah was the first child of that marriage, but the only Hannah Waite listed in Malden’s vital records as born in 1780 was the daughter of another couple.

By that year young Thaddeus was living in other families in Templeton and Shrewsbury, retired ministers who started to prepare him for Harvard College. He kept in touch with his mother, who died in Malden in 1801. Harris was then settled as a minister in Dorchester, and thus might already have come into possession of Boston Tea Party tea. (As I wrote back here, I think it’s quite unlikely Thaddeus picked it up off the shore in 1773, “as legend has it,” since he was a small boy living in another town at the time.)

Alternatively, the stories behind this vial of liquid tea might have been brewed out of the two dominant narratives already established by the late 1800s: that the Rev. Dr. Harris collected some tea, and that some tea came out of a participant’s shoes.

TOMORROW: Orphan samples.

“Tea which fell into the shoes”

The 10 Nov 1821 issue of the Boston Daily Advertiser contained the fifth of a series of short essays headlined “Reminiscences.”

It told readers about the destruction of the East India Company tea in Boston harbor in December 1773, an event not yet dubbed the “Boston Tea Party.” The author wrote:

The destruction was effected by the disguised persons, and some young men who volunteered; one of the latter collected the tea which fell into the shoes of himself and companions, and put it in a phial and sealed it up;—which phial is now in his possession,—containing the same tea.

In 1835 an Independence Day orator identified the man who “preserved a vial full” of tea as Thomas Melvill, who had died three years before.

Twenty-one years later a literary chronicler stated that tea was “found in his shoes on returning from the vessel it was sealed up in a vial, although it was intended that not a particle should escape destruction!”

Back in 2018, I tracked that storied sample of tea to its present repository in Revolutionary Spaces’ Old State House museum.

As a historical artifact, that vial had some advantages over the tea reportedly collected on the Dorchester shore and being distributed to historical organizations by the Rev. Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris before he died in 1842.

First of all, the Melvill leaves had an unbroken provenance leading back to the tea ships. Harris didn’t record who collected the tea in Dorchester or who gave it to him, but Melvill and his descendants presented a complete chain of custody.

Furthermore, Melvill’s tea came from a participant in the destruction of the cargo, not just someone who woke up the next morning and found wet tea leaves on a beach.

Of course, there was the matter of Melvill preserving tea that he was supposed to destroy. But he’d explained that—he “and companions” had brought home this tea inadvertently. That touch of irony made the story even more savory.

Now either lots of other men brought home tea in their shoes the same way, to be secretly preserved by their families until the late 1800s, or this story became an archetype that several other families duplicated.

For example, there’s a strong tradition that John Crane was part of the Tea Party, and he was certainly part of the right crowd. By 1893 the Bostonian Society was in possession of a:

Tea-caddy, with tea found in the pocket and boots of John Crane, one of the Boston Tea Party, when taken injured to his home, Dec. 16, 1773.

An old photograph of that tea-caddy appears above.

By that same year of 1893, the Essex Institute in Salem had received what a young St. Nicholas correspondent named Peggy described as:

two bottles of the tea that was thrown over board at the Boston tea-party,—it was found in the shoes of Lot Cheever after removing his disguise

The name of Lot Cheever is not otherwise linked to the Tea Party. Indeed, the only Lot Cheever I can find was born in Danvers in 1837. (Ezekiel Cheever was captain of the militia patrol that Bostonians appointed to keep the cargo from being landed on November 30.) Maybe Lot Cheever was the donor of this artifact, not the original creator.

The story of tea leaves coming home with a Tea Partier also appears in Robert Lawson’s novel Mr. Revere & I, in which Paul Revere’s mother shakes out his clothing to increase her supply of caffeine. That shows the appeal of this anecdote.

TOMORROW: Competing traditions.

Thaddeus Mason Harris Passing Out Tea

In 1793, a young Harvard graduate named Thaddeus Mason Harris became the minister of the new Unitarian meeting in Dorchester.

Harris had previously been a schoolteacher and a librarian at Harvard College.

He also claimed to have been offered the position of secretary to George Washington, but there’s no evidence of that and the job wasn’t open at the time.

That’s not the only story in Harris’s biography which I find a little suspect, so I’m more skeptical than usual about historical anecdotes or artifacts that come through him.

However, Harris was a co-founder of and longtime volunteer for the American Antiquarian Society, and active in other historical organizations, so he’s hard to avoid. (Joshua R. Greenberg alerted me to Christen Mucher’s article about Harris’s work on Commonplace last month.)

In particular, Harris spread around samples of tea said to have been collected from the Dorchester shore after the Boston Tea Party. He doesn’t appear to have preserved the name of the person who gave him this tea.

Harris’s own name did remain attached to these relics, however, so often people assume he collected the tea himself. He would have been five years old at the time, living with his family in Charlestown, on the other side of Boston from Dorchester. It seems far more likely that one of the minister’s neighbors or parishioners after he settled in Dorchester gave him this tea.

Harris donated some of that tea to the Massachusetts Historical Society. It rests in a glass jar with paper labels that say:

Tea
that was gathered up on the Shore of Dorchester Neck on the morning after the destruction of the three Cargos at Boston
December 17, 1773

Presented by Rev. Dr. Harris

You can play with a curious digital image of that artifact here.

The Dorchester minister gave another sample to the American Antiquarian Society in 1840, two years before he died. That organization describes its treasure as:

Less than five inches high, the mold-blown, pale aqua bottle filled with tea leaves is wrapped at its mouth with twill tape and sealed with red sealing wax. Its attached paper label reads: “Tea Thrown into Boston Harbor Dec. 16, 1773.”

A second label survives in the handwriting of the A.A.S. secretary in the 1860s with text very similar to the M.H.S. bottle and Harris’s name on it.

This past June, Heritage Auctions sold a third small bottle of tea with a paper label. This one says:

“Tea gathered on the shore at Dorchester Neck the morning after the destruction of the three cargoes December 17” 1773. From
Thaddeus Mason Harris, D.D.

Rec’d from the American Antiquarian Society, March 1895
F. W. Putnam
Part of a lot in a stone jar found at Ant. Soc. among other things

Frederic Ward Putnam (1839–1915) was an anthropologist, first director of the Peabody Museum in his home town of Salem, and curator at the other Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

That sample of tea, deaccessioned in some way from the A.A.S., was passed down in private hands in the twentieth century. When it was sold in June, it fetched $87,500.

TOMORROW: More tea samples.

Meeting of the Body of the People in Old South, 16 Dec.

Revolutionary Spaces is relaunching its Boston Tea Party reenactment this year, in anticipation of 2023’s Sestercentennial event. Today is the last day to buy tickets at the early discount.

Old South Meeting House was the site of the big public protest meetings that started in November 1773 and led up to the destruction of the tea.

On Friday, 16 December, that extended debate over what to do about the taxed tea will be recreated in the same space where thousands of Bostonians gathered in 1773. The museum’s announcement says:

Join Revolutionary Spaces at Old South Meeting House for the return of the reenactment of the Meeting of the Body of the People! Meet iconic Bostonians whose vigorous debate led to the destruction of tea in 1773, as well as other personalities whose contributions shaped colonial Boston. Experience this moment in time in the room where it happened!

Doors open at 5:00 PM for a pop-up tea shop at Old South’s museum store. Come early and meet the Ladies of Boston and other colonial characters you might recognize to learn about what life was like leading up to the Revolution. Ticket holders can enjoy tastes of Revolutionary Spaces’ tea and snag their own box for a special price. Exclusive tea tasting hosted by Revolutionary Spaces’ member community and The Tea Can Company!

In special appreciation of our member community, all Revolutionary Spaces members will also receive one complimentary barrel mug and SAVE 40% off regular retail prices on all tea sold in the museum store during the night of the event.

The meeting reenactment is scheduled to start at 6:30 P.M. I might have something to do with launching it; after several years of serving as narrator for the Boston Massacre reenactments, I’ve been invited to move up three years and be the unseen voice of the Tea Party meetings.

Tickets to the “Meeting of the Body of the People” include access to both of Revolutionary Spaces’ sites, the Old State House and Old South Meeting House, from Friday, 16 December, through Sunday, 18 December.

The early prices are $24 for adults, $20 for people aged 65 and older or aged 13 and younger, and $18 for members of Revolutionary Spaces. After 15 November, the prices will go up.