This is a clear, highly readable, and fascinating account of the Boston Tea Party, what led up to it, what followed, and how this became the spark that created the American Revolution.

Many things have been said and repeated about the Tea Party that simply aren't true. It wasn't about the tax on tea making tea unaffordable; the tea duty had been cut to the point it was undercutting the smugglers bringing in Dutch tea. It wasn't an act of vandalism by drunken thugs. the Tea Party crew were all responsible citizens, small merchants, professionals, farmers, and skilled craftsmen of Boston and the surrounding countryside. They were extremely careful to do no damage except to the tea, and to cause injury to no one.

The Tea Party was part of a rising tide of political discontent in the American colonies, arising out of conflicts between the interests of the colonies and Britain, and their lack of understanding of each other's positions. The British at home were heavily taxed to pay for the wars that had, among other things, protected the colonies. The colonists were paying almost nothing in taxes--and the colonies, beyond question, had the wealth to contribute to their own defense.

What they didn't have was either the understanding of what they were costing the mother country, or the hard currency with which taxes had to be paid.

Both sides in this conflict repeatedly tried to carry their point in ways that simply provoked and enraged the other side.

On the American side, the personalities involved are fascinating, complex, and only dimly familiar to us from grade school history class. Sam Adams is a far more interesting character than I had previously suspected, and his uneasy alliance with John Hancock, one of the few Boston plutocrats who came to side with the small merchants and the radicals in their opposition to British policy, is one of the most intriguing features of this account.

If you want to know more about the early history of the American Republic, this is a great place to begin.

Recommended.

I borrowed this book from the library. ( )

When I studied American History in school, I remember learning how the Americans were so upset with the British Government trying to make them pay a tax on the tea purchased from England that in December 1773 a group of them dressed like Indians boarded the ships and tossed the tea into the ocean. This action lead to the Revolutionary War, the British leaving, and the birth of the United States and its attendant rights. According to Harlow Giles Unger in AMERICAN TEMPEST, HOW THE BOSTON TEA PART SPARKED A REVOLUTION, that’s not quite what happened.
The tax on teas was the fourth tax levied on the Americans. Most of the earlier protests had been led by Sam Adams and James Otis. Their followers were dominated by ruffians and rabble rousers whose main interest was violent protests against individuals as well as the government.
The Stamp Act placed duties on five types of glass, red and white lead, paints, paper, and tea and was paid by all British subjects except the Americans. It cost less than a shilling a day per capita in US or less than 3 hours earnings a year for skilled artisans. However, merchants, publishers, and lawyers, the most influential groups, were the most heavily affected.. After protests from the Americans, all but the tax on tea were repealed. Tea, primarily drunk by wealthy women, was not a popular beverage. It was a symbol of the British and the wealthy. That was the first organized opposition to rule by the British monarchy. It united the Americans and taught them the power of organized united action against a government.
After the Bread Riots in England, the British reduced farm and property taxes 25%, cutting government revenues £500,000. It faced serious financial problems and were desperate for new sources of income. They could not reduce the cost of the miliary or the King’s £800,000 allowance and the Exchequer wanted the colonists to pay the full costs of the British military operations in North America. Except for tea, everything the colonists purchased was made in England so smuggling, which was somewhat common, was not an option for the Americans.
At that time, several states had paid or greatly reduced their war debts. Others could have done the same through land sales. The result was a call for the boycott of English goods Non-financial acts that the colonists protested included the courts trying smugglers and accomplices without juries and the direct payment of judges and governors by parliament rather than colonial legislatures. That would make the courts independent of colonial influence.
When British soldiers arrived, Adams’s backers retreated and most patriots became more moderate. However, the troops were a source of irritation to the Patriots. The British government was arrogant and they made a major miscalculation: they didn’t think any British subject would rebel.
At first, not all the colonies supported the anti-British actions. However, when town meetings without the governor’s consent became illegal, the others realized their states could also suffer. More tea parties occurred and England extended the Canadian boundaries to the Ohio River. That meant taking land owned by Virginia, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and the influential Lee family. The action united the wealthy and powerful against the British.
Committees of Correspondence spread the message of what was happening to all the colonies, in many cases inciting the Americans to take action. A Continental Association was formed which demanded a right to self-governance.
Lord Thomas Hutchinson sought reconciliation but the King demanded the rebellion be crushed. He barred New England fisherman from the North Atlantic fisheries and forbade New England colonists from trading with anyone except Britain and the British West Indies. Two week later the ban was extended to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina.
Both sides began spreading propaganda and false reports of atrocities.
The immediate results of the Revolution were not what many of the people expected. The Tea Party leaders fought against taxation without representation. They not only failed to end taxation, the new independent state governments taxed more heavily than British had proposed or would propose. Americans had to support central national government and national military, both of which had been financed by the British. They had to buy arms and ammunition at a steep price. Only one member, John Hancock, rose to national prominence.
The first Virginian governor, Patrick Henry, taxed Virginians without their consent. Office holders had to be white, male property owners. Voters we same men of wealth and influence who had governed states under royal governors before revolution. South Carolina required voters and candidates for governor to have assets of at least £10,000. Pennsylvania levied a heavy poll tax. Virginia required voters to own at least 500 acres. These actions disenfranchised many who had fought in the revolution.
The wealthy continued to be able to exploit land and less fortunate. Now, they didn’t have to share their income with the crown. Only three states guaranteed the right of free speech; All states promised freedom of religion although five had state religions which everyone had to support financially. Eleven had freedom of the press. Eight offered the right of peaceful assembly. The Articles of Confederation did not guarantee individual freedoms or trial by jury of peers.
While many of these restrictions on individual freedom were removed by the Bill of Rights, others, such as voting restrictions, remained in place until the twentieth century.
AMERICAN TEMPEST is relatively easy reading and provides an interesting, alternative view of our country’s early history. It is repetitious and sometimes contradictory at times e.g., who drank tea.
The economic divide and the way the wealthy treated the rest of the colonists, the fight against paying taxes, and the effects of the split from England and our independence sounds a lot like the conflict in the US today between the classes and political parties. ( )

Written in Mr. Unger's usual fashion - fast paced, and nowhere near deficient in information or historical importance. He pulls no punches and lays out the events surrounding the Boston Tea Party and the local politics of Boston and America. He does make passing comparisons between the colonial patriots and modern-day TEA Party members in his introduction. Making no aim to whitewash or cover the monied interests, personal gains and "human nature" of revolutionary America.

A great recount of the events in revolt to numerous taxes enforced by British Parliament. ( )

This is the real (as opposed to commonly taught) story of the Boston Tea Party and the network of greed, smuggling, bribery, and personal vendettas that provided the impetus to the American Revolution. Truly, if you want to believe in the sanctity of the pursuit of liberty and freedom from tyranny that allegedly motivated the Founding Fathers, this is a book you should avoid. Unger, a respected historian, documents in this carefully written history the way in which, as he writes: "…many were ready to sacrifice their honor as human beings – and the blood of innocents – by disguising their struggle for wealth as a quest for liberty for the common man.”

Unger reveals that the problem the Bostonians had with taxation issues and writs of assistance (or search warrants) was that they interfered with the huge smuggling operations which had been making them exceedingly rich. The purpose of the smuggling was to avoid paying any tax or duties to the Crown.

As an example, Unger points out that at the time of the passage of the inflammatory Molasses Act of 1733, rum was New England’s most popular drink. To make it, New England merchants smuggled an estimated 1.5 million gallons of molasses a year. They should have paid 37,500 pounds in duties for this molasses, which amounted to only three percent of their gross revenues. The proposed six-pence-per-gallon duty would have cut their gross profits from 1,200 percent to 1,161.5 percent! This is what caused Bostonians to get so incensed about their “natural right” to import cheap, duty-free molasses from the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies! (And it was so cheap, of course, because it was produced by slave labor.)

The Americans, it should be noted, still expected the British to support and protect the colonies, but just not with their money. Moreover, the colonists also wanted to retain the right to sell supplies to the countries with which Britain was at war, including France, even when Britain and France were fighting in America!

When the French and Indian War began in 1754 (started after an order to fire on the French by then twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington), the British, who lost thousands of men in America over the course of the next seven years, discovered that French forces were kept well-supplied in spite of being separated from their homeland by an ocean that was controlled by the British navy. Astonishingly, most of their supplies were British! The supplies were smuggled to Newfoundland by American merchants. As Unger observes, "Clearly, many merchants in Massachusetts had prolonged the war by smuggling essential goods to French forces, not only undermining the British military effort but depriving the British treasury of revenues to help pay for the war.”

This is the reason that William Pitt, in the British government, demanded that Parliament pass an act allowing customs officers to obtain writs of assistance to search and seize without specifying in advance specifically for what they were searching.

Parliament also hoped to stop the new practice of bribing customs officials to overlook the mislabeling of shiploads of molasses, a technique to ensure the shipments would be duty-free. The practice worked so well that colonists soon expanded their operations to include a wide range of other dutiable goods including tea. The ensuing wave of smuggling enabled the merchants to amass enormous wealth and power, while the British treasury suffered huge loses, and as Unger writes, “duty-free smuggling soon metamorphosed into one of the basic human rights afforded to all Americans.”

Meanwhile, at the end of the French and Indian War, colonists began to move west into land that was owned by Indians according to treaties made with the British. Both sides fought one another, and both demanded protection by the British. The French and Indian War had left the British government badly in debt, however, even while colonial merchants had reaped fortunes from it. Some 40,000 English were in debtor’s prisons and there were anti-tax riots across the country. The British Prime Minister felt he had no choice but to try and enforce tax collection in the colonies. There were, after all, some 10,000 British regulars guarding the western frontier, and the British navy protected the eastern coast. But Boston merchants, intoxicated by wealth and inflamed by the ideas of the new philosophers on the Continent such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau “(“Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains”) seized upon the idea of “natural rights” and ran with it. (Rousseau, Unger explains, was not talking about the right not to support the necessary sacrifice of some individual liberties in order to support the social contract, but colonists preferred a selectively understood version.)

And thus Bostonians ranted and raved about “taxation without representation,” even though in truth, Boston itself limited voting to “freeholders” – the wealthiest, most influential white, propertied males. Only about four percent of their own population was allowed to vote!

There were other complications. For instance, both Samuel Adams, Jr. and James Otis, Jr. (later declared insane), the two biggest agitators in Boston, had personal grudges against the British government fueling their passion. In fact, of James Otis, it was later said that he “provided the ‘spark’ that kindled the conflagration that eventually engulfed Boston.” Otis had earlier sworn that if his father was not appointed justice of the superior court in Massachusetts, “he would do all the mischief he could to the government [and] would set the province in a flame if he died in the attempt.” Samuel Adams had been humiliated when his father lost a great deal of money trying to make more, in a paper currency scheme. Young Sam was forced to endure a humiliating demotion in social rank at Harvard. He, also, was reported willing to “commit any crime” to overthrow the British government.

In the end, on top of everything else, the very issues for which the Tea Party leaders had fought were only made worse by their actions: "…the revolution they had helped foment not only failed to end taxation, it forced the new, independent state governments to tax more heavily than the British had proposed or would ever have conceived of proposing.”

The states now had to support their own governments and provide for their own defense. They couldn’t steal arms, ammunition, and materiel from the British. The states were soon facing bankruptcy and antitax riots.

John Hancock, the first governor of Massachusetts, resigned in 1785 rather than deal with the issue of a bankrupt state with no options but taxation. He had amassed a great deal of wealth and political power from smuggling operations during the French and Indian War. But he was one of the few of the Tea Party originals who tried to stay true to his principles [sic].

James Bowdoin, a rich friend of Sam Adams who helped write inflammatory pamphlets and “who seldom let facts stand in the way of his conclusions” was elected to succeed Hancock in 1785. He quickly intuited that there was no recourse but to raise taxes to cope with the enormous state debts from the Revolutionary War. He ended up coping with Shays’ Rebellion instead.

Sam Adams, the one-time arch enemy of taxation, served as governor of Massachusetts from 1793 until 1797. He now insisted taxes must be paid, declaring that “The man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”

Discussion: I felt like I was reading a young adult novel. The greedy, rebellious kids learn that Mom and Dad weren’t so bad after all, and that their parents actually knew what they were talking about from time to time. But in this story, when the kids grew up, they got control of the teaching of the family history, and created myths to make themselves look good in spite of a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Evaluation: This is a “must read” for serious students of American history. Unger’s style is quite accessible and even though he goes into great detail, these are characters with whom most of us are familiar, so I don’t think the specifics are onerous. ( )