The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution by Alfred F. Young

    After getting big historical and ideological context for the American Revolution, I am honing in on three books addressing three disadvantaged groups of the period: the poor, women, and slaves. This is the first, on the poor, and covers the life and popular discovery of George Twelves Hewes. Hewes was a young man who participated in the Boston Tea Party, and was rediscovered as an old man in 1834, when two books were published about him amidst a reinitiation of interest in the Boston Tea Party.

    One complaint about the book is that Hewes is not as important as the book makes him seem, and the premise that the Boston Tea Party had been forgotten and rediscovered, which was teased in the introduction, is revealed by the end to not be true. No one had forgotten the Boston Tea Party. And although the 1830s biographies of Hewes were the first works in print to name the event the "Boston Tea Party," Young's investigation reveals that the term had been used colloquially probably since the event itself, but was only formally referred to as the spilling of the tea in Boston Harbor or something to that effect.

    What is interesting is that the spilling of the tea was not commemorated as a holiday for about half a century after the revolution. Boston was dominated by the Federalists, who were more aristocratic and resented the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre as the "wrong" kind of events in the American Revolution, being led by the mob. It was not until Democrats began to dominate the city in the 1820s and 1830s that celebrations of the mass actions became more popular in Jacksonian America. July 4th had taken over all the other Boston commemorations once the war had ended, whereas during the war, Bostonians had celebrated opposition to the Stamp Act on August 14th, the resistance to the Redcoats in 1770 on March 5th, the old Pope's Day celebration of the Gunpowder Plot being foiled on November 5th, and the Tea Party on December 16th. These were all swallowed up into the 4th of July after the war. New public memory was rekindled by the War of 1812, and by Congressional acts that sought to grant pensions to surviving veterans of the Revolutionary War. One such act required veterans to write about their experiences, which created a surge of popular memory about the war. Additionally, Lafayette's visit to America in 1824 spawned more interest, as well as fiftieth anniversary celebrations in that decade. Finally, increased interest came from men like George Twelves Hewes, who were well-understood to be the last exemplars of that generation.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the summer of 1768, there were four thousand British soldiers posted in Boston, a town of fewer than sixteen thousand inhabitants. That gives a lot of context to the Revolutionary-era fear of standing armies.