The Participants
One common misconception about the Boston Tea Party was that it was a random act put together at the last minute by random colonists. In reality, it was an organized effort put together by the group called the Sons of Liberty. This group first formed in the summer of 1765 in response to the Stamp Act. This group was created in order to directly oppose the unfair taxation of the colonists and to do something about it.
The Sons of Liberty eventually spread throughout the colonies, but "the Boston group, styling themselves the Loyal Nine, seems to have been one of the first to organize".1
This group included prominent members such as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock. These were the ones who organized the act and gathered the colonists at the Old South Meeting House and arranged for a collective act to be carried out. After this call to action, all different kinds of men answered. They were inspiried by the leaders in the Sons of Liberty but were not all members themselves. There were about a hundred men in the end who took part in the dumping of the tea, but all of them were united in their belief in the right to more representation in the government that ruled them.
Many of the participants were working class citizens who could not afford to pay higher prices on this commodity and served as a perfect foil to the wealthy British merchants and officials who gained something from the rise in price. At the time in the colonies, "women and men considered tea a social marker of wealth and refinement"2. This small luxury was being taken away from them because of the greed of already wealthy people. This served as motivation for people who were not already members of the Sons of Liberty or even activists of any kind to step up and particpate in the Boston Tea Party.
1 Davidson, Philip G. “SONS OF LIBERTY AND STAMP MEN.” The North Carolina Historical Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1932, pp. 38–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23514881. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.
2 Petrovich, Lisa L. More than the Boston Tea Party: Tea in American Culture, 1760s – 1840s, University of Colorado at Boulder, United States -- Colorado, 2013. ProQuest, https://ezproxy.msu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/more-than-boston-tea-party-american-culture-1760s/docview/1459228034/se-2.
