The Use of Violence in Revolutionary Boston

Scholars have crafted a rich, often conflicted history of crowd action and the use of violence in Revolutionary America.  Whig leaders respected the idea that crowds might react violently against an oppressive government as a matter of last resort.  Whig leaders also coordinated, along with crowds, their protests against the British crowds.  Yet crowds sometimes acted on their own, and Whig leaders generally tried to discourage crowd action when they believed it would bring bad publicity to the Whig cause.           

Whig leaders did not, however, merely tolerate crowd action while exclusively pursuing a policy of “ordered resistance.”  While Samuel Adams was hardly a puppet-master (an older caricature), he—and his allies among the Boston Whigs—saw crowd action as a vital weapon in the resistance to Parliament and its placemen.  During the protests against the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, British troop presence, Tea Act, and Coercive Acts, Whig leaders certainly made a show of discouraging crowd action when it got out of hand—they had no choice but to do so if they wanted to be understood as legitimate in the broader British Atlantic public sphere.  But they also understood that in the face of civil officials or recalcitrant merchants who refused to bow to Whig pressure, the threat of crowd action was effective.  The Whig leaders were responding to a broader American audience of radicals that occasionally demanded adherence to certain tactics: nonimportation, disobeying certain laws, and refusal to acknowledge certain officials.  When Whig leaders encountered Tory enemies who refused to submit to radical demands, they pointed to the threat of crowd violence as a way to compel those enemies to change their stance.           

This paper will also suggest some of the parallels and disjunctures between the incidents surrounding the Boston Tea Party and the contemporary “tea party movement.”