Defiance of the Patriots

Benjamin L. Carp. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & The Making of America.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Despite being a famous event that almost every American is familiar with, the Boston Tea Party has not generated a great volume of scholarly literature. Carp notes in the “Further Reading” section of the bibliography that his book is the first academic work on the matter since The Boston Tea Party by Benjamin Woods Larabee, published in 1966. Despite Carp’s claims to the events larger significance (much of which is certainly justified) of the incident, the fact remains that the Boston Tea Party itself was a brief incident in a larger story. The story Carp tells is interesting and even illuminating, but it doesn’t challenge any general historiographical consensus on the Revolutionary period.

This is not a criticism—Carp makes no claims that a clearer picture of the Tea Party will force a rethinking of any accepted interpretations of the Revolution or American history in general. Instead, he is mainly interested—beyond the telling of the story itself—in a warts-and-all account which can complicate subsequent references to the event by those who would use the Tea Party as a symbol of protest for a wide spectrum of national, political, social, and ideological causes.

He points out that Americans struggled with the memory of the event from the beginning—was it a righteous outburst of patriotic resistance, or an extra-legal resort to property destruction, vandalism, and terrorism? Carp leaves that to the reader—that ambiguity is the real legacy of the Tea Party, perhaps, although he also refers to the democratic aspects of a mass effort carried out by men from a wide spectrum of colonial society, with broad support (both tacit and otherwise) from society at large.

In the end, knowing the story of the Tea Party helps illuminate the story of the outbreak of the American Revolution; this is a fairly modest and un-revolutionary goal, but this well-written and readable book does add some nuance and color to a crucial turning point in the imperial crisis of the early 1770s, as well as giving contemporaries who harken back to the original event a fuller and more richly nuanced version of those events than sloganeering activists generally grant it.