features
Photographs by Michael J. Clarke
spring 2024
Experiential learning takes on new meanings in Professor Bob Allison’s history courses, which are frequently conducted at different historic sites around Boston, including at Griffin’s Wharf, site of the 1773 Boston Tea Party.
There may be no better guide to Boston’s revolutionary history than Suffolk History Professor Robert Allison, author of numerous books on the era and chair of Revolution 250, a consortium of organizations planning commemorations of the American Revolution’s semiquincentennial in 2026.
Celebrations kicked off on December 16, 2023, when thousands of tourists and history buffs flocked to Boston Harbor to commemorate the Boston Tea Party. That event generated not only headlines but also donations of tea from around the world, which were ceremoniously tossed in the Atlantic Ocean by costumed reenactors—including 250 pounds from the British East India Company, purveyors of the original dumped crates. (To eliminate any environmental impact, only biodegradable tea was used and all the 2023 crates were promptly retrieved from the harbor.)
Follow Professor Allison and his students on one of their frequent walking tours along the Freedom Trail (which winds through the heart of the Suffolk campus) and key Boston Tea Party hot spots, and you’ll absorb his enthusiasm for this rebellious group of Bostonians whose waterfront antics and destruction of British tea late on the evening of December 16, 1773, became legend—and “after which the American Revolution became inevitable.”
By Erica Noonan
Why has the Tea Party become such a meaningful and enduring symbol of rebellion around the world?
“It wasn’t about the tea,” Allison declares. “It was about power and who would wield it.”
The saltwater tea dump actually followed a period of relative calm citywide in the wake of the Boston Massacre, the 1770 skirmish with British redcoats that killed five colonists. Tensions among colonists over “taxation without representation” reached a fever pitch after a series of meetings that culminated on December 16, 1773, when more than 5,000 colonists jammed into and around the Old South Meeting House to hotly debate a controversial tea tax.
When the final attempt at compromise failed, Sons of Liberty leader Samuel Adams gave a signal from the podium to a ragtag group of men who led the way to Griffin’s Wharf. There they dumped an estimated 92,000 pounds of tea in 342 chests—worth more than a million British pounds—into the harbor.
Starting at the Granary Burying Ground—steps from the final resting spots of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and victims of the Boston Massacre—Allison points out that the friendly face on that ubiquitous beer bottle bears no resemblance to the real Samuel Adams, a dour, humorless Puritan.
“Nobody called him Sam,” Allison says dryly. “He did not make beer. He wasn’t the happy guy you might have seen on the beer cans. There is no recorded instance of Samuel Adams ever cracking a smile.”
A few hundred yards away at the Old South Meeting House, Allison paints a vivid portrait of a fed-up, angry mob that was rallied to march down to the waterfront by a set of plotting politicians who were cagey enough to stay behind to deliver more speeches so they could prove “plausible deniability.”
Their ploy was successful: Samuel Adams, John Adams, Paul Revere, and other colonial leaders evaded arrest that night and were able to continue successfully strategizing against the British over the next two years.
Revolution 250 plans to honor a number of upcoming 250th anniversaries and historical reenactments, including the lighting of the lanterns at the Old North Church and the firefights at Lexington and Concord in 2025. In 2026, the group will commemorate the British Army’s evacuation from Boston and other important moments, culminating with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026.
‘It Wasn’t About the Tea'
Shortly after the mob left the Old South Meeting House that night intent on tossing the tea, Revere jumped on his horse for his first, far-lesser-known ride of the American Revolution: a journey to New York and Philadelphia to inform Sons of Liberty members there of Boston’s tea tax resistance.
Why don’t history teachers celebrate that ride of Revere’s? “
The short answer is there’s only so many things people can talk about,” says Allison. “And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not write a poem about his ride to New York or his rides to Philadelphia in the fall of 1774. But what Longfellow wrote, and for generations many school children memorized, was a wonderful poem about Lexington and Concord.”
Down at Griffin’s Wharf, site of the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, Allison boards a re-creation of The Eleanor, the ship that saw its cargo dumped overboard. The destruction of the tea drew British wrath, further inflaming the power struggle with the colonies.
“This is why John Adams said the Revolution was accomplished before a drop of blood was spilled at Lexington Green,” Allison says. “Without this event you don’t have independence—he knew it would be remembered.”
Less dramatic protests followed in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York, where the tea either was returned to England or impounded by the patriots; in Annapolis, the owner of the ship Peggy Stewart was forced to set his ship ablaze to answer charges he was bringing in tea. Boston’s tea dump remained far more celebrated and examined by historians, he says.
Paul Revere’s less-famous ride
Allison says his fascination with the revolutionary time period in America is rooted in its underlying idealistic principles. The Boston Tea Party was at its heart an act of civil disobedience, a nonviolent revolution that injured nothing but tea.
It sparked the American Revolution, one of the few revolutions in world history, Allison says, that succeeded in improving the lot of the citizenry.
What made it successful, he says, is that the “revolution allows us to govern ourselves. Most revolutions end with a government in place worse than the one they started with. This one ends with a government set up to prevent the kind of tyranny that Samuel Adams warned about.”
Of course, the government that saw its genesis in the Boston tea rebellion did not exactly deliver liberty and justice for all—enslaved people, women, and people of color were not afforded the same rights and protections as white men.
Since then, Allison says, America has been striving to live up to its founding ideals. He points to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” address in Washington, DC, when the civil rights leader spoke movingly of the “promissory note” issued in 1776.
“The revolution offers a radical promise that all men are created equal,” Allison says. “This is the fundamental point, that each of us is an individual and has certain rights, not because of the group to which we may belong—ethnic, religious, gendered—but because each of us is an individual. Was this universally applied in 1776, or at any time after? No, but this is the first nation setting out with that as its fundamental idea.”
His passion for the revolutionary era has earned Allison renown on campus and beyond, and today dozens of his former students are employed at public history projects like the Old State House and Old South Church, as well as at Revolutionary War sites in Chelsea and East Boston, to name just a few.
For Allison, the Boston Tea Party’s 250th anniversary was never about reenactment pomp or fife-and-drum dramatics. Rather it was fueled by a determination to pass along its importance to the next generation. “The goal,” he says, “is to see young people excited about this history.”
A 'Successful' Revolution
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Professor Robert Allison at the Boston Tea Party Museum. Watch a video tour here.
Experiential learning takes on new meanings in Professor Bob Allison’s history courses, which are frequently conducted at different historic sites around Boston, including at Griffin’s Wharf, site of the 1773 Boston Tea Party.