The meeting at the Old South Meeting House lasted all day. Five thousand people in and around the building — more people than I had ever seen in one place — and Samuel Adams speaking, and others speaking, and the crowd outside hearing it through the windows and passing it back through the street in fragments that arrived already changed by the passing. I was nineteen. I stood on a barrel near the side door and listened to the parts I could hear and felt the crowd's mood the way you feel weather coming in from the harbor.
The decision had already been made, I think, before the meeting started. The meeting was the city deciding together, in public, that it had already decided — which is a different thing from deciding. What we were doing at the Old South Meeting House was making the decision unanimous.
The Disguise
I was given a blanket and some soot from the blacksmith's shop where my friend Thomas worked, and I rubbed the soot on my face and put the blanket around my shoulders and looked at myself in the wavy glass of Thomas's window and thought: no one will believe this is a Mohawk Indian. I was correct. No one believed it. The disguise was not for the British sailors watching from the harbor or for the governor in his house — it was for the record, for the future, for the legal document that would say unknown persons disguised as Mohawks rather than James Whitfield, nineteen, of Cooper Street.
There were perhaps a hundred of us who went to the ships. More people watched from the docks — the whole of Boston, it felt like, standing in the December cold watching us cross the gangplanks. No one tried to stop us. The harbormaster did not stop us. The customs men did not stop us. The sailors on the ships stood back and watched. Whether this was because they secretly agreed with us or simply because there were too many of us to stop practically, I do not know.
The Work
We worked for three hours. The chests were heavy — forty pounds each, some heavier — and we had to haul them up from below decks and carry them to the rail and break them open and dump the contents into the harbor. After the first few, we developed a method: two men to carry, one to break the lid with a hatchet, tip and dump. The tea spread on the water in dark patches and the smell of it — strong tea, harbor salt, cold night air — is a smell I have never encountered since without thinking of that evening.
We did not take anything. This was important to us: we were not stealing, we were destroying. There was a man who tried to stuff tea into his coat pockets and he was stopped and his coat turned out and the tea returned to the harbor. The line between protest and theft mattered to us; we were making an argument, not committing a crime, or rather we were committing the precise crime we intended and no other.
A group swept the decks afterward and returned a padlock that had been broken during the work. This detail has always struck me as exactly right: we were angry, we were principled, and we were also the kind of people who return broken padlocks.
After
We dispersed into the city. The crowd that had watched from the docks had already gone home. By midnight, Griffin's Wharf was quiet except for the ships sitting lower in the water than they had an hour before, and the smell of tea still on the air.
The British response, when it came, was harsher than some had expected: the Coercive Acts, the closing of the port, the quartering of soldiers. Within two years we were at war. Within ten years we had a country.
Whether the tea in the harbor caused the revolution or only accelerated something that was already inevitable is a question I have heard argued for fifty years and expect to hear argued fifty more. What I know is what I saw: five thousand people in one building deciding together, and a hundred of us on three ships in the cold, and the particular smell of the night, and the padlock returned to the deck.
Narrator's note: James Whitfield is a fictional figure. The meeting at Old South Meeting House, the approximate number of participants, the three hours of work, the returned padlock, and the prohibition on theft are documented in Benjamin Labaree's The Boston Tea Party (1964) and eyewitness accounts collected by the Massachusetts Historical Society.