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Guest Thinkers —

On the Original Tea Party

What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two, perhaps caught between principle and pragmatism.
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George Washington disapproved of the Tea Party, and Benjamin Franklin called it “an Act of violent Injustice on our part.” But the Revolution was not yet in the hands of the Founders, although it had left those of the merchants, who now dodged and stalled as the people—passionate and heedless of economic niceties—called for a ban on all tea, even what was smuggled from the Dutch. The merchants were also losing their ability to control crowd violence. Britain overreacted, closing the port of Boston, restricting town meetings in Massachusetts, and giving the King the power to appoint the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature.

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