Next, a flashpoint in the American Revolution and missing details critical to the story dropped from the pages of history.

- This is a little known part of the lead up to the American Revolution.

Join me on this remarkable investigation into the conflict between the colonies and Crown.

- As historians, we see an effort to kind of clean up some of the more violent aspects of the American Revolution.

Events at the center of the struggle, lost in the fog of memory and time.

Drive By History starts now.

[Music] Made possible by the Preserve New Jersey Historic Preservation Fund.

administered by the New Jersey Historic Trust, State of New Jersey.

Also, the New Jersey Historical Commission, enriching the lives of the public by preserving the historical record and advancing interest in and awareness of New Jersey's past.

Additional funding provided by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

We explore, cultivate, and champion the public humanities in order to strengthen New Jersey's diverse community.

Every day, thousands of motorists pass by countless history markers and say to themselves, one of these days I'm going to stop and read that.

One of these days I'm going to find out what happened and why it mattered.

Well, this is that day.

- I'm heading to a history marker that commemorates a surprising history, a tea party that took place around the time of the American Revolution.

The surprise, though, is that I'm not going anywhere near Boston.

I'm Ken Magos, and this is Drive By History.

Today's investigation begins in Greenwich, New Jersey.

This corner of Cumberland County is a popular destination, in part due to its two marinas, both of which offer water access to the Cohansey River and the Delaware Bay.

In fact, the town's proximity to water has everything to do with the history I'm investigating today.

- Here's the history marker.

It says, In honor of the patriots of Cumberland County, New Jersey, who on the evening of December 22nd, 1774 burned British tea near this site.

- Next are the names of the tea burners here on the side listed one by one.

- Now, the monument doesn't say a lot.

- However, it grabbed my attention because of what it does say: Burned British Tea.

- Sounds kind of similar to what happened in Boston Harbor, doesn't it?

Not exactly the same, but close.

I'm off to find out more.

The Boston Tea Party is familiar to many Americans as a seminal moment in our nation's history.

But I had always thought it was a one time event specific to Boston.

Maybe it wasn't.

To find out more, I'm off to the Guggenheim Library, housed in the former summer estate of Murry and Leonie Guggenheim on the campus of Monmouth University, where Drive By Historys Anthony Bernard is already hard at work, steeped in this history.

- Hey, Anthony, how are you doing?

- Ken, how are you?

- Good to see you.

- Listen, I just came from a history marker that talks about patriots burning tea.

- And I was nowhere near Boston Harbor.

- I was in Greenwich, New Jersey - No, I checked - its actually pronounced green witch.

- Now, I'm always looking for local events that fit into the national narrative, and I think I found it here.

- Was there more than one tea party, so to speak, in connection with the American Revolution?

- Yes.

Actually, there were at least six similar incidents that occurred up and down the East Coast in the 1770s.

- By some counts, there may have been more than a dozen.

- Wow.

- But, I want to start with Boston.

- That's the one that most of us know about, or at least we think we know about.

- I'm never actually sure.

The language makes it sound like something that it wasn't.

- A tea party, you mean, as if it was something social, an actual party.

- Yes.

Let me ask you, what images come to mind when you hear Boston Tea Party?

- You know, I think of Sam Adams and people throwing tea into Boston Harbor dressed up like Native Americans.

- Right, nothing more than a little Halloween mischief in today's parlance, - Halloween mischief.

- That does capture the tone of the history, in my mind at least.

But I know where you're going -- that minimizes it.

- What those colonists did was serious.

It was an act of civil disobedience.

It was an act of vandalism.

And because we were a British colony at the time, it was an act of treason.

- Very serious.

- Theoretically, they could have been punished with death.

- Right.

- Now, digging into the specifics, attacks on tea had been implemented earlier.

The history gets confusing.

But in a nutshell, the Tea Act of 1773, which is what caused the outcry, would have lowered the price of tea.

You'd think lower prices would be welcomed by the colonists, but in this case it was intended to drive out competition.

So the Americans saw it as a show of power, that they were at the mercy of the British.

- And that would rile the independence-minded Americans, for sure.

- You know it.

Now let's get to exactly what happened.

It's December 16th, around 6 pm.

It's already dark at that time of year.

Thousands of colonists go to the wharf to witness the civil disobedience.

- The public knew what was planned?

Very interesting -- go on.

- According to the accounts, 30 to 60 men boarded each ship.

- Boarded each ship?

- Three ships were involved.

According to this account, carrying 340 chests of tea.

Isn't it amazing that we know that?

And those chests were heavy, Ken.

They weighed something like 350 lbs each.

- That heavy?

I had no idea that they weighed 350 lbs.

- Not many people can toss around 350 lb chests.

- Now, again, that idea of tossing the tea overboard invokes the idea of mischief.

The reality is the chests were hacked apart with axes, and according to this account, it was low tide, so the tea piled up higher than the ship's bulwarks.

That's the side of a ship.

The Vandals were dressed like Native Americans.

We said that.

But I want to add that it might have been symbolic.

They were Americans, not British.

And also they disguised themselves so that if they had to, they could say, not me.

- That's a very different image.

Do we know how much tea was destroyed in total?

- We do.

Over 92,000 lbs.

That would be worth over $1 million in today's money.

- That's incendiary, no doubt about it.

- The colonists were willing to go that far.

They felt that England had really taken advantage of them, and they'd had it.

- Great detail.

That's important context.

Now, how exactly does all of this fit in with the Greenwich Tea Party?

- Ah, That's the question, isn't it, and that's where the next leg of this investigation begins.

[Music] To find out more, Anthony sends me to Philadelphia, to the Museum of the American Revolution.

I'm greeted by Doctor Scott Stephenson.

He's the president and CEO of the Museum, as well as one of the nation's leading historians of the colonial era.

Scott has arranged a private tour of the galleries exclusively for Drive By History.

We begin on a replica of a ship from the 1700s, anchored in a busy harbor.

- So, Scott, talk to us a little bit about where we're standing right now on this recreation of a vessel.

[Music] - So we have recreated a small coasting vessel - Okay.

- ...of the 18th century, thats right here in the galleries in the museum.

Scott has chosen this location because, as Anthony mentioned, in the library, there were at least six and perhaps as many as 17 other tea Party incidents right before the war.

- This is a little known part of the lead up to the American Revolution.

Really, for an entire year from 1773 to 1774, from as far north as York, Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts, as far south as Charleston, South Carolina.

There were many local activities about shutting down the importation and payment of duties on tea.

The Greenwich Tea Party was, by almost all accounts, the last Tea Party.

In most of these incidents, the Continentals did considerable damage.

- It's important to note there was a sort of deep tradition of political protest focusing on property destruction.

And this goes deep, deep, deep in sort of English political culture.

But it wasn't sort of like wanton looting and rioting.

It was, it was, it was intended to be very specific.

So that's the background.

Similar tea parties occurred in Annapolis, Provincetown and New York City, all well-known destinations to this day.

Greenwich is admittedly less familiar.

However, much like those other places, in the 1700s Greenwich was also an important hub for commerce.

- I mean, this was a place where ocean-going vessels would come, off-load their cargoes into smaller, what we would call coasting vessels like this, be brought up here to Philadelphia, Trenton, and so it was a very important sort of entry point for... for goods that were coming in.

In December of 1774, word got out that tea had come in.

- A local man named Daniel Bowen, who had a... had a, you know, substantial building there, was a merchant.

- They brought the tea and hid it in his basement.

- Yeah.

- So the word got out that this tea had arrived.

- A local committee was formed, and they made a decision that they were going to destroy this tea.

In this circumstance, the colonists, again in disguise, forced their way into the basement.

They seized the tea chests and hauled them to a nearby field.

Then the cargo was hacked apart, with the tea leaves and splintered wood heaped into a pile.

After that, the Americans ignited the mound using dried tinder, perhaps even gunpowder, until the tea was reduced to ash in a massive and crackling blaze.

The aggression is undeniable.

- Yes, you raise an important point.

- This is, this is menacing.

- This is something that there...it is very clear at the time that not everybody was comfortable with these... even if you did not want, you might agree that we do not want to consume the tea, but you didnt necessarily agree with the violence of this action.

- Why did tea create so much ire?

- So we have to go back a few years.

- Of course, remember, 1765 is the Stamp Act.

- That's repealed in 1766.

- 1767 they come back and they say, okay, we're going to put a series of duties on specific items that are being exported to the colonies, things like paint and lead and wallpaper and tea.

- 1767 there's another round of colonial protests against this.

- 1770 those Townsend Acts are repealed, with the exception of the tax on tea.

And, you know, that ultimately will be the tea will be the sort of rock that breaks the ship of Empire.

As Scott just referenced, the tax on tea brought tensions between the Crown and the colonists to the proverbial boiling point.

Just a few months after the Greenwich Tea Party shots were fired in Lexington and Concord.

I understand the broad concept of it -- the cries of taxation without representation.

For me, however, I'm still focused on tea.

How does a beverage as ubiquitous as tea land front and center as a flashpoint in American history?

To find out, I can think of no one better to ask than my friend and colleague from Drive By History: Eats Food and Culture Historian Doctor Libby O'Connell, author of The American Plate .

- Let me tell you something, they were really angry.

- They loved their tea.

- They were good tea drinkers.

There were two issues at play, at least as far as I can tell.

The first was fairly straightforward.

Although the English repealed most of the taxes levied by the Townsend Act, they left a tax on tea.

Moreover, that remaining tea tax added something... something incendiary.

- Parliament had declared not only that they would tax the tea, but that tea tax represented Parliament's right.

- They declared it in a declaratory act.

- This tax means that we will always be able to tax you.

- So it's the principle of... - It's the principle as well as the tax.

- It made that that little tax very much like a gouge rather than just a little bit of money.

That takes me to the second issue, the one I'm personally fascinated by: why tea?

To understand that piece of the puzzle, Libby says we need to go back in time to the age of exploration, when tea was first making its way west from China.

- It was exotic and very luxurious.

- It was aspirational.

- And you saw it primarily in the courts.

Portugal, France, Spain and England all financed expeditions to the East, and as a result, tea made its way to their port cities.

As it happened, tea tickled the fancy of a very influential royal in Portugal.

- Catarina de Bragança.

- She loves tea.

- She has tea among her friends at court and really sets a style.

What Catarina de Bragança did next is probably why tea became the beverage of choice in the colonies, and why tea is still the beverage of choice in Great Britain.

- She marries Charles II, the Merry Monarch.

- That was during the time of the Restoration.

Catarina de Bragança, now known as Catherine, becomes Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland.

And although she wasn't always well liked by the masses, she was certainly popular in her elite circles.

- Catarina de Bragança was an influencer.

- People loved her hair, they loved her gowns.

- So they imitate her style.

- She was really dressed to the nines and today she'd be, you know, on TikTok.

[laughter] The famous and fashionable also imitated her practice of taking tea with the accoutrements part of the appeal.

The well heeled acquired and proudly sipped tea served from delicate China made specifically for the practice.

- So I'm curious, then, how was tea consumed at the time?

- We think of teacups now, and sometimes they're very dainty.

- Yes.

- How were they drinking tea?

- They drank dishes of tea.

- And this is an example of a tea dish from... this is an actual tea dish from the 1700s.

- Okay.

It's safe to say that tea took off, in part because it provided an opportunity for the rich to display their wealth.

And just like today, the elite were also the tastemakers.

- How and when does it start trickling down into the middle order?

- Well, first of all, because its so popular among the upper classes, it'll be aspirational.

- Right.

- So there's always that -- people want to be fashionable.

- It doesn't matter how wealthy you are.

- That is something you want in your own house.

Then during the first decades of the 1700s, the tea trade caught a tailwind and its popularity exploded among the masses.

- This is interesting.

Parliament wants to protect the - textile development in Great Britain.

- Okay.

- So they banned the import of textiles from...from Asia.

But Libby, what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?

I couldn't help myself.

- That leaves these big merchant ships from the British East India Company mostly empty.

- And they fill up the hulls of their ships with tea.

- Nothing is going to make that price of tea go down faster than big merchant ships pulling up into the docks of London, filled with tea.

In addition to lower prices, tea received a stamp of approval from the medical community.

- Most health writers, and there were health writers back then, endorsed tea.

- It picked up your spirits, it was soothing, it was warm, and it was a whole lot better than drinking ale and hard cider every day.

All told, tea became entrenched in British life and at all levels of society.

- Plus, let's face it, it tastes good, it's warm.

- Britain is a cold and damp place.

- You want your warm mug of tea there.

- Theres no central heating in the colonies.

- A nice warm mug of tea is what P.G.

Wodehouse used to call a cup of the hot and strengthening.

- And I don't think we should underestimate that at all.

That's how important tea was to the British.

And in the early 1770s, most colonists were still very proud of their connection to Britain.

By keeping the tax on tea, Parliament subjugated the American colonists on a very personal level, and in a mean spirited way, really.

That's why I think the tax sparked such a violent backlash.

I'm discovering there's a nasty side to this history, something you'd never suspect, given the way we refer to events today.

- I want to talk a little bit about the fact that we refer to the Boston Tea Rebellion as a tea party .

- That's correct.

- We're having a tea party.

- That wasnt what they were doing.

- No.

A tea party is given that name, and it's kind of revisionist history and it's very ironic, its an ironic name.

- This is the last thing from a party.

- This is a demonstration.

- These are wild radicals.

The language we use to characterize events is also something that came up at the Museum of the American Revolution.

Scott Stephenson told me that historians can't find the phrase Boston Tea Party in any letters or documents at all from the 1770s or the 1780s, or 1790s, for that matter.

- The phrase Tea Party, as it applies in Boston, places like Greenwich and other places, doesn't appear in print until the 1830s.

- Okay, so you're a good almost 60 years later.

- Exactly, exactly.

- To some degree, there was...as historians, we see an effort to kind of clean up some of the more violent aspects particularly of the lead up to the American Revolution.

As we tour the museum further, Scott takes me to a replica of the Liberty Tree, so famously cut down by the British in 1775 during the Siege of Boston.

The giant elm had been a gathering place for the Sons of Liberty and other colonists who agitated for independence.

As it turns out, like the Tea Party, this wasn't the only Liberty Tree in the colonies.

There were many others.

We just don't hear about them.

But that begs the question if you're telling me there are other Liberty trees and there are other tea parties, why do we only know about the ones in Boston?

- That revolutionary generation were very cognizant that this experiment of creating, a republic was fraught with danger.

- The people who made the revolution and lived through it didn't agree on what they meant when they even said the American Revolution.

As a result, different histories mattered more or mattered less depending on who was telling the stories.

- Only slightly tongue in cheek, I'll say, because New Englanders wrote all the first books about the American Revolution, and there's a grain of truth to that.

- The victors write the history.

[laughter] Also, in today's parlance, events in Boston just got more press.

- Because the war breaks out in Massachusetts and sort of the most dramatic acts that lead to this chain of events that...that sparks the Revolutionary War are in Massachusetts, I think that also tended to lift up those events.

- You know, it was the the Tea Party in Boston that provokes the response from Parliament.

There is, however, another factor at play, one which is less obvious today.

The people of the young republic wanted a history they could celebrate.

Some of it just didn't feel good.

- There's often a little tidying up and cleaning up of what actually happened.

- Yeah.

- There's usually a desire to make things seem more unified, linear.

In other words, collectively, we soften the edges, in part to make the history more palatable and in part to bring us together.

- This was an incredibly diverse country from the beginning.

- It was polyglot, multiple languages spoken.

- People did not share the same backgrounds, the same ethnic origins, did not worship the same way.

- And so history was going to play a really important role in creating some glue to hold this nation together.

Consequently, today we say the Boston Tea Party, rather than the destruction of the tea, and we place much more emphasis on events in Boston as compared to similar events elsewhere.

Now, full disclosure: we've kept things simple here.

Historians spend a lifetime studying why we know what we know about the American Revolution.

- It's important to always keep in mind that, you know, history is not a fixed thing, right?

[Music] - Think about history, as the great Historian E.H. Carr once said, as the history is a dialog with the past.

The changing nature of history is something I'd love to explore, but that's a complex topic, a journey for another time.

As the day draws to a close, I want to keep things simple and get back to the many other tea parties at the time of the Revolution.

After all we've discovered today, I can think of no better place to end than at the beginning with the Greenwich Tea Party and the context it provides.

- So, Scott, I'm curious, how does that inform you as a historian who's interpreting this information?

- Yeah, so for me, places like Greenwich are showing this was a movement of ordinary people.

- It makes it so much more powerful, I think, much more relatable to know that in the town of Greenwich, you know, a group of people took an action, a principled action to defend liberties.

- This is a great example of a local history fitting into the larger national narrative.

Whether it's the Boston Tea Party or the Greenwich Tea Burning, it helps us understand cumulatively, the story of America.

I think it also reminds us to ask questions about history that at any given time, there might be a little more to see than otherwise meets the eye.

See you next time.

Made possible by the Preserve New Jersey Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the New Jersey Historic Trust, State of New Jersey.

And the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

We explore, cultivate, and champion the public humanities in order to strengthen New Jersey's diverse community.

Also, the New Jersey Historical Commission, enriching the lives of the public by preserving the historical record and advancing interest in and awareness of New Jersey's past.

Have you driven past a history marker and said to yourself, I should tell Drive By History about that?

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You can reach us through our website, which is Drivebyhistory.org or through our Facebook page.

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