Tea Blog

The phrase “tea party” has a number of meanings nowadays. It might refer to an actual tea party, complete with actual tea and those cute little crustless sandwiches. Or it might refer to a political movement of recent vintage. Or it could refer to a number of political uprisings that took place during our colonial days, as briefly touched upon in this article. Or it might refer to “the” tea party – the one that took place in Boston almost exactly (depending on what date this article is actually published) 239 years ago.

If you do even a cursory search for books on the topic of the Boston Tea Party you’ll find that there are about zillion (give or take a couple of million). Many of these have been written in relatively recent times, but for an interesting perspective on this or any other historical event you might try going back in time closer to the actual event. For starters, you might try a pair of curiously similar books I ran across recently that were published only about six decades after the fact.

The first of these is James Hawkes’ A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-party: With a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbour in 1773, a book that first appeared in 1834.

In his preface Hawkes puts the numbers of this band of patriots at anywhere from sixty to as much as two hundred, depending on who was doing the counting. He also points out that, not surprisingly, these patriots weren’t keen to go around bragging about their involvement in this somewhat incendiary event. By the time of Hawkes’ book Hewes was said to be the last of the group still drawing breath. The two hundred-some pages of his reminiscences might include a little more than we need to know about his early life, but readers not needing or wanting to read any of this can skip past it to the more pertinent tea party stuff.

For another take on essentially the same source material, take a look at Traits of the Tea Party: Being a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, One of the Last of Its Survivors : With a History of That Transaction, Reminiscences of the Massacre, and the Siege, and Other Stories of Old Times. It was written by Benjamin Bussey Thatcher and perhaps not coincidentally, was published just a year after the aforementioned volume.

It’s a different book, for the most part, though it proceeds in roughly the same fashion, and the author was kind enough to break things down into chapters, with a detailed listing of contents for each chapter. Which comes in handy, if, once again, the reader would like to skip straight to the tea party stuff.

In any event, whether you want to read these entire works or just browse selected passages, you can grab the free ebooks located here and here.

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