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The Boston Tea Party Was An Alcohol-Fueled Riot
Nathaniel Currier
History remembers the Boston Tea Party as the night when angry patriots ended a standoff with a bunch of British ships by boarding them and throwing crates of tea into the harbor, thus giving birth to America. What history usually fails to mention is that this event would probably have ended much more diplomatically if said angry patriots hadn't been raging drunk on the night in question. Hell, there's a better-than-even chance that most of them didn't even remember it the next day.
Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Unlike the modern Tea Party, which you only wish you could forget.
The drinking started after a meeting led by Samuel Adams at the Old South Church, when a group of men gathered at the house of newspaper publisher and tea-hater Benjamin Edes to discuss what to do about the British ships. Among the participants was a potent "punch" of red wine, rum, and whiskey to facilitate the flow of ideas, served in Edes' family punchbowl, which his son Peter was instructed to keep topped off like the country itself depended on it.
Hours later, the Sons of Liberty were deeply under the effect of Edes' freedom juice, and the party began to reach that precarious point in a heavy drinking session at which property damage becomes an inevitability. Sam Adams declared (with a likely slur in his voice) that diplomacy was getting them nowhere. Drunk logic dictated that they should therefore dress up as Indians, stumble down to Boston Harbor, and show the British how irrational they were being by wrecking their shit.
W.D. Cooper
"Next target: income tax. Burn all the money!"
The punch-drunk patriots boarded the ships and spent hours tossing the tea crates into the harbor, their efforts reportedly slowed by mandatory barf breaks. One Son of Liberty, John Crane, was knocked unconscious by a falling crate and mistaken for dead by his comrades. Thus did they waste additional time trying to figure out where to hide the body, eventually determining that the best place for it was in a pile of wood shavings in a shop near the dock. Given the situation and BAC levels that night, this is admittedly not the worst place Crane could have woken up.
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