Restrained, targeted, calibrated violence as a counterweight to tyranny, and to the tyrant that lurks within us all.

Why did the American Revolution not descend into butchery and chaos as every other revolution before or since? How was it successful in its original purpose without being diverted? It wasn't easy and it took lots of work.

The tea action, unlike those events they lost control over (the Boston Massacre, the sacking of Governor Hutchison's house), was in their hands from beginning to end. . . To grasp the situation we must return to the principal Whig problem of the era: the "mob." The Tory interpretation of the popular side of the Revolution -- "the people were like the Mob-ility of all countries, perfect Machines, wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch" . . . was a caricature of the reality in Boston. In the long decade of conflict leading up to the break with Britain, as the Whig leadership around Samuel Adams . . . confronted the British establishment, its Loyalist allies, and a divided merchant community, they struggled to control the popular movement. Such admonitions as "No violence or you'll hurt the cause" and "No mobs, no confusion, no tumults" in the patriot press can be taken as their motto for the decade. By 1775 they had established a coalition that included all but a minority of the merchant class.

In the eighteenth century, long before the imperial crisis, Boston had a tradition of crowd action and a reputation as a "mobbish" town. Crowd action was often "quasi-institutional" . . . Crows used "extralegal means to implement official demands" or to "enforce laws otherwise not enforceable" or "to extend the law in urgent situations beyond its technical limits." Crowds of laboring people also acted in their own interests, most strikingly against impressment, dragnet sweeps of the port to press men into the much hated British navy. . .

In their resistance to British policies, Whig leaders were preoccupied with harnessing, mobilizing, or suppressing the energies of the crowd . . . Reaction to the Stamp Act set the pattern. Resistance in 1765-66 was built on the scaffolding, symbolism and leadership of (previous mob action) . . . in collaboration with the leader of the Sons of Liberty. . . Ebenezer McIntosh, a shoemaker . . . became the leader of the united group whose officers were outfitted, wined, and dined by John Hancock and other patriot merchants. From 1765 until 1773 . . . the gang warfare channeled into unified patriotic processions against detested British symbols.

To protest the Stamp Act there were five major actions in 1765, two in August, two in November, and one in December. The first, on August 14, was organized by the leadership to intimidate Andrew Oliver, the Stamp Act commissioner designate, by hanging effigies on what became the Liberty Tree, holding a formal procession, pulling down Oliver's office, damaging his house, and making personal threats against him. The second, on August 26, in which a crowd gutted the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, likely rose out of "private resentments" but all the same delighted a wide range of Boston patriots. Then, on November 1, the day the Stamp Act was to go into effect, McIntosh, "sensible & manly" who "dressed genteely," as Judge Oliver told the story, "paraded the Town with a Mob of 2000 men in two files. If a whisper was heard among his followers, the holding up of his finger hushed it in a moment." On November 5, the united companies marched again, and on December 17, McIntosh escorted Andrew Oliver to the Liberty Tree to force another resignation. McIntosh was dubbed "Captain General of the Liberty Tree."

The Sons of Liberty were highly selective. They claimed August 14, disavowed August 26, and ignored November 1, November 5, and December 17, thus setting a pattern of dissociating themselves from what, either through their own making or that of others, was politically embarrassing. From 1766 to 1769, they commemorated August 14 . . . while suppressing the memory of "the destestable" August 26. McIntosh, feared by some as a possible "Masaniello," the leader of a seventeenth-century proletarian rebellion in Naples, was shunted aside, replaced as crowd leader by Dr. Thomas Young and William Molineux, who were members of the Whig inner circle.

There was no single "mob" and "no single pattern" to Boston's crowd actions . . . At one pole were crowd actions organized by Whig leaders in their campaign to boycott those merchants who violated agreements not to import British goods. The Whig pattern is recognizable through written records: a town meeting, public notices warning the targets to desist, articles in the papers, a formal delegation or committee, and recognizable leaders, all an effort to clothe the action in legitimacy. At the other pole were tarring-and-feathering crowds, lower class and led from within, and usually organized on the spur of the moment against a target of opportunity, which in Boston invariably meant customs officers or informers against whom the laboring classes had their own grievances.

Whig leaders were quick to memorialize self-initiated street actions that got out of hand as well as actions they did not initiate, yet served their purposes. An example of the first was the picketing of T. Lilly's shop by boys in February 1770, which turned sour when a customs official fired into the crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Seider. Whig leaders organized a funeral procession of five hundred boys and two thousand men and women for Seider "the martyr." The famous example of the second is the confrontation of townspeople with British troops several weeks later, on March 5, (the Boston Massacre). -- The Shoemaker and the Tea Party by Alfred F. Young, Beacon Press, 1999.

From this description, the leaders of the Sons of Liberty appear to be opportunistic, unprincipled liars. Perhaps. Yet they were successful in gradually building pressure on the forces of the Crown and their Tory opponents until, finally out of frustration, the British provided the revolutionaries with Lexington and Concord Bridge. And, in the end, they were also successful in restraining the bloody passions let loose by the Revolutionary War from degenerating into eye for eye and tooth for tooth vengeance killings after the victory.

I present this to all of you, especially those who ask "when are we going to guns" and are impatient with the answer "not yet."

Ever ask yourself why we had no counterpart to Madame Defarge, no tumbrils parading to the guillotine? You may credit that to the Founders, "opportunistic, unprincipled liars" though they may have been. They were also adults and serious revolutionaries who accomplished what they set out to do, without losing their souls and with a minimum of bloodshed.

May we be as wise.

For Restoration, ladies and gentlemen, is even tougher than Revolution.

Mike
III
Tumbril filled with French aristocrats on their way to the guillotine.