Q&A with Author Joseph Cummins
Q: How did you learn about the nine other tea parties that you describe in Ten Tea Parties?
A: A few years ago, I was visiting the Naval Academy at Annapolis and saw the historical marker on the wall of a residence hall there commemorating the Annapolis Tea Party: "On this spot the brig Peggy Stewart was burned . . . to pacify the indignation of the citizens roused by the payment of duties on seventeen boxes of tea imported in the brig." And I thought, wait a minute, another tea protest? Then I began researching and found that, for a year between 1773 and 1774, Americans went crazy over tea. They burned it, dumped it, boycotted it, whatever. And it wasn't just in Boston. Up and down the East Coast during that year before the shooting war began, Americans held tea parties. And no one has really told those stories.
Q: Why does history seem to have forgotten such important events in the birth of the United States?
A: I think we remember the Boston Tea Party, rather than all the others, because it was the first major organized protest. There was an earlier protest in Lexington, Massachusetts, but it was relatively minor. And the Boston event involved history's best-known participants: John Hancock, Sam Adams, and Governor Hutchinson, among others.
Q: Why were the other tea parties so important in the founding of the United States?
A: The other tea parties were seminal in the fight for independence because they fostered a sense of solidarity among colonists. Tea parties were held from York, Maine, to Charleston, South Carolina, in support of Boston after the British crown blockaded Boston Harbor to force the colonists to reimburse the East India Company for the destroyed tea. Remember that, before the Revolutionary War, people from the thirteen colonies were not all that fond of one another. There were regional differences and prejudices. These protests and boycotts mark the first time people widely separated in culture and outlook put aside their differences and came together. Had the British been able to isolate the town and its patriots, as they intended, the Boston Tea Party alone would not have been enough. It took all of the tea parties in all of the colonies to elicit change.
Q: What can the reader take away from this book concerning the protection of freedom and the example set by the tea party protests?
A: I say in Ten Tea Parties that the tea party form of protest is in our blood, our very DNA. It has been used by varied protest groups, from suffragettes to temperance fanatics to anti-Prohibitionists to gay Americans to the current-day Tea Party. The tea party is both a circus event and a template for protest. Although it is an occasion to dress up as Indians, wear tea bags, and dump things into harbors, the tea party is also a sign that we are a free people, that we have a say in our own destiny. After the year of ten tea parties, the American people fought and won a revolution. Tea party protests are, in this sense, aspirational. Protests can lead to change; government can be forced to be responsive.
Q: Do you enjoy a nice cup of tea?
A: I do like a steaming cup of English breakfast tea. But if someone wanted me to dump coffee into a harbor somewhere, I might balk. They will have to pry the Starbucks out of my cold, dead hand.
