DISSATISFACTION with Britain’s customs union was especially strong in Massachusetts, and on March 5th, 1770, five civilians were shot during a demonstration on King Street. Westminster hastily lifted restrictions on other commodities but the taxes on tea remained, lest American lawyers infer London had given up her right to tax the Colonies.

On December 16th 1773, with HMS Dartmouth, HMS Beaver and HMS Eleanor waiting to unload in Boston harbour, Samuel Adams and some seven thousand angry residents gathered at the Old South Meeting House to demand that Governor Thomas Hutchinson send the ships home. He refused; and that evening, protestors dumped three hundred and forty-two chests of the Company’s tea into the water.

Next day, Samuel Adams’s second cousin John wrote admiringly in his diary, “The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered”. Perhaps John was thinking of it when he was one of the five men who presented the Declaration of Independence to Congress on June 28th, 1776.