None of that was true, of course, as any of the freshmen who’d remained awake through the lecture Adrian gave at the start of every year to his newest class could have explained. Adrian believed the Tea Party had very little to do with taxation without representation at all. The Tea Act was not a new tax; it was a repeal of the heavy taxation inflicted on the colonies up to that point. It was called the Tea Act because the one item exempt from the repeal was tea. But the real indignity of the Tea Act wasn’t the continuation of taxes, but that in the same stroke the British gave the foundering East India Company a total monopoly over the tea trade, indemnifying them from shipping duties. Tea itself became cheaper for the colonies, not more expensive. But if the people of Massachusetts had no real reason to be upset by the protectionist move, one class of Bostonians became instantly incensed: the smugglers. The most prominent smugglers of the time—John Hancock and his friend Sam Adams—realized their tea business couldn’t compete with such a monopoly, and decided they needed to do something. So, they turned to their colleague Paul Revere.

It wasn’t simply out of patriotic fury that the angry townspeople gathered in the Old South Meeting House that evening to foment an act of rebellion against the crown. They were incited by Revere’s Sons of Liberty, or more accurately, his more professional cadre of clandestine operatives: his Mechanics. It was the Mechanics who provided the rabble-rousers with Native American costume, adorning them with war paint and Mohawk feathers. It was the Mechanics who had provided the tomahawks that were used to shatter the lids of the tea crates. And it was John Hancock, the top tea smuggler in the colonies and soon to be hero of the Revolution, who had reportedly led them from the meeting house, with the shout: “Let every man do what is right in his own eyes!”