The era of the American Revolution was marked by a series of violent outbreaks in town and countryside. A sequence of urban violence runs from the Stamp Act riots in 1765 through the Sons of Liberty violence, the Boston Massacre, the burning of the Gaspee , and the Boston Tea Party to the incident that triggered the Revolutionary War--the fighting at Lexington and Concord. Behind the violence in Boston was the city's remarkable patriot infrastructure of the 1760s and 1770s, headed by James Otis, Samuel Adams, and their colleagues. The infrastructure grew out of the convergence of a historical tradition with a contemporary situation. The historical tradition was the CookeCaucus heritage of popular politics in Boston, and the contemporary situation was the diversity and complexity of Boston's social, economic, and political life in the 1760s, which formed a fertile seedbed for the growth of the anti-British movement.
             In 1773 the East India Company was on the verge of financial collapse. Since the seventeenth century the company had traded in India as its private corporate enterprise. Many company officials had become rich through bribery and special privileges, but the company itself had suffered. One of its few remaining assets, seventeen million pounds of tea held in its London warehouses, remained unsold because of the American boycott, and also because heavy taxes made it too expensive in Britain itself. Why not, Lord North asked, drastically reduce the English tax? With only three pence per pound to be paid on arrival in America, the tea would become so cheap that it would undersell smuggled Dutch tea. The tea would sell widely and the East India Company would be saved from ruin and the government would at last raise some much-needed revenue from the troublesome mainland colonies. This plan received legislative form in the Tea Act of 1773. What North did not foresee was that Americans would perceive this scheme as an insulting b...