Paul Revere's friend Benjamin Edes was the son of the printer Joseph Edes, who, along with his partner John Gill, began publishing The Boston Gazette and Country Journal in 1755. Written largely by workmen like themselves, the Gazette and its competitors such as the Boston Post Boy provided opportunities for bringing people together to discuss the news of the day. These were the same people who fought on the frontiers and paid taxes as British citizens. These new men and women not only exchanged and commented among friends about the news of the day, but they brought their ideas and their confidence about expressing them into public places where they cajoled and fought their opponents and sought them out in order to exchange ideas and make their own wishes heard. Edes and Gill's other publications included the North American Almanac and the Massachusetts Register, newspapers that did not actively campaign for one issue or another, but established a notion of a free press as the connective link in a self-governing community.
Printing was all well and good, but information and opinion lies inert if people do not pull it apart through intense commentary. Paul Revere and the artisans, small shopkeepers, and more prosperous people with whom he associated in various grass-roots organizations carried this work out admirably. Grass-roots spread wildly and the associations to which this modern term applies may vary from associations of people who experience shortages and decide to, do something rectify the situation to neighbors who discover that they are victims of environmental hazzards to parents who gather to discuss common problems. The caucuses to which Paul Revere belonged met in Boston's North or South End in casual meetings in inns such as the Green
Dragon Tavern on Union Street where men discussed current political affairs and developed powerful ties to one another. In 1765, some of these caucuses in Boston went further and may have constituted themselves into something closer to an open political club such as the Sons of Liberty that played a large role in the events leading up to the American Revolution.
The start of American Revolution was intimately related to taxation. In order to streamline tax collection and avoid the confrontations involved in taxing merchandise for export, in March 1765, the British government passed the Stamp Act that was to go into effect in November. It would have required nearly all publicly circulating printed matter—all newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, legal documents, insurance policies, and playing cards—to be printed on paper bearing a stamp paid for in advance. Designed to avoid the incessant pursuit of smugglers that led authorities to invade warehouses and private homes, the tax effectively burdened all legal and commercial traffic, intensifying the threat of economic collapse. The increased taxes the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch imposed on their colonies in the eighteenth century antagonized virtually all colonized people, and sometimes united groups who otherwise had no common identity. In fact, while attempting to simplify tax collection, the Stamp Act of 1765 created a community of patriots opposed to British imperialism. Resistance to this hated imposition of an outside authority generated local assemblies that regarded taxation as a local matter over which their own provincial assemblies should have ultimate control. Nine colonies sent delegates to a Stamp Act Congress in New York in October 1765 that issued a protest against taxation without representation, arguing "that it is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted right of Englishmen, that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives . . ." They went on to add "that the only representatives of the people of these colonies, are persons chosen therein by themselves, and that no taxes ever have been, or can be constitutionally imposed on them, but by their respective legislatures."2 The Stamp Act was repealed in March 1776.
The victory of these locally controlled representative institutions that promoted material as well as abstract benefits heightened the resolve that popular institutions, rather than Parliamentary decrees, should govern the colonies. In the context of continued conversations about freeborn Englishmen and their rights (reminiscent of the Levellers' demands), colonists questioned whether they were or should be subordinate to fellow citizens who lived across the Atlantic. By the mid-eighteenth century, colonists had established their own routines for feeding, clothing, housing, and governing themselves, and any interruption in these routines was bound to cause havoc. Yet the British were attempting to centralize power and needed increased revenue to do it. Parliament, trying to recoup its losses from the French and Indian Wars, turned again and again to the American settlers for economic support, with the Stamp Act of 1765, the equally notorious Townshend Duties in 1767, and eventually a tax on tea.
The Massachusetts Assembly, which represented local white male property holders, had appointed and paid local judges until 1773. In that year, Parliament decided to take control of the local judiciary and imposed the infamous tax on tea to pay the judges' wages. Not only were the British reducing the colonists' powers, but they were making them pay for their diminished control. In order to enhance their own authority, local leaders in Massachusetts formed so-called Committees of Correspondence and Safety that served as mini-legislative bodies, and Sam Adams helped organize eighty such Committees throughout Massachusetts. Settlers in other colonies followed suit and in 1773 the Virginia House of Burgesses appointed its own province-wide Committee of Correspondence.
If democracy entailed public debate, news was its currency. It took several months for the colonists to learn that Parliament had passed the Tea Act in May 1773. When the first of four ships destined for Boston arrived on November 28, 1773, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, unlike the governors in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, accepted the delivery, thus provoking local people to take action. As the tea was being unloaded on December 16, 1773, a now famous group of determined citizens probably organized by Sam Adams took matters into their own hands. More than a hundred men, a few sporting Indian headdress, dumped the tea chests into Boston harbor in a powerful act of resistance, a Tea Party, against what was widely considered British tyranny.
Many local women, with significant economic power as controllers of household economies, joined Sam Adams in a boycott of English goods. The practice of boycotting, thought to have emerged among Irish tenant farmers in the eighteenth century, became an early form of passive resistance that democratic groups around the world have employed to promote their own interests against more powerful adversaries. When the British, recognizing the popular power of the boycott, retaliated by placing the city of Boston under virtual martial law