When George Robert Twelves Hewes was 93 years old, he traveled the long distance from his home in Richfield Springs, New York, to be feted as a celebrity in Boston. While he was there, he sat for a long interview with a historian, Benjamin Bussey Thatcher, and they talked about that December night in 1773, sixty-two years earlier, when Hewes had helped dump chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. They talked for hours, and soon after, Thatcher published his account as Traits of the Tea Party: Being a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, One of the Last of Its Survivors. George Hewes lived out the next, and last, five years of his life in Richfield Springs, and there he died in 1840, widely believed by his family and community to have been the oldest survivor of the Tea Party. He may well have been, but there was no way to be certain. Like many others who had boarded the tea ships that night, Hewes had concealed his face in the crude disguise of an Indian. Later generations would suppose this mockery was intended to insult and fool the British authorities. But in truth, the men also sought to conceal themselves from each other, so that none need fear being betrayed by an informer. Decades later, even Hewes himself could not say for sure who else had been with him on the deck that night, laboring for three hours until the last tea chest was torn open and tossed overboard. Hewes swore that for a brief while, John Hancock himself helped him rip apart one crate. Thatcher included this “curious reminiscence” about Hancock in his Memoir. “But we believe it a mistake,” he added skeptically.

Thatcher failed to notice another curious element of Hewes’ reminiscence. They had talked for hours, just as Hewes had talked with another biographer a year earlier, yet never once had the old man called the event a Tea Party. Thatcher hadn’t noticed, but historian Alfred Young did, and it provoked this book about a lowly shoemaker and America’s recovered memory of an event, sixty two years after it occurred. “People did not call it the Tea Party after it happened in Boston the night of December 16, 1773, at least not in print. … ‘The destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor’ was the way contemporaries, friend and foe alike, referred to the serious political event in public accounts and private letters.” “As surprising as it may seem, the two biographies of George Robert Twelves Hewes, A Retrospect of the Tea-Party (1834) and Traits of the Tea Party (1835), were not only the first books to feature ‘tea party’ in the title, they were also the first of any sort to focus on the event itself and the first biographies of any participant, high or low.”

Alfred Young’s book is two stories intertwined, as he searches the life of George Hewes to discover why it took Americans a full generation to find an acceptable way of “remembering” a pivotal event in the Revolution. The key to the puzzle lies in Hewes’ occupation: he was a shoemaker. Defiant as a boy, always ready with his fists, and indifferent to punishment, he had been placed as a shoemaker’s apprentice by his desperate parents. When he reached age 21, Hewes started his own shop in Boston’s wharf area, making and repairing footwear for customers hardly more prosperous than he was. It was not a promising trade, for already the factories of nearby Lynn were mass-producing 80,000 pairs of shoes each year. Hewes went into debt for “a sappled coat & breeches of fine cloth” in which to court the daughter of a washer woman, got chucked into debtors prison for failing to repay, and a decade later, he and his wife and children were still desperately poor and living with relatives.

By his own account, Hewes had no interest in patriotic politics until he happened upon the crowd of enraged citizens harassing a squad of British soldiers on Kings Street in March of 1770. The soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five men in the Boston Massacre. Hewes knew four of the slain men. One was shot in the back while standing next to Hewes and fell into his arms. Over the next three years, Hewes was involved in several altercations with Loyalists and British troops, including one in which he was nearly killed. These episodes seem to have been as much about social class resentment as about politics, and Hewes never formally joined any patriotic group. He remained just one of a teeming throng of angry workingmen along the docks, ready to form a mob when signaled by someone’s shrill whistle. Hewes’ talent as a loud whistler apparently got him recruited to board the tea ships in December 1773.

Hewes is such a colorful character that we are bound to share Alfred Young’s curiosity about why America lost interest in him and the event he helped make, and then a generation later revived the memory and attached a label that conjures up a genteel social occasion of no consequence — a Tea Party. Young devotes the second half of his book to this forgetting and remembering.

Young’s account of the forgetting will sound familiar to those who have read David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride, and recall that Revere’s own narrative of his ride was suppressed until long after the Revolution, because it revealed meticulous planning in anticipation of the “unprovoked attacks” committed by British troops on April 19th. The destruction of the tea in Boston by characters such as Hewes — an impoverished, illiterate, apolitical ruffian — was soon overshadowed by the Revolution itself. Yet if the purpose of such political action is to put your opponent in the wrong and keep him there, the destruction of the tea was also problematic for the patriotic cause. A rebel conspiracy had set to work, not in hot anger but in cold deliberation, to destroy (in today’s value) roughly a million dollars of property over the span of three hours. Refusing to buy the tea, with its hated tax, was a Whig’s own choice. Destroying the tea, so that others could not make their own choices, was an act of coercion and intimidation aimed at other Americans as much as at the Crown. And after the Revolution was won, why dwell on an event whose remembrance could only spark divisive questions about who provoked the war, and who was on which side and when.

Young’s account of how the next generation came to remember the destruction of the tea carries his book into the social and political turmoil of America during the early Republic. Young’s explanation is elegant and engaging and deserves to be read in his own words. One need not accept the full Revisionist or Post-Modernist implications of Young’s argument to see his point — a society’s “history,” in the sense of those past events that it resurrects and celebrates, is in some measure a social invention, and this invites questions about who does the inventing and for what purposes. A radical Revisionist or Post-Modernist might ask only, “Who has the power, and who stands to gain?” Young is more nuanced, but he does see politics in the answer. The early Republic was an era of vicious, often bloody contention over the purpose and legacy of the Revolution. Which events were recalled, and how they were labeled and interpreted, reflected the political battles of the day. For those who worried about the increasingly strident demands of a rising, urban working class — and Benjamin Bussey Thatcher was one who worried — labeling the destruction of the tea as a Tea Party transformed this radical attack on property from a dangerous precedent into a frivolous prank, and the genteel imagery linked the event to society’s “betters” rather than to wharf mobs and the likes of George Hewes. At the same time, urban radicals had their own interests in recalling the Tea Party, as a mockery of the manners of those who claimed to be their “betters” and as a reminder (and an implied threat) of their own rising power in American society.

George Robert Twelves Hewes, his wife, and their eleven children lived in relentless poverty. After she died in 1828, he shuttled among the homes of his children, each in turn too poor to shelter him for very long. In his final years, he was often asked to say a few words at Fourth of July celebrations. At one such gathering, he offered this toast: “May we meet hereafter, where the wicked will cease from troubling, and the true Sons of Liberty will be forever at rest.” He was never much of a shoemaker.