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Although Adams blamed Britain’s policy of quartering soldiers for provoking the citizens of Boston, he blamed the mob for instigating the violent altercation.

In his closing argument, Adams portrayed the crowd as a howling “rabble” that shouted, “Kill them! Kill them!” and threw “every species of rubbish” at the soldiers: “We have entertained a great variety of phrases to avoid calling this sort of people a mob. Some call them shavers, some call them geniuses. The plain English is, gentlemen, [it was] most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jacktars. And why should we scruple to call such a people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.”

The American jury acquitted the British officer involved, as well as six of his eight soldiers. After the verdict, there was no rioting or looting; all was calm. Respect for Adams increased, and he would later say that his defense of the British soldiers for firing on the mob was “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”8

This country’s founders were strongly against the mob—as are today’s Tea Party patriots. Noticeably, modern Tea Partiers haven’t engaged in one iota of property destruction, in contradistinction to nearly any gathering of liberals. Violence and property destruction are specialties of the Left. As the New Yorker reported, a twenty-six-year-old Tea Partier from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thought about printing out a copy of the entire 2,000-page 2010 health care bill and throwing it in Boston harbor, but changed his mind when he found out it would be against the law.9

That’s why—until recently—it has been liberals pushing the Boston Tea Party as a crucial event in the American Revolution, while conservatives have preferred to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the bicentennial of the Constitution. Liberals hate the idea of a revolution by gentlemen, which is why they celebrate hairy, foul-smelling revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Susan Sarandon. They want to elevate the rabble and place the spectacularly unique American Revolution in the tradition of France’s mob revolt.

Thus, for example, Russell Bourne, a regular guest on NPR and PBS, has written a sad little book titled Cradle of Violence: How the Boston Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution. More accurately, the waterfront mobs nearly derailed the revolution.

Fear of mobs was a primary rationale of the Loyalists. Even those wishing independence from Britain worried that without British protection, the hoodlums might run wild. As the left-wing historian Howard Zinn admits, the “well-to-do merchants” of the Sons of Liberty “worried about maintaining control over the crowds at home.”10

Consider the case of Lord Hugh Percy. He had been a fervent supporter of the Americans, taking their side repeatedly in the British Parliament, including voting against the hated Stamp Act. When he arrived in Boston as a brigadier general of the British army in 1774, Percy was a strong advocate of American independence. But he took one look at the Boston waterfront and changed his mind, so “shocked” was he “by the mobbings he witnessed.”11

This is why, today, we know Patrick Henry’s name. We know Paul Revere’s name. We know the names of John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and of all the other signatories to the Declaration of Independence. We know the names of the authors of The Federalist. We know the name of pamphleteer Thomas Paine. We don’t know the names of the lowborn workers at the Boston Harbor engaging in tumult and property destruction. (Other than by the general catchall term “Celtics fans.”)

The men behind the American Revolution—the militias, the Minutemen, and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the framers of the Constitution—were the very opposite of a mob. Today we would call them “Republicans.” They were educated, aristocratic property holders, doctors, lawyers, ministers,