John Hicks made it home well after midnight on that chilly December night in 1773. Not wanting to wake his wife—and thus incur her wrath—he quietly entered his house in Cambridge, Mass., gingerly removed his boots and silently crept up to bed.
The next morning, Elizabeth came downstairs first. Spotting his out-of-place footwear, she quickly surmised that John had sneaked out during the night. When her husband finally awoke, the suspicious Elizabeth began questioning him about his nocturnal activities.
Although John denied leaving the house, the harsh interrogation continued unabated: “Well, look at your boots standing here. They weren’t here last night when you wore them up to bed. Of course, you were out last night!”
With that, Elizabeth picked up his boots and spotted something falling from them: tea leaves. John then fessed up—he had left the house to join the Sons of Liberty in neighboring Boston as they protested the hated Tea Act of 1773 and assisted in dumping 340 chests of the British Empire’s favorite beverage into the harbor.
Hicks’ involvement in the event—which marked its 250th anniversary in 2023—offers intriguing insight into a defining moment that triggered the American Revolution. On December 16, 1773, more than 100 men—a few dressed as American Indians—clambered aboard three merchant vessels docked at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston and set in motion actions that led to the “shot heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord 16 months later.
“The Boston Tea Party was the catalyst that brought about this revolutionary change,” wrote Benjamin Woods Labaree in his eponymous epic about the incident that upended history, first published in 1964. He added, “For three years before the Tea Party, the
