Political Change
Revolutionary Period

Samuel Adams and early riots

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Some of the first uprisings in the colonies against the British government occurred along the eastern coast in the mid-1700s. There, dockworkers rebelled against the British Navy’s practice of impressment, in which Naval officers would try to force poor dockworkers to join their crews. Mobs of people rioted against impressments from the 1730s through the 1760s, from Charleston , SC to Boston , MA.

Mob violence was common during the Revolutionary era in cities along the coast. The most famous incident of mob violence during the American Revolutionary era was the Boston Tea Party.

The honble. Samuel Adams, esqr. First delegate to Congress for Massachusetts / J. Norman sc.

Samuel Adams was a popular revolutionary leader and pamphleteer during the Revolutionary period. His widely-read pamphlets discussed topics like anti-impressment riots and the Stamp Act. These pamphlets played an important role in getting the public’s support for the Revolutionary cause. Adams was also a leader in the Boston Tea Party.

The bloody massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt.
Samuel Adams used his position as a pamphleteer to spread Revolutionary fervor throughout the colonies. In addition to organizing the Boston Tea Party, Adams helped draw attention to the Boston Massacre of 1770, depicted in the image here. Adams ’ pamphlets portrayed the British soldiers as evil, unfair and violent and the murdered citizens as brave people who died for the developing Revolutionary cause.
Die einwohner von Boston wersen den englisch-ostindischen thee ins meer am 18, December 1773 / D. Chodowiecki inv. et del. ; D. Berger sculpsit 1784

This image of dockworkers during the Boston Tea Party shows that they were often a motley assortment of people from a variety of racial and ethnic groups.

The Bostons paying the excise-man or tarring & feathering / copied on stone by D. C. Johnston from a print published in London 1774

Rioters used tarring and feathering to intimidate supporters of the British during the Revolutionary period. This drawing from the 1830s depicts a scene in which Boston patriots tar and feather someone supposedly defending the British.