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The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. By Alfred F. Young. (Boston: Beacon Press. 1999. Pp. xvii, 262. $24.00.)
Toward the close of this significant and engaging book, Alfred F. Young, Senior Research Fellow at the Newberry Library and Professor Emeritus of Historv at Northern Illinois University, remarks that his subject, George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840), was "a reallife Rip Van Winkle." Born and raised in Boston, Hewes was an obscure resident of Attleborough and rural Wrentham, Massachusetts, for thirty years following the American Revolution, and then, for a quarter-century after 15, he lived close to some of his children and their families in Richfield Springs, Otsego County, in upstate New York. Although Hewes remained a humble shoemaker throughout his life, he was present at the Boston Massacre in March 1770; was a boatswain at Griffin's Wharf in December 1773 when a boating party hacked open tea chests and dumped them in Boston Harbor (his face and hands blacked with coal dust from a blacksmith's shop); was the immediate provocation for a mob that tarred and feathered royalist John Malcolm in January 1774 after Malcolm clubbed Hewes so brutally that he left a permanent dent on the cobbler's skull; and eventually served as a militiaman and privateersman during the War for Independence. He-wes crossed paths with John Hancock, John Adams, George Washington, and James Fenimore Cooper. He was present at the creation.
More than half a century of penury and neglect followed; but in the mid-1830s sheer longevity and a temporary shift in the climate of opinion brought Hewes a glorious glimpse of triumphant celebrity. For more than a generation, Young argues, from the 1790s through the later 182os, the dominant interpretation of the Revolution in New England emphasized the events of 1765-81 as a struggle for home rule but o)ot (in Carl Becker's felicitous phrase) a struggle to determine who would rule at home. Social conservatives, fearful of disorder and eager to retain traditions of deference, minimized...