Burns Says the Boston Tea Party Costumes Claimed an Identity Apart From Britain
Burns argues the outfits said the colonists belonged to this land, even as they were taking it from its Native peoples.
The Rest Is History · Ken Burns on Why America Really Declared IndependenceDocumentary filmmaker Ken Burns says the Boston Tea Party costumes meant the opposite of what most Americans learned in school. Talking through the coming of the Revolution, he argued that the 50 or 60 rich and poor white men who dressed as Native Americans were not trying to put the blame on Native people.
Burns puts the message in the colonists' mouths: "We're not of you anymore."
In his telling, the outfits were a way of claiming to be a native people of the land. After 150 years in North America, much of it left alone by London, the colonists were identifying with something native. It was, Burns argues, an early symbolic cultural split from Britain, worn in public before independence was declared.
Burns also insists on the irony in that claim. The previous 150 years had been about taking the land where the 13 colonies stood, he says, and the next 150 years would be about taking the rest of the continent from its original inhabitants. The gesture, in his telling, carried hypocrisy.
For Burns, that irony is why the costumes matter. They were claiming the land as theirs while the coming century and a half would take it from its original inhabitants.
Questions people ask
When did the Boston Tea Party happen, and what did the men actually do?
It happened on December 16, 1773. The men boarded three British ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea into the water. Parliament had kept a tax on tea as a sign of its right to tax the colonies, and the protest was aimed at taxation without representation.
How did Britain respond?
Parliament passed what colonists called the Intolerable Acts in 1774. They closed Boston Harbor until the tea was paid for and sharply restricted self-government in Massachusetts. The measures united many colonists in opposition and helped lead toward wider resistance.