Today in 1773, 340 chests of British East India Company Tea, weighing over 92,000 pounds (roughly 46 tons), onboard the Beaver, Dartmouth, and Eleanor were smashed open by the Sons of Liberty armed with an assortment of axes and dumped into Boston Harbor.
Liah Greenfeld in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity:
National identity is, fundamentally, a matter of dignity. It gives people reasons to be proud…. Even for materialistic Americans, taxation without representation was an insult to their pride, more than an injury to their economic interests. They fought—and became a nation—over respect due to them, rather than anything else.
Greenfeld quotes John Dickinson’s “Liberty Song”:
Our purses are ready,
Steady, friends, steady,
Not as slaves, but as freemen our money we’ll give.