From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com

[From *Politico*, 2014]

Matthew Stewart is an independent scholar based in Boston. This article is adapted from his most recent book, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. Copyright © 2014 by Matthew Stewart. With permission of the publisher, W. W.
Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

How do we decide who deserves a place in history? Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it
was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party—the one in Boston Harbor. And he went on from there to help kick off the Revolution in Pennsylvania, co-write the first modern constitution, and name the state of Vermont. The reason he isn�
��t well remembered today is just this: The grandfather of today’s Tea Party was an atheist in all but name.

Thomas Young was born in 1731 in upstate New York. The child of impoverished Irish immigrants, he grew up in a log cabin without the benefit of a formal education. But he was an avid reader who began collecting books at a young age and eventually amassed
one of the finest personal libraries in New England. As a teenager, he taught himself enough to become a successful doctor.

In 1764, at the age of 33, Young published his first screed championing the rights of “the common people” of the colonies against the injustices of imperial rule. In 1765, while living in Albany, he played a starring role in the protests against the
newly passed Stamp Act, which put a tax on printed colonial goods, including newspapers, pamphlets and playing cards, and rose to the leadership of the local chapter of the Sons of Liberty. In 1766, Young moved to Boston to join with the radical faction
gathering around James Otis and Samuel Adams. He rapidly established himself as the group’s most militant voice in the local newspapers and the go-to man whenever a rabble stood in need of rousing. Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, a Boston-
born loyalist, regularly named Young as one of the most dangerous men in town.

In 1772, together with his fellow radicals, Young founded the Boston Committee of Correspondence. Formally, it was just a letter-writing extension of the traditional Town Meeting, an assembly of local citizens; informally, it was the people’s
liberation organization of Boston. “What an engine!” John Adams exclaimed many years later. “The history of the United States can never be written” until one has inquired into the activities of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, he said. “
France imitated it, and produced a revolution. England and Scotland were upon the point of imitating it, in order to produce another revolution. … The history of the past 30 years is a sufficient commentary upon it.” And Young’s handwriting was all
over the project—quite literally. In the files now held in the archives of the New York Public Library, his distinctive script appears on dozens of unsigned pages of committee papers—more than any other committee member—including on parts of a
draft of the 1772 declaration of the “Rights of the Colonists” that Adams later suggested was one of the models for the Declaration of Independence.


Dr. Thomas Young | Library of Congress

At the decisive Boston town meeting of Nov. 29, 1773, while ships loaded with cargo from the East India Company idled in the harbor, Thomas Young was the first and only speaker to propose that the best way to protest the new Tea Act was to dump the tea
into the water. Two weeks later, after Governor Hutchinson declined the meeting’s request to turn the ships away, the rest of the town coalesced around Young’s plan. On the evening of Dec. 16, 1773, Young kept a crowd of thousands at the Old South
Church shouting and clapping with a satirical speech on “the ill effects of tea on the constitution” while his best friends, dressed as Mohawks, quietly set off to turn Boston Harbor into a briny teapot. Decades later, when the last surviving “
Mohawk” was asked to name the leaders of the movement, Young’s name was the first on his lips.

In 1775, Young tumbled into Philadelphia and instantly fell in with Thomas Paine and a group of like-minded revolutionaries. At the time, the government of Pennsylvania was mostly under the control of conservatives who favored reconciliation with Great
Britain—that was, until May 1776, when Young and his gang engineered a Bolshevik-style coup d’état that replaced the legitimately elected government of the province with a pro-independence faction. The new government in turn tilted the balance of
the Continental Congress in favor of permanent separation from the Crown, and within six weeks the Congress declared independence.

In the summer and fall of 1776, Young and comrades organized a convention and produced a constitution for the newly independent state of Pennsylvania. With a declaration of individual rights, an annually elected unicameral legislature, and universal
manhood suffrage, it was “the most radically democratic organic law in the world at the time of its creation,” one historian has observed. Benjamin Franklin handed out copies in Paris, and the people of the salons assumed that such a revolutionary
document could only have been the great scientist’s work. But, as John Adams groused, angry that Franklin was getting all the credit, the real authors were Young and his friends. Young sent a copy together with an open letter to the people of Vermont—
a state whose name he himself coined from the French for “Green Mountain.” There, with some further modification, it served as the basis for the first state constitution to ban slavery.

Yet when Young died suddenly of an illness in 1777 while serving as a doctor in the Continental Army, he all but vanished from American history. In 1970, the historian David Freeman Hawke named him “unquestionably the most unwritten about man of
distinction of the American Revolution.” Apart from a couple of worthy pieces of scholarship in recent years, the claim remains mostly true.

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