The American Revolution’s resistance tradition began with smuggling molasses for rum.

Evidence

Eight years before the Boston Tea Party, colonists took part in a lesser-known Rhode Island revolt against the Sugar Act of 1764, which dramatically increased enforcement of duties collected on imported sugar and molasses. Rhode Islanders had avoided paying these taxes by illegally smuggling in molasses for their lucrative rum business from cheaper French West Indian suppliers, bypassing the British West Indies. On April 7, 1765, a group of men blackened their faces to disguise themselves as Native Americans and seized the cargo of the Polly, which included “barrel after barrel of molasses from the sugar islands,” write Aronson and Budhos. John Adams observed that the British Parliament had gone too far with its revenue scheme. “Molasses was an essential ingredient of American independence,” Adams would later write. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s core frame: what a nation dates its origin from determines what counts as deviation vs design — here the Boston Tea Party tradition actually begins with a molasses revolt, not tea.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — the molasses smuggling as the unglamorous root that undergirds the symbolic ‘tea’ tree event.
• SEED: Article angle: the Rhode Island Polly revolt as the Boston Tea Party’s forgotten dress rehearsal — the colonial rebellion tradition was founded over molasses, not tea.
• CANDY: Boston Tea Party was preceded eight years by a molasses-tea-party-style revolt — a light, surprising fact worth sharing.