This is a fascinating article on the history of the Boston Tea Party, and whether the origins of the American Revolution in New England were based on the purity of principle or the concerns of the merchant class.
Ironically, the Founding Fathers did not appear to be all that sympathetic to the Boston Tea Party. In fact, they were appalled:
George Washington disapproved of the Tea Party, and Benjamin Franklin called it “an Act of violent Injustice on our part.” But the Revolution was not yet in the hands of the Founders, although it had left those of the merchants, who now dodged and stalled as the people—passionate and heedless of economic niceties—called for a ban on all tea, even what was smuggled from the Dutch. The merchants were also losing their ability to control crowd violence. Breen reports that, in early 1774, a New Hampshire supporter of Parliament bled to death after a mob forced him to ride a sharp fence rail, which left a four-by-six-inch hole in his groin.
Britain overreacted, closing the port of Boston, restricting town meetings in Massachusetts, and giving the King the power to appoint the upper house of the Massachusetts legislature. British troops arrived in Boston in May. A Salem newspaper called Britain “more cruel than Sea-Monsters towards their young ones,” and a meeting in Wrentham declared that Britain seemed to want to reduce colonists “to nothing short of the miserable and deplorable State of Conquered Slaves.” A few merchants still hoped that Boston might pay for the tea and reconcile with Britain, but they were too intimidated by the outbursts of popular anger to give voice to their proposal at a Boston town meeting.
This is part of a fascinating thesis by Barbara Clark Smith in her recent book The Freedoms We Have Lost, which goes through the stark differences between how the British government relied upon citizens to enforce laws — and therefore citizens had the ultimate trump card of merely not enforcing the laws they emphatically disagreed with.
Quite a contrast to the American system where the government enforces the law. More to the point, you can see where the Boston Tea Party was an assertion of citizen rights rejecting the impulses of Parliament, and how the overreaction from Britain pulled the “pragmatists” into the orbit of the merchant class.