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 isnâ   
   €™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 peopleâ€� 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!â€� John Adams exclaimed   
   many years later. “The history of the United States can never be writtenâ€�   
   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.â€� 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 Colonistsâ€� 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 constitutionâ€� while his best friends, dressed as Mohawks, quietly   
   set off to turn Boston Harbor into a briny teapot. Decades later, when the   
   last surviving “   
   Mohawkâ€� 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,â€� 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.â€�   
   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.â€� Apart from a couple of worthy   
   pieces of scholarship in recent years, the claim remains mostly true.   
      
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