A Very Polite Tea Party

Edenton, North Carolina

Every day, Jackie and Ben Hobbs go about their modern lives inside walls hewn by hand before the In dustrial Revolution. The sounds of their TV and telephone mingle with the quiet creaks of wide slat floorboards laboring under 200 years of foot traffic, as the couple runs a small country bed-and-breakfast and restaurant outside Hertford, county seat of Perquimans County, North Carolina.

Ben, a math teacher turned entrepreneur and local elected official, is the kind of man who invariably has to take off his work glove to shake hands. He was digging trenches for irrigation lines when I arrived. But for the small back-hoe he was using, it might have been a scene from the 1700s, as he strode over to greet me against the backdrop of the inn's modest early-American cabins, collected from across the state and restored by Ben himself, furnished with reproduction period furniture he makes onsite.

Jackie, also a public school teacher in the area before the Hobbses started the Beechtree Inn, showed me around their comfortable and slightly incongruous world of pencil-post beds and central air, where rooms feature both wainscoting and web access.

But this small business was not the only echo of colonial life in northeastern North Carolina last week. In nearby Edenton, a historic town of about 5,000, residents gathered for a "Tax Day Tea Party"--one of about 800 grassroots protests against expanding government held across the nation on April 15. The demonstrations drew more than 250,000 supporters and some openly hostile news coverage, as reporters painted the gatherings as rage-fests filled with antigovernment crackpots.

Ben, who laid aside his tools to head to the tea party, was unsurprised by the tone of the coverage. After all, he said, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had just labeled small-government entrepreneurs like him potential terrorist threats. He was referring to the Department of Homeland Security's report on the danger of "right-wing extremism," which was fodder for many jokes at the Edenton Tea Party, as church ladies, veterans, and young moms chuckled about their allegedly subversive activities.

The demonstration, held on the town square facing the waters of the Albemarle Sound, attracted about 500 protesters. As was the case at many of the nation's tea parties, their complaints were disparate--objections to the stimulus package, the growing deficit, a cigarette tax hike, a proposed reduction in charitable tax deductions, and just-plain-big government.

An elderly couple sat at the edge of the crowd, American flags and protest signs affixed to the baskets of their Hoveround motorized scooters. A red-headed high-school student stood with his father holding a sign that pinpointed the crowd's disappointment with the president: "Keep the change. We need the cash."

Several teenaged girls stood in the front row of the crowd with their mothers, a denim-clad, modern-day echo of the first organized protest by women in the American colonies, which took place in this very town on October 25, 1774, and went down in history as the Edenton Tea Party. Though the women of Edenton didn't dump tea into the bay that day, as their revolutionary brethren in Boston had done the year before, they drafted a letter of solidarity, promising to forsake "British tea and cloth."

Edenton was already a hotbed of political activity when Penelope Barker, the wife of the state treasurer, organized what guests thought was a routine tea party for about 50 Edenton women. When her guests arrived, she convinced them to sign a letter, which was later published in London newspapers:

The Provincial Deputies of North Carolina having resolved not to drink any more tea, nor wear any more British cloth, &c. many ladies of this Province have determined to give a memorable proof of their patriotism, and have accordingly entered into the following honourable and spirited association. I send it to you, to shew your fair countrywomen, how zealously and faithfully American ladies follow the laudable example of their husbands, and what opposition your Ministers may expect to receive from a people thus firmly united against them: