'Sons of Liberty': The Perfect Song to Remember the Boston Tea Party

Today, December 16, is the 249th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. While the tea-dumping protest of the Massachusetts colonists might have seemed less than inspiring to some in the moment, the splash of the tea into Boston Harbor started a tidal wave of Revolution that eventually swept in the freest country on earth, America.

In honor of this important anniversary, I would like to share one of the sadly under-appreciated and largely forgotten Disney songs, a song written specifically to celebrate the Boston Tea Party: Johnny Tremain’s “Sons of Liberty.”

Johnny Tremain is a 1957 Disney moviebased on the 1943 book by Esther Forbes, a historical novel that combines fictional and historical heroes of the tumultuous years leading up to the start of the American Revolution in Boston. Young silversmith’s apprentice Johnny Tremain’s life changes forever when he accidently cripples his one hand while attempting to make a silver pitcher, and one of the few places he finds acceptance is with the strange group of enthusiastic, “treasonous” Patriots calling themselves the “Sons of Liberty.” The story ends with the beginning of the Revolution and the conflict at Lexington and Concord. I have two favorite scenes in the Disney movie. One is James Otis’s speech, where he ultimately sums up the motivations for the Revolution in a single sentence. “We give all we have—we fight, we die—for a simple thing: only that a man can stand.” The second is the scene following the Boston Tea Party, where the excited Patriots, led by Sam Adams and Paul Revere, march through Boston still in their Indian disguises and hang lanterns on the Liberty Tree while a crowd of Bostonians cheer.