“The truth is that Bostonians had not been very good patriots…While New York City and Philadelphia had been smuggling all of their tea by 1770…the Bostonians were willing to purchase a little bit of the legal tea and pay the duties on it. So they were not as good at being boycotters as the [other cities] were,” says Benjamin L. Carp, author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America.