At the end of the last episode, we left colonial Boston chafing under British military rule. Now Boston was a big port, a very important commercial center of New England, but it wasn’t all of New England, and it wasn’t even a very big city. In fact, Boston, at the time, was entirely on one small peninsula of land, in the middle of Boston Harbor. It was connected to the mainland by one small isthmus of land to the south. Nowadays, a lot of the harbor space around Boston has been backfilled, and so the old part of Boston isn’t quite as isolated as it was back in the colonial days.
But back in 1774, it was pretty easy for the British to cut off Boston harbor and cut off the city of Boston from the rest of Massachusetts. And after the Tea Party, the redcoats fully imposed martial law. There was a strict curfew, and restrictions on gatherings and crowds. But there was still an underground network of patriots, meeting secretly, and making plans. And they had spies amongst the British loyalists.