From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
I couldn’t write more yesterday because such a lot of people came in to see my father and I had to be polite to them. I want to tell the rest of the Boston Tea Party story…
Well, all the people said that they didn’t want to be ruled by England anymore. Then England was angry and sent a lot of soldiers over here and we didn’t have any soldiers, but all of the farmers took their rakes and hoes and hatchets and they went to their front yards to meet the English soldiers. Some of these soldiers weren’t even English, they were German because the King had hired them to fight for him. We had a wonderful brave man named Paul Revere who jumped on a horse as soon as he knew that the English had landed in America and he rode all night and morning, warning the American people that the English soldiers were coming. The poor horse must have been very tired. Well then we had other brave men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, only then they were all English citizens at that time, but they got together and wrote out the Declaration of Independence on a big sheet of paper. It said that we were never again going to be bossed by England and we were never again going to pay any taxes on tea or stamps or anything else. We were going to be free to do anything we pleased. So there was a big war and lots of people were killed and when it was over, there was the United States.
Even so I don’t like the Fourth of July. Everyone shoots firecrackers and hangs out the flag but I hate the noise.