National Review Online
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Two hundred and fifty years ago today, in the
dark of night in Boston Harbor, 50 Americans crossed a fateful line. The result
would bring the rest of the colonies with them, leading to revolution — and to
the America we know today.
The fundamental question that led to the Boston Tea Party
was taxation without representation. Seeking to recoup the costs of the Seven
Years War (known here as the French and Indian War), which had begun on the
western Pennsylvania frontier, the British Parliament between 1765 and 1770
made successive efforts to tax the American colonists. The amounts involved
were hardly oppressive, and the colonists were among the most lightly taxed
people in the Western world at the time — but they liked it that way, and
grasped immediately the menace to their freedoms in the principle that they
could be taxed by a faraway body in which they had no voice. They were also
alarmed that new taxes would finance a larger and more intrusive colonial
government.
The result was protests, boycotts, and worse — including
riots that terrorized anyone who cooperated in collecting the taxes. This
struck the British as unreasonable, but being unreasonable in devotion to
liberty and self-government turns out to be an excellent basis upon which to
found a nation.
Parliament repeatedly backed down and repealed most of
the taxes. The most conspicuous exception was the tax on tea, which Americans
then consumed in vast quantities, all of it imported from China. The tax was
widely evaded, with some historians estimating that anywhere from 75 percent to
90 percent of the tea consumed in the colonies was “Dutch” — i.e., smuggled to
avoid taxes.
The trigger for a renewed crisis lay at the intersection
of corporate bailouts and international trade — already topics with the
potential for explosive controversy in the 1770s. In 1773, Parliament engaged
in an unprecedented and controversial bailout of the British East India
Company, the private corporation that was then coming to rule large portions of
India. As a part of that notorious exercise in crony capitalism, Parliament
gave the EIC for the first time the right to sell tea directly in America. This
would eliminate one of the rounds of taxation levied at the point of the tea’s
sales to middlemen within Britain.
The British hoped that this would make EIC tea more
competitive on the American market. But its entry threatened the livelihoods
not only of smugglers but of everyone in the distribution chain. More
alarmingly, it was received by Americans as a renewed effort to establish the
principle that Britain could lay taxes in the colonies without consent — a
reaction Parliament failed to foresee. Adding insult to injury, colonists
denounced the EIC as a corrupt monopoly and abusive colonial master in India
that should not be unleashed upon Americans.
In Philadelphia and New York, colonists refused to allow
the EIC’s tea ships to enter their harbors, and in Charleston, customs
officials impounded the tea. Boston was later to respond, and efforts to
intimidate the consignees of the tea were unsuccessful. Royal governor Thomas
Hutchinson, his family deeply invested in the EIC and the consignment of the
tea, dug in his heels. His behavior confirmed the fears of those who felt that
the EIC would corrupt America just as it corrupted London and Bengal.
So, at a signal from Samuel Adams, 50 Sons of Liberty,
wearing implausible Native American disguises as Mohawks, broke onto the tea
ships on the night of December 16, 1773. It was the last night before
Hutchinson’s royal customs officials would begin processing the tea for
taxation and sale. From the efficiency of their efforts, we can assume that
many of them were longshoremen familiar with unloading shipborne cargo. In the
course of a few hours of work, they dumped 342 chests of tea, 90,000 pounds of it
worth £10,000 (millions in today’s money), into the harbor. They did no
other damage, even replacing the one padlock they broke. Most of the
participants, sworn to an oath of secrecy, took their identities as Tea
Partiers to their graves.
The methods of the Tea Party in destroying private
property, and the extremity of their provocation of British authorities,
dismayed and divided American patriots just as John Brown’s acts did to
Republicans in 1859. Benjamin Franklin, then in London, bemoaned “the act of
violent injustice on our part.” John Adams, by contrast, found “a Dignity, a
Majesty, a Sublimity, in this the last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly
admire.”
More important, as Adams immediately recognized, “the Dye
is cast: The People have passed the River and cutt away the Bridge.” He was
right: This was a revolutionary act, and the British authorities responded with
punitive measures that would lead, 16 months later, to the outbreak of war at
Lexington and Concord.
The Boston Tea Party acquired its storied name in the
19th century. It has remained an icon ever since of resistance to encroachments
on liberty, especially those that emanate from an unholy and mutually
corrupting alliance of big government and big business. Not for nothing was it
the namesake of the Tea Party movement of 2008–15, which protested bank
bailouts and mandates to buy health-care policies from private insurers.
The Boston Tea Party also symbolizes something
obstreperous in the American character. The American Revolution, bloody as it
was, was accompanied by far fewer civil horrors and disorders than revolutions
in France, Russia, or China. The destruction of the tea and the threats to
businessmen and government officials are not the best model for a civil society
resolving its disputes peaceably in normal times. For that, we have recourse to
representative institutions, courts of law, and a free press. The spilling of
the tea propelled the dissolution of the bonds between Britain and her
colonies, and led to seven years of destructive war. But it also sent a message
that comes down to us through the ages: Push Americans too far, deny them their
liberties and their access to the political process, and they will not stand
for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment