Sorry Tea Baggers, Washington and Franklin Opposed the Boston Tea Party

In Boston on her non-campaign tour of historic sites last week, Sarah Palin mangled the facts about the midnight ride of Paul Revere. As any school child knows, Revere rode out from Boston toward Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming for them. In Palin’s version, Revere was “ridin’ his horse through town” sending “warnin’ shots and bells” to warn the British that Americans love guns.

Earlier this year, Palin’s doppelganger, Rep. Michele Bachmann, misspoke in front of a New Hampshire audience, asserting that the battle of Lexington, which occurred subsequent to Revere’s ride, had happened in their state, not Massachusetts.

Even worse, campaigning for the presidency in Iowa back in January, Bachmann asserted that the Founding Fathers had ended slavery. She specifically cited the role of John Quincy Adams in freeing the slaves. She was apparently unaware that JQA was not a Founder and that slavery ended in the mid-1860s, long after he and his father’s generation had shuffled off this mortal coil.

Based on a new history of the Boston Tea Party — “American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution,” by historian Harlow Unger — if facts mattered to Palin, Bachmann and their tea bagger followers, they probably would have chosen another revolutionary era movement as a model:

As Unger points out, the first Tea Party in Boston Harbor had less to do with tea than the political ambitions of James Otis, Jr., a certifiably mad lawyer, and Sam Adams, a bankrupt brewer and convicted embezzler. After the British government tried collecting import duties to pay for American defense, Boston merchants — mostly smugglers and tax evaders — protested. American Tempest reveals how Adams and Otis took over the protest movement and seized political power in Massachusetts.

Organizing waterfront workers into raging mobs, Adams and the tax protestors swarmed through the streets, burning homes and dragging opponents to the “Liberty Tree” to be stripped, swabbed in scalding tar, dressed in chicken feathers, and subjected to unmentionable agonies and humiliations. Then, on Thursday, December 16, 1773, about seven dozen men disguised as Indians dumped £10,000 worth of British tea into Boston harbor and sent Boston’s reign of terror spreading across America. Mobs dumped tea and burned tea ships in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and elsewhere, and stripped tens of thousands of Americans of their homes and properties, forcing nearly 100,000 to flee the land of their forefathers forever.

Condemned as vandals by George Washington, the original Tea Party Patriots nonetheless set off a social, political, and economic storm that ended with the Declaration of Independence and birth of a powerful new, independent nation.

Yup, George Washington did not approve, as a group of tea baggers who toured historic Williamsburg found out when they question a Washington reenactor last summer:

Sometimes, the activists appear surprised when the Founding Fathers don’t always provide the “give “em hell” response they seem to be looking for.

When a tourist asked George Washington a question about what should be done to those colonists who remain loyal to the tyrannical British king, Washington interjected: “I hope that we”re all loyal, sir” — a reminder that Washington, far from being an early agitator against the throne, was among those who sought to avoid revolution until the very end.

When another audience member asked the general to reflect on the role of prayer and religion in politics, he said: “Prayers, sir, are a man’s private concern. They are not a matter of public interest. And nor should they be. There is nothing so personal as a man’s relationship with his creator.”

And when another asked whether the Boston Tea Party had helped rally the patriots, Washington disagreed with force: The tea party ‘should never have occurred,” he said. “It’s hurt our cause, sir.”

That may not have been the answer the man expected from the father of our country. But even in that spirited crowd, no one was going to tell George Washington he was wrong.

The record shows that Benjamin Franklin also viewed dumping about $1 million worth of tea into the harbor as vandalism, according to Masonic history:

Benjamin Franklin, a Grand Master of Masons in Pennsylvania, was in London at the time. He called the Boston Tea Party “an act of violent injustice.” A group of London merchants wanted to pay twice the value of the tea in order to keep trade open. Franklin offered to pay for the tea himself or raise the money in Boston. “Though the mischief was the act of persons unknown, yet as probably they cannot be found, or brought to answer for it,” Franklin said, “there seems to be some reasonable claim on the society at large in which it happened.”

C-SPAN’s Book TV recently presented a half hour lecture by Harlow Unger on the tea party. You can watch the video at BookTV.org, via this link — unfortunately, the video can’t be embedded, but here is a partial transcript:

01:38

HARLOW UNGER: I doubt that there’s a single one of today’s so-called ‘tea party patriots” who knows what the original tea party and tea party movement were about. Far from being patriots, those original tea partiers were mostly smugglers, some of them among the wealthiest men in America — merchants, among the John Hancock. Yes, the John Hancock, whose bold signature on the Declaration of Independence left his name synonymous with the word ‘signature.”

But long before he put his John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence, he was arguably the wealthiest merchant-banker in America, living in an opulent mansion on top of Boston’s Beacon Hill, with a commanding view of the Massachuetts landscape and seascape.

[The financial issue that underpinned British taxes on the colonies was covering the costs of the French and Indian War, which in Europe was called the Seven Years’ War. The colonials had supported the war, but when it was over, refused to pay their share of Britain’s costs.]

3:07

Tea was nothing more than a social beverage for wealthy women. Men seldom drank it, and it ranked below ale and rum among the beverages that Americans consumed most.

[The Brits’ first attempt to recoup their costs from the colonials was the Stamp Tax.]

7:13

Two clever politically ambitious Bostonians, James Otis Jr. and Samuel Adams Jr., saw an opportunity to make money and gain political power by organizing mobs of waterfront workers to protest the Stamp Tax, and there were many of these workers left after [the British and colonials] ended the Seven Years War.

To win some public support for their protests, they cloaked their activities under the banner of constitutional rights.

They claimed that Americans had no representation in Parliament and that for Parliament to tax them without such representation was a violation of the British Constitution.

They were under — these mobs were under the secret pay of the merchants and newspaper publishers. Adams and Otis sent these mobs to terrorize Britain’s waterfront.

They attacked tax collectors, burned their homes, prevented ships from landing. Gradually, they closed the waterfront and closed Boston to almost all British ships…

8:50

Merchants stopped importing British goods. Within months, British manufacturers and exporters absorbed huge financial loses. British trade fell by 50 percent, and the British merchants and British exporters demanded that Parliament repeal the Stamp Tax in America to restore trade relations.

In 1765, Parliament did just that, and turned Sam Adams and James Otis into heroes in Boston and elsewhere in America…

12:24

…The Stamp Act protests left Adams in command of a powerful force of armed thugs in Boston, but the repeal of the Stamp Act left Britain still choking from economic problems. The British government remained bankrupt with a large army in America to protect Americans without any financial support from the Americans.

[After the Stamp Act was repealed, the British tried a tax targeted at the wealthiest Americans — a tax on goods imported into the colonies from Europe, which was called the Townshend Act. It was discovered that wealthy colonials had made money smuggling weapons to the French when they were at war with the colonials’ own government.]

15:07

To cloak their treason, the smugglers transformed themselves into outspoken patriots, claiming they didn’t oppose taxes as long as they had a vote in establishing tax laws.

Although that reads very well in today’s history books for children, that argument was nonsense. It was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now.

Few taxpayers in England had any representation in Parliament. You couldn’t vote if you didn’t… own property. And only 1 million of the 9 million adult males in Britain were entitled to vote.

[Samuel Adams unleashed another wave of protests, including one that culminated in the Boston massacre. Finally, the British repealed all the taxes in the Townshend Act but one.]

19:41

In repealing the Townshend duties, a small group of angry parliamentarians decided they needed to retain some symbol of what they insisted was Parliament’s absolute authority to tax all British subjects with or without their consent.

Although Parliament had yielded to all the demands of the Americans, its majority felt it had to retain at least one of the Townshend duties as a symbol of its authority so it retained the smallest, most innocuous one — the one on tea…

The tax on tea was negligible, about one-tenth of one penny for a nine-penny cup. Nine pence. That’s a tax of about one-one-hundredth of one percent…

So [American merchants] resumed smuggling. And of course British customs officials tightened anti-smuggling enforcement, and after the British seized one of John Hancock’s ships for non-payment of duties, Hancock reopened his cash drawer to Sam Adams. Adams sent his paid thugs to vandalize and destroy the shops and homes of anyone who sold or drank imported tea from Britain, or even reported by someone as having drunk some tea.

So if your neighbor hated you, he just called somebody over and said, “He’s drinking British tea,” and the house would be burned down.

The tea boycott spread to other New England port cities and then down the Atlantic coast to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and other ports.

This was the original tea party movement. It wasn’t patriotic, and it wasn’t pretty or glorious.

The furor climaxed on Thursday, Dec. 16, 1773, just before Christmas, with the legendary Boston tea party and the dumping of about a million dollars worth of British tea.

23.10

[The] participants in the Boston Tea Party unleashed a social, political and economic upheaval that they would never again be able to control.

The tea party evoked a reign of terror in Boston and other American cities, inflicting unimaginable barbarities on each other.

Mobs dumped and burned tea ships in New York, Philadelphia and Charleston. Boston staged a second tea party a few months after the first one.

The mobs brooked no dissent. They burned the homes of anyone they suspected of favoring British rule and sent their dreaded tumbrill [sp], an imitation of the Inquisition coach, to the doors of citizens who dared voice support for their church, their king, their country and their legitimate, established government…

This was no fight for liberty or independence. This was a civil war between British subjects over the extent of state authority and the rights of the individual, and independence did not end that conflict.

Colonial tea partiers and those who supported them were essentially libertarians, who had built businesses and carved out farms from the wilderness, on their own without government help, and they were not about to share profits of their labor with any government or any government tax collectors.

And independence did not change matters. Almost immediately after Britain recognized our independence, farmers across the nation — Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, Virginia — began rioting against government taxation, this time taxation by their own elected governments in each state.

It was the same conflict between the same collective rights of the state, the authority of the state, against the rights of the individual.

Taxation by any state, by any government, invariably deprives the individual of some of his property, forcing him to contribut involuntarily to his community’s defense and other essential services, and sometimes non-essential services.

28:03

We can only hope that the growing tea party movement today does not divide the nation and produce the conflict it did in the 18th century.

At the time, Massachusetts” Chief Justice Peter Oliver described the horrors produced by the colonial tea party movement in his memoirs:

‘the tarring and feathering and riots reined uncontrolled. The liberty of the press was restrained by the very men who had been hallooing for liberty. Those printers who were inclined to support government, were threatened, their presses destroyed, and all this uproar arose from the selfish designs of the merchants, mock patriots who disguised their private views by mouthing the word “liberty,” but who would sacrifice everything for money.”

The turmoil of the colonial tea party movement stripped tens of thousands of Americans of their dignity, their homes, their properties and their birthrights in the name of liberty and independence. Nearly 100,000 Americans left the lands of their forefathers forever in what was history’s largest exodus of Americans from America. And untolled thousands who refused to leave their native land fled westward into the dangerous wilderness to start life anew under new identities…

30:50

George Washington and other respected American leaders across the country condemned the Boston tea partiers as vandals, and they might well have ended in jails and faded into obscurity had the British government not responded so rashly and so violently by sending troops back to Boston.

By quartering troops in private homes of loyalists as well as rebels, the British military command seemed to declare war against all Americans and that provoked almost the entire Massachusetts citizenry into open rebellion.

32:50

One irony of the tea party, however, is that none of those who dumped tea into Boston Harbor rose to prominence in the government of the nation that emerged from the Revolution — and that’s because the kind of men who lead revolutions and destroy governments — the Robespierres in France, the Sam Adamses in America — seldom have the qualities needed to organize and build a new government or nation.

They never nurture. Their instincts are to destroy.

To kill.

And a second irony of the revolution that the tea party sparked is that instead of eliminating taxation, it increased it ten thousand-fold.

Suddenly, local governments had to pay for defense, law enforcement, postal services and all the other government services that the British government had paid for before independence. Instead of paying a small, single duty on tea, Massachusetts imposed huge duties on every product that passed through its ports, and collected, apart from the cost of the tea that was lost in the tea party, that was dumped overboard, the Boston Tea Party was undoubtedly the most costly tea party in world history.

Connect: