Historical Reality: Boston Tea Party

Often, historical stories get changed in the retelling and can come to mean entirely different things than their original facts indicated.  I explore these "myths by retelling" in the series Historical Reality.

#1 Boston Tea Party

In honor of Tax Day in the US and with a growing tide of protesting voices calling themselves "tea partiers", it's time to take a look at the Boston Tea Party, the traditional "anti-tax/anti-government" story.  First, let's hear how the story is currently told.  Here's one example from the Re-Tea Party:

The Boston Tea Party was an act of direct protest by American Colonists demanding representation in the British Government. They became known as the original patriots.

What were they protesting?  Lack of representation in the British Parliament?  Hmm.  Let's look at another.  This one, from the Tea Party Patriots, doesn't so much tell the story as it sums up what they believed the tea party was all about:

The Tea Party Patriots stand with our founders, as heirs to the republic, to claim our rights and duties which preserve their legacy and our own. We hold, as did the founders, that there exists an inherent benefit to our country when private property and prosperity are secured by natural law and the rights of the individual.

Interestingly enough, another portion of their mission statement, regarding their beliefs, reads:

...united by our core values derived from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill Of Rights as explained in the Federalist Papers

That's an intriguing, if off-topic, blurb which I might explore later.  For now, suffice it to say that the Boston Tea Party is generally believed to be a response by patriotic proto-American citizens to an oppressive government with its huge tax burden.

The Reality

The Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773.  One of the main protagonists was Samuel Adams, a Whig Party member and tea smuggler, who worked closely with John Hancock, another well known smuggler.  What they and their cohorts were protesting wasn't the high taxes on tea.  Quite the contrary, actually.

By early 1773, the Townshend Act tax on tea had been place for almost 6 years and was pretty much a fixture of the colonial tea trade.  In fact, the tax was higher in England than it was in the colonies, meaning that such merchants as the East India Company with growing warehouse surpluses in England due to poor sales even as their colonial exports did okay (they received a refund of some of the taxes they collected from tea exported to the colonies).

Meanwhile, in the American colonies, the tea taxes were either grudgingly paid or were bypassed altogether with the burgeoning tea smuggling such notables as Adams and Hancock engaged in with tea from Denmark.  By the middle of the year, the EIC was lobbying the Parliament for some help to deal with their surplus tea stock (a bailout, if you will ;) ).  The Parliament responded with some changes to the law which allowed the EIC to pay the colonial taxes in England instead of collecting them in port and also gave a subsidy for tea shipments to the colonies.  This resulted in a net decrease in the tax on tea the colonists paid.

Let's say that again:  the taxes the colonists paid on tea went down.

This was a win for the colonists.  They got to pay less for their tea than before and enjoy a fine cup of the good EIC stuff.  Yet, this wasn't something all colonials welcomed.  Re-enter, the smugglers.

Hancock and Adams, et al, found themselves facing an undercut tea price.  You see, the lowering of the tea tax meant the colonists could enjoy not only a lower cost tea, but a lower cost than even the smugglers could sell it.  This threatened the bottom line of Hancock's lucrative shipping business and that of his loyal lackey Adams.  What to do?

Well, protesting against lowered taxes was out because who wants to protest that?  So, those early tea partiers (smugglers) focused instead on another thorny issue: representation in the Parliament.

"No taxation without representation" was the shrill cry.  Except, this was also wrong.

You see, the colonists did have representation in the Parliament.  In England, at that time, the Parliament was comprised of voted-in members.  The people doing the voting?  Roughly 3% of British citizens.  Nearly all British subjects, colonists included, had virtual representation in the Parliament.  According to the great English statesman, Samuel Johnson, the colonists are represented by the same virtual representation as the greater part of England."  This was especially true for the colonists given their distance from the English mainland and the sheer costs of protecting the colonies from other countries and the natives.

In effect, the tea smugglers of the colonies jumped on the traditional notion for how British Parliament worked in an effort to stir sympathy to their cause of protesting a 6 year old tea tax which was recently lowered.

So, what did they do?  On the night of December 16, the last night the EIC ships could remain in harbor without offloading and being paid their taxes or risk confiscation by the local authorities, a group of men left the meeting Samuel Adams was holding nearby.  They dressed like Mohawk natives, apparently to play on fears of native invaders and to hide their identities, boarded the ships, and dumped all the tea overboard, thereby securing smuggler trading for weeks and months to come.

And it didn't stop there.

The tea was stored in tightly packed bags inside crates and chests.  Many such bags and chests continued to float in the harbor and eventually float out to sea.  Enterprising colonists, hearing about the previous evening's "party", peered out on the water to, sure enough, see a wealth of floating tea.  Everyone from store merchants to poor people and anyone else who could row a boat floated out to collect some of the floating tea.

The tea smugglers (tea partiers) not wanting to allow even this small loophole in their plans to secure their smuggling business also rowed out.  They physically threatened and turned away anyone trying to collect the floating tea bales.  They then beat the bales with their oars in order to soak and sink them forever, ruining the tea and preventing anyone from getting a freebie.

Samuel Adams used this incident to begin a long series of propaganda pieces, depicting the tea partiers (smugglers) as patriotic heroes who were standing against an unjust government.  This, combined with similar monied interests, fomented the beginnings of the American revolution.

Myth:  American patriots struck a blow against Big Government and excessive taxes.

Reality:  Monied smugglers, acting under the guise of populist sentiment, struck a blow against their legitimate competition and ensured their smuggling profits, made from the colonists themselves, weren't affected by the lowered taxes.