At Least Get the Real Meaning of the Boston Tea Party Correct

Let’s get one thing straight, once and for all you tea partiers—the Americans did not seek independence from paying taxes; they sought independence from having no say as to how those taxes were being raised, or how they were being spent. The colonists had been paying taxes to their colonial assemblies for over a century and had tolerated the British Navigation Acts for just as long because it was an economic relationship with the mother country that benefited everyone. So when tea partiers (and I refuse to capitalize that nickname) say they are opposed to paying taxes because our forefathers were, they aren’t telling you the full story. But maybe that’s not their fault. Maybe they just don’t know.

A question I put to my students is “Why did 140 years of trade restrictions on the colonists not cause an independence movement, but 11 years of attempts at direct taxation did”? The key word in that question, of course, is not “taxation,” but “direct.” The Navigation Acts were laws passed by Parliament to make sure that the colonies served their purpose, which was to enrich the mother country. The colonists were to harvest raw materials like lumber, tobacco, and furs, sell them to the mother country for cheap prices, and then buy more expensive finished goods back. Superficially it sounds like a no win situation for the Americans. The trade balance under these restrictions seems to favor the British. And in some cases, if not many cases, it did. But the colonists knew that no matter how much timber they cut or beavers they trapped, they would all be sold. A lumberman or a trapper could easily harvest enough material to purchase what he needed and have money left over.

But the colonists had other advantages. Parliament was 3,000 miles away with made enforcement difficult. The Americans could manufacture much of what their families needed, even though in some cases this was technically illegal. Customs officials could easily be bribed to look the other way because their government paid them so little, which allowed American merchants to exploit the opportunities inherent in the black market. In addition, as long as the mother country was making a profit, there was little incentive to redirect resources to stop smuggling. It was a system that worked.

Then along came the French and Indian War and the ultimate conflict between Great Britain and France for control of the continent. Under the leadership of William Pitt, Britain pulled out all the stops and spared no expense in defeating the French, falling deeply into debt in the process. Up to this point, the British had been making money on the colonies through trade. There might have been some import duties assessed here and there, not to make money but to regulate behavior. However, the British quickly learned that these kinds of duties only inspired colonial traders to bribe and smuggle and often they were quickly abandoned. But the national debt crisis caused Parliament to forget that lesson. The British government was also being pressured by the already very highly taxed people of England, who opposed an increase in their taxes to pay for a war that they saw as benefiting the Americans rather than themselves. The only revenue opportunity left, according to some members of Parliament, was to tax the colonists.

There were two problems in trying to convince the Americans that they had to pay their fair share of the costs of the war. First of all, they saw that they fought, bled, and died to help the British expand their empire. The Americans felt they had contributed sufficiently with their lives and the time they spent away from their families and farms. And second, with the British victory and the banishment of the French, the bankrolling of Indian terrorism against the English settlers stopped. In other words, the Americans no longer needed the British for protection. But the British needed the Americans’ money, but the Americans didn’t need the British. Not a good foundation upon which a mother country needs to build support.

Had Parliament appealed to the colonial legislatures for assistance in raising money from the colonists to pay for the war, things could not have gone any worse. At least that way the tax legislation would have come from people they could vote against in the next election. Instead, the British turned the tables. The Americans had tolerated the economic restrictions of the Navigation Acts for nearly 150 years because Britain had left the Americans alone politically. True, several colonies had royal governors who did the bidding of the king, but the king gave the assemblymen control over the governor’s pay, which gave them a lot of power and independence over this external form of rule.

The trouble began when Parliament first outflanked the colonial assemblies in 1763 with the Stamp Act, the first attempt by the British government to tax the colonists directly. It met with several months of boycotts, protests, and riots was eventually repealed without having sold one single stamp. That set off a playground shoving match that resulted in a shooting war beginning in 1775.

In 1773 scores of Sons of Liberty, for some reason disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded ships carrying tea from the British East India Company, threw the inventory into Boston Harbor, and inspired passage of the Coercive Acts that placed Boston under martial law.

This attack on British tea was not about a tax making tea more expensive. In fact, the Tea Act actually reduced the cost of tea in the colonies. The act gave a monopoly on the sale of tea to the British East India Company because it was having difficulty selling its product. This allowed the company to circumvent established tea merchants in the colonies and sell directly to the Americans. Lowering the price was a ploy to get the American consumers to accept the legislation. But to the Americans, a tax was a tax and merchants shut out of the tea trade became very vocal and aggressive. In spite of less expensive tea, the act demonstrated the lengths that Britain would go to exploit the colonies for financial gain, and the Americans were correct in their collective assessment that if the British government could take their business and money away without their consent, they could also take their land, which in 1773 was an important form of currency in itself.

Now in case you’re wondering about the slogan “No taxation without representation,” don’t take that to imply that had Parliament agreed to give the colonists representation they would have been happy to pay taxes. In no way were colonial representatives to Parliament to accept representation because they knew they would be quickly outvoted on any measure and they would be in worse shape than they were before. As voters they could influence and hold their colonial assemblies accountable, which meant there was some restraint on the level of local taxation.

All taxes are not unjustified as some tea partiers would have you believe. There are even some taxes that are arguable unjust and in all fairness should be repealed. And government officials, especially right now, need to be reminded very quickly that they work for us. It’s not the other way around. But at least get the colonial Americans’ position on taxes correct if you want people who know history to take you seriously.