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A good cup of tea
Author: TriSec    Date: 09/19/2009 13:36:46

Good Morning!

You're probably having a cup of coffee with breakfast right about now. A few hundred years back, the hot beverage of choice used to be tea.

I bet you know the story; Bostonians were unhappy about the tea tax, so they dumped a couple of shipments in the harbor, and now we all drink coffee. Later, some ill-informed folks seized that as a symbol of government oppression and started waving their teabags at politicians.

Curiously, we're not number one for per capita coffee consumption. Finland is, at nearly 12kgs per person per annum. Curiously, our neighbor to the north that remained British drinks more coffe than us too, at 6.5kgs. The USA ranks only number 26, at 4.2 kgs.

So what's the big deal?

You've got to go back a bit to the Townshend Acts, passed in 1767 by Parliament.



Reaction to the acts wasn't swift, but slowly but surely the people started to turn against it. This led to the Boston Massacre some 3 years later. Boston was the most important city in the colonies at the time, and so the British set up their revenue office there in order to enforce the Townshend act's taxes.


The newly created American Customs Board was seated in Boston, and so it was there that the Board concentrated on strictly enforcing the Townshend Acts. The acts were so unpopular in Boston that the Customs Board requested naval and military assistance. Commodore Samuel Hood complied by sending the fifty-gun warship HMS Romney, which arrived in Boston Harbor in May 1768.

On 10 June 1768, customs officials seized the Liberty, a sloop owned by leading Boston merchant John Hancock, on allegations that the ship had been involved in smuggling. Bostonians, already angry because the captain of the Romney had been impressing local sailors, began to riot. Customs officials fled to Castle William for protection. With John Adams serving as his lawyer, Hancock was prosecuted in a highly publicized trial by a vice-admiralty court, but the charges were eventually dropped.

Given the unstable state of affairs in Massachusetts, Hillsborough instructed Governor Bernard to try to find evidence of treason in Boston. Parliament had determined that the Treason Act 1543 was still in force, which would allow Bostonians to be transported to England to stand trial for treason. Bernard could find no one who was willing to provide reliable evidence, however, and so there were no treason trials. The possibility that American colonists might be arrested and sent to England for trial produced alarm and outrage in the colonies.

Even before the Liberty riot, Hillsborough had decided to send troops to Boston. On 8 June 1768, he instructed General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief, North America, to send "such Force as You shall think necessary to Boston", although he conceded that this might lead to "consequences not easily foreseen". Hillsborough suggested that Gage might send one regiment to Boston, but the Liberty incident convinced officials that more than one regiment would be needed.

People in Massachusetts learned in September 1768 that troops were on the way. Samuel Adams organized an emergency, extralegal convention of towns and passed resolutions against the imminent occupation of Boston, but on 1 October 1768, the first of four regiments of the British Army began disembarking in Boston, and the Customs Commissioners returned to town. The "Journal of Occurrences", an anonymously written series of newspaper articles, chronicled clashes between civilians and soldiers during the military occupation of Boston, apparently with some exaggeration. Tensions rose after Christopher Seider, a Boston teenager, was killed by a customs employee on 22 February 1770. Although British soldiers were not involved in that incident, resentment against the occupation escalated in the days that followed, resulting in the killing of five civilians in the so-called Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770. After the massacre, the troops were withdrawn to Castle William.



Ironically, on the day of the massacre, Parliament repealed many sections of the Townshend act except for one....the tea tax. All tea shipped to the colonies by the East India Tea Company had to first pass through London, where it was subject to an additional tax. This had the effect of giving the colonies the highest-priced tea in the Empire, and it led to a thriving black market and smuggler's trade to the New World.

Well, you can guess what happened. Very quickly, the East India Tea Company was awash in a sea of red ink. Their tea was essentially taxed twice; by the British in London, and again by the Governor in Boston under the Townshend acts.

Not wanting to see an icon of the Empire go under, Parliament authorized the Tea Act of 1773. This waived the London tax on tea and enabled the East India company to ship directly to America...and pay the hated Townshend Act Tax directly.


American radicals opposed the Act, not so much because it rescued the East India Company, but more because it seemed to validate the last remaining duty imposed by the Townshend Acts of 1767, the so-hated tea tax. Britain in turn yearned to quash the trade of smuggled tea to America. Before the Act, smugglers imported 900,000 pounds of cheap foreign tea a year. The quality of the smuggled tea did not match the quality of the dutiable East Indian Tea of which the Americans bought 562,000 pounds per year. Although the British tea was more appealing in taste, some Patriots encouraged the consumption of smuggled tea. All this however did little to damage the British tea trade.

Before the Boston Tea Party occurred, the colonies did not agree with the decision to impose the Tea Act, whereby they would be acquiescing to the payment of the tea tax. In New York and Philadelphia, they sent the British ships with the tea on board back to Britain. In Charleston, the colonists left the tea on the docks to rot. The Royal Governor in Boston was determined to the leave the ships in port, even though the colonists refused to take the tea off the boat. The Boston Tea Party soon erupted, representing a turning point in Anglo-Colonial political relations.


Britain was appalled by our actions, and reaction was swift. The Royal Navy closed the port of Boston until the destroyed tea was paid for, and parliament passed the first of the so-called Intolerable Acts; the rest, of course, is history.



But why have the 'Teabaggers' seized this as their example? Well, here's the Tea Party Patriots website. Among their core values listed are:


Fiscal Responsibility: Fiscal Responsibility by government honors and respects the freedom of the individual to spend the money that is the fruit of their own labor. A constitutionally limited government, designed to protect the blessings of liberty, must be fiscally responsible or it must subject it's citizenry to high levels of taxation that unjustly restrict the liberty our Constitution was designed to protect. Such runaway deficit spending as we now see in Washington D.C. compels us to take action as the increasing national debt is a grave threat to our national sovereignty and the personal and economic liberty of future generations.

Constitutionally Limited Government: We, the members of The Tea Party Patriots, are inspired by our founding documents and regard the Constitution of the United States to be the supreme law of the land. We believe that it is possible to know the original intent of the government our founders set forth, and stand in support of that intent. Like the founders, we support states' rights for those powers not expressly stated in the Constitution. As the government is of the people, by the people and for the people, in all other matters we support the personal liberty of the individual, within the rule of law.

Free Markets: A free market is the economic consequence of personal liberty. The founders believed that personal and economic freedom were indivisible, as do we. Our current government's interference distorts the free market and inhibits the pursuit of individual and economic liberty. Therefore, we support a return to the free market principles on which this nation was founded and oppose government intervention into the operations of private business.


But does this jibe with the colonists?

At the end of the day, the Boston Tea Party was less about being taxed than being taxed without having a say in the government. The Colonies were seen as an endless repository for money and goods to the British Empire, under military control of the crown, and without the citizens having a say in how things were run in their own colonies.

"No Taxation without Representation" came from these events.

So the Teabaggers have it all wrong. It's easy to look at the Boston Tea Party and say we dumped the tea because we didn't want to pay taxes on it, but that's not correct.

We would have gladly paid the taxes on the tea had we a seat in Parliament. This was more about our rights to self-rule than anything else.

200 years later, we still have representatial democracy. This is what the colonists wanted, and started down the path towards, that cold December night when the tea went swimming.

What exactly do the 'teabaggers' want now?


 

12 comments (Latest Comment: 09/19/2009 22:41:22 by Raine)
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