America 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
From Merriam-Webster, online.
Today’s entry in my series on this country’s highlights and lowlights as we approach its 250th b-day, isn’t necessarily a contradiction, as have been my previous entries herein. It’s pretty straightforward but, just to keep things tidy, let’s label it as such.
Contradiction No. 6: The Boston Tea Party
Today’s CIA agents as well as spies and spooks from every undercover outfit around the world are heirs to the grandpappies of the craft, the Sons of Liberty. The loose, secretive Boston cabal had been active since Britain enacted the Stamp Act of 1765, imposing crushing taxes on the Colonies in the New World. Colonial printers could only use paper manufactured in Britain (and stamped to verify its origin) to produce legal documents, magazines, newspapers, and other printed material (like playing cards, believe it or not). It was far more expensive than paper the New World printers could obtain domestically. Britain used the paper’s tax revenue to pay for stationing its soldiers in the Colonies.
The imposition of the Stamp Act enraged residents of the 13 Colonies. They considered it an extreme form of taxation (higher prices, naturally, had been passed along to consumers) and argued that they shouldn’t be taxed because they had no representation in the British Parliament. Britain retorted by saying only landowners on the British Isles could serve in Parliament so the colonists were SOL. Out of this contretemps emerged the rallying cry, No Taxation Without Representation.
In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, allowing the British East India Company to sell tea in the Colonies (tea being as indispensable to them as bottled water is to us) without being taxed. Well, the colonists huffed, that’s not fair! Why do they get off not paying taxes while we’re burdened by the Stamp Act?
The Sons of Liberty were driven to do something more than huff. In the middle of the night on December 16, 1773, a number of Sons dressed up as Native Americans, stole aboard the merchant ship Dartmouth docked in Boston Harbor, and procedure to toss overboard some 340 chests of East India Company tea.
Sons of Liberty in disguise.
Well, the British threw a fit. They imposed the Intolerable Acts in retribution, closing the Port of Boston and suspending the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter, eliminating any form of self-government there.
That was pretty much the last straw for the colonists. Within two-plus years the Declaration of Independence had been issued and the Revolutionary War was on.
As I’ve indicated before in these precincts, taxes were the drivers behind the American Revolution, not any high-minded ideals like liberty and other such stuff. Although, to be fair, the authors of both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were Enlightenment deists who plugged in all those noble notions like freedom and equality, values so slippery that we continue to try (and too often fail) to lock them down to this day.
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