Six Cents

On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party

It was an ingenious scheme hatched in an age of beguiling despotism. A prestigious, profitable, multinational corporation based in London was now on the brink of bankruptcy. Its Bengali tea operation was about to collapse. War, mismanagement, and an extraordinary famine that had claimed a third of the country’s population and more than a third of its cultivable land had combined to force the East India Company (EIC) to seek financial assistance from the British Parliament.

A government bailout was viewed favorably by the administration. EIC’s continued operation would keep thousands of Bengali farmers employed, would maintain a lucrative source of revenue for the treasury, and with millions of pounds of tea sitting in its London warehouse, the EIC could flood the American market with an inexpensive, high-quality tea that, hopefully, would create brand-loyalty overnight.

Thus, the plot was born. The Tea Act of 1773 provided a mammoth loan to EIC to keep it solvent, eliminated the import duties for its tea, and allowed its tea to be shipped directly to America to be sold at a price that was fifty percent lower than it had been before and twenty-five percent lower than the best tea smuggled from Holland. The tea sold in America would now be cheaper than the tea sold in England. On the surface, the strategy appeared to be an inspired stroke of Parliamentary brilliance.

The American tea market loomed like a gold mine to the EIC. Twice each day one million colonists drank tea, most of it of questionable Dutch origin. With a virtual monopoly in hand, the higher-quality EIC varieties were poised to take the majority market share. Even with a small, three-pence per pound tax collected in America, the tea was still cheaper than any other, smuggled or otherwise.

News of the Tea Act reached America in September 1773. Some evidence suggests the initial colonial opposition was directed solely against EIC’s monopoly and not against the tax itself. Indeed, a duty on tea had been paid in America since the Townsend Acts of 1767 and remained after the Acts had been repealed in 1770.

However, the greater part of the historical record suggests otherwise. No sooner had the news of the Tea Act arrived in America than the prominent political leaders began to voice strong opposition. They reminded the colonists of the imposition of the stamp tax in 1765 and the resistance that brought it down. They returned to well-known arguments about external and internal taxation, the lack of representation in Parliament, and the legitimate extent of parliamentary prerogative. Within weeks, all America was in a flame.

In the fall of 1773, 1700 chests containing 600,000 pounds of tea were shipped from London to America, destined for the port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charlestown, South Carolina. Once the ships had arrived in Boston, intense negotiations commenced between Boston’s political leaders, of whom Samuel Adams was preeminent, and the royal governor. These frequent and lengthy meetings kept the tea from being unloaded but resolved nothing. On December 16, a town meeting attended by nearly 6000 people was called by the popular leaders to explain that the governor could not be dissuaded from his intention to land the tea. Shortly after 10 pm, when the meeting had run its course, Samuel Adams stood and solemnly closed the meeting with one prophetic utterance: This meeting can do no more to save the country.

That night several hundred Sons of Liberty disguised as Indians boarded the three vessels and ceremoniously dumped 342 chests, each weighing 360 pounds, into Boston harbor. At one point the mound of tea in the water approached the level of the decks. After the tea had been destroyed, the perpetrators put everything back in place and swept the decks clean. Nothing else on the ships had been harmed. Even a padlock broken during the raid was replaced.

It’s inevitable whenever the Boston Tea Party comes up for discussion, Americans young and old will question the right of Boston patriots to destroy the property of others without stopping to consider whether Parliament had the right to take patriot property through taxation. They might conclude the American Revolution could have been avoided if America’s colonial leaders had exercised more restraint.

Fundamentally, the Boston Tea Party and the revolution that followed were a response to old-world despotism. The decisions of law and policy made by King George and Parliament that led to the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor constitute the zenith of a tyranny that had as its single aim the denial of the liberty of conscience and from there the denial of the rights of human liberty, prosperity, and life itself.

It all began innocently enough in 1765 with the passage of the Stamp Act, which required all legal documents, commercial transactions, and newspapers to be written or printed on stamped paper. This first direct tax by Parliament in America was intended to augment and eventually replace an old, clumsy system of requisitions by which colonial assemblies voluntarily contributed to the British treasury funds for various expenses. Most commonly these expenses dealt with frontier defense, and at this particular time, they related to the retirement of debt from the French and Indian War. The requisition worked well only if the assemblies complied with Parliament’s request and compliance was customary when the colonies viewed the requests as reasonable and appropriate.

In the case of the lingering war debt, some in Parliament believed the American colonies had borne little of the expense of ridding the French from North America. Since the requisition was too unreliable to raise the funds necessary to retire the debt within a reasonable period, an alternative was needed that bypassed the assemblies.

At the time British Prime Minister Lord Grenville told Benjamin Franklin he was not disposed to insist upon the Stamp Act if the Americans could conceive something better to replace the requisition. No alternatives were suggested since there were no options except direct taxation. So, Grenville formally announced the measure in March 1764, a full year before it was to take effect, presumably to give Americans the chance to express their opinions about it. The caveat could not have been more profound or the crucible less benign: only Americans could be selected as the officers charged with the business of selling the stamped paper.

Two months later, at Boston’s annual town meeting, Samuel Adams moved that the people should assert their rights and privileges in a series of instructions to be delivered to their representatives in the General Assembly. In the instructions, Adams poised the critical question for the first time: If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves? This earliest state paper of Samuel Adams contained the first formal and public denial of the right of Parliament to tax the colonies.

These instructions were soon followed by James Otis’ widely read, well-received treatise, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, wherein he showed that all government is founded on the will of God and the laws of nature. He wrote, Should an act of parliament be against any of his natural laws, which are immutably true, their declaration would be contrary to eternal truth, equity and justice, and consequently void... Quoting Locke, Montesquieu, Vattel, and Grotius, the 39-year-old assemblyman enumerated the first principles of law and justice, and having made it clear that no man can take my property from me without my consent, implored the British Parliament to devise a way for the colonies to be represented in that body.

What ensued was more than a year of colonial protests, remonstrances, declarations, and resolves, including the convening of the Stamp Act Congress, the first significant act of union in the colonies’ 145-year history. Some rioting occurred too, in the summer of 1765, most notably the destruction of Chief Justice Hutchinson’s library in Boston, considered at the time to be the finest in America. (The Massachusetts Assembly fully indemnified him for his loss.)

By March 1766, the Stamp Act was repealed, only to be replaced by the Declaratory Act in which Parliament reasserted its right to tax America however and whenever it chose. A year later the Townsend Acts would establish port duties on glass, paper, lead, painter’s colors, wine, oil, fruits, and of course, tea. The Townsend Acts themselves would be repealed by March 1770, except for the tax on tea. The amendment to include the tea tax in the Townsend repeal failed in the House of Commons by a vote of 204-142. Prime Minister Lord North explained that retaining the tax was merely a matter of principle, for the properest time to exert our right of taxation is when the right is refused.

So, let’s get historically technical for a moment with North’s principle. The cost of a pound of tea in Boston in 1773 was 49 pence (4 shillings 1 penny) which included a three pence tax. According to Lee Humphrey’s Tea and Coffee Trade in the American Colonies, the colonists were paying the equivalent of a six percent sales tax for the tea imported from England. In our world, that’s six cents on the dollar so North and his Parliament can assert they have a right to take my six pennies without my consent – that is, without my being represented in Parliament, the taxing authority.

John Adams estimated at the outbreak of the Revolution that two-thirds of the colonists favored independence and one-third opposed it. Any loyalist living in Boston at the time would have considered it absurd that something so insignificant as a six-penny tax on tea could lead to the Boston Tea Party, the closing of the Boston port, the uniting of the colonies to supply food to the blockaded city, the formation of committees of correspondence in every colony, the battles of Lexington and Concord, the commissioning of George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, the Dorchester Heights encampment that forced the British evacuation from Boston, and the rest of the War of Independence ending in Yorktown with the surrender of the greatest army in the world.

Any loyalist would have said to Adams and his compatriots Sam Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, and James Otis, that they were out of their minds to abandon their 150 years-long English heritage over a trifling tax on tea. (The emphasis would have been on trifling – as in trivial, petty, unimportant.) How could they even conceive of themselves as anything other than British subjects? And what about obeisance to the Crown? Oh my god, Adams!

For thirteen years or so I taught a college course on moral leadership. At some point in the course I would ask my students to gauge the acuity of their consciences by imaging coming home from Walmart and discovering the checkout clerk forgot to scan something. I asked them to put a dollar value on the item and tell me whether they’d return it or keep it. Universally the students chose the pragmatic approach to the item’s return. It all depended on how much the item cost. The higher the cost the higher the likelihood the students would return the item. So, I asked them if they could be persuaded to return something that only cost six cents. Collectively the response was a resounding Absolutely Not! Their consciences could never be negatively actuated over six lousy pennies.

Yet in Boston in 1773 our patriot forbearers resolved they could not in good conscience acquiesce to paying a trifling six percent tax on tea. In their minds, such a tax was not inconsequential. Of course, the tax was slight, but the principle upon which the tax was levied was monumental. If Parliament could take their six cents without their consent, it could take any amount or kind of property from them as well. Their money, their houses, their land – nothing would be secure if the principle of taxation without representation were given legitimacy.

The philosopher of the American Revolution was John Locke. He wrote in his Second Treatise on Civil Government that Government has no other end than the preservation of property. Our patriot ancestors understood this concept as well as they understood the Ten Commandments. If Parliament violated this end, then its laws were no longer just. Furthermore, if James Madison’s words were true - that conscience is the most sacred of all property – then not even an individual’s beliefs and convictions were safe with a Parliament that claimed unlimited authority to confiscate property of any kind.

The patriot mind that comprehended the logical end of this dressed-up parliamentary tyranny astounds me. Yet, the patriot will that stood against it is even more remarkable. They resisted despotism with everything they had – first with their conscience and then with their life.

Contemporary America is nothing like colonial America. Our minds are mush when it comes to expounding a philosophy of liberty and self-government. When it comes to defending individual rights and freedoms and putting the government in its place, our default is scrolling through Facebook and eating a cheeseburger.

Boston patriots refused to spend six cents more on a cup of tea, and that repudiation led to a revolution that changed the world forever. Is your conscience sharp enough to be troubled by a scant six cents?

They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, “Peace! Peace!” — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! (Patrick Henry)