Once a month, The duty challenges history enthusiasts to decipher a current theme based on a comparison with a historical event or character.
On the evening of December 16, 1773, a group of men, most of whom disguised themselves as Aboriginal people, boarded East India Company ships and dumped all of the tea found on them into the sea. Nothing predestined what posterity will call the “Boston tea party” to be anything other than another mood swing in an empire which experienced revolts, civil wars, and even large-scale Jacobite rebellions at regular intervals.
Not only have any participants in this event, the 250th of which is being celebrated todaye anniversary, did not wish for the independence of the British colonies in America, but everyone imagines that by destroying the cargo of tea from three ships in Boston harbor, they were acting like “real British”.
Observed from the docks by thousands of Bostonians, the operation is impressive: you need to have detailed knowledge of how a boat works since the 340 chests filled with tea to be brought up from the bottom of the holds weigh no less than 400 pounds each. Each participant had sworn to destroy only the tea crates: apart from a man who was caught filling his pockets with tea and who was beaten up, no one was reported dead, not one injured, nor anything else. other damaged.
But how did tea become the object of Bostonians’ vindictiveness? Since the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which saw Canada ceded to Great Britain, the British Parliament has tried to replenish the coffers of the kingdom by imposing various taxes on its colonies, but they will be for the essential repealed as the muscular refusal of the settlers makes it impossible to perceive them. Boston had been most radical in this opposition, so much so that London sent troops there in 1768 and a brawl between soldiers and subjects caused the death of five people during a famous “massacre” in March 1770.
Monopoly
In 1773, Parliament decided to grant the East India Company a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies on which a very low tax was imposed. As was the norm at the time, the agents who could sell the tea obtained this largesse through patronage. They were often personal friends or family members of the governors, which shocked the excluded merchants, among whom there were many prominent patriots.
You should also know that the East India Company is not just any company. Several members of Parliament are shareholders. Its charter gives it exorbitant power, including that of having its own armies! It militarily occupies large areas of India, levies its own taxes and exercises ruthless repression. Even during the frightening famine of 1770 which led to the death of at least a million people in Bengal, it continued to brutally collect taxes from starving peasants. The echoes of this repression had cast opprobrium on the leaders of this company, who are called the “Nabob”, unscrupulous nouveau riche whose corrupting influence on Parliament inspires distrust.
Once an exotic product because it came from the Orient, tea was, in the 18th centurye century, consumed by the smallest subject, the majority obtaining their supplies through Dutch contraband (in which the Americans excel). By allowing the East India Company to now sell its (much better) tea at a competitive price and directly to the colonies through a monopoly, Parliament wanted to help it sell off its stocks and make smuggling unprofitable. and to create a precedent legitimizing its right to tax the colonies.
In America, the announcement of the Tea Act (1773) which granted this monopoly was received with a certain ambivalence, with most simply shrugging their shoulders. But the most patriotic elements see it as not only a liberticidal, but an existential threat.
Existential? Yes, because if there is one thing that the British were proud of in the 18the century, it is to be able to benefit from a political system of freedoms at a time when elsewhere in Europe royal absolutism prevails. Habeas corpus, trial by jury and above all “not to be taxed without consent” represent the main freedoms. The British are pleased to be able to count on a mixed regime which retains the best aspects of monarchy and republicanism. Among the working classes a whole mythology is propagated according to which the British are the freest of men first and foremost because they understand that power and freedom are antitheses and that indolent peoples lose their freedom.
Tax slavery
Represented as the protector of the constitution, the “patriot” king, who has accepted since the Glorious Revolution that his power be limited, is celebrated at the slightest occasion. But we fear like the plague those around us, who we imagine to be made up of vile advisors. Every attempt on the part of Parliament to tax the colonies (while they have no representatives there) is interpreted among the popular classes as emanating from a papist plot.
The often puritanical populations of the colonies were sensitive to this mythology according to which a true Briton must revolt with arms in hand when a plot was hatched against the least of his freedoms (dixit Algernon Sydney), because at the end was not only the reintroduction of Catholicism in the kingdom, but downright “slavery”.
In this sense, the “homeland” of the American “patriots”, until late in 1775, was Great Britain, this kingdom which embodies their “old” freedoms. It is no coincidence that they call themselves the “Sons of Liberty” (read: sons of Great Britain) and that they are indignant that the “mother country” wishes to treat them like non -British. Only non-British people (like the Bengalese) would agree to pay the “taxation without representation” which ruined them.
However, harmony does not reign between the patriots of the different colonies, who mutually suspect each other (with good reason) of having contravened since 1767 the various slogans of non-importation of taxed products. Watching themselves like earthenware dogs, they express indignation through newspapers at the possibility that “the others” will not be sufficiently virtuous when the taxed tea arrives. Boston took action first, in the well-known manner, which nevertheless shocked the other colonies. If it is considered acceptable not to purchase the cursed tea or forbid it from being discharged, the outright destruction of such a fortune was scandalous.
Continental Congress
The condemnation of the Boston patriots was almost universal, which undoubtedly explains why the British Parliament took the liberty of severely punishing the city. But Parliament made the mistake of passing four laws (closing its port, unilaterally reforming Massachusetts’ colonial charter, depriving its subjects of trial by jury, and requiring all colonies to pay for the quartering of British troops) representing a series of dangerous precedents for all the colonies.
Worse ! He adopted the “Quebec Act”, which had nothing to do with the other measures, but which confirmed the British colonists in America in their opinion that a vast plot was being hatched in London against their freedoms. This law in effect established the Catholic religion (through the right to collect tithes) on a territory several times the size of Great Britain.
Faced with such a threat, 12 colonies sent delegates to the first Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774. This congress increased calls for good understanding with London. In an astonishing letter addressed to the inhabitants of the province of Quebec, he even tried to convince Canadians that the Quebec Act, far from being a benefit, prepared Quebecers for eternal political dependence, in short, for never knowing the freedom.
The delegates of the First Continental Congress promised to meet again the following year, but a few weeks before the scheduled date the Battle of Lexington and Concord broke out between the British troops and the “Sons of Liberty”. In haste, George Washington was given command of the colonial troops who came to defend Boston in June 1775.
In front of his enthusiastic soldiers from all the colonies, George Washington toasts the health of none other than… King George III, against whose troops he is preparing to fight! This is because even in the summer of 1775, almost no one still envisaged that the aim of the struggle was independence. We had to wait for the publication of an extraordinary pamphlet written by Thomas Paine, who had barely arrived a year earlier, to convince the “Americans” that the plot hatched in London against their freedoms was not the work of Parliament, but squarely of king.
More than 440 days after the start of the fighting, the Americans declared their independence on July 2, 1776. Two days later, Congress adopted a declaration justifying it, by which the Americans henceforth anchored their rights based on principles that were no longer “British”. ”, but universal. They declare that they hold “the following truths to be self-evident: all men are created equal; they are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
If it’s not time for celebration in America in anticipation of this 250e anniversary, it is undoubtedly because the American political regime has too often failed in the task of living up to its founding principles. But let us remember that when Martin Luther King made his famous speech, “ I have a dream », in Washington, he will not say that America is forever vitiated by its origins. Rather, he will recall it to its founding principles by making the idea that all men are created equal the “credo of America”.
To propose a text or to make comments and suggestions, write to Dave Noël at [email protected]