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Tea Parties, Brushfires, and Sam Adams
Apr 15, 2010 Current Events, History Leave a comment
Posted by
G Miller
It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
Samuel Adams was tied to the original tea party movement in this country, the one that led to a British naval blockade on the Boston port. Disguised colonial freedom activists dumped tea in the bay. Other tea shipments sat unused in the cargo holds of ships that could not be unloaded due to the refusal of dock hands to perform the labor. What was the big sin that so riled New England and other colonial citizens? Was it a tax that made tea unbearable to buy? Not at all.
The tax that so outraged the American Colonists was a corrupt bargain. In fact on the issue of taxes, many taxes that were hated by the colonists had been lifted by the British parliament. Seen as a finger in the eye, the Tea tax was a statement by parliament that not only basically said, “Not only can we tax you dirty colonists but we will.”
To make this statement more palatable to supposed subservient citizenry, parliament made a tax arrangement with suppliers of the East India Trading Company that actually made the tea cheaper for the colonists. The EIT Co. would supply tea to the colonists at tremendous discounted wholesale cost and the British government would then subsidize the suppliers with revenue from a tax placed on the tea. The resulting cost of the tea was cheaper than it would have otherwise been.
It may have been cheaper tea, but it was unacceptable government to a large minority of citizen colonists. It was a finger in their eye. It was a matter of principle to principled people. The parliament had made a corrupt bargain that, leading to cheaper tea, also would lead to a cheap purchase of individual freedom from colonist British citizens who could not have a vote in parliament and could not effect future taxes and potential corrupt bargains.
Samuel Adams:
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
It was the Lockean notion of Natural Law that sparked the grassfires of freedom in the American colonies. No intellectual elite in a far-off capital could trump the natural freedom of people in the dominion of the elites, true. Still, natural law meant more.
Justice was equally important. The British government had made corrupt bargains with one group in favor and others not in its favor. It was not the outcome that was important, but the injustice of taxing one to pay another and to take from the justice-minded colonist his voice to appose the injustice.
The colonist minority activists had but one recourse. “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” This was treason to the crown! To the minority freedom activist colonists it was treason to natural law to allow liberty to erode further.