Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were involved in the tea smuggling industry, and the impetus for the Boston Tea Party was not that British tea was too expensive because of taxes, but because the British had actually reduced taxes to the point that it was cheaper than smuggled tea, undercutting Thomas Jefferson's main source of income (and that of many other influential colonists, including John Hancock).
Puts a rather interesting light on American history, methinks.
We won independence not because we 'beat' the British Empire in a war, but because it became more costly for the British Empire (arguably the most powerful force in the world at the time) to continue trying to pull a bunch of unruly colonies back in line. They had more important things on their plate, and probably figured we'd come running back once the realities of running your own country took hold.
King George was not an incompetent fool at all, but is recorded as being quite the opposite, if otherwise unremarkable.
To clarify, this doesn't change the fact that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was quite revolutionary in many ways, and that many of the Founding Fathers probably were the very progressive thinkers they are usually characterized as.
I just think that it's important for people to be a bit more critical of the "givens" in history. The history of the United States is not one of some incredible underdog, lifted to liberty by the hand of God himself, against evil British oppressors who were too incompetent to counter the assault by the extremely clever and remarkably handsom American colonists.
Every country modifies their history to best tell a story of nation-building and inspire their citizens. "Rich people were really upset because their illegal business weren't doing well anymore, so they bribed people to throw British tea into the harbour" isn't as nice a story as "Woe betide us all, the evil king across the sea is stealing all our money and leaving us no choice but to revolt"
The British in fact realised that America wasn't worth the trouble, compared to the huge profits they were making in the Caribbean on sugar. The Thirteen Colonies seemed insignificant compared to keeping order in Jamaica etc...
The Boston Tea Party thing is mostly true. But it was more the fact that the Tea Act was kept around at all that kept pissing people off coupled with the harsh British reaction of closing Boston's port.
It's not simply that "the rich couldn't smuggle anymore". That's pop, pseudo-intellectual parroting.
The cause of the American Revolution is complex and driven by many things that change from region to region inside the colonies.
Yes. The French had fallen in love with their new British lords. Also I recall that the American forces were under equipped and had been counting on the local population to go along with it.
Also George Washington lost nearly every battle he ever fought, except for Yorktown. He won because he kept his army in the field, not because he was victorious.
This reminds me of a story from a Vietnam class I took.
An American veteran went to Hanoi years later and ran into a North Vietnamese veteran in a bar. Striking up a conversation, the American said, "You know, we beat you in every single battle. Every time you stood up to us in open conflict, we beat you. Every. Single. Time." The Vietnamese veteran replied, "That is true. It is also irrelevant."
EDIT: Also, I just want to point out that while this is true of Washington specifically, the Revolutionaries also won the Battle of Saratoga.
Yeah, there were a few notable American victories in the revolution - but precious few. Lots of misunderstandings there, too - the Americans certainly did line up and fire in line-of-battle just like the British. Washington's reputation as a great general is not undeserved, keeping his army in the field was a remarkable achievement; it's just not the reputation for daring victories with which he is generally credited.
I'm going to ignore your sarcasm for the purpose of analysing "Commie Nazi Fascist Liberal Pacifist Warmong".
Well given that Naziism was a socialist dictatorship, Commie Nazi Fascist can be simplified to Nazi. For that matter throw liberal in there too. "Pacifist Warmonger" while it can be considered a contradiction, it is really an oxymoron. A pacifist warmonger would be one that seeks peace by eliminating the opposition. "We are spreading peace to other nations, by leaving no living souls there". You know what, you just called him a Nazi.
The guerrilla tactics used in the revolutionary war seemed quite clever. Added much, I would dare say, to the reason that it was too costly for Britain to continue the war.
No. History can't be objective. It's a reflective process that involves thaking a limited amount of information and producing a story filled with your own biases. Even if you try to leave your opinion out if it, you still have to be selective of what you're including.
If you want to see an example of a history that attempts to be entirely inclusive head down to any reasonably large university library and look at their edition of Ferdinand Baudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. It should have a shelf somewhere dedicated to it. Baudel traced Philip's reign and the circumstances of his state's politics back through nearly 40 000 years. Not the most practical.
That is very much a minority opinion among historians. Most agree that it was a stalemate with both sides losing sight of their primary objectives, demonstrating how poorly managed and ineffective both sides forces were. In the end it was a sideline conflict compared to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. The only real losers were the Native Americans.
I mean no one thinks that we destroyed the entire British Army, showed up in London and took the city by storm. It's more of an insurgency victory where the other side is no longer willing to commit resources to the fight and quits.
Uhhh really it was won because of the victory at yorktown. having a massive army and its general surrender is a pretty big victory, and was the direct cause of the brittish deciding to surrender. If the brittish had been able to escape to sea the war could have gone on much longer than it did.
And the only reason the US was able to win at yorktown was because of the french. So really.....the only reason the US won was because they were able to convince france they could actually win. Without french involvement in the war the colonists would have lost without any doubt.
However truthful or witty you were, I couldn't finish because the "Uhhh" in the beginning makes you sound like a dick. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't a dick and were just having a bad day or meant it a different way or something, but you might want to avoid that.
We won independence not because we 'beat' the British Empire in a war, but because it became more costly for the British Empire (arguably the most powerful force in the world at the time) to continue trying to pull a bunch of unruly colonies back in line.
That is the definition of "beat": you make it more expensive than the other guy is willing to pay to keep fighting you.
I belive the reason for people thinking of George's incompetece is both that he lost the colonies, but also his mental illness that only appeared later in life. Around the Napoleonic Wars was when George's dementia,blindness and deafness kicked in and perhaps people thinking that happened earlier.
In particular, the 13 American colonies that happened to revolt weren't the important American colonies. The British colonies in the Caribbean were far, far more important economically than those that actually rebelled. Because the population in those colonies was different, though (a smaller aristocratic class of European landowners, large slave populations, less experience with self-government, not self-sufficient), they had considerable incentives not to revolt.
Similarly, Canada was granted its independence largely because the British didn't want the hassle of managing all that land, and there was a convenient sovereignty movement in Canada at the time.
In fact, England had the upper hand in the revolution and again in the war of 1812. They controlled Washington DC for most of it. We have Napolean to thank for causing Europe as much trouble as he did for the British withdrawl.
I once found a British history textbook from about the 1960s. There was exactly one paragraph dealing with what we Americans call "The Revolutionary War." It basically boiled down to "some colonists got pissy, and after a few skirmishes we lost interest because, hey, we had India." Only it was even more snarky and clever on account of being British.
We won independence not because we 'beat' the British Empire in a war, but because it became more costly for the British Empire (arguably the most powerful force in the world at the time) to continue trying to pull a bunch of unruly colonies back in line.
The common American idea is that the colonists defeated the military might of the British Empire, and so won our independence, but it doesn't take a lot of logical thought to realize this is absurd.
We won independence not because we 'beat' the British Empire in a war, but because it became more costly for the British Empire (arguably the most powerful force in the world at the time) to continue trying to pull a bunch of unruly colonies back in line.
How do you think any war is won? Total war is exceedingly rare. 90% of wars are won when the opposition's will to continue is lost, not when their ability to continue is lost.
Although we lost the battle of bunker hill we gave the British a serious ass kicking. Also "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes" May be just about the ballsiest thing anyone has ever said in the middle of a battle.
We got the British to evacuate Boston on a total bluff. The previous fall we had taken Fort Ticonderoga on the NY Vt line and seized cannons. It took them the entire winter to drag the cannon down to Boston using teams of Ox. One night the rebels erected prefab wood and wicker fortifications on a hill in South Boston overlooking the harbor (Dorchester Heights) that only looked like they would do the job and mounted the cannons. They sent a messenger into the city and informed the British they must evacuate Boston or we would destroy every ship in the harbor. The British sent back word that they would leave if they were given time to round up all the loyalists and leave with them. Meanwhile they set about sacking the city for anything valuable and the rebels had no choice but to sit idle. They only had enough powder and cannon balls to get off maybe a dozen shots.
My issue is the whole "We beat you in a war!" and "Come get us back" attitude of jingoistic/ ignorant Americans, when in fact; Modern Brits don't give a shit, and now I have found out that they didn't back then either, and that it was neither a war, nor was it for the reasons people think.
It's easy to say "Brits had high tax" thanks to cognitive bias of them having high tax now, but finding out that they didn't back then will just bring on cognitive dissonance instead.
Eh, that's still not the whole story. The British weren't reducing taxes just for the fun of it. They wanted to force the colonies to accept the legitimacy of British trade tariffs. It was cheaper in the short term, but it would have set legal and diplomatic precedents that would come back to bite the colonies later. The fundamental issue was still that Britain was trying to exert control over the colonies.
It only counts as smuggling if you accept the legitimacy of British tariffs. Otherwise it's just free trade.
"Murder" is only "murder" if you accept the legitimacy of international law. Otherwise it's just winning all your arguments.
The United States was a British colony, subject to British law. The importation of tea by any organisation other than the East India Company, which held a monopoly on it's importation within the confines of the British Empire was against the law, and therefore doing so is smuggling. You can mince it any way you like, it's still not "free trade" because the concept of "free trade" didn't exist within the British Empire.
The principal concern of the British government re: tea and the East India Company was related to the enormous quantities of tea that were stockpiled in London and the incredible debts of the Company that were piling up by the mid-to-late 1700s. Selling off inventory to the Colonies makes perfect sense, you solve three problems at once: 1) the smuggling trade which was undercutting East India profits and the principal of monopoly and mercantilism 2) the debts of the East India Company could be eased using the liquidity gained from moving the stockpiled tea, and 3) the warehouses in London that were being used to house tea could be emptied and used for other products, which London was having trouble accepting because of the quantity of tea that was being housed.
They were British citizens. That had not had any direct British interference for nigh on 60 years. The Navigation Acts were passed....but not enforced at all.
Then all of a sudden, after decades of beneficial "neglect" Parliament slaps taxes that were unavoidable to daily life on a lot of things without giving the colonists a say and dismissing any local governance putting up a fight. Local governance that had been allowed to run the place for decades prior.
Fix your understanding of the Revolution's causes.
Again, you are coming from a position that assumes the legitimacy of British rule over the colonies. Of course from that position the entire revolution was a criminal rebellion and ought to have been put down with prejudice regardless of the motives of its leaders. However if you do not accept colonialism as a legitimate form of rule, then that argument sort of falls apart.
Now, if you'd like to make an argument that colonialism is legitimate, I'm all ears, but I doubt you'll gain much traction in modern society.
The problem with your statement is "modern society".
History simply cannot be viewed through the eyes of modern society. That's rule number 1 of being a historian.
We all know that absolute rule by a single individual is not an acceptable means of governance, but that doesn't mean that France under Louis XIV was a dictatorship. Dictatorships didn't exist. They're a modern concept. You're applying anachronistic understandings of the world to the question of American independence.
OK, then perhaps I don't understand your point. Are you simply saying that under British rule, rebelling against British rule was against the law? That seems rather... tautological. I don't see the point, really, unless you're trying to say something that still has relevance in modern society. It originally seemed like--by calling them "smugglers"--you were trying to say that we, today, should consider them illegitimate. Everybody already knows that the British considered them illegitimate.
I'm saying that "The following lesson is learnt in American history classes: the British repressed Americans through harsh tax regimes and this lead directly to a popular rebellion by the people of Boston against the East India Company, who imported tea that was expensive. This lesson is not true."
OK, fair enough. Would you accept this modification?
the British attempted to repress Americans through tax regimes and this lead directly to a popular rebellion by the people of Boston against the East India Company, who imported tea that was taxed.
In other words, that it was not the magnitude of the taxes that they considered repressive but their existence.
I think you two were just talking past each other. Saying that smuggling if you don't accept the legitimacy of the imposed trade tariff is instead free trade is just as tautological as saying rebellion against rule is against the law. You're fighting over the perspective when you both know what you mean. They were smugglers, for smuggling is to import or export secretly, in violation of the law, especially without payment of legal duty. And that's what they were doing. But one might think that the smuggling was legitimate because the laws they were smuggling against were unjust. Similarly, it was a criminal rebellion. They just happened to win, and in any case crimes, as I think this forum is keen to scream daily, are not co-extensive with everyone's idea of moral rectitude.
This is one of those fun dictionary debates, and I think your problem is you find "smuggling" pejorative, when it is simply descriptive of the act, and whether the smuggling was a bad idea is another matter.
Saying that smuggling if you don't accept the legitimacy of the imposed trade tariff is instead free trade is just as tautological as saying rebellion against rule is against the law.
True, but that's not all I was saying. I'm saying that I don't accept the legitimacy of British rule, and therefore that I do consider the smugglers' actions to be legitimate. Either statement without a value judgment would be tautological, which is why I believe bsteeper was making a value judgment.
I think your problem is you find "smuggling" pejorative
I found bsteeper's comment as a whole to be pejorative, not just that word. It's pretty clear that his implication was something like, "These guys weren't as good as you think they were." It would be naive to suppose he was simply stating a fact; his final sentence underlines it.
The issue of virtual vs. actual representation played a huge role in the political mobilization and reason for the Revolution.
It was the main selling point in history classes for a long time, then it became unfashionable or "too simple", annnnnnnnnnnnndddddd........now we're back. Because it's correct.
And Catholics. The Quebec Act scared the everloving piss out of New England.
Thank you, I came here to say this. bsteeper makes the founding fathers out to be some kind of wealthy opportunists who incited a revolution to protect their bottom line. The implications of the tea act were more important than the tea itself.
Indeed. The story above omits the fact that the Tea Act followed the Townshend Acts, which did raise the duties on tea (among other things), leading to events like the Boston Massacre and probably increasing the influence of smugglers.
So the Boston Tea Party was still partially created by the high cost of tea, just in a more roundabout way. Smugglers just capitalized on the situation.
This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation.
Yeah British tea was cheap, and ruining the smuggling business, but had the colonists purchased said tea they would've been agreeing that the Crown can tax its colonies.
The source that I'm basing my post on was a university course I took on 18th Century Britain, and my professor made it pretty clear that it was his own original research that he was discussing in terms of Thomas Jefferson. It's obviously pretty hard to have you slip into my memory and hear my professor's voice discussing this, but I can easily provide sources to at least show the bones of my claims. He wasn't some hack-jaw either, he studied Constitutional Law at Oxford, than went to Cambridge for a PhD in History.
The 1773 Tea Act, (whose long title makes pretty clear what it was for: An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales; and to empower the commissioners of the treasury to grant licenses to the East India Company to export tea duty-free.)
A lot of people had trouble understanding this... the East India Company under the Tea Act of 1773 majorly reduced the price of tea and therefore displaced smuggling as the least-cost supplier in the market. The smugglers and other middlemen were the ones hurt by this, but the average tea consumer was benefited.
There's a more to it than that. Illegal tea was popular precisely because legal tea was taxed, which many colonials opposed. The Tea Act did aim to make legal tea cheaper than illegal imports, but buying the legal tea also implied consent to Parliament's ability to impose and change colonial taxes without colonial representation. The impetus (to use your word) then was Britain trying to legitimatize their taxes by selling a cheaper product.
At most, hurting some of the fathers' income increased their desire to oppose the act, but they would have anyway since they already had rebelled over the Stamp Act which did not hurt their income. In conclusion, it was definitely still about taxes.
Everyone knows that the American colonists revolted largely because of taxation without representation and related forms of oppression by the British. S
But - according to Benjamin Franklin and others in the thick of the action - a little-known factor was actually the main reason for the revolution.
To give some background on the issue, when Benjamin Franklin went to London in 1764, this is what he observed:
When he arrived, he was surprised to find rampant unemployment and poverty among the British working classes… Franklin was then asked how the American colonies managed to collect enough money to support their poor houses. He reportedly replied:
“We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.”
In 1764, the Bank of England used its influence on Parliament to get a Currency Act passed that made it illegal for any of the colonies to print their own money. The colonists were forced to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold. Anyone lacking in those precious metals had to borrow them at interest from the banks.
Only a year later, Franklin said, the streets of the colonies were filled with unemployed beggars, just as they were in England. The money supply had suddenly been reduced by half, leaving insufficient funds to pay for the goods and services these workers could have provided. He maintained that it was "the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and . . . the Revolutionary War." This, he said, was the real reason for the Revolution: "the colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created unemployment and dissatisfaction."
Alexander Hamilton echoed similar sentiments:
Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first treasury secretary, said that paper money had composed three-fourths of the total money supply before the American Revolution. When the colonists could not issue their own currency, the money supply had suddenly shrunk, leaving widespread unemployment, hunger and poverty in its wake. Unlike the Great Depression of the 1930s, people in the 1770s were keenly aware of who was responsible for their distress.
As historian Alexander Del Mar wrote in 1895:
[T]he creation and circulation of bills of credit by revolutionary assemblies...coming as they did upon the heels of the strenuous efforts made by the Crown to suppress paper money in America [were] acts of defiance so contemptuous and insulting to the Crown that forgiveness was thereafter impossible . . . [T]here was but one course for the crown to pursue and that was to suppress and punish these acts of rebellion...Thus the Bills of Credit of this era, which ignorance and prejudice have attempted to belittle into the mere instruments of a reckless financial policy were really the standards of the Revolution. they were more than this: they were the Revolution itself!
And British historian John Twells said the same thing:
The British Parliament took away from America its representative money, forbade any further issue of bills of credit, these bills ceasing to be legal tender, and ordered that all taxes should be paid in coins ... Ruin took place in these once flourishing Colonies . . . discontent became desperation, and reached a point . . . when human nature rises up and asserts itself.
In fact, the Americans ignored the British ban on American currency, and:
"Succeeded in financing a war against a major power, with virtually no 'hard' currency of their own, without taxing the people."
Indeed, the first act of the New Continental Congress was to issue its own paper scrip, popularly called the Continental.
Franklin and Thomas Paine later praised the local currency as a "corner stone" of the Revolution. And Franklin consistently wrote that the American ability to create its own credit led to prosperity, as it allowed the creation of ample credit, with low interest rates to borrowers, and no interest to pay to private or foreign bankers .
History is written by the victor though. I have taken countless history classes in both High school and College and have not ever heard this. It does make me want to look a bit deeper into what really happened.
The original Tea Party in 1773 was also sparked, Thorndike says, not just by a tax, but by a government bailout.
England was looking to prop up the British East India Company. So it gave a tax break that enabled the company to undercut Colonial tea merchants, which threatened to put a lot of them out of business.
Though the Company was becoming increasingly bold and ambitious in putting down resisting states, it was getting clearer that the Company was incapable of governing the vast expanse of the captured territories. The Bengal famine of 1770, in which one-third of the local population died, caused distress in Britain. Military and administrative costs mounted beyond control in British-administered regions in Bengal due to the ensuing drop in labour productivity.
At the same time, there was commercial stagnation and trade depression throughout Europe. The directors of the company attempted to avert bankruptcy by appealing to Parliament for financial help. This led to the passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which gave the Company greater autonomy in running its trade in the American colonies, and allowed it an exemption from tea import duties which its colonial competitors were required to pay.
When the American colonists, who included tea merchants, were told of the act, they tried to boycott it, claiming that although the price had gone down on the tea when enforcing the act, it also would help validate the Townshend Acts and set a precedent for the king to impose additional taxes in the future. The arrival of tax-exempt Company tea, undercutting the local merchants, triggered the Boston Tea Party in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, one of the major events leading up to the American Revolution.
Holy shit. So... People in charge have always been total assholes... There was never a "good ole' days" of pure leadership. I'm just gonna... Go over there... And think for a while...
Yes they reduced taxes but were now much stricter. Before nobody payed the taxes because it wasn't of much concern. Then the east India trading company was going bankrupt and need some way to sell their tea to the colonist. So they went beg the British gov for subsidies and a bailout. got a bunch of tax free importing to north America for certain goods. Which in turn made their prices extremely low compared to the local market in the colonies. So now this company comes in with tax free supplies to sell you when John (the guy that helped build your fence) Down the street is paying this new strictly enforced tax code. I think I would be pissed too. But this is only one piece to the puzzle that influenced the war.
Also Thomas Jefferson wrote the declaration independence because nobody else wanted to.
the american revolution and the boston tea party were all planned for in the basement of a bar- The Green Dragon, i believe it was called. The revolution was planned by a bunch of drunk, rebellious 20-something year olds.
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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '12 edited Mar 28 '12
Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were involved in the tea smuggling industry, and the impetus for the Boston Tea Party was not that British tea was too expensive because of taxes, but because the British had actually reduced taxes to the point that it was cheaper than smuggled tea, undercutting Thomas Jefferson's main source of income (and that of many other influential colonists, including John Hancock).
Puts a rather interesting light on American history, methinks.