Tea Party II
For those of us old enough to remember the great national party of 1976, it’s a shock to find ourselves facing a new anniversary – 250 years of nationhood. Already? Yes, here we are again, and with Dec. 16, 2023, the commemoration begins.
During the evening hours of Dec. 16, 1773, a group of men with blackened faces, wrapped in blankets, some bearing feathers in their hair, boarded three ships in Boston harbor, lifted 342 lead-lined chests of tea from the holds, whacked them apart with hatchets, and spilled the contents overboard. In accounts of the
American Revolution, this event is termed the “Boston Tea Party.”
The British crown and parliament were not amused. What followed – military occupation of
Boston, the Continental Congress, Paul Revere, the battle of Lexington and Concord, George Washington, the Continental Army, etc. etc. – took 10 years to settle, with the Treaty of Paris granting the colonies independence and the possession of a big swath of North America. So we must prepare ourselves to face quite a few celebratory moments ahead.
Seems a lot of bother over tea. But it wasn’t tea, it was taxes (sound familiar?). A tax on tea, and taxation without representation. Should the British parliament, without any members from Massachusetts, Georgia, or even Virginia, make laws for folks in North America?
“No,” said Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and a covey of other rabble rousers. For 10 years they had filled newspapers with reams of arguments, demonstrating that the government in London had no right to tax the colonies. The British, naturally, disagreed, and occasionally authorities considered arresting these traitors who fomented unrest and occasional riots.
As a consequence of the Tea Party, the British government finally took action. Redcoats camped on the Boston Commons. Naval ships blocked imports, leaving housewives struggling to find bread to put on the table. The possibility of imprisonment or even a death sentence cast a shadow over protests. Two hundred and fifty years later, we know how things turned out, that in the end they triumphed. But Bostonians had no way to be certain of a glorious future.
So perhaps it’s proper that we take the time to remember the men and women of Boston, far away in time and place, who planted their feet, their pens, their voices, their rifles, firmly on the notion that all people have the right to choose their government. In the face of a whirl of government investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, questioning, interrogating, not one of the thousands of Bostonians who gathered on the wharf that night, ever named a participant in the “party.” To this day, the names of the tea destroyers are unknown.
Besides a theory of government, the consequences of the Boston Tea Party echo through American society, beginning at breakfast. During those frantic years of revolution, no true patriot would think of brewing a pot of tea. How then to counter the shaking hands and headache of a caffeine-less morning?
Coffee. Coffee houses, coffee pots, dozens of inventions claiming to brew a better cup of joe, cozy eateries called cafés, coffee breaks, and coffee cakes. American merchant ships sailed to North Africa, where the precious beans originated, and eventually into a war with the Barbary pirates.
Tea sank so low in American regard that it became the beverage of the sick room and afternoon gatherings of posh ladies in silly hats.
Families bound for new frontier homes packed coffee along with their spinning wheels and plows, and any entrepreneur who set up a store beside his log cabin knew to include coffee in his orders to the suppliers back east. Exploring parties and fur trappers made sure the bags slung onto their mules contained plenty of coffee. When Edward
Kern, in the 1840s, ventured through the Owens Valley, he and his comrades faced a shortage of food, slaughtering horses against starvation, but they still had a supply of coffee to carry them across Walker Pass.
Not too long ago, authorities of an Oxford college, considering a program with an American university, asked how they might handle an influx of “Yanks.”
The answer was simple. “Buy a coffee urn.”
(Marty Voght has, through a long life in history, written scholarly articles, film scripts, humor, and romance novels. She finished her master’s degree in the history of Western America at Cali State Northridge, and has studied various topics in European history at University of Oxford. She lives in Aspendell.)