In Boston 250 years ago this week, on Dec. 16, 1773, a throng of radical patriots called the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, swarmed aboard three British ships in the harbor, broke open 342 crates of Ceylon and Darjeeling tea worth almost 10,000 pounds — nearly $2 million in today's money — and spent the next three hours dumping the contents into the water.
The Boston Tea Party, as the event soon became known, has been hailed ever since as an admirable act of civil disobedience. When I first learned about the American Revolution in grade school, the famous raid by the Sons of Liberty was presented as an intrepid show of resistance by Massachusetts colonists chafing under British rule — a heroic blow for freedom and a noble step in the liberation of the American colonies from King George. That is the view embraced in Boston's annual reenactment of the event, celebrated on US postage stamps, and portrayed in popular art and culture from Currier & Ives to Hollywood.
It was also the view of John Adams, who wrote in his diary that the destruction of the tea had been "most magnificent" and gushed: "There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire."
I've come to a different view.
The events preceding the Tea Party were complicated. Parliament had imposed a modest duty on tea sold in the American colonies, triggering a widespread boycott. Many Americans turned to illegally smuggled Dutch tea, which they could buy for less than the taxed English product. When that caused financial distress for the British East India Company, Parliament responded by exempting it from the tax. That instantly brought down the price of English tea — but it also undercut local merchants, unleashing new outrage.
So when half a million pounds of tea were shipped by the East India Company to America in the fall of 1773, the opposition was intense. In New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, S.C., protesters prevented the tea from being unloaded; the ships' captains eventually decided to return to England with their cargo and avoid a potential confrontation with angry activists.
But in Massachusetts the reaction was different. Three British ships — the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver — arrived in Boston in late November. They too encountered a hostile atmosphere and could not unload their cargo. But the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, refused to let the ships leave the harbor. The standoff continued for several weeks. At last, during a meeting at the Old South Meeting House, Samuel Adams gave a prearranged signal and the Sons of Liberty, armed with axes and hatchets, blackened their faces and swung into action, shouting "Boston Harbor, a teapot tonight!"
When word of the destruction reached London, Parliament retaliated with fury. It closed Boston's port, suspended Massachusetts' elected assembly, and authorized the governor to quarter British troops in public buildings. "In a single stroke," Yale historian Mark Peterson wrote in "The City-State of Boston," Massachusetts was transformed "from a self-governing commonwealth into a military autocracy." That only intensified Boston's resentment of British rule, and helped set the stage for the outbreak of rebellion in 1775 at Lexington and Concord.
How should we regard the events of that night 250 years ago? Was it really an act of heroism to destroy 46 tons of tea? Was that massive and costly act of vandalism to private property justified by the protesters' anger at Britain's policy on tea?
I revere the founders of the American republic and rejoice in the independence they ultimately wrested from Great Britain. I have only disdain for the "woke" view of history that regards the United States, in the words of a 2017 essay in The New Yorker, as "a mistake from the start." I am profoundly grateful that I had the good fortune to be born an American. But that doesn't change the fact that destroying other people's property to advance a political cause is wrong. It is wrong whether the cause is right-wing or left-wing. It is wrong whether the cause is racial equity, climate change, opposing a war, overturning an election, or denouncing Wall Street. It is wrong in 2023 and it was wrong in 1773.
Hostility to the Tea Act of 1773 was entirely defensible. But the Sons of Liberty didn't have to destroy a vast fortune in tea to make their point. After all, anti-British patriots in other cities had managed to block the English tea without causing damage.
There are times when breaking a wrongful law is the only way to effectively advocate for justice. But an essential element of committing civil disobedience is to face the consequences. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: "One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty." That was not what happened at the Boston Tea Party. The attackers were in disguise, and most of them fled or went into hiding as soon as it was over.
I share the view of Benjamin Franklin, who deplored the vandalism of the Tea Party. He was "truly concern'd," he wrote, "that there should seem to any a Necessity for carrying Matters to such Extremity, as, in a Dispute about Publick Rights, to destroy private Property." The East India Company, he observed pointedly, "are not our Adversaries."
George Washington, too, was dismayed by what the hotheads in New England had done. "The cause of Boston ... now is and ever will be considered as the cause of America," he wrote from Virginia. But in his very next words, he condemned "their conduct in destroying the Tea."
It can be all too easy to justify — or glorify — violence in the name of a popular political movement. Zealots like to tell themselves that the destruction they wreak is honorable. Usually it is indefensible. To be sure, history is sometimes kind to the vandals, as it was to the men with axes in Boston's wharf in 1773. But that is no excuse for doing the wrong thing. Even when you're on the right side of history, you have an obligation to act rightly.
Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe
