The most historical instance of protesting against taxation without representation is now being taught in Texas schools as a terrorist act.
As recently as January of this year, the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative included a lesson plan that depicted the Boston Tea Party, an event that helped ignite the American Revolution, as an act of terrorism. TheBlaze reports that in a lesson promoted on the TESCCC site as recently as January, a world history/social studies class plan depicted the Boston Tea Party as being anything but patriotic, causing many people to become upset with the lack of transparency and review for lessons.
Myths of the American Revolution: A Noted Historian Debunks the Conventional Wisdom About America’s War of Independence
We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history.
Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most significant myths of the Revolutionary War are reassessed.
I. Great Britain Did Not Know What It Was Getting Into
In the course of England’s long and unsuccessful attempt to crush the American Revolution, the myth arose that its government, under Prime Minister Frederick, Lord North, had acted in haste. Accusations circulating at the time—later to become conventional wisdom—held that the nation’s political leaders had failed to comprehend the gravity of the challenge.
Actually, the British cabinet, made up of nearly a score of ministers, first considered resorting to military might as early as January 1774, when word of the Boston Tea Party reached London. (Recall that on December 16, 1773, protesters had boarded British vessels in Boston Harbor and destroyed cargoes of tea, rather than pay a tax imposed by Parliament.) Contrary to popular belief both then and now, Lord North’s government did not respond impulsively to the news. Throughout early 1774, the prime minister and his cabinet engaged in lengthy debate on whether coercive actions would lead to war. A second question was considered as well: Could Britain win such a war?
When did the Boston Tea Party become the pivotal event we know today? Certainly not at the time or the following 50 years. The dumping of tea into the harbor was n act of defiance to be sure, but defiance against whom- the British or the local governing body? One local congressman referred to the act as one of petty crime and no more.
Some argue the events at Boston Harbor were primarily about commercial interests, a view that prevailed for a long time. Only later on did the meaning of those events take on a more ideological turn.
By many accounts the Boston Tea Party was about class warfare, the haves and have nots.
At the time, the event that took place in Boston on the night of December 16, 1773 was not called the “Tea Party.” For more than 50 years, if it was mentioned at all in print, it was usually as “the destruction of the tea.” Bostonians never celebrated it as they did their triumphs over other British measures. Patriot leaders cited the Indian disguises worn by some in the boarding parties in order to deny responsibility for the affair and claim it was the work of outsiders.
By mid-1774, after Britain closed the port as punishment and a British army once again occupied the town, it was hardly politic to claim credit for it. Nor, as rebellion turned to revolution, did it fit the pose patriots assumed as the victims of British aggression. In Paul Revere’s classic engraving of the Boston Massacre, a line of British soldiers fires on a group of hapless civilians at the command of their officer, and in the depiction of the Battle of Lexington the soldier James Pike carved on his powder horn, the men on one side of the iconic Liberty Tree are “Regulars, the Aggressors” and on the other side “Provincials Defending.” The carefully planned, disciplined action of a hundred and more men boarding three ships docked at Griffin’s Wharf, hoisting 342 heavy chests of tea out of the holds, hacking them open with axes, and dumping their contents into the harbor could hardly be portrayed as defense against aggression.
Since then, “owning” the Tea Party has been a political act. Partisans of today’s Tea Party movement have seized on it as a symbol of defiance of government, claiming the founders were united in opposition to taxation (with or without representation), government regulation, and spending. But Tea Party advocates seem indifferent to the original event. When Glenn Beck devoted an episode of his since-cancelled Fox News show to celebrating Samuel Adams, one of the Boston Tea Party organizers, he was mainly concerned with depicting Adams as a neglected Christian patriot. And when Sarah Palin spoke on the Boston Common in 2010, she had nothing at all to say about either the deliberations in Old South Meeting House that set the stage for the event or about the action itself at the waterfront.
The reluctance of today’s Tea Party to explore the history is not surprising given the thrust of recent historical scholarship on the resistance movements that led to the American Revolution. In the newly released Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, Benjamin Carp demonstrates that the Tea Party and Boston’s revolutionary culture emerged in good part from the influence on elites of what conservative contemporaries dismissed as the “lowest ranks” of the people or “rabble.” And in The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America, Barbara Clark Smith, extends this argument about popular influence to the colonies as a whole. Moreover, she shows that a “Patriot coalition”—in contrast to the present-day Tea Party—sought “public power to counteract the coercions of the market.”