1773
IN DECEMBER 1773 THREE BRITISH MERCHANT ships lay at anchor in the harbour of Boston, Massachusetts, their holds filled with forty-five tons of tea. Packed in 342 wooden chests, there was enough of the dried leaf, it has been calculated, to brew twenty-four million cups of tea – and, offloaded from an overproduction in India, it was going at a bargain price.
Yet the tea seemed no bargain to the citizens of Boston who, for more than a decade, had been tussling with the British government over the troublesome question of tax. As London saw it, the two and a half million inhabitants of North America’s thirteen colonies should pay for the protection provided by the British troops stationed there. But many Americans resented the meddling of a government that was three thousand miles away. In 1763, for instance, London had halted the colonists’ land-grab of native ‘Indian’ territories by drawing the ‘Proclamation Line’ along the Appalachian Mountains, creating a boundary beyond which the colonists were forbidden to seize or purchase native land.
Over the years a succession of British governments had first imposed, then withdrawn, a variety of taxes and customs duties in the face of colonial non-compliance and opposition. But tea was the exception, retained by London less to raise revenue than to defend a point of principle. ‘There must always be one tax to keep up the right,’ declared King George III, who had succeeded his grandfather George II in 1760. ‘And as such I approve of the tea duty.’
On the night of 16 December 1773, a group of fifty activists showed what they thought of the royal claim. Painting their faces with red ochre and lamp-black and dressing in blankets to disguise themselves as Indian warriors, these tomahawk-wielding ‘Mohawks’ boarded the three British merchantmen to smash open the tea chests and spill their cargoes into the waters of Boston harbour. Next morning, rowing-boats steered out into the brown slurry to push any still-floating cases under the water and make sure that the hated British tea was well and truly ruined.
‘No taxation without representation!’ declaimed Samuel Adams, the local brewer whose oratory had helped inspire the demonstration.
Britain’s reaction to Boston’s act of defiance was split. Lord Chatham, who, as William Pitt, had masterminded Britain’s victories in the Seven Years War, counselled conciliation. He knew how difficult a long-distance quarrel with the colonies could prove, and he called for Britain to pull back from the dispute ‘while we can, not when we must’. But George III and his Prime Minister, Lord North, felt that the colonists must be compelled to show more respect for the ‘mother country’. So the port of Boston was closed and troops were sent to reinforce the garrison.
The colonists refused to be cowed. Money and supplies poured in to sustain the Boston population and local resistance forces were raised, the so-called minutemen who kept their weapons ready so they could fight the redcoats at a minute’s notice. In April 1775 they clashed with British troops at the village of Lexington outside Boston. America’s war with the mother country had begun.
On 4 July 1776 the representatives of all thirteen colonies gathered in Philadelphia as the ‘United States’, to pronounce their defiance in a Declaration of Independence. Most of its clauses recited their grievances and denounced George III – ‘a prince whose character is marked by every act that may define a tyrant’. But the historic declaration is remembered today for the preamble which its framer, Thomas Jefferson, a radical young lawyer, drew from the thinking of John Locke: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
In the five years of war that followed, the colonists’ forces were shrewdly led by George Washington, a Virginia landowner who had learned his fighting as a British officer during the Seven Years War. Far from home and fighting in impossible terrain, some of it dense forest, Britain’s redcoats steadily lost ground – particularly after 1778 when France weighed in on the American side. It was the arrival of the French fleet in Chesapeake Bay in October 1781 that led to the final surrender of the British forces, who marched out of Yorktown to the tune ‘The World Turned Upside Down’.
‘Oh God,’ declared Lord North when he received the news, ‘it is all over.’
So America had won its liberty, creating a new republic in which all men were created equal – except for those who happened to be slaves. Four of the first five US presidents were slave-owners, including Washington and Jefferson.
‘How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty,’ asked Samuel Johnson derisively, ‘come from the drivers of negroes?’
And then there was the plight of the new republic’s pre-existing underclass, the native Americans. Independence meant the end of the Proclamation Line with which Britain had protected the enticing expanses of native territories. The white ‘Mohawks’ of the Boston Tea Party had borrowed the warpaint of the ‘Red Indians’. Now they were free to take over their land.