Last weekend, Beantown celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.  We’re on our way to the Semiquincentennial of American Independence in 2026!

The Boston Tea Party was important, in part because it set into motion events that would blow up in the start of the American Revolution 16 months in the future.  Seventeen seventy-four would be a somewhat dull year, where lines were being drawn.  After the December 16, 1773 Tea Party, the British resolved to punish the bandits who acted like non-teetotalers through a series of “Coercive Acts.”

Boston Harbor was closed until the tea was paid for (even though it was an otherwise “peaceful” protest by modern standards).  British Redcoats were stationed in Massachusetts and entitled to claim quarters in the “insurrectionists’” homes.  (The Tea Party did, after all, threaten to interfere with an official government act: because the governor promised to unload the tea for customs inspection, the participants clearly had an insurrection brewing.)  Trial of crimes of which the establishment was accused was assured a favorable change of venue (to England).  And, in April 1775, when the Redcoats moved out toward two villages — Lexington and Concord — to seize the arms of these violent people, those farmers bitterly clung to their guns and Bibles. 

American history, however, suffers from two problems.  On the one hand, we don’t teach it well, and we expect people even less to remember it, much less draw conclusions from it.  On the other hand, when we do “teach” it, it is often larded with ideological interpretations that say more about the teacher than what is taught.

Take the Boston Tea Party.  In some ways, it’s the consummate expression of the Revolutionary slogan, “No taxation without representation!” 

But let’s unpack that slogan.  The issue was not primarily economic.  It was not about tax tables: the Brits’ was too high, the Americans’ too low.  It’s not that Massachusetts men were not “paying their fair share.”  It was not first and foremost about money.

Nor was it directly about politics.  It’s not that the colonists would have been happy if “the gentleman from Boston” had been seated next to “the M.P. from Boston in Lincolnshire.”  Both sides knew that, under 18th-century conditions, “representation” in Westminster was not practical. 

So, was this just a coy way by which the Americans figured, “Heads, I win; tails, you lose?”  “I want representation, but since there’s no way you can provide it, you can’t tax me.” 

No, because the real problem at the root of this all were differing notions about the size and proximity of government.

To borrow a favorite Pope Francis word, North America was a “periphery” for England.  From the arrival of the first colonists some 150 years before the Tea Party, it served two purposes: it was a raw materials source that was a guaranteed monopoly British export market, and it was a place to dump people England “didn’t want too many of” — like Puritanical religious troublemakers (who could make trouble in Massachusetts or Connecticut) or deadbeat debtors (who could settle Georgia and die if the Spaniards moved north from Florida).

Americans and Brits had gotten used to roughly a century and a half — about seven generations — of “benign neglect.”  When, in response to war with France, the Redcoats showed up to protect the American colonies (and add Canadian ones), that relationship changed.  The Brits came...and they didn’t seem to want to leave.

That meant a bigger, more intrusive government than that to which Americans had grown accustomed.  It was also likely a less accountable one: it was one thing to deal with your neighbor in the New England Town Meeting (which the Coercive Acts limited), another to deal with His Majesty’s bureaucrat dispatched from London.  And you want me to pay for all this with no say about it?

On the other hand, the arrangements looked great if you were British.  All sorts of potential sinecures opening up that other people would pay for.  What a deal!

The important thing to note here is that Americans had experienced, liked, and wanted to continue small, limited government.  The post-1763 British vision for North America seemed to threaten that, imposing unaccountable bigger government by others paid for by them.

So it wasn’t about the tax rates.  It was about how big a government those ratables would buy.

It’s important we remember this, because it says small, limited government is in America’s DNA.  Americans want accountable government, not big government.  The American Revolution is actually a rather conservative affair — not about expanding government, but about cutting it down to size. 

The editors of National Review brought out key points of this vision in their masterful editorial on the Tea Party.  But we should not forget the Tea Party’s applicability to our day.  There’s a reason that the limited-government conservatives who stood athwart big government back in 2009 were called the “Tea Party.” 

Before the revisionists try to rewrite our historical memory (and don’t be surprised at how many attempts to rewrite U.S. history will appear in the next few years), let’s stop for a moment.  Let’s recapture an awareness of what those cultural appropriators who boarded the Dartmouth, Beaver, and Eleanor, throwing so much Earl Grey to the bottom of Boston Harbor, were really fighting for...and what they were fighting against.

Image via Picryl.