Debating the Boston Tea Party

On the night of December 16, 1773, colonists in Boston forcibly boarded the trading ship Dartmouth and dumped the bulk of her cargo, 340 chests of tea, overboard. The men broke open each chest before they heaved it over, exposing the delicate, dried leaves inside. As each chest hit the brackish water the tea inside was flooded and ruined, never to be drunk—or have taxes paid on it—by colonial consumers. What thousands of pounds of tea gently steeping in the Boston Harbor portended for the future of the British Empire was murky.

The news took weeks to cross the wintry Atlantic, shocking and outraging the public. Britons prided themselves on having the freest, most enlightened constitutional monarchy in the world. Why were colonists acting this way? Could they be at all justified? How must Britain respond? In a robust print debate, authors raised a host of thorny questions that penetrated to the heart of the nature of empire. 

One pamphleteer, the anonymous author of America Vindicated from the High Charge of Ingratitude and Rebellion, defended Americans and blamed “the many weak, oppressive measures” of leaders like Lord Hillsborough for the present crisis. The American colonists were, in fact, “an injured people,” harmed by misjudged taxes to which they had not consented. While the destruction of the tea had been wrong, Britain could not do worse now than to “exert the false honor and dignity of Parliament.” The pamphlet’s author urged Britain to avoid “ill-advised, compulsive methods, which would only exacerbate the rift”. Instead, Britain must, in effect, take a deep breath, remember how important North America was to its economy, and consider that to keep it through military force would be impossible. The colonies were growing quickly, and their collective population would soon exceed that of the mother country. Britain must therefore “draw them by the gentle cords of Humanity and Love.” To keep them through force was impossible and “absurd.”[1]

John Gray, author of The Right of the British Legislature to Tax the American Colonies Vindicated, could not have disagreed more. In fact, Britain had been far too permissive up to this point. Meanwhile, the colonists acted selfishly, immorally, and “directly contradictory to the principles of the British constitution.” He urged political remedies, but insinuated darkly how easy it would be to burn the ports of Halifax, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia “without interruption” should the colonists remain obstinate.[2]

Gray dismantled colonists’ arguments that their political compact existed exclusively with the king and not Parliament. Though the Crown had granted the original colonial charters, to be sure, Gray scoffed that “new discovered lands are vested in the crown as head of the state, not as [his] private property.” Colonists pointed to a long history in which Parliament had not interfered with them, but “what follows from that?”, Gray asked. Stuart kings had attempted to govern in England itself without Parliament “and both were unconstitutional.” In fact, colonists held their land not from the king, but from the “nation collectively united in the supreme legislative body.” Gray accused the colonists of attempting to roll back the primacy of the representative legislature, hard-won in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. “Who would have expected to have found such very zealous advocates for royal prerogative among the puritannical inhabitants of New England,” he mused.[3]

For Gray, Parliament had every right to legislate in all cases whatsoever for the colonists, who in turn had a duty to obey. The “supreme power” in the empire lay in “the united wills of the king, lords, and representatives of the people in parliament assembled,” and it could not be divided. Colonists owed their liberties, their lands, and their safety to that empire and therefore the taxes necessary to fund it were not a matter of “free gift given at the pleasure of the individual” but a necessity and a duty. “The right of taxation is not in the people,” Gray explained, and even in Britain itself, only a tiny fraction of inhabitants voted directly for members of Parliament. Instead, the “Supreme Superintending Power,” which was Parliament, had the right to require the funds to support itself. Such a power “makes part of its very essence. There can no more be a sovereignty without it, than there can be a man without a living soul.”[4] 

Gray stood the colonists’ argument about taxation without consent on its head. He endeavored to prove that the political economy of the empire served the mother country, and justly so, but that the arrangement made the American colonies rich and easy. Britain asked no more than “one fortieth part of the income of the colonies,” indulgently leaving them “untaxed in a just proportion with their fellow-subjects.” But by “factiously and unjustly” refusing to pay their taxes, the colonists only made the “burdens” of ordinary British subjects “the heavier.” “By withdrawing themselves from taxation,” Gray averred, the colonists were “actually taxing Great Britain without her own consent.”[5]

For all else they differed, the authors of America Vindicated and the British Legislature… Vindicated yet agreed on one fundamental point: the multitude of colonial governments was a problem. “HERE LIES THE DISEASE!” thundered the otherwise sympathetic author of America Vindicated. Eighteen separate governments resulted in a system “manifestly defective” which made it difficult to “harmonize and co-operate in one design.” Gray agreed. “In every civilized state, there must be, somewhere a Supreme all-controling Power,” he argued.[6] 

Gray’s solution was clear: the colonists must submit to Parliament. If they did not, he recommended the king take extreme actions, including revoking all the colonial charters and passing laws rendering all colonists aliens rather than citizens of the British empire until they obeyed Parliament.[7] 

America Vindicated took a different approach. “If the consent of the whole people is indispensably necessary to every law…the most obvious remedy would be, to consolidate all their little Parliaments into ONE,” he proposed. Such a North American legislature would facilitate colonists’ consent while rescuing the empire from the “defects” of the provincial constitutions which were in many cases too beholden to “popularity”—that is, responsive to public opinion. A colonial Parliament, with upper house and lord lieutenant appointed by the king, would operate at a further remove from “popular lees, and narrow party considerations.” Anticipating James Madison’s advocacy for a strong federal government thirteen years later, the author of America Vindicated believed that a continental system would guard against the excesses of local control and create a “firm and lasting Union.”[8]

At the core of the debate between America Vindicated and the British Legislature… Vindicated was one fundamental question. Were American colonists Britons or were they something else? Put another way, were they part of the whole or were they distinct? 

For all his vitriol, Gray clearly advocated that Americans were British citizens with all the rights and, he emphasized, the duties pertaining thereto. “The colonists… when it serves their purpose, are perpetually considering their interests as different from those of the state” he fumed. But this was “absurd.” Like a ship on the sea, “the colonies and the people of Great Britain, are all embarked on board the same vessel, and it is equally the interest of all of them, that the vessel be properly navigated, and always in a state of defence.” All hands could not at once “consult in the cabin,” but all must work together “as the Commanding Power directs.” Though the colonists pointed to long histories of separate settlement, they remained an integral part of the empire. “The colonists are not a new people,” Gray explained. They are “our fellow-subjects.” Now, they “seditiously aim[ed] at unconstitutional independence,” but if they planned to separate, they “must first move off from the lands belonging to their mother country” because the king (or Parliament) could no more lay off “a community independent of the kingdom, than he can create a new planet.” It was precisely because Gray considered the colonists to be enfolded in the rights, protections, and obligations of the British constitution that his threat to take legal action to alienate them—revoke their citizenship—was the most dangerous threat in his angry pamphlet. It was only after this threat that he raised the specter of burning port cities.[9]

By contrast, for all his apparent sympathy, the author of America Vindicated saw the colonists as something separate from Britain. He introduced his essay as seeking to soften the biases of “people of this country,” even as he demurred that prejudice against “every nation and people not themselves” was common and even “natural.” From the opening pages, then, America Vindicated set colonists apart as a “nation and people not themselves” to his British audience. The contrast was not necessarily complimentary to the mother country. The author characterized Britons as “disarmed” and subject to “a luxurious selfish effeminacy,” while white Americans were hardy pioneers who were accustomed “to level his gun at the fowls of the air, the beast of the forest, or the savage of the wilderness.” The author offered this comparison by way of signaling the danger of “a civil war,” suggesting one nation, but the effect, again, was to underscore the distinctiveness of the armed, forest-habituated colonists from opulent Britons. At root, the author argued that asserting Parliamentary supremacy was both unconstitutional and impractical. On both grounds he advocated “pursuing… a permanent and solid foundation for a just constitutional Union between both countries.”[10]

Such a “Union” was, to Gray’s way of thinking, an impossibility. The American colonies were not another country. They were not, like Ireland, “an independent nation that was conquered.” The original colonists and their descendants moved with permission from the Crown “with all the privileges of subjects remaining at home.” They were not separate from Britain, and they were not the original inhabitants of North America. “The free associated Indian nations,” by contrast, “would certainly have a right to propose their own terms, and to make stipulations as a distinct people, offering to live in a foederal union with Great Britain.” For colonists to do so was impossible. They must submit to Parliament.[11]

And so the print debate in London raged. The putative ally to the colonies, the author of America Vindicated, excoriated overreach by power-mad policymakers and Parliament and defended the colonists, but at the expense of recognizing them to be part of Britain. Hazily, he cast the American colonists as something different, something apart. The logical extreme of such a position would put them in the place Gray had threatened: not fellow citizens meriting the protections of the constitution but outsiders who could be negotiated with but also attacked. Gray, on the other hand, who hurled invective at the colonists, argued that fundamentally they were inside, not outside, the ambit and protection of the British constitution; that was why they had to obey Parliament. He accused colonists of unconstitutional behavior, but from within, not without the British nation. Americans reading either pamphlet might have deep cause for concern.