“A well-organised assault by smuggler-barons and their henchmen”?

The Spectator just published an article about the Boston Tea Party by Andrew Roberts, a British historian and journalist who was made a life peer a year ago.

In “The Myth of the Boston Tea Party,” Roberts resurrects a hypothesis about the event that most eighteenth-century Americanists discarded decades ago: the idea that the protest was directed by “the smuggler-barons of Boston, New York and Pennsylvania who employed the ‘Patriots’ who attacked the vessels.”

This article owes a lot, including one unacknowledged direct quotation, to Caleb Crain’s 2010 New Yorker article “Tea and Antipathy,” which I discussed back here.

According to Roberts’s take, for “a quarter of a millennium,” “A central part of the American founding story” has been that the destruction of the tea was “a spontaneous uprising of ordinary Americans angry at high taxes and prices.” In fact, all serious authors have described the Tea Party as planned and disciplined, organized by Boston’s top political activists.

Those leaders wanted to keep men focused on destroying only the taxable tea and not let resentments boil over onto people or other things, harming the reputation of the movement and the town as earlier riots had done. In other words, they exercised control to keep people’s anger focused, not to rile it up.

How many of those politicians or the powers behind them were actually in the tea-smuggling business, their wealth threatened by the new Tea Act? Roberts provides no evidence any of them were. In fact, he doesn’t name any of those men, even while referring to “one radical Boston merchant-smuggler” who reportedly employed eight of the scores of people involved in the destruction.

This approach seems to rest on the assumptions that all the Boston merchants were smugglers, all the smugglers imported tea, and their economic motivations dictated their politics. Yet Roberts doesn’t mention two elements of the tea crisis in Boston that bear on this thesis:

• The Tea Act wasn’t simply “a government attempt to halve the price of one of New England’s major commodities,” as the article has it. That law was designed to help the politically connected, too-big-to-fail East India Company and make it easier for the London government to collect the tea tax and thus to manage North America through appointees. American Whigs had objected to that tax for over five years.
• Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, mentioned twice in the article, was the father of two tea merchants granted the contract to sell East India Company tea. The governor himself was investing about £1,000 a year in the tea trade, according to biographer Bernard Bailyn. He was receiving a salary from the royal government’s tea tax revenue. If we want to look for economic motives behind how the tea crisis played out, surely that’s not an example to overlook.

Instead, Roberts paints all the Tea Party participants with a broad brush as puppets employed by a coterie of tea smugglers.

Let’s set aside the need for evidence and assume that the tea-smuggling merchants of Boston—and Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York—directed their maritime and waterfront employees to riot against the local tea consignees and then to destroy the tea, as Roberts describes.

How did those smugglers also motivate silversmith Paul Revere, carpenter John Crane, painter Samuel Gore, blacksmith’s apprentice Joshua Wyeth, and other land-based craftsmen to risk arrest by destroying the tea? How did they prompt a tea-burning in rural Lexington? How did the movement reach Williamsburg, Virginia, inland capital of a colony without a major trading port?

In “Tea and Antipathy,” Crain came round to acknowledging that the “no taxation without representation” argument had taken hold in colonial minds, producing a political opposition to the Tea Act not driven by direct economic motives. Yes, the new law promised lower tea prices. But many people, rightly or wrongly, saw problems ahead. Especially when they perceived that law being used to benefit political insiders like the Hutchinson clan.

Roberts, on the other hand, offers only recooked iconoclasm.

TOMORROW: Government resources.