Harbour for your tea

if you ask me

“The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History.” ~ John Adams, Boston, Anno Domini 1773

You will see above a painting depicting the first known instance of Americans dunking bags of tea in water rather than using a proper tea infuser. Such rebels!

Below the painting, as is my habit, I have identified a suitable quote from some other source to indicate my themes for the current essay. I’ve found over the years that doing things in this way provides a consistent format for the benefit of the reader. The image is also handy for posting links on such apps as find a thematic image for inclusion, by which I mean apps excluding Twitter’s newly styled “X” which refuses to allow proper links from Substack out of personal animosity and viciousness on the part of its current major shareholder.

My intention is to serve the reader with a quick pic and brief historical quote to firmly set the expectation, so you can come back to the essay later if you prefer, or find yourself on solid footing from the beginning. Please feel free to let me know in the comments if this approach is helpful, annoying, or horrifying, as I always like to read the comments.

This day in history, in the year 1773, Bostonians fed up with British taxes, with the dissolution of their legislature, and with the contumely of the Hanoverian usurper and his ugly parliament of clowns, declared themselves in open revolt. They dumped tea from a British flagged vessel into the salty and turbid water of the harbour. Their actions destroyed the bales of dried tea. No one would want tea that had been fouled by the raw sewage flowing from Boston and surrounding communities.

Ending tyranny

The Boston Tea Party which we celebrate today was the beginning of a war. To be fair, the British had fired on a crowd of Bostonians in 1770, murdering Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, and Patrick Carr. Attucks, a freed black or possibly Native American sailor was likely the first killed. Gray was a rope maker. Caldwell was the mate on an American ship. Maverick was an apprentice ivory turner whose trade would be abolished by communists in the 20th Century; he died of his wounds the next morning. Carr suffered from a fatal abdominal wound for two weeks before succumbing in death.

Thus, arguably, what the declaration of independence would later say, that the power in London had abdicated government, placed us out of their protection, and make war on us was true from as early as 1770. It was clear that things were on a very sour footing from 1765, as evidenced by Patrick Henry’s speech

Resolves

I’ve been a teacher for a great many years. In some ways I was a teacher and tutor all through my youth. My parents were both academics, mom teaching English and dad nuclear physics, at the university of Kansas. My older brothers taught me how to read when I was three, out of the “Dick and Jane” books. I will never forget them laughing as they made up the line, “See Spot dick Jane.” Naughtiness is its own reward.

My teaching skills were first put to paid work in 1980 during my salad days when I was green in judgement. I was paid before I was “qualified” to vote, and by the university of Kansas, so I was taxed without being represented in congress due to the FICA and income tax withholding that appears on that first pay stub, ever so long ago. Oh, right, y’all don’t have pay stubs any longer. It is “direct deposit or you get nothing” from ever so many employers. It was long ago, in what now seems like another country, and besides Christopher Marlowe is dead.

Thus, I have become used to people not knowing a single blessed thing about their country’s history. Americans, who are around 84% of the readership of this fine journal (just topping 500 subscribers this month!) and most of the followers of this account (somewhat more than 850 followers, w00t! as we write in l33tspeak) don’t benefit from public education, but are hampered by it.

So you probably don’t know about Patrick Henry speaking to the assembled house of burgesses in Virginia in the fifth month of 1765 when he was nearly shouted down for treason saying, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the first his Cromwell, and George the third … would profit from their examples.” Over what? Why would he be such a firebrand just two years after the end of the French and Indian war, more widely known as the Seven Years War, which was one of the first global wars in the last millennium? Well, because of the resolves. Yes, Jim, what resolves are those?

Oh, the resolves of Virginia to be sent to the seat of power across the ocean. Five ideas.

First, taxation without representation is tyranny. British citizens were expected, under the bill of rights of 1688 and the magna carta of 1215 and other traditional agreements, to be represented in parliament. The taxes imposed to pay off the debts incurred in the recent war were imposed without any colonists being represented in parliament. Such much tyranny, that remains with us today.

Second, the general assembly of Virginia has the exclusive power to tax the people of Virginia. At least in theory some of the Tidewater Tuckahoes were represented therein, and because they owned quite a lot of other people they were, in their view, entitled to accept or reject taxes on behalf of the people they owned on the plantations they managed. City folk might be represented, might not be, and the folks in the hinterlands, well, they barely ever got to town to collect mail. Mail in those days was typically addressed to a person’s name and a town, and would be delivered to the tavern or saloon. After a few days if the person named on the outside of the letter (folded and sealed perhaps, or just folded, rarely in an envelope) hadn’t stopped by to collect their mail, it would be read aloud with much amusement, in case someone mentioned in the letters might know how to go about finding the missing persons. The idea that rural populations in Western Virginia were ever represented in the colonial assembly is idiotic, and the same is true today, though the colonial assembly has been upgraded to an infestation of state legislators and a considerable bureau rat plague.

Third, the colonists are entitled to the same liberties as British subjects. We have a list in our bill of rights, the British had a slightly different list. Yes, keep and bear arms was included, for Protestant gentlemen in the 1688 bill of rights, you can look it up.

Fourth, the colonists have the right to be governed by their own laws. Well, of course, that’s not true. You have the right to be governed by God’s laws. You really don’t have the right to make up laws and impose them on other people and pretend that you matter. State legislators are usurpers. They are usurping the authority to make laws. It has gotten so thick that the legislators are also handing power to legions of bureau rats who “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance” to again quote a particular complaint that appears in the declaration of 1776.

Fifth, the Virginia resolves indicated that a court of inquiry in Rhode Island was unconstitutional as it falsely claimed authority to transport the accused across the ocean to be tried far from the witnesses for the defence, far from their support, and far from their own counsel. If that sounds to you like the “black bag rendition” by the filthy maggots of the cia to their “black sites” to be tortured and beaten to obtain evidence against you, why, yes, just like that. Only more 18th Century in terms of rations and hygiene.

Skipping

Yes, friends, I am skipping around. Start in 1773, skip back to murder most foul in 1770, skip further back to 1765, skip forward to quote from the declaration in 1776, and what do you expect? A curriculum? Well, if that’s what you want, to quote Flavour Flav, “you got to pay me boy-eee” which is not how this works. I am available as a tutor for advanced placement history if you are in the area, but most of you are on the other side of the continent. And, no, I am not going to turn on Stripe, give them my banking information, because of what they did to Robert Malone, because I don’t trust them, and because I don’t much want to charge for paid subscriptions. I’d rather you not look at this ‘stack of essays as costing you money, but as a way of finding out about things so you can do your own research. My goal is to be provocative, and if you aren’t provoked, I don’t feel I’m really getting through.

Besides, only a couple hundred of you even bothered to open the last essay when it was emailed through to you, so I am not writing for a mass audience. I am writing for the remnant, about which you can learn more by visiting the Von Mises web site at mises.org and looking for the essay “Isaiah’s Job” by Albert Jay Nock. We few, we happy few, we band of brethren, to misquote from a Shakespeare historical play.

Anyway, the skipping around is simply my way of dealing with the ennui involved in nothing much changing for decades. From 1763 to 1773 the colonists were more or less at peace. Then war broke out, in response to the Boston Tea Party.

The Empire Occupies Boston

Well, yes, the empire struck back. Go figure.

It says here, “Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts to punish the colonies. In 1774, General Thomas Gage was appointed governor of Massachusetts and commander-in-chief of British troops in North America. Gage commanded about 4,000 British troops in Boston.” Gage would arrive in Boston in the fifth month of 1774, and began to consolidate British troops from other outposts and cities in the 9th month of that year.

So, you may wonder, what was it like in Boston after the magistrates were hiding in their homes, or tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on rails? How was it living in Boston from the Christmas season in 1773 until the Spring of the following year? Well, friend, it was glorious.

All the accounts I’ve read indicate that there was essentially no crime. Americans helped one another. People accommodated the poor out of charity and enthusiasm for the cause of keeping Boston free. People had been involved in colonial militias for the last hundred and forty years or so, because there were various threats from pirates, hostile tribes, European aristocrats, and criminals.

Gage didn’t like the militias and one of his first moves was against the militia storehouse in Somerville, Massachusetts. In the 9th month of 1774 he sent an expedition to seize all the powder, cannons, and small arms from the armoury there. This mission succeeded, but it was very unpopular. As a result, militias began marching in earnest.

You are probably aware of the events that occurred in the 4th month of 1775. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a long poem about the midnight ride of Paul Revere at a time when “hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.” More recently, that same day became memorable in 1993 when the butchers of the fbi “hostage rescue team” deliberately detonated a shaped charge on the roof of the church vault, ventilated the wooden frame structures of the buildings, and then fired flammable CS gas and pyrotechnics into the church at Mount Carmel, Texas to deliberately murder all the men, women, and children inside. Evil John Danforth tried to whitewash the evidence, but the truth was coming out.

So on another 19th day of the 4th month, this time in 1995, with all the evidence from the Rose law firm, the Whitewater scandal, and the Waco massacre in the Murrah feral building in Oklahoma City, Bill Clinton and Janet Reno ordered it detonated. They arranged to have the local feral agents mostly notified by pager not to go to work that day, and they arranged to kill even more children in the explosion. They also arranged for a patsy and very unlikely story of a truck bomb at considerable remove from the multi-lobed explosion. But, as always, no, I am not here to offer you links or to suggest some comprehensive look at the details. You want to know the truth about recent events? Go do your research.

Feel free to report on your findings in the comments. Maybe someone will visit the links you post, if you post them. The point I’m making is very simple. You won’t believe the links I send you to if I were to post them, so I won’t bother. You will either do your own research and convince yourself that you understand what happened, or you won’t. Me posting links doesn’t help you, it hampers you, because you’ll necessarily wonder whether the sources I use are valid and worthy. And I don’t care to help you evaluate their quality. It is not my job to educate you. Good teachers know this fact: you don’t learn unless you teach yourself. My goal is to show you how to look for the truth and give you an outline of what it seems, to me, to mean. If that isn’t why you’re here, that’s okay too. You get what you pay for, and so do I.

If these matters don’t merit your time and attention, guess what? I’m not upset about it. You can’t please everyone, so you have to please yourself. Me too.

Tyranny remains

Well, there was a time when it seemed like the defeat of the British empire was going to take. But the inflation of the Continental currency was a mess, so there were additional rebellions in 1785 or thereabouts. You can read about Daniel Shays and his rebellion, and their grievances.

Ben Franklin and the American negotiating team did get some independence for 12 out of 13 colonies in the treaty of Paris in 1783. But, no, Delaware is not listed in that treaty as one of the colonies made independent. And every major corporation in America used to prefer Delaware (until they began making a mess of “equity” in an effort to use lawfare against the mElon). It remains the only state where equity and law remain separate, so that shareholder disputes are tried in a Chancery court. Interesting matters.

Franklin, a known demon worshipper and hellfire club member, used to live in a house on Craven street in London. In 1997, human bones with knife marks were found buried under the house. These were human sacrifice victims. Vivisection is an ugly business.

Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Washington, and Franklin made sure to arrange the constitutional convention while its major opponent, Thomas Jefferson, was in Paris as ambassador from the new republic. Then the freemasons swore a blood oath of secrecy, Hamilton produced his draft, they haggled over some of the terms, and the plantation owners put a plantation slavery system in place for the entire population of the country. By 1812 the British were fed up with things not going their way and sent more troops, set fire to parts of Washington DC, won the war as described in the treaty of Ghent in 1814, lost the battle of New Orleans, and the masquerade continued.

Eventually, some of the states were convinced that the national government was determined to operate with plenary power and not within any limits. So they seceded, as was their proper authority under the constitution. But, they were defeated thanks to thousands of Europeans fresh from the barricades in major European cities being deported to America and drafted on the docks as soon as they arrived. The northern side had more men to send into frontal wave assault attacks and a lot more manufacturing to provide arms and ammunition. It was the most costly war, to this day, in terms of dead and wounded in combat, dead from diseases in military camps, dead in cities and towns from pillaging and looting, dead and wounded and raped all over the country.

Tyranny persists. So on this “Boston Tea Party” anniversary, try to think about what you would do, to make a memorable act, if you and your friends and neighbours were to stand up and declare your independence. See if you can screw your courage to the sticking point, to quote another Shakespeare play of note.

The freedom you save may be your own.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.