"Tea is really a slow poison, and has the corrosive effect upon those who handle it"

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?"
Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night.""

--- Charles M. Schulz

***

Debunking Boston Tea Party Myths

"Myth 1: The dispute was about higher taxes

Parliament insisted on taxing colonists to support—and command—colonial administration. Colonists countered that they were more than willing to tax—and rule—themselves. No more "taxation without representation" became their rallying cry, not "down with high taxes."

Myth 2: Tea taxes were an onerous burden on ordinary Americans

At three pence per pound, the tax on tea was barely felt by American consumers, who also had access to the smuggled competition...

Participating in the elaborate British ritual of teatime—with an array of fancy crockery and silver utensils—was prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of Americans. Calls for a continued boycott of tea dovetailed nicely with lower-class resentments. Tea was an easy target, a symbol both of Parliament's arrogance and a crumbling social hierarchy.

Moreover, tea consumption was deemed suspect, even sinful, by a large segment of the American public. "That bainfull weed," as Abigail Adams called it, was an artificial stimulant, what we would call today a recreational drug. Promoters of virtue, who had long been expounding the evils of tea, suddenly became patriots. One concerned writer, in a Virginia newspaper, claimed that ever since tea had been introduced into Western society, "our race is dwindled and become puny, weak, and disordered to such a degree, that were it to prevail a century more we should be reduced to mere pigmies."

Pointing to his medical expertise, Boston's Dr. Thomas Young declared authoritatively that tea was not just a "pernicious drug," as some assumed, but a "slow poison, and has the corrosive effect upon those who handle it. I have left it off since it became political poison, and have since gained in firmness of constitution. My substitute is camomile flowers."

Resistance leaders also launched a new wave of negative propaganda that played to anti-foreign sentiments: Tea from the East India Company was packed tightly in chests by the stomping of barefoot Chinese and was infested with Chinese fleas. In turn, a vast number of colonists vowed to protect American business from foreign competition, even if that business was smuggling. Beware of products from China, buy America, wage war on drugs, down with corporations [were slogans]...

Myth 3: Dumping British tea unified the patriots

For Americans who called themselves patriots, the slogan "liberty and property" was a common rallying cry, shouted at least as often as "taxation without representation." George Washington, among many others, chided Bostonians for "their conduct in destroying tea." Benjamin Franklin was hardly alone when he argued that the East India Company should be compensated for its losses...

The destruction of tea had been a catalyst for events leading to independence, but its belligerent tone ran counter to the favored patriotic story line: The British were the aggressors, causing peace-loving Americans to act in self-defense"