There is a dim understanding among the Great Unwashed that the new and improved “Tea Party” rebellion movement has its origins in colonial Boston, when heroes dressed as Mohawk Indians sneaked aboard ships and dumped lots of British tea into the harbor.
The tea was going to be taxed on the order of Cadillac health insurance plans – and the Brits had hand-picked several East India Trading Co. tea middlemen to sell the stuff. The Brits also were mandating that Americans had to eat English cuisine – and that was the indignity that eventually led to the Revolutionary War.
Unlike the impulsive boys in Boston, the rebels in Charleston, S.C., actually confiscated the tea – and eventually sold it to help finance the war and hire a lobbyist to win them some Pentagon contracts.
Massachusetts has always been a bubbling, fiery, unstable caldron of revolutionary spirit. The rebellion that most closely matches what is going on in America today among the “tea party” set wasn’t the colonial tea-bag toss in 1773, but Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 and 1787.
The farmers of western Massachusetts, trapped in what might well be called a recession, demanded that the politicians cut taxes, declare a moratorium on farm foreclosures, and issue paper money, even though the Federal Reserve hadn’t yet plugged in its printing presses.
Boston was then, much like today, uninterested in any whining from western Massachusetts, wherever the heck that was. And the new state and country hadn’t quite gotten a handle on paper money and who would do the issuing and whose picture would be on the $5 bill.
The Springfield-area farmers were frustrated. Their farm loans had been boxed and packaged and wrapped and shipped to a securities trader guy in London, who resold them at a price tied to the British tea futures market.
Led by Daniel Shays, the farmers invaded Springfield (once rush-hour was over on Interstate 91) occupied the county courthouse, and threatened to transform the Basketball Hall of Fame into a farmers’ market.
The rebels were vanquished and chased out of town, eventually arrested and sentenced – either to death, or forced to listen to Vice President Joe Biden’s speeches for the rest of their lives. The 14 rebel leaders, known informally as the Republican National Committee, were eventually pardoned.
State Of Change
But much like the tea party rebels of today, the Shays’ Rebellion crowd had a significant impact. Shays and his gang stunned the American political leadership into realizing that not only were the natives restless, but also that the creaky, new Articles of Confederation-style governing apparatus was insufficient to the task at hand.
Even George Washington, who had tried, in Obama fashion, to avoid the dirty day-to-day business of politics, confessed that the Shays incident and the paper-money craze had prompted him to agitate for a larger, more sophisticated federal apparatus.
The irony, of course, is that that while the Shays rebels did agitate for lower taxes, in a “conservative” kind of way, their major accomplishment was prodding the elite into forming a stronger, larger federal government – with a printing press.
You can just imagine a Sarah Palin-type, helping to train the Shays’ Rebellion troops on how to load their muskets – and then being horrified by the ensuing strong federal government, capable of assigning her to a Death Panel not of her choosing.
Thomas Jefferson reflected the ambiguity that many felt about the mixed blessing that was Shays’ Rebellion. In a letter to James Madison in 1787, Jefferson suggested that the “late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done … No country should be so long without one.”
The latest Massachusetts rebellion, of course, was the election of Scott Brown, who sort of wants Congress to cut taxes and do something about public debt, without the bother of having to storm the gates of Springfield.
The next Massachusetts insurrection will involve the attempted repeal of the Chapter 40B affordable housing law. The rebels insist that if you want to sit around in your chaise lounge, in your own house, you have to be able to afford the market-rate price for the house. This will be dubbed, “Chaise Rebellion.”
