Committees of Correspondence
Tea Party followed by 10 years
By
KrisAnne Hall
Tenth
Amendment Center
I
recently read with joy a conservative blogger’s attempt to connect
the TEA party movement to its historic roots; a topic I have been
meaning to write about for months now. The blogger rightly said that
the “the historical precedent for the TPM wasn’t the Tea Party
event in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773.” I actually uttered an
“Amen, brother!” He went on to describe the Continental
Association established on October 20, 1774 by the First Continental
Congress in response to the Intolerable Acts. That’s when I
realized that I have waited long enough to write this article.
The
fact is the Continental Association of 1774 (10 months after the
Boston Tea Party) is about 10 years too late. The first organized
opposition to a tyrannical government in the colonies came in 1764 in
the form of the Committees of Correspondence.
In
April 1764 Parliament passed the Sugar and Molasses Act. These laws
were originally passed in 1733 at the insistence of the large
plantation owners in the British West Indies (can you say lobbyists?)
The six-pence tax was never successfully collected, and so the Sugar
Act actually cut the tax in half but stepped up enforcement. At the
same time, the Sugar Act taxed the sugar, coffee, wine, and spices
the colonists used, and also regulated the export of lumber and iron.
This “excessive taxation and regulation” immediately impaired the
colonial economy. In conjunction with the Sugar Act, parliament
passed the Currency Act, which essentially assumed control of the
colonial monetary system. The Currency Act also established
“superior” Vice-admiralty courts to ensure rulings favorable to
British interests.
In
1764 the colonies were in the midst of a depressed economy due to the
protracted Seven Years’ War, so these indirect taxes and
restrictive laws were particularly grievous. In addition to the
economic impact, the psychological impact was particularly offensive.
The Sugar Act not only restricted the exports by the colonists, but
gave an economic “leg up” to the British West Indies...
KrisAnne Hall is a lawyer who lost her job as a prosecutor because she had been teaching constitutional principles to folks hot to learn law from an able practitioner.(click here for the minority report)
http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/08/06/the-real-origin-of-the-tea-party-movement/
the tea party in waco is a joke,run by only two people that get your money and lets your taxes be increased.
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