At the close of the Seven Years War in 1763, victorious Britain became the largest empire and largest colonizer in the world, holding more people in bondage than any other nation. Americans, as English subjects—or as true-born Englishmen, as they saw themselves--initially shared in Britain’s military glory But gradually over the course of the 1760s and early ‘70s that changed. Britain, in dire financial straits after a war fought on so many fronts, turned to the colonies for increased revenue. Americans looked at India and saw a nation of ethnic others being exploited, emasculated, for the good of East India Company merchants. The passage of the Tea Act in 1773, allowing the East India Company for the first time ever to bring tea directly to the colonies, was confirmation that Americans themselves were now viewed as an exploitable market rather than equal and autonomous players in selling the world’s most valuable commodity: Chinese tea.
In an early 1774 cartoon sketched just as the infamous tea ships approached Philadelphia, colonial artist Henry Dawkins
graphically portrayed the deep-rooted anxieties and covetousness aroused by trade with a place called the “East Indies,” as well as the crisis in American identity vis-à-vis English ministers. Chinese tea chests figure prominently in the foreground of the conflict. We notice that the contest with East India Company merchants over this all-important trade has actually transformed American Patriots from “civilized” English merchants to Indians—to just another of the brown-skinned, ethnically-other world populations vulnerable to East India Company colonization. In this dispute that pitches the colonies as a target market, as consumers of rather than masters of East India tea, American men became non-European, exploitable, and enslave-able. (See
image key for identification of people.)
The whole tea affair was tainted with elements of Eastern despotism and slavery, as Americans recalled repeatedly in an ardent conversation in the press in the months following the passage of the Tea Act. To understand why English ministers became “tyrants” in trying to tax American consumers, we need to look at the models available to the colonialists. A “Mechanic” writing in the Pennsylvania Gazette evokes the scepter of slavery perpetrated in “Whole Provinces” of India:
The East India Company, if once they get
Footing in this (once) happy country, will leave no
Stone unturned to become your Masters.
They are an opulent Body, and Money or Credit is not wanting amongst them
They have a designing, depraved, and despotic Ministry to assist and support them.
They themselves are well versed in Tyranny, Plunder, Oppression and Bloodshed.
Whole Provinces labouring under the Distresses of Oppression, Slavery, Famine, and the Sword, are familiar to them.
Thus they have enriched themselves, thus they are become the most powerful Trading Company in the Universe."
The December 2, 1773, issue of the New York Journal carried this warning: “A SHIP loaded with TEA is now on her Way to this Port, being sent out by the Ministry for the Purpose of enslaving and poisoning ALL the AMERICANS.”[6] Americans would be reduced to dependent consumers while imbibing a soporific substance produced by a despotized people. One preacher pleaded with his congregation in western Connecticut, “We have not as yet experienced the galling chains of slavery; tho’ they have been shook over our heads. For this reason few perhaps among us, realize the horrors of that slavery, which arbitrary and despotic government lays men under….now [you] supinely slumber.”[7] “A Mechanic” and then “A Countryman” in Philadelphia protested, “They [the East India Company] will...Ship US all other East India Goods...Thus our merchants are ruined...and every Tradesman will groan under dire Oppression.” “Hampden” in a New York paper warned, “and the trade of all the commodities of that country [China] will be lost to our merchants and carried on by the company.”[8] “If so,” a Pennsylvanian added, “have we a single chance of being any Thing but Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Waters to them. The East Indians are proof of this.”
This last remark was a Biblical reference to enslavement. The full passage from the
Book of Joshua was certainly familiar to most Christian Americans. It reads, "Now therefore, you are cursed, and you shall never cease being slaves, both hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God." The Pennsylvania author imagined precisely this sort of divinely sanctioned slavery perpetrated by Britons in East India and, in this reference, demonstrated the degree to which deep-rooted notions derived from Christian theology saturated the American consciousness. Even though blatant institutionalized slavery existed in their very midst, colonial pamphleteers habitually called forth some version of imagined Eastern slavery, explicitly Egyptian, Moorish, Ottoman, or Indian.
John Adams wrote in his diary the December morning after the tea was destroyed in Boston that landing the tea would have been equivalent to “subjecting ourselves and our Posterity forever to Egyptian Taskmasters,” not interestingly to Virginia slave owners or Rhode Island slave drivers. This overlooked discourse founded on embedded prejudices and anxieties about the relationship between Anglo (“Western”) and Asian (“Eastern”) peoples, fueled by commercial prerogative to Chinese wealth, needs to be interrogated as part of the cultural climate of the Tea Party, and ultimately the identity of American patriots.
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[6] New York Journal, or General Advertiser, Dec. 2 – 9, 1773.
[7] "Appendix stating the heavy grievances the colonies labour under from the several Acts of the British Parliament," in A Sermon containing scriptural instructions to civil rulers, given by Rev. Samuel Sherwood in Fairfield, Conn., Aug. 31, 1774.
[8] NY Journal, Oct. 28, 1773. "Hampden" was a pseudonym used by James Otis, Jr.
