By
Attorney Rees Lloyd
December 18, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
December 16, 2010, marked the 237th anniversary of the first American “Tea Party” on December 16, 1773. However, while the Boston Tea Party is an iconic milestone of American liberty, it has not yet been officially recognized as “National Tea Party Day” by Act of Congress.
But it ought to be, by Act of the incoming 112th Congress, now commonly referred to as the “Tea Party Congress,” since so many of those elected owe their elections to the grass-roots efforts of Tea Party Patriots.
Who better to spark an effort to establish a National Tea Party Day than the Tea Party Patriots who are walking in the footsteps of the American patriots of the original Tea Party?
Many of the oppressive and tyrannical acts of England in deprivation of American liberty which inspired the first Tea Party on December 16 1773, appear to be replicated in substance if in different form today by the oppressive and tyrannical Democrat Party regime led by President Barack Hussein Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry (Dirty Deal) Reid, and House Speaker San Francisco Nancy Pelosi.
Obama-Reid-Pelosi today, with Democrat Party monopoly control over the White House, the Senate, and the House in the 111th Congress, have continued to collectively thumbnose Americans (and worse) by taxing, spending, and redistributing wealth to those whom they favor with all the haughty contempt for Americans that English King George III and Prime Minister Lord North manifested toward America before Americans rebelled and chose freedom over security.
The American revolutionary “Tea Party” of Dec. 16, 1773, was the culmination not the start of a series of oppressive acts of England to tax Americans “without representation” in the Parliament.
As author William Federer pointed out in his “AmericanMinute.com” on Dec. 16, 2010, those acts included: “1764 the Sugar Act –taxing sugar coffee, wine; 1765 Stamp Act –taxing newspapers, contracts, letters, playing cards, and all printed materials; 1767 Townshend Acts—taxing glass, paints, paper;” and, in 1773, the Tea Act, which compelled Americans to pay taxes on tea while allowing England’s favored “East India Tea Company to sell a half million pounds of tea in the colonies with no taxes, giving them a monopoly by underselling American merchants.”
Rebelling against “taxation without representation,” American patriots led by firebrand patriot Samuel Adams, known as the “Father of the American Revolution,” a founder of the “Sons of Liberty,” on December 16, 1773, carried out the first, historic “Boston Tea Party” in a manner which I believe reflects the exceptional, and continuing, American spirit and character—bold, daring, determined, willing to sacrifice in the cause of liberty, totally committed to freedom and victory, but acting also with élan and a sense of humor.
That is, those colonial Americans, in defiance of the English Empire, set out to dump the English tea in the Boston Harbor rather than surrender to England’s oppression. Those American patriots, many of them Sons of Liberty, knowing they would face dread punishments if caught, dressed as “Mohawk Indians” to carry out the first Tea Party. These American patriots had a sense of humor.
At the harbor, those “Mohawks” boarded the three English tea-bearing ships, at anchor, the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver, and dumped a reported 342 chests of tea in the water. Stole none for personal use or profit, and then went home. Nobody, least of all the English, thought “the Indians did it.”
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Patriot William Federer, author of among other books, “America’s God And Country; Encyclopedia of Quotations,” the best single resource on what the Founding Fathers said and wrote of their beliefs in founding America, reports that a statement issued by the Americans of the Boston Tea Party was:
“Death is more eligible than slavery. A free-born people are not required by the religion of Jesus Christ to submit to tyranny, but may make use of such power as God has given them to recover and support their liberties…We implore the Ruler above the skies that he would bare His arm…and let Israel go.”
Those early American patriots, many if not most of whom considered America to be the “New Israel” (no matter how offensive that historical reality would be to 21st century politically correct liberals), would soon learn that England’s King George III was no less vindictive than was Pharaoh. England would not easily let America go. Rather, England imposed the punitive “Coercive Acts,” also known as the “Intolerable Acts,” meant to beat down the Americans into submission.
Those oppressions failed to kill the American spirit and love for freedom. Rather, patriotic Americans, pledging “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, fought the greatest military power on earth for American freedom, from 1775 until Gen. George Washington’s citizens’ army defeated England’s mercenary army at Yorktown in 1781. England, though militarily defeated, did not let go of America completely until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Many of the Americans of the Boston Tea Party generation did, indeed, sacrifice their lives, and their fortunes, fighting for freedom. Our freedom.
The Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, truly one of the milestones of liberty, has continued to inspire.
For one instance, in India, Mahatma Gandhi, after leading his successful nationwide protest against England’s monopoly of “salt” in 1939, reportedly presented the English viceroy with some duty-free salt, saying that the salt was “to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party.”
For further example, on February 19, 2009, Rick Santelli, broadcast news financial reporter, saying “ President Obama – are you listening?,” rose up in a nationwide broadcast against the Obama administration’s re-distributionist governmental policies to famously call for a “new Tea Party.” Santelli’s apparently spontaneous protest sparked the rise of the now nationwide Tea Party Movement.
For the most immediate example, on November 2, 2010, patriotic Americans proudly proclaiming themselves to be “Tea Party Patriots” notwithstanding the defamatory slings and arrows of outraged and outrageous “liberal progressives” in politics, government, and media who attacked them as “racists,” demented reactionaries, and worse, voted for freedom and elected the first “Tea Party” Congress to office in order not to “transform America,” but to restore the republic of limited government, maximum liberty, and individual and governmental prudence, virtue, and responsibility, which the Founding Fathers created as the last, best hope of humankind.
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The original Tea Party Patriots who have continued to inspire Americans to defend freedom should be remembered, and honored, by, first, an Act of the Tea Party Congress to establish December 16th as “National Tea Party Day; ” and ,second, and most importantly by the Americans of this generation fighting to preserve American freedom for our posterity as those original Tea Party patriots fought to establish and preserve freedom for us.
� 2010 Rees Lloyd - All Rights Reserved
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REES LLOYD is a longtime civil rights attorney and veterans activist whose work has been honored by, among others, the California Senate and Assembly, and numerous civil rights, workers rights, and veterans rights organizations. He has testified as a constitutional expert at hearings before the U.S. House and Senate representing The American Legion.
He has been profiled, and his work featured, by such varied print media as the Los Angeles Times and American Legion Magazine, and such broadcast media as ABC's Nightline and 20/20, Fox News In The Morning, and, among others, by Hannity. His writings have appeared in a variety of national, regional, and local newspaper, magazine, and other publications. He is a frequent radio commentator, and a sought after speaker.*
[*For identification only. The views expressed here are solely Rees Lloyd's and not necessarily any person, entity or organization he may otherwise represent. ]
E-Mail: ReesLloydLaw@gmail.com
