Are you going, going to the Boston tea party?

Interesting to note that today, December 16^th is the 236^th anniversary of the infamous Boston Tea Party.

Instrumental in sparking off the American Wars of Independence, this act of revolt against the British Empire and the British East India Company was undertaken by American colonialists who donned cunning disguises as native Mohawk American Indians and dumped boxes of tea in the harbour.

Future American President, Samuel Adams worked to publicise and defend the ‘Sons of Liberty’, stating that the Tea Party was not the act of a lawless mob, but was instead a principled protest and the only remaining option, for people who suffered taxation without representation and had no other means with which to defend their constitutional rights.

A few months earlier in September, 1773, a couple of hundred miles North of Boston, a cargo ship, 'the Hector', arrived in Pictou harbour, Nova Scotia, with 189 passengers aboard. It had been at sea for two-and-a-half months after leaving Greenock with thirty-three families and twenty-five single men on board.

The man behind this scheme was the formidable, Dr. John Witherspoon formerly of Paisley. President and head professor of what was to become Princeton University. Witherspoon, had purchased 200,000 acres of land from the Philadelphia Land Grant Company, whose shareholders included Benjamin Franklin. Settlers were offered a farm lot and a year of provisions.

A glance at the names of those on board, displays many familiar to today’s Scotland.

Witherspoon, long critical of the British Empire had embraced life in the colonies and was a strong supporter of the Revolution.  When challenged that America was not yet ready for independence he replied that it "was not only ripe for the measure, but in danger of rotting for the want of it."

At the same time that a fledgling Independence movement in the Americas is gathering momentum, in Scotland professional Englishman Doctor Samuel Johnson and his loyal acolyte James Bowell were engaged on ‘A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland’. This grand tour in search of the romantic savage, came a mere seven years after the death of James Edward Stuart and the end of the Pope’s recognition of  "Bonnie" Prince Charles as the lawful sovereign of Great Britain.

The Western Isles that Johnson and Boswell encountered was a desperate place with the disintegration of the Clan system and the Clan chief’s Highland Clearances policy starting to take effect, with whisky and the wearing of Tartan still banned after the 1745 rebellion. Johnson infamously opined, "The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England!"

As many of Scotland’s leading lights were drawn to London and the glittering prizes there, unsurprisingly few if any, took Doctor Johnson to task for such pithy throwaway comments like. "Scotland is a vile country, though God made it, but we must remember that he made it for Scotsmen, and comparisons are odious, but God also made Hell”. One wonders what Witherspoon might have made of Johnson.

Who would have thought that Scotland and Scots would have had to wait for over 200 years to get just a little bit more representation for our taxation, whereas the Yanks simply chucked boxes of tea overboard?