The second act, often called the Townshend duties or the Revenue Act, imposed direct revenue duties—that is, duties aimed not merely at regulating trade but at.
Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to:. Describe the purpose of the 1767 Townshend Acts. Explain why many colonists protested the 1767 Townshend Acts and the consequences of their actionsColonists’ joy over the repeal of the Stamp Act and what they saw as their defense of liberty did not last long. The Declaratory Act of 1766 had articulated Great Britain’s supreme authority over the colonies, and Parliament soon began exercising that authority.
In 1767, with the passage of the Townshend Acts, a tax on consumer goods in British North America, colonists believed their liberty as loyal British subjects had come under assault for a second time. THE TOWNSHEND ACTSLord Rockingham’s tenure as prime minister was not long (1765–1766).
Rich landowners feared that if he were not taxing the colonies, Parliament would raise their taxes instead, sacrificing them to the interests of merchants and colonists. George III duly dismissed Rockingham. William Pitt, also sympathetic to the colonists, succeeded him.
However, Pitt was old and ill with gout. His chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend , whose job was to manage the Empire’s finances, took on many of his duties. Primary among these was raising the needed revenue from the colonies.
Figure 5.10 Charles Townshend, chancellor of the exchequer, shown here in a 1765 painting by Joshua Reynolds, instituted the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 in order to raise money to support the British military presence in the colonies.Townshend’s first act was to deal with the unruly New York Assembly, which had voted not to pay for supplies for the garrison of British soldiers that the Quartering Act required. In response, Townshend proposed the Restraining Act of 1767, which disbanded the New York Assembly until it agreed to pay for the garrison’s supplies, which it eventually agreed to do.The Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 placed duties on various consumer items like paper, paint, lead, tea, and glass. These British goods had to be imported, since the colonies did not have the manufacturing base to produce them. Townshend hoped the new duties would not anger the colonists because they were external taxes, not internal ones like the Stamp Act. In 1766, in arguing before Parliament for the repeal of the Stamp Act, Benjamin Franklin had stated, “I never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in parliament, as we are not represented there.”The Indemnity Act of 1767 exempted tea produced by the British East India Company from taxation when it was imported into Great Britain. When the tea was re-exported to the colonies, however, the colonists had to pay taxes on it because of the Revenue Act. Some critics of Parliament on both sides of the Atlantic saw this tax policy as an example of corrupt politicians giving preferable treatment to specific corporate interests, creating a monopoly.
The sense that corruption had become entrenched in Parliament only increased colonists’ alarm.In fact, the revenue collected from these duties was only nominally intended to support the British army in America. It actually paid the salaries of some royally appointed judges, governors, and other officials whom the colonial assemblies had traditionally paid. Thanks to the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, however, these officials no longer relied on colonial leadership for payment. This change gave them a measure of independence from the assemblies, so they could implement parliamentary acts without fear that their pay would be withheld in retaliation. The Revenue Act thus appeared to sever the relationship between governors and assemblies, drawing royal officials closer to the British government and further away from the colonial legislatures.The Revenue Act also gave the customs board greater powers to counteract smuggling. It granted “writs of assistance”—basically, search warrants—to customs commissioners who suspected the presence of contraband goods, which also opened the door to a new level of bribery and trickery on the waterfronts of colonial America. Furthermore, to ensure compliance, Townshend introduced the Commissioners of Customs Act of 1767, which created an American Board of Customs to enforce trade laws.
Customs enforcement had been based in Great Britain, but rules were difficult to implement at such a distance, and smuggling was rampant. The new customs board was based in Boston and would severely curtail smuggling in this large colonial seaport.Townshend also orchestrated the Vice-Admiralty Court Act, which established three more vice-admiralty courts, in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, to try violators of customs regulations without a jury. Before this, the only colonial vice-admiralty court had been in far-off Halifax, Nova Scotia, but with three local courts, smugglers could be tried more efficiently. Since the judges of these courts were paid a percentage of the worth of the goods they recovered, leniency was rare. All told, the Townshend Acts resulted in higher taxes and stronger British power to enforce them. Four years after the end of the French and Indian War, the Empire continued to search for solutions to its debt problem and the growing sense that the colonies needed to be brought under control. REACTIONS: THE NON-IMPORTATION MOVEMENTLike the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts produced controversy and protest in the American colonies.
For a second time, many colonists resented what they perceived as an effort to tax them without representation and thus to deprive them of their liberty. The fact that the revenue the Townshend Acts raised would pay royal governors only made the situation worse, because it took control away from colonial legislatures that otherwise had the power to set and withhold a royal governor’s salary.
The Restraining Act, which had been intended to isolate New York without angering the other colonies, had the opposite effect, showing the rest of the colonies how far beyond the British Constitution some members of Parliament were willing to go.The Townshend Acts generated a number of protest writings, including “Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer” by John Dickinson. In this influential pamphlet, which circulated widely in the colonies, Dickinson conceded that the Empire could regulate trade but argued that Parliament could not impose either internal taxes, like stamps, on goods or external taxes, like customs duties, on imports. “Address to the Ladies” Verse from The Boston Post-Boy and AdvertiserThis verse, which ran in a Boston newspaper in November 1767, highlights how women were encouraged to take political action by boycotting British goods. Notice that the writer especially encourages women to avoid British tea (Bohea and Green Hyson) and linen, and to manufacture their own homespun cloth. For examples of the types of luxury items that many American colonists favored, visit the to see pictures and documents relating to home interiors of the wealthy. TROUBLE IN BOSTONThe Massachusetts Circular got Parliament’s attention, and in 1768, Lord Hillsborough sent four thousand British troops to Boston to deal with the unrest and put down any potential rebellion there.
The troops were a constant reminder of the assertion of British power over the colonies, an illustration of an unequal relationship between members of the same empire. As an added aggravation, British soldiers moonlighted as dockworkers, creating competition for employment. Boston’s labor system had traditionally been closed, privileging native-born laborers over outsiders, and jobs were scarce. Many Bostonians, led by the Sons of Liberty, mounted a campaign of harassment against British troops.
The Sons of Liberty also helped protect the smuggling actions of the merchants; smuggling was crucial for the colonists’ ability to maintain their boycott of British goods.John Hancock was one of Boston’s most successful merchants and prominent citizens. While he maintained too high a profile to work actively with the Sons of Liberty, he was known to support their aims, if not their means of achieving them. He was also one of the many prominent merchants who had made their fortunes by smuggling, which was rampant in the colonial seaports. In 1768, customs officials seized the Liberty, one of his ships, and violence erupted. Led by the Sons of Liberty, Bostonians rioted against customs officials, attacking the customs house and chasing out the officers, who ran to safety at Castle William, a British fort on a Boston harbor island. British soldiers crushed the riots, but over the next few years, clashes between British officials and Bostonians became common.Conflict turned deadly on March 5, 1770, in a confrontation that came to be known as the Boston Massacre.
On that night, a crowd of Bostonians from many walks of life started throwing snowballs, rocks, and sticks at the British soldiers guarding the customs house. In the resulting scuffle, some soldiers, goaded by the mob who hectored the soldiers as “lobster backs” (the reference to lobster equated the soldiers with bottom feeders, i.e., aquatic animals that feed on the lowest organisms in the food chain), fired into the crowd, killing five people. Crispus Attucks, the first man killed—and, though no one could have known it then, the first official casualty in the war for independence—was of Wampanoag and African descent. The bloodshed illustrated the level of hostility that had developed as a result of Boston’s occupation by British troops, the competition for scarce jobs between Bostonians and the British soldiers stationed in the city, and the larger question of Parliament’s efforts to tax the colonies.The Sons of Liberty immediately seized on the event, characterizing the British soldiers as murderers and their victims as martyrs. Paul Revere, a silversmith and member of the Sons of Liberty, circulated an engraving that showed a line of grim redcoats firing ruthlessly into a crowd of unarmed, fleeing civilians. Among colonists who resisted British power, this view of the “massacre” confirmed their fears of a tyrannous government using its armies to curb the freedom of British subjects. But to others, the attacking mob was equally to blame for pelting the British with rocks and insulting them.It was not only British Loyalists who condemned the unruly mob.
John Adams, one of the city’s strongest supporters of peaceful protest against Parliament, represented the British soldiers at their murder trial. Adams argued that the mob’s lawlessness required the soldiers’ response, and that without law and order, a society was nothing. He argued further that the soldiers were the tools of a much broader program, which transformed a street brawl into the injustice of imperial policy. Propaganda and the Sons of LibertyLong after the British soldiers had been tried and punished, the Sons of Liberty maintained a relentless propaganda campaign against British oppression. Many of them were printers or engravers, and they were able to use public media to sway others to their cause.
Shortly after the incident outside the customs house, Paul Revere created “The bloody massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt.” , based on an image by engraver Henry Pelham. The picture—which represents only the protesters’ point of view—shows the ruthlessness of the British soldiers and the helplessness of the crowd of civilians.
Notice the subtle details Revere uses to help convince the viewer of the civilians’ innocence and the soldiers’ cruelty. Although eyewitnesses said the crowd started the fight by throwing snowballs and rocks, in the engraving they are innocently standing. Revere also depicts the crowd as well dressed and well-to-do, when in fact they were laborers and probably looked quite a bit rougher. Figure 5.11 The Sons of Liberty circulated this sensationalized version of the events of March 5, 1770, in order to promote the rightness of their cause.
The verses below the image begin as follows: “Unhappy Boston! See thy Sons deplore, Thy hallowed Walks besmeared with guiltless Gore.”Newspaper articles and pamphlets that the Sons of Liberty circulated implied that the “massacre” was a planned murder. In the Boston Gazette on March 12, 1770, an article describes the soldiers as striking first. It goes on to discuss this version of the events: “On hearing the noise, one Samuel Atwood came up to see what was the matter; and entering the alley from dock square, heard the latter part of the combat; and when the boys had dispersed he met the ten or twelve soldiers aforesaid rushing down the alley towards the square and asked them if they intended to murder people? They answered Yes, by God, root and branch! With that one of them struck Mr.
Atwood with a club which was repeated by another; and being unarmed, he turned to go off and received a wound on the left shoulder which reached the bone and gave him much pain.”What do you think most people in the United States think of when they consider the Boston Massacre? How does the propaganda of the Sons of Liberty still affect the way we think of this event? PARTIAL REPEALAs it turned out, the Boston Massacre occurred after Parliament had partially repealed the Townshend Acts. By the late 1760s, the American boycott of British goods had drastically reduced British trade. Once again, merchants who lost money because of the boycott strongly pressured Parliament to loosen its restrictions on the colonies and break the non-importation movement. Charles Townshend died suddenly in 1767 and was replaced by Lord North, who was inclined to look for a more workable solution with the colonists. North convinced Parliament to drop all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea.
The administrative and enforcement provisions under the Townshend Acts—the American Board of Customs Commissioners and the vice-admiralty courts—remained in place.To those who had protested the Townshend Acts for several years, the partial repeal appeared to be a major victory. For a second time, colonists had rescued liberty from an unconstitutional parliamentary measure. The hated British troops in Boston departed. The consumption of British goods skyrocketed after the partial repeal, an indication of the American colonists’ desire for the items linking them to the Empire. Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book is Creative Commons Attribution License4.0 and you must attribute OpenStax.Attribution information.If you are redistributing all or part of this book in a print format,then you must include on every physical page the following attribution:Access for free at you are redistributing all or part of this book in a digital format,then you must include on every digital page view the following attribution:Access for free atCitation information.Use the information below to generate a citation. We recommend using acitation tool such as.Authors: P.
Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Sylvie Waskiewicz, Paul Vickery.Publisher/website: OpenStax.Book title: U.S. History.Publication date: Dec 30, 2014.Location: Houston, Texas.Book URL:.Section URL:© Jan 13, 2020 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution License 4.0 license.
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Rudolph Ackermann 1808The House of Commons and the House of Lords combine to form Britain's Parliament. Charles Townshend was a member of the House of Commons when he convinced Parliament to impose a new tax on the American colonies in 1767.After the Stamp Act was repealed, the relationship between England and the American colonies was still shaky. 'Nervous tension' is the term that best describes it. Many issues remained unresolved. It was hard for England to enforce regulations from across the sea. Still, the British Parliament did not want the colonists to think that they were giving up authority over the colonies. So, immediately after repealing the Stamp Act, Parliament issued the Declaratory Act.The Declaratory Act stated that Parliament had complete control over the governing of the colonies in “all cases whatsoever.” The British were not willing to give up any control to the colonies.
In the colonies, leaders had been glad when the Stamp Act was repealed, but the Declaratory Act was a new threat to their independence. It was 1766, and to most colonists, the ability of England to tax the colonies without giving them representation in Parliament was seen as disgraceful. The rebellion against the Stamp Act was proof of this view.
But the right for Parliament to make laws in other areas was acceptable. The intent of the Declaratory Act was not clear, though.
'All cases whatsoever' could surely mean the power to tax. Colonial leaders waited anxiously for the issue to resurface.
As Britain continued to impose taxes on the colonists, reactions turned violent toward tories (colonists loyal to Britain) and British officials.Sure enough, the 'truce' did not last long. Back in London, Charles Townshend persuaded the House of Commons to tax the Americans once again. This time, though, there would be an import tax on such items as glass, paper, lead, and tea. The Ties that BindCharles Townshend had two reasons for introducing new taxes into Parliament. He wanted to collect money from the colonies, but he also wanted more power for Britain.
His idea was to use the taxes to pay the colonial governors. This was a big change. Before, the colonies paid their own governors. That way, if people were not satisfied with the governor’s leadership, they could cut his salary. The legislature could basically blackmail the governor into doing what they wanted.
Once the salary process changed, the governors could be free to oppose the colonial assemblies. Instead, they would be more tied to Parliament. Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, sponsored the Townshend Acts.
He believed that the Townshend Acts would assert British authority over the colonies as well as increase revenue.Townshend also created an American Board of Customs Commissioners. Officials from this group would be stationed in the colonies to enforce tax policy on imports and other goods. Customs officials received bonuses for every smuggler that got convicted, so they had reasons to want to catch and capture colonists.Finally, Townshend began putting pressure on the colonies to obey and support Britain. He even suspended the New York legislature because they did not have enough supplies for the British troops stationed there.
As the pressure increased, it seemed like a conflict was bound to happen. SKILLS: Analyze, Create Take It BackIn a letter to the other colonies, the Massachusetts legislature recommended that the 13 colonies take action against Parliament.
As a response, Parliament voted to dissolve the Massachusetts legislature. But colonial assemblies reacted strongly and voiced support of Massachusetts by supporting the letter. Feelings of disgust for Britain were growing. More Information on the Massachusetts Circular LetterSamuel Adams wrote the Massachusetts Circular Letter in 1768.
The letter was a petition inviting all of the colonies to unite against Britain. In it, Massachusetts said that it was wrong for England to tax the colonies without giving them representatives in Parliament — “taxation without representation.” When news of the letter came to England, Lord Hillsborough warned colonial legislatures against promoting any such ideas. He threatened to remove powers from any colony that joined Massachusetts' campaign.
Even so, many legislative assemblies throughout the colonies, including New York, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, spoke out against “taxation without representation” and accepted the petition written by Samuel Adams.The more rules the British tried to enforce, the more the colonists rebelled and resisted. By 1769, British merchants began to feel the sting of nonimportation. They couldn’t possibly make a living. In April 1770, news of a partial repeal reached America. But at least one import tax was still being collected and enforced: the tax on tea.