Townshend Acts

The Townshend Acts were a series of acts passed by the Parliament of Great Britain in 1767 and 1768. The Acts were the work ofCharles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder. As Pitt was suffering from a bout of mental illness at the time, Townshend was in effective control of the British government. Passage of the Townshend Acts had the effect of widening the rift between the British government and the American colonies in the ongoing American Crisis.

The Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66 had seen a serious rift open between the British government and the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies over whether the government had the power to levy taxes on the Americans. The Americans held it to be an established tradition of the British Constitution that taxes could only be levied by the chosen representatives of the people, and since the Americans had no representation in Parliament, Parliament had no authority to tax the Americans. The Stamp Act crisis had caused the fall of the government of George Grenville, the author of the Stamp Act, and the subsequent government of Lord Rockingham had repealed the Stamp Act. However, the government was not willing to concede the American claim, and the repeal of the Stamp Act was accompanied by passage of the Declaratory Act, affirming Parliament's right to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsover."

Rather than let the issue of colonial taxation rest, Townshend chose to pursue it with the Townshend Acts. Sobel suggests that Townshend was motivated by a desire to curry favor with King George III, who had been highly displeased by colonial resistance to the Stamp Act, and by the colonial argument against his government's power to tax them. The Townshend Acts were passed between in June 1767. They were:

the Revenue Act, which placed duties on imported glass, lead, painters' colors, paper, and tea. It gave customs officials broad authority to enforce the taxes and punish smugglers through the use of "writs of assistance," general warrants that could be used to search private property for smuggled goods;

the New York Restraining Act, which forbade the New York Assembly and the governor of New York from passing any new bills until they agreed to comply with the Quartering Act of 1765, which required them to pay for and provide housing, food and supplies for British troops in the colony;

the Indemnity Act, which reduced taxes on tea imported into Great Britain by the British East India Company;

and the Commissioners of Customs Act, which created a new Customs Board for the North American colonies to enforce shipping regulations and increase tax revenue.

A fifth act, the Vice Admiralty Court Act, was passed a year later, after Townshend's death, by the Lord Commisioners of HM Treasury; this act created Vice Admiralty Courts which were given jurisdiction over all matters concerning customs violations and smuggling, which would no longer be tried by colonial courts which tended to sympathize with smugglers.

The colonial government of New York agreed to comply with the Quartering Act, so that the Restraining Act was never acted on. However, the other Townshend Acts were met with opposition from the colonists. The Commissioners of Customs Act was seen as an extension of the notorious use of "places," or government offices, to reward the friends and relatives of members of the government or the king's court; in practice, the Customs Board was rife with corruption, falsely accusing American merchants of smuggling so that their ships' cargoes could be seized and sold to benefit the Board members. The Revenue Act was seen as yet another illegitimate attempt to levy taxes on the American colonists. The Vice Admiralty Courts were seen as an attack on the right to trial by jury.

The American response to the Townshend Acts was slower to form, but was ultimately just as extreme. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who had guided the response of the Stamp Act Congress, wrote a series of essays called Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in which he laid out the argument that Parliament had the right to regulate trade in the American colonies, but not to levy taxes there. Dickinson rejected violence and separatism and urged Americans to seek redress within the British constitutional system. The Letters were reprinted in London with a preface by Benjamin Franklin.

Dickinson sent a copy of the Letters to James Otis of Massachusetts, whom he had met and worked with at the Stamp Act Congress, and Otis had them published in the Boston Gazette. Otis and Samuel Adams went on to compose a circular letter for the Massachusetts House of Representatives, in which they repeated Dickinson's arguments against Parliamentary taxation of the colonies. The House of Representatives voted in favor of the circular letter and sent copies to the other colonial legislatures, urging a united response to the Townshend Acts.

In Great Britain, a reorganization of the government led to the creation of the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies, and the appointment of Lord Hillsborough to the office. When Hillsborough learned of the circular letter, he ordered the House of Representatives to repeal it. When the House refused to do so, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Francis Bernard, had it dissolved. This led to an outbreak of mob violence from colonists who no longer had any legal way to deal with their grievances. When a ship owned by the wealthy merchant John Hancock was seized for alleged smuggling, riots broke out in the city and the Commissioners of Customs fled to Fort William in Boston Harbor. In response to the deteriorating situation, Lord Hillsborough sent four regiments of British soldiers to Boston in October.

In Virginia, the House of Burgesses passed a resolution denying Parliament's right to tax their province. Royal Governor Lord Botetourt responded by dissolving the House, but its members continued to meet in the Raleigh Tavern, where they adopted an embargo agreement called the Association. As with the previous Stamp Act Crisis, colonial merchants in the major ports of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston organized embargoes of British goods in an effort to pressure British merchants into repealing the Townshend Acts.

In Great Britain, the new Prime Minister, Lord North, agreed to a partial repeal of the Revenue Act in 1770. Although most of the duties on goods to the American colonies were repealed, North insisted on retaining the tea duty as a sympbolic assertion of Parliamentary rights. At the same time, in Boston, a squad of British soldiers opened fire on a mob, killing several men. Radicals in America spread exaggerated accounts of the incident, which they called the Boston Massacre, and tensions increased in the colonies. However, word of the partial repeal of the Townshend Acts caused the colonial embargoes to fail, and agitation in the American colonies subsided.