Townshend Act

12 Key excerpts on "Townshend Act"

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  The Drama of American History Series

  • James Lincoln Collier, Christopher Collier(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Blackstone Publishing

    (Publisher)

  home, and make up the difference by laying duties on a number of things Americans imported in quantity from England, like glass, lead, paper, paints, and tea.

  George III has been much maligned in American history, in part for good reason. His unwillingness to give any ground in the dispute between England and the American colonies led to the Revolution and ultimately the formation of the United States of America. But George III was also a thoughtful husband and father and a loyal friend. He was, at times, certainly insane and a paradoxical human being.

  Now it was the Americans' turn to be angry. So far as they were concerned, it was the same old story—taxation without representation. The news of what are now called the Townshend Acts, after the chief financial minister for England whose idea they were, reached America in September 1767. Within days there was a meeting in Boston chaired by the fiery James Otis, to work out a way of fighting off the Townshend taxes. A great many people had disapproved of the riots that had followed the Stamp Act, even though they hated the Act itself. This time it was decided to work by peaceful means. The merchants would revive the boycott of a wide range of British goods, including clothes, jewelry, coaches, watches, and other things.

  This meeting was widely reported in newspapers around the colonies and the papers remained full of the story for months. Very important in working up public opinion was a series of articles written by John Dickinson called "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies." Dickinson said that the new taxes on Americans would "sink them into slaves." When a man like Dickinson with a reputation for reason and moderation used such strong terms, it was clear that the American resistance to the Townshend taxes was going to be extremely firm.

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  Colonial America and the Early Republic

  • Philip N. Mulder(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Revolution did not occur in 1765. The bonds of empire withstood the challenge, and as soon as parliament repealed the Stamp Act the Americans returned to the import shops. The confrontation with the mother country had eroded but not destroyed the traditional meaning of consumer goods. Newspaper advertisements carried the familiar words “just imported from England”, a clear indication that many colonists still took their cultural cues from Great Britain. Until that connection could be severed, independence was out of the question. This does not mean that Americans deserted the political principles that they had mouthed during the Stamp Act protest; most certainly they were not hypocrites. The boycott had provided colonists with a behavioural link between a political ideology and local experience, and when it was abandoned ideas about liberty and representation, slavery and virtue were temporarily dissociated from the affairs of daily life.

  The Townshend Act of 1767 returned consumer goods to the centre of American political discourse. This ill-conceived statute levied a duty upon imported glass, paper, tea, lead and paint.41 Patriotic leaders throughout the colonies advocated a campaign of non-consumption, and though this boycott would ultimately disappoint some of its more fervent organizers, it revealed the powerful capacity of goods in this society not only to recruit people into a political movement but also to push them — often when they were unaware of what was happening — to take ever more radical positions. As in the Stamp Act crisis, imported British manufactures provided a framework in which many colonists learned about rights and liberties.

  During the period of protest against the Townshend Act, roughly between 1767 and 1770, colonists began to speak of consumer goods in a highly charged moral language. Of course, these Americans were not the first people to condemn the pernicious effects of luxury and self-indulgence. That concern had vexed moralists for centuries. Nevertheless during the Stamp Act crisis a dominant theme of the political discourse had been debt. The purchase of British manufactures undermined the personal independence of the American consumers and thus made them fit targets for tyrannical conspirators. But after 1767 the thrust of patriotic rhetoric shifted from private debt to public virtue. By acquiring needless British imports the colonial consumer threatened the liberties of other men and women. “Every Man who will take Pains to cultivate the Cost of Homespun”, advised a writer in the Boston Gazette, “may easily convince himself that his private Interest, as well as [that of] the Publick, will be promoted by it”.42

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  Beginnings of the American People

  • Carl L. (Carl Lotus) Becker, William Edward Dodd, (Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  And no doubt most Englishmen would willingly have let the question rest. But an unwise king, stubbornly bent on having his way; precise administrators of the Grenville type, concerned for the loss of a farthing due; egoists like Wedderburne, profoundly ignorant of colonial affairs, convulsed and readily convinced by the light sarcasms with which Soame Jenyns disposed of the pretensions of "our American colonies": such men waited only the opportune moment for retrieving a humiliating defeat. That moment came with the mischance that clouded the mind of Pitt and withdrew him from the direction of a government of all the factions. The responsibility relinquished by the Great Commoner was assumed by Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man well fitted to foster the spirit of discord which then reigned, to the king's great content, in that "mosaic" ministry. In January, 1767, without the knowledge of the Cabinet, this "director of the revels" pledged himself in the House of Commons to find "a mode by which a revenue may be drawn from America without offense." Since the Americans admit that external taxes are legal, he said, let us lay an external tax. Backed by the king, he accordingly procured from Parliament, in May of the same year, an act laying duties on glass, red and white lead, paper, and tea. The revenue to be derived from the law, estimated at £40,000, was to be applied to the payment of the salaries of royal governors and of judges in colonial courts. A second act established a board of commissioners to be stationed in America for the better enforcement of the Trade Acts; while a third, known as the Restraining Act, suspended the New York Assembly until it should have made provision for the troops according to the terms of the Mutiny Act.

  The Townshend Acts revived the old controversy, not quite in the old manner. Mobs were less in evidence than in 1765, although riots occasioned by business depression disturbed the peace of New York in the winter of 1770, and the presence of the troops in Boston, the very sight of which was an offense to that civic community, resulted in the famous "massacre" of the same year. Yet the duties were collected without much difficulty; and although the income derived from them amounted to almost nothing, the commissioners reorganized the customs service so successfully that an annual revenue of £30,000 was obtained at a cost of £13,000 to collect. Forcible resistance was, indeed, less practicable in dealing with the Townshend Acts than in the case of the Stamp Act; but it was also true that men of character and substance, many of whom in 1765 had not been "averse to a little rioting," now realized that mobs and the popular mass meeting undermined at once the security of property rights and their own long-established supremacy in colonial politics. Desiring to protect their privileges against encroachment from the English Government without sharing them with the unfranchised populace, they were therefore more concerned than before to employ only constitutional and peaceful methods of obtaining redress. To this end they resorted to non-importation agreements, to petition and protest, so well according with English tradition, and to the reasoned argument, of which the most notable in this period was that series of Farmer's Letters

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  The American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence

  The Essays of George H. Smith

  • George H. Smith(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Libertarianism.org Press

    (Publisher)

  Lord North favored a middle course. He wanted to repeal all the Townshend duties except the duty on tea. This duty, which was quite small, should remain as a symbol of British authority and thereby reaffirm the right of Parliament to tax the American colonies.

  Lord North got his way. On April 12, 1770, the Townshend duties on glass, paper, and paint were rescinded. Only the tax on tea was retained—a symbolic gesture that would later have profound and irreversible consequences.

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  5The Coercive Acts and Their Theoretical Significance

  The Boston Tea Party has often been called a pivotal event that led to the American Revolution, but it would be more accurate to say that the British response was the true catalyst.

  Beginning in March 1774, in retaliation for the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, Parliament passed four pieces of legislation known as the Coercive Acts. (Some historians include a fifth, the Quebec Act, among the Coercive Acts, but this had been in the works for some time and was not a direct response to the Boston Tea Party.) These measures, which many Americans called the Intolerable Acts, amounted to a declaration of martial law in Boston. They left Americans with no plausible course of action between the extremes of total submission and revolution.

  The Coercive Acts closed the Port of Boston (with some minor exceptions) until Bostonians provided restitution to the East India Company, compensated customs officers for their losses, and showed proper respect for law and order. The charter of Massachusetts (its constitution, in effect) was severely altered to give the royal governor extensive powers. He could now appoint or fire “all judges of the inferior courts of common pleas, commissioners of oyer and terminer [i.e., judges who dealt with treason, felonies, and misdemeanors], the attorney general, provosts, marshals, justices of the peace, and other officers of the council or courts of justice.” And “upon every vacancy of the offices of chief justice and judges of the superior court . . . the governor . . . shall have full power and authority to nominate and appoint the persons to succeed to the said offices, who shall hold their commissions during the pleasure of his Majesty.”

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  Colonial America

  • Jerome Reich(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Townshend thought that he would take advantage of the distinction (made by Dulany and accepted publicly before a Parliamentary committee by Benjamin Franklin) between internal and external taxes by levying customs duties—external taxes—on lead, paints, paper, glass, silk, and tea imported from England into the colonies. The £40,000 expected to be raised by the Townshend Acts of 1767 would be used to pay the costs of colonial administration in America. At the same session in Parliament, the customs service was tightened up still further.

  Most Americans had never accepted the distinction between internal and external taxation. The Stamp Act Congress had made it clear that it objected to any tax that raised revenue in the colonies. Only taxes for the regulation of trade were acceptable. These views were repeated in Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania written by John Dickinson. He, too, warned that acceptance of Parliamentary taxation would make Americans “as abject slaves as France and Poland can shew in wooden shoes, and with uncombed hair. . . .”

  Similar views were expressed by Samuel Adams, who wrote the Circular Letter of February 11, 1768, sent by the Massachusetts legislature to all the other colonies. Adams stressed the point that if governors and judges no longer depended on the colonial assemblies for their salaries, Americans would lose their freedom. This, together with the reform of the customs service, could only result—for the first time in colonial history (with the possible exception of the short-lived Dominion of New England)—in effective enforcement of the Navigation Acts.

  At first the English government gave every indication of enforcing the Townshend Acts. Lord Hillsborough, who held the newly created post of secretary of state for the colonies (another sign of the government’s intention to strengthen its control over the colonies) ordered the Massachusetts legislature to rescind the Circular Letter. When the legislature refused, Hillsborough ordered the governor to dissolve the legislature and had several regiments of troops transferred to Boston. However, once again nonimportation of English goods proved effective, thanks to the support of the Daughters of Liberty. Accounts from virtually all colonies testify to the zeal with which American women boycotted British goods—particularly tea. Therefore, by the end of 1769 (Townshend had died two years earlier) the ministry, again in deference to English merchants and manufacturers rather than to American constitutional theory, repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea. The latter was retained as Lord North*

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  The Patriot Parson of Lexington, Massachusetts: Reverend Jonas Clarke and the American Revolution

  • Richard P. Kollen(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  Although the Stamp Act’s repeal appeased its opponents momentarily, the British ministry remained determined to use the North American colonies as a revenue source. When the Rockingham administration collapsed, William Pitt, another friend of the American colonies, became prime minister. But Pitt’s chronic gout gave his chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend—a man decidedly unsympathetic to American discourse about liberty—an independent hand in crafting economic policy. The Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 sought to levy a tax and target the revenue to pay royal governors’ and judges’ salaries. Heretofore, provincial assemblies had legislated judicial pay. Not only did the new tax propose to extract revenue from Americans, but Whigs also suspected that it targeted the funds to erode their liberties by removing an institutional check on the executive and judiciary.

  Parliament enacted Chancellor Townshend’s taxes on British glass, tea, lead, paper and paint, confident that such duties could never be considered internal taxes because England collected the duties externally, at the American ports of entry. But for the Whig opposition, where the British customs service collected the duty mattered little. Unlike the earlier import duty on foreign molasses aimed at redirecting American trade from the French to the British product, these Townshend items had no alternative source. Thus, they were expressly designed to raise revenue pure and simple. Although not levied internally, they remained a tax. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania made just this argument in his four-part “Letters from a Farmer,” published in newspapers throughout the colonies from December 1767 through February 1768. Dickinson also reminded Americans of nonimportation’s effectiveness during the Stamp Act crisis.2

  Boston responded to the new duties by extending the embargo of British goods, this time beyond merchants. Town meeting adopted a citywide non-consumption plan in an effort to diminish demand for British goods. The plan encouraged country towns to join the boycott. Boston’s town meeting in October furnished a list of items, luxury goods in particular, to boycott after December 31, 1767, among them loaf sugar, coaches, chaises and carriages, gloves, shoes, gold and silver buttons, snuff, malt liquors and glue. Various textiles and fabrics such as silk, cotton, velvets and any broadcloth worth more than ten shillings were included.3 Some criticized the list for omitting the Townshend commodities and urged people to dispense with the items. Taking the lead, a group of Boston ladies swore off “foreign” tea for a year.4

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  Lord North

  • W. Baring Pemberton(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Papamoa Press

    (Publisher)

  Sincere or otherwise, the rejoicings over the repeal of Grenville’s Stamp Act were soon damped down by the news of Townshend’s tax upon lead, glass, paint, paper and tea. These new taxes were supposed to pander to the susceptibilities of the Americans, who, Franklin had assured the Ministry, would not question the power of Parliament to impose external duties for the purposes of regulating imperial trade. Commissioners were appointed for carrying out the Act and, at the same time, for sealing up loopholes through which the colonists had hitherto escaped the provisions of the Mutiny and Navigation Acts, to the detriment of the British taxpayer. From the estimated yield of £40,000 from his taxes, Townshend proposed to pay the salaries of governors and judges, thus removing one fruitful cause of friction, and at the same time usefully strengthening the executive. Any balance was to go to the defence of the colonies. The absurdity of taxing British exports—for this is what it amounted to—seemed to have escaped everyone in the Government but North, and he, not yet being in the Cabinet, probably did not think it of any use to object.

  Thus, once more, the British Government played into the hands of the extremists, who in press, pulpit and marketplace, had not been idle since the Stamp Act. As usual, Massachusetts took the lead. Non-importation, so successful in the past, was immediately revived; but because they did this in a more sober manner, to Camden, at least, the attitude of the colonists seemed more menacing than in 1765.{377} Even more sinister, though at the time less spectacular than the boycott, was the circular letter which the same indomitable Massachusetts sent round to other provinces, ostensibly asking for advice, but by implication suggesting concerted measures. Unanimity in action was still some years ahead, but from New Hampshire to Georgia there appeared unanimity in determination, actively or passively expressed, not to submit to the Townshend Revenue Acts. While the struggle was a fiscal one with Parliament, few colonists, however strongly Tory, supported the authority of the British legislature. According to one traveller, scarcely one in a hundred was not firm on this point, and ready to argue that they had as much right to fight for what they considered liberty as the people of Great Britain had done a century or more earlier.{378}

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  The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89, Fourth Edition

  • Edmund S. Morgan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  The Americans still felt most strongly the danger to their liberties from Parliamentary taxation, but they were learning to extend their inquiries to Parliamentary legislation too. They would have been obliged to explore deeper into this territory if England had continued without pause in her efforts to make them bow to absolute authority. But after the proposal to hang a few Bostonians, the ministry and the members of Parliament began to think of tempering authority with wisdom. No one in the ministry thought highly of Townshend’s duties: taxes on Britain’s exports to the colonies were as disadvantageous to British as to colonial prosperity, and the revenue they brought in was trifling. The Townshend Acts had in fact been passed in a fit of wishful thinking. The only difficulty with repealing them was that by doing so Parliament would seem to be retreating in the face of American resistance.

  The solution which occurred to the ministry was to repeal all the duties but one, that on tea. In this way the principle would be upheld, but the substance for the most part given up. Hillsborough notified the colonies that he was going to propose this measure to Parliament and also that the government had no intention of suggesting any more taxes on America for the purpose of revenue. As a further gesture of good will he allowed Governor Bernard to summon the Massachusetts Assembly into meeting again with nothing more said about their refusal to rescind the circular letter. Ten months later, in March 1770, while Boston was suffering its “massacre,” Parliament (now under the leadership of Lord North as first minister) redeemed Hillsborough’s pledge by repealing all the Townshend duties except that on tea.

  Though memory of the Boston Massacre continued to smolder throughout the coming years, England’s concessions resuscitated much of the old good feeling in the colonies and retarded the development of new questions about Parliament’s authority. After Parliament enacted its partial repeal of the Townshend duties, the non-importation agreements began to crack. There had been much talk of holding firm until the duty on tea should be removed too, but when New York decided to resume importation (except for tea), the merchants of the other great ports were disposed to follow suit lest they lose all their business to the New Yorkers. The rest of the population, which hitherto had looked to the merchants for leadership, were more ready to continue the boycott; but the whole movement required an extraordinary unanimity in order to be successful, and it quickly broke down.

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  Reacting to the Past™

  • Bill Offutt(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Ironically, the original reason for the upheaval had been repealed, only the colonists didn’t know it yet. A new prime minister, Lord North, thought the costs of the Townshend duties not worth the revenue benefits. However, to preserve Parliamentary authority, a symbolic tax on tea was retained. When colonials heard the news, there was more rejoicing. Colonial politicians who were worried about the POWER conspiracy noted the tea tax and contended that non-importation should continue, but most ignored such fears and consumed all sorts of British goods (including tea) once again. From 1770 to 1773, relative peace descended throughout North America. Most turbulence seemed confined to Massachusetts, where politicians continued to see plots against colonial liberty in how their governors were paid. Massachusetts leaders set up Committees of Correspondence to fulminate about the ongoing plot against colonial rights and to spread awareness of this evil, sending out letters that were read and answered in many towns and counties throughout the colonies as a political education project. Then, in 1773, the British East India Company faced bankruptcy, holding 17 million pounds of unsold tea in its English warehouses. Parliament, whose members included many East India Company investors, decided to bail out the company through its trade with the colonies. The existing tea tax would be lowered to make the tea less expensive and thus presumably increase consumption. Furthermore, all middlemen merchants were to be eliminated, as only official East India Company agents would be allowed to sell tea. This streamlining promised to reduce the tea price still further. The bottom line, from the British perspective, was that colonists would consume more tea, the Company would sell all the tea that colonists consumed, and it would thus become profitable again

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  The Boston Tea Party

  The Foundations of Revolution

  • James M. Volo(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Rather than being oppressive, certain aspects of the acts were actually an important source of colonial wealth. 67 Colonial planters could accumulate large fortunes in only a few years by growing enumerated crops, such as rice, tobacco, and indigo. Moreover, restrictions placed on the colonial iron, hat, and shipping industries did “not materially hamper” their development. 68 The Sugar Act of 1764 was the first of the new measures designed to reorganize the empire and raise revenue from America. The act not only put a small 6d. tax on each gallon of molasses but it also contained more than 40 provisions for changes in the customs and commerce regulations, thereby affecting an unprecedented change in the status of the colonies “amounting to a constitutional revolution.” 69 Documentation and regulatory paperwork was vastly increased, and enforcement was extended to almost all coastwise traders including the smallest intercolonial shippers who might move cargoes only a few miles along the shoreline. The skippers of vessels greater than 10 tons were required to obtain documentation of their cargoes before they were shipped out and to do likewise when they were landed even if going from one colony to another. “If any goods are shipped without such sufferance…the officers of the customs are empowered to stop all vessels…which shall be discovered within two leagues of the shore of any such British colonies or plantations, and to seize all goods on board.” 70 The Townshend Acts of 1767 thereafter created the so-called Writs of Assistance (general search warrants), which were widely regarded in America as unconstitutional and damaging to personal liberty. Vessels and cargoes could be condemned on the most technical grounds, and the regulations were to be enforced in the admiralty courts operating under a system of law different from that used in the local colonial court system

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  George III

  King and politicians 1760–1770

  • Peter Thomas(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  130

  On this occasion Townshend took the opportunity of informing MPs about his plans for American customs duties, a method he was adopting to meet the supposed colonial distinction between internal and external taxes. He gave a list of items to be taxed, one that was to be greatly altered in the next few weeks, and estimated the total revenue would be £40,000. Townshend also for the first time announced that the aim was to pay civil government costs, to free officials and judges from financial dependence on the assemblies. The only comment was a denunciation by Grenville of the taxes as inadequate. In retrospect the most conspicuous omission from Townshend’s list was tea, because not until 20 May did he negotiate an agreement with the East India Company. Townshend finally presented his proposals to the Commons on 1 June. The import duty of 3d a lb on tea would produce £20,000, and the same total would come from duties on china, glass, paper, and paints. This total of £40,000 was the same as that from the markedly different set of duties announced on 13 May, and would seem to have been the target sum, one which almost exactly matched the estimated cost of colonial government. Grenville again attacked the total as paltry, but this fateful American taxation apparently met with no opposition at Westminster.131

  After the Parliamentary session ended in June the Duke of Grafton drew the conclusion from his buffeting in the House of Lords, and setbacks in the Commons, that he ought to strengthen the ministry by recruiting part of the opposition, and early in July he obtained royal permission to do so. George III, the Duke told Conway and Horace Walpole, ‘was not disinclined to take Lord Rockingham, but protested he had almost rather resign his crown than consent to receive George Grenville again’.132 Grafton’s own preference was for the Bedfords, but after an initial rebuff he was persuaded by Conway to approach Rockingham on 7 July, when he offered his own post of the Treasury. The Marquess assumed that he was being invited to form a new administration;133 and he conducted prolonged negotiations during the next fortnight under that misapprehension. Rockingham was not now prepared, as he had been in 1765, to base a ministry only on his own following. He wanted a comprehensive administration, to include the Bedford group, and at their request some Grenvillites, together with some selected Chathamites: but he would not have potential rivals like Chatham, Grenville or Temple in his cabinet. His plan for a coalition ministry differed completely in principle from Chatham’s 1766 attack on the factions. Rockingham was seeking to coerce the Crown by an alliance of factions too strong to be resisted, or removed. He had learnt his lesson. The Bedfords initially agreed to take part, and consulted Grenville, who, aware that he had no chance of office himself, raised with them the issue of America, infuriating the Marquess by deeming Rockinghamite and Chathamite views to be identical. Rockingham and Bedford contrived a verbal compromise formula, an agreement that British sovereignty there would be asserted ‘with firmness and temper’: this implicit contradiction the signatories were never called upon to resolve. These opposition negotiations broke down not on policy but over Rockingham’s adamant insistence on having Conway as his Commons Leader. Bedford vainly suggested Dowdeswell, in view of Conway’s proven incompetence during the last two sessions.134 On 22 July Rockingham reported to the King his failure to form a ministry, only to be informed that he had not been asked to do so. The Marquess was astonished, and also angry, thinking he had been deceived by Grafton.135 Grenville had already perceived that the ministry would gain from the failure of the negotiation, as well as its success; for discord would be sowed among the opposition factions. Whether or not that was Grafton’s deliberate aim, as Grenville suspected, the prognosis was correct, and Grenville himself the greatest loser. His alliance with the Bedfords had been born out of past events, and nurtured by self-interest. But the Bedford group was now cognisant of Rockingham’s impossible demands and of the virtual royal veto on Grenville. Next time they would make their own bargain.136

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  Samuel Adams

  A Life

  • Ira Stoll(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  On May 10, Parliament approved the Tea Act of 1773, allowing the East India Company to sell its surplus tea to America, provided that the Townshend Act duty be collected. During the discussion of the matter in Parliament, one member, William Dowdeswell, was prophetically skeptical. Addressing himself to Lord North, the prime minister who had proposed the plan, Dowdeswell predicted, “I tell the Noble Lord now, if he don’t take off the duty, they won’t take the tea.” 3 If Parliament was doing its part to strain relations between Britain and Massachusetts, the Massachusetts House of Representatives—that is, Samuel Adams and his allies—would do its part, as well. On Wednesday, May 26, the House convened in Boston for a new legislative session. Adams was elected clerk, as he had been every year since 1766, and was sworn in with an oath that ended, “So help you God.” The same day, Charles Turner, pastor of the church in Duxbury, opened the legislative session with an emphatic sermon on the duties of civil leaders and the rights and responsibilities of citizens

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