The Townshend Acts of 1767: The British government faced looming debts from the Seven Years’ War after the Stamp Act Crisis. The American colonies were also under political pressure to prove Parliament’s taxing authority. With William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, at the head of the ministry from 1766, Charles Townshend was at the Exchequer or finance ministry, and General Henry Conway and Lord Shelburne were in the cabinet as supporters of the Marquis of Rockingham. Colonial interests were also important to Rockingham.
Among them were Pitt, who had supported the repeal of the Stamp Act, and Conway, who had been a colonial sympathizer for many years. In February 1767, Townshend faced a severe financial defeat when Rockingham’s supporters forced a 20 percent cut in the customary land tax from 4 shillings to 3 shillings. It was therefore more crucial than ever to raise revenue.
The new proposal, which was external and covered by the Declaratory Act, only applied to goods that the colonists voluntarily imported. As Townshend pointed out in March 1767, the Stamp Act had been an internal tax. Thus, the Stamp Act was an internal tax. Additionally, Townshend gambled that the items themselves, such as Spanish and Portuguese fruit and wines, tea, paint, pane glass, and paper, would affect only the wealthy, preventing agitation among the lower classes.
Wine and fruit were eventually removed from the act after merchants argued that it contradicted the Navigation Acts by allowing Iberia to trade directly with America. The House of Commons passed Townshend’s new tax bill without much debate on June 29, 1767, when it was thinly attended at the end of the spring session. Americans were only able to protest the new taxes personally and through petitions during the summer recess of colonial assemblies.
In London, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee (writing under the pen name Junius Americanus) distributed leaflets, but Wilkes’s ridiculous attempts to reenter the House of Commons overshadowed the whole affair. Samuel Adams, an American radical, attempted to organize boycotts similar to those that had led to the repeal of the Stamp Act.
While some patriots refused tea and let their houses go unpainted, merchants and many Southern colonies did not support the war enthusiastically. As a result of the 1765 boycotts, London merchants found that their European markets had been expanded, and they did not add their voices to those of the colonists calling for a repeal of the laws.
Townshend presented, and the House of Commons passed a series of related bills that really threatened colonial leaders. The new taxes would not pay the war debt or cover the costs of garrisoning the army, but rather would make colonial officials independent from their legislatures. Additionally, there would be three new Admiralty courts in Charles Town, Philadelphia, and Boston, as well as Halifax, and an American-based Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston to prosecute smuggling without juries.
New England customs collectors used Writs of Assistance to arrest colonists without cause and hold them indefinitely; these warrants were expanded throughout the colonies. The London administration dismissed the assembly after it voted against the resolution and was instructed to rescind it. In October, Massachusetts passed a resolution supporting boycotts and resistance. Samuel Adams wrote a circular letter that was forwarded to the other colonies.
Assembly members who voted to obey the government’s orders were harassed and thrown out. Even if every other colony voted in favor of the circular letter, their true support was merely token because some of them were already taxed to fund their authorities, and the taxes had no negative impact on them.
In Pennsylvania, lawyer John Dickinson published a series of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in the Pennsylvania Gazette between December 1767 and February 1768, arguing that although Britain could regulate imperial trade, no tax, internal or external, could be levied on the colonies without their consent, a more stringent position than the British authorities had previously been presented.
After Townshend died unexpectedly of typhus on September 4, 1767, his policies were never implemented. Lord North succeeded him as Exchequer. An appalled ministry moved 4,000 troops into Boston—including two regiments recently employed in Ireland—to put down a malt tax protest and dispatched naval patrols to Boston Harbor. Although Samuel Adams encouraged resistance to the troops, they landed without incident and took up garrison duty in a resentful city that had to feed and quarter them.
There were riots over seized ships (John Hancock’s smuggler, Liberty, was taken) and harassment of customs officials, which led to more hostile relations with the troops, resulting in the Boston Massacre of 1770. A growing number of colonists, emboldened by Dickinson and Adams and alarmed by the government’s expanding enforcement capabilities in London, signed nonimportation agreements against British products in 1770.
There was only one Townshend Act that survived the repeal on April 12, 1770. The British politicians involved attributed the repeal more to internal British politics than colonial pressure, as Lord North used it to form a new cabinet. Parliament kept the tea tax as symbolic proof of its power to levy taxes on colonies, despite it being the least lucrative of the items.
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