Townshend Acts (1767): Duties That Revived Colonial Resistance

The Townshend Acts were a series of laws passed by the British Parliament in 1767 and 1768 that placed duties on glass, lead, painters’ colours, paper and tea imported into the American colonies, and tightened customs enforcement. Introduced by Charles Townshend, they revived the quarrel over taxation that had seemed settled with the repeal of the Stamp Act. Colonial boycotts forced Parliament to repeal most of the duties in 1770, but the tax on tea remained.

Background

The repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 had been accompanied by the Declaratory Act, which asserted Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever”. The government still faced high costs in America and pressure at home to cut taxes; in early 1767 the House of Commons voted to reduce the land tax, leaving a gap in the budget.

Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the ministry nominally led by William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, promised to raise money from America. Some colonists had distinguished between “internal” taxes, such as stamp duties, and “external” duties on trade, which Parliament had long imposed. Townshend chose external duties, apparently hoping that colonists would accept them.

The acts

The measures usually grouped as the Townshend Acts were:

• The New York Restraining Act (1767), which suspended the New York assembly until it complied with the Quartering Act of 1765 by supplying British troops.
• The Revenue Act of 1767, which received royal assent on 29 June and took effect on 20 November 1767. It placed duties on imported glass, lead, painters’ colours, paper and tea.
• The Indemnity Act (1767), which lowered the cost of tea re-exported to the colonies by the East India Company, to compete with smuggled Dutch tea.
• The Commissioners of Customs Act (1767), which created a new American Board of Customs Commissioners based in Boston.
• The Vice-Admiralty Court Act (1768), which set up new courts, without juries, in Halifax, Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston to try smuggling cases.

The duties themselves were small, and the revenue expected was modest, often estimated at about £40,000 a year. What alarmed colonists most was how the money would be spent: on the salaries of royal governors and judges, freeing them from dependence on the colonial assemblies that had paid them until then.

Townshend did not see the results. He died suddenly on 4 September 1767, aged 42.

The colonial response

Letters from a Farmer

From December 1767 to February 1768 the Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson published twelve essays, the Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which were reprinted in almost every colonial newspaper. Dickinson accepted that Parliament could regulate imperial trade, but argued that any duty designed to raise revenue was a tax, and that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies. The distinction between internal and external taxes, he wrote, was meaningless.

The Massachusetts Circular Letter

On 11 February 1768 the Massachusetts House of Representatives approved a circular letter, drafted largely by Samuel Adams, urging other colonial assemblies to join in protesting the acts. The Earl of Hillsborough, the new Secretary of State for the Colonies, ordered the House to rescind it. In June 1768 the House refused by 92 votes to 17, and the “Glorious Ninety-Two” became heroes of the resistance. Governor Francis Bernard dissolved the assembly.

Non-importation

Merchants in Boston agreed in August 1768 to stop importing most British goods, and New York and Philadelphia merchants adopted similar agreements; other colonies followed in 1769. Women, sometimes called Daughters of Liberty, held public spinning bees and promoted homespun cloth and herbal substitutes for tea. Committees published the names of merchants who broke the agreements. British imports into the colonies fell sharply in 1769.

Troops in Boston

The customs commissioners in Boston met hostility from the start. In June 1768 customs officers seized John Hancock’s sloop Liberty on suspicion of smuggling, and a crowd attacked the officials, who fled to a warship in the harbour. In response, the government sent troops. Regiments landed at Boston on 1 October 1768, the scene recorded by Paul Revere in his engraving, and the presence of soldiers in the town created the tensions that ended in the Boston Massacre.

Partial repeal

The boycotts hurt British merchants, and the duties were raising little money while taxing British manufactures. On 5 March 1770 the new First Lord of the Treasury, Lord North, proposed repealing all the duties except the one on tea, which was kept to uphold Parliament’s right to tax. The repeal took effect on 12 April 1770, and the non-importation movement soon collapsed, though many colonists continued to avoid taxed tea.

Timeline

• 1767, 29 June: The Revenue Act receives royal assent.
• 1767, 4 September: Charles Townshend dies.
• 1767, 20 November: The Townshend duties take effect.
• 1767, 2 December: The first of Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer appears.
• 1768, 11 February: Massachusetts approves its Circular Letter.
• 1768, 10 June: The seizure of the Liberty sparks a riot in Boston.
• 1768, 1 October: British troops land in Boston.
• 1770, 5 March: Lord North proposes partial repeal; the Boston Massacre takes place the same evening.
• 1770, 12 April: All Townshend duties except the tea duty are repealed.

Why it matters

The Townshend Acts showed that the dispute over taxation was about principle, not just money. They spread the arguments of Dickinson and Samuel Adams across the colonies, brought soldiers into Boston, and left behind the tea duty that would lead to the Boston Tea Party in 1773.