This lecture is
best viewed with screen resolution set at 1440 x 900.THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
Lecture 7: The Townshend Acts and the Boston Massacre
This lecture is
best viewed with screen resolution set at 1440 x 900.|
After
1765, British-American relations were never the same again. The
crisis over the Stamp Act aroused and unified Americans as no previous
political event ever had. It stimulated bold political and
constitutional writings throughout the colonies, deepened the
colonists' political consciousness and participation, and produced new
forms of popular resistance. In their mobs the people learned
that they could compel both the resignation and obedience to other
popular measures. |
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The
Townshend Acts (1767) Charles Townshend |
The British government had also
learned from the crisis. They knew they could no longer rely
simply on a measure of Parliament to generate revenue. If the
Americans would not stomach an internal tax like the Stamp Act, then
Parliament would have to gather revenue through indirect taxes like
customs duties. Consequently, it fell to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Charles
"Champagne Charley" Townshend, to impose new levies
on glass, paper, paint, and tea imported into the colonies. Even
with these revenues, the sums yielded amounted to less than one-tenth
the annual cost of maintaining British troops in America. The British also realized they needed a more effective way of organizing executive authority within the empire. In 1767-68, Parliament created the American Board of Customs, located in Boston, which would centralize collection of duties. It also established three new superior vice-admiralty courts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. It created a new secretaryship of state exclusively for American affairs. At the same time, the government decided to economize by pulling back much of its army from deployments in the West and closing many remote posts. It would now station British troops in the coastal cities where, according to the Quartering Act of 1765, the colonists would be responsible for housing and supplying the troops. This withdrawal of troops away from the frontier not only contributed to chaos between Indians and settlers, but the concentration of a standing army in peacetime amid civilian population blurred the Army's original mission in America and raised the colonists' fears of British intentions. By 1768 there was a new determination among British officials to put down the unruly forces that seemed to be loose in America. Colonial governors received instructions to tighten their control of colonial assemblies and not to agree to acts that would increase popular representation in the assemblies or lengthen the time the assemblies met. Meanwhile, royal officials toyed with more elaborate plans for remodeling the colonial governments. |
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The
Townshend Crisis in America
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In the charged atmosphere of the
late 1760s, these measures and proposals were not simply
irritating: they were explosive. With the passage of the
Townshend duties, the earlier pattern of resistance established by the
Stamp Act Crisis reappeared and expanded. Pamphlets appeared
rejecting the right of all parliamentary taxation and calling for a
revival of the non-importation agreements that had proven so effective
during the Stamp Act Crisis. Following Boston's lead in 1768,
merchants in colonial ports again formed associations to
boycott
British goods. Popular acts such as wearing homespun cloth were
encouraged. By now, more Americans were involved in the
resistance movement. Extralegal groups and committees, usually
but not always restrained by popular leaders, emerged to harass customs
officials. Resistance was strongest in Massachusetts, where Samuel Adams, cousin of prominent attorney John Adams, was the dominant figure. In February 1768, the Massachusetts assembly issued a "circular letter" to other colonial legislatures denouncing the Townshend duties as unconstitutional violations of the principle of no taxation without representation. When the royal governor ordered the assembly to revoke the letter, members refused, forcing the governor to dissolve the representative assembly. With legal means for resolving such grievances now removed, mobs and other unauthorized groups in the colony turned to violence. When a British warship arrived in Boston harbor in June 1768, customs officials promptly seized John Hancock's ship Liberty for violating trade acts. (Hancock had grown very wealthy through smuggling.) The seizure was supposed to offer an object lesson in the cost of defying royal authority, but instead it set off one of the fiercest riots in Boston history. Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for American affairs, ordered a reroute of troops bound for Ireland to go instead to Boston to help maintain order. The appearance of these troops in October 1768 marked a crucial turning point in the escalating controversy: for the first time the British government had sent a substantial number of soldiers to enforce British authority in the colonies. Colonists already feared standing armies, and the arrival of these troops, together with those brought in from the frontier, now made the ration of British soldiers to colonists 1 in 4. Colonial leaders protested the presence of so many troops, saying that having so many young men in town, with little to occupy them, would only lead to disaster. Their fears proved prophetic. |
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The
Boston Massacre
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On
March 5, 1770, a crowd of Bostonians gathered as usual outside the
customs house to harass British soldiers on duty. The customs
house symbolized the hated Townshend duties and other British
impositions upon the colonists. Boys, unemployed seamen, and
other "rabble" jeered and tossed snowballs--some containing rocks or
other objects--at the troops. Whether the actions this day exceeded
those on other days, we don't know, but a young captain appeared and
ordered his men to take up their arms and fire into the crowd.
The killed five colonists, including a free black man, Crispus
Attucks,
and wounded several others. Eventually, the troops and their
officer were all tried in colonial courts and acquitted by colonial
juries. Much of the credit for the acquittal fell to
attorney John Adams, who defended Captain Thomas Preston.
Adams
represented Preston because he felt that the colonies must prove
that their justice system worked, and a fair trial would do that.
As a result of Adams' selfless and noble gesture, his business as an
attorney temporarily dried up, as many colonists did not share his
noble vision and would have preferred only a nominal defense that would
have produced a guilty verdict. Nevertheless, the case brought
John Adams into public attention, where he would only remain throughout
he crisis period that followed. Reports of "The Boston Massacre" aroused American passions and inspired some of the most sensation rhetoric heard in the Revolutionary era. To many colonists, the British resort to troops to quell civil disorder provided the ultimate symbol of the ineffectiveness of the British government's authority, and the British knew it. British officials advanced and retreated, pleaded and threatened, in ever more desperate efforts to enforce British authority without aggravating colonists' hostility. |
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