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Suspicion of Parliament remained high in the colonies, even after the partial repeal of the Townshend duties. This was especially true in port cities like Boston and New York, where British customs agents were a daily irritant and a reminder of imperial power.
In public houses and town squares, people met and discussed politics. Among the works that provided topics for these discussions was John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. Published almost a century earlier, it influenced opinions about the role of government in protecting life, liberty, and property. The Sons of Liberty provided fuel for debate by issuing propaganda whenever, in their view, Parliament overreached its authority.
Committees of correspondence were of particular importance during the colonial resistance to Parliament's taxation efforts. The committees emerged in Boston in 1764, to encourage opposition to the Currency and Sugar Acts. They also played an important role during the resistance against the Stamp Act.
By the early 1770s, committees of correspondence had formed throughout the colonies, enlisting between seven and eight thousand members. They identified potential enemies of the nonimportation movement and other resistance efforts, exchanged ideas, and shared information. In times of crisis, like those associated with the Stamp Act or the Townshend Acts, the committees published versions of events that differed from royal accounts. They began to replace royal officials as a source of information for many colonists and, by 1773, they combined to form a communications network throughout the colonies.
In 1773, a major financial panic pushed the British East India Company, which supplied tea for the British Empire, to the brink of bankruptcy. Had the company failed, Britain’s entire economy would be affected and its hold on India would be jeopardized. Parliament issued the Tea Act in an attempt to save the company by allowing it to export tea directly to the American colonies.
Prior to 1773, all British tea, which was supplied by the British East India Company in India, had to be sent to Great Britain, where it was taxed, then shipped to the colonies, where it was taxed again (e.g., the Townshend duties). The Tea Act allowed the British East India Company to ship its tea directly to the colonies without having to go through Great Britain and pay taxes there. This enabled the British East India Company to sell tea in the colonies at prices lower than that of tea smuggled in from elsewhere. The hope was that lower prices for British tea would drive colonial smugglers out of business and increase revenue for the company, thus saving it from bankruptcy. In addition, by purchasing legally imported and taxed tea, Parliament believed that consumers would, in effect, accept parliamentary authority over the colonies.
It is important to remember that Parliament did not enact the Tea Act to punish the colonists or raise revenue. On its surface, the Act was a straightforward measure to protect a company on the verge of bankruptcy. However, by lowering the cost of British tea in the colonies, the Tea Act coerced colonists to accept parliamentary supremacy through their consumption of British tea.
Parliament’s plan was perhaps too clever. A number of colonists, including many merchants who would lose business as a result of the law, saw the Tea Act as another assault on their liberty and a violation of the British Constitution.
By granting a monopoly to the East India Company, the Tea Act not only cut out colonial merchants, who would otherwise sell the tea themselves, but it also reduced their profits from smuggled foreign tea. The merchants were among the most powerful and influential people in the colonies, so their dissatisfaction carried weight in colonial politics. Moreover, because the tea tax that the Townshend Acts imposed remained in place, tea continued to represent the idea of “no taxation without representation”.
As they had when protesting earlier acts and taxes, the colonists responded with a boycott. Committees of correspondence coordinated resistance in all of the colonial port cities. Up and down the East Coast, ships carrying tea from the British East India Company were unable to unload their wares. In Charles Town, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, the equivalent of millions of dollars of British tea was locked in warehouses or rotting in the holds of ships as they sailed back to Great Britain.
Colonists held mass meetings in the port cities that convinced royal officials to turn back the tea before it was unloaded. In Boston, however, Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused to allow the tea ships to leave Boston Harbor, believing it was his duty to uphold Parliamentary law. He urged merchants to receive British tea when it arrived in the harbor. Meanwhile, Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty sought to prevent captains from paying the tea tax to customs officials and posted groups in the harbor to make sure that British tea was not unloaded.
When the Dartmouth sailed into Boston Harbor in November 1773, it had twenty days to unload its cargo of tea and pay the duty before returning to Great Britain. Two more ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver, followed soon after. On December 16, as the Dartmouth’s deadline approached, townspeople gathered at the Old South Meeting House determined to take action. A group of the Sons of Liberty and their followers left this gathering and approached the three ships. Some were disguised as Native Americans. Protected by a crowd of spectators, they dumped approximately £10,000 worth of tea in the harbor (the equivalent of $1 million in today’s currency). What became known as the Boston Tea Party was a significant loss for the British East India Company and a direct affront to Parliamentary power in the colonies.
In London, response to the destruction of the tea was swift and strong. King George III and his prime minister, Lord North, insisted that Massachusetts must pay for the losses. Though some colonial merchants put forward a proposal for restitution, the Massachusetts Assembly refused to make payment. As a result, Parliament and the king agreed that Massachusetts would be forced to pay for the tea and yield to British authority.
In early 1774, leaders in Parliament issued four measures designed to punish Massachusetts. Commonly known as the Coercive Acts, they are described in the table below.
Coercive Acts | |
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Massachusetts Government Act |
Colonial government placed under the direct control of Crown officials. Traditional town meetings subject to the governor’s approval. |
Revised Quartering Act | Massachusetts still had to provide housing for British soldiers. |
Boston Port Bill | Closed Boston Harbor until British East India Company was repaid for tea lost in the Boston Tea Party |
The Administration of Justice | Allowed civil trials to be moved to Great Britain or to another colony if officials believed bias by local juries would result in acquittal regardless of evidence. |
At the same time, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which granted religious toleration to French Catholics and formally established the royal colony of Quebec in Canada. To many Protestant colonists, tolerance of Catholicism was highly controversial. The Quebec Act also ceded much of the Ohio River Valley to Quebec, which deprived American colonists of access to the western territories they had fought for during the French and Indian War.
A number of colonists, especially those in Massachusetts, referred to the Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act as the “Intolerable Acts”. Some in London also believed that Parliament had gone too far, as suggested in the political cartoon below, titled "The able Doctor, or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught," from London Magazine, May 1, 1774.
This political cartoon shows the Prime Minister (with the Boston Port Bill in his pocket) forcing the Coercive Acts down the throat of America, depicted as a Native American woman. Ironically, the woman is forced to drink British tea, which was a commodity that many colonists happily consumed prior to the crisis. Britannia (i.e., the British Empire) weeps in the background while an officer to the left carries a sword with the words "Military Law."
In June 1774, Paul Revere obtained a copy of the cartoon and distributed it throughout the colonies. At the same time, committees of correspondence in Massachusetts, which had coordinated a response to the Tea Act, mobilized committees in other colonies to support the cause. A series of Parliamentary actions, designed to discipline one colony (Massachusetts), had provoked responses throughout eastern North America. An increasing number of colonists began to see the Coercive Acts as an assault on their rights as English citizens.
Source: This tutorial curated and/or authored by Matthew Pearce, Ph.D with content adapted from Openstax “U.S. History”. access for free at openstax.org/details/books/us-history LICENSE: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL