IV.

Taxes on Tea

The Stamp Act controversy set the pattern for future conflict over imperial policy. In 1767 Great Britain passed the Townshend Acts, which placed duties on a variety of items imported by the colonies. These acts also suspended the New York colonial assembly for violations of the Quartering Act of 1765, a measure that required the colonies to provide housing and supplies for British troops. Once again the colonists formed committees, arranged a boycott, and pressured Parliament to repeal the acts. Rising tensions also led to the Boston Massacre, a violent confrontation in March 1770 between a mob of Boston residents and British troops guarding the Customs House. Angry colonists used this incident to whip up even greater anti-British sentiment, even though they soon received news that the British government had canceled all of the Townshend duties except the tax on tea.

Three years later Parliament passed another Tea Act in an effort to aid the British East India Company, a large commercial trading firm that had experienced financial difficulties. This measure granted the East India Company a monopoly of the tea trade, but actually lowered the price of tea in the colonies because it did not require the company to pay customs duties to the British treasury. However, the new Tea Act faced great opposition because it required collection of the import duties on tea, forcing colonists to accept English taxation and hurting the business of merchants who were competitors of the East India Company.

On December 16, 1773, an organized mob in Boston dumped East India Company tea into the harbor in what has become known as the Boston Tea Party. More 'tea parties' followed in other ports. To punish the colonists for this destruction of property, Parliament in 1774 passed a series of laws that the colonists called the Intolerable Acts. These measures curtailed the powers of the Massachusetts assembly and local town meetings, closed the port of Boston, required colonists to provide housing and supplies to British soldiers, and allowed the governor to move the trial of British officials from Massachusetts in capital cases for acts committed in the line of duty.