American Revolution and War for Independence

The agitation following enactment of the Townshend duties was less violent than that stirred by the Stamp Act, but it was nevertheless strong. Merchants once again resorted to non-importation agreements. Men dressed in homespun clothing, women found substitutes for tea. Students used colonial-made paper. Houses went unpainted. In Boston where the mercantile interests here most sensitive to any interference, enforcement of the new regulations provoked violence. When customs officials sought to collect duties, they were set upon by the populace and roughly handled. For this, two regiments were dispatched to protect the customs commissioners.

The presence of British troops in Boston was a standing invitation to disorder. On March 5, 1770, after 18 months of resentment, antagonism between citizens and soldiery flared up. What began as a harmless snowballing of the redcoats degenerated into a mob attack. Someone gave the order to fire; three Bostonians lay dead in the snow; and colonial agitators had a valuable issue n their campaign to arouse hostility toward England. Dubbed the Boston Massacre, the incident was dramatically pictured as proof of British heartlessness and tyranny.

Faced with such opposition, Parliament in 1770 opted for a strategic retreat and repealed all the Townshend duties except that on tea. The tea tax was retained because, as George III said, there must always be one tax to keep up the right. To most colonists the action of Parliament constituted, in effect, a "redress of grievances," and the campaign against England was largely dropped. An embargo on "English tea" continued but was not too scrupulously observed.Generally, the situation seemed auspicious for imperial relations. Prosperity was increasing and most colonial leaders were willing to let the future take care of itself. Inertia and neglect seemed to succeed where bolder policies had failed. The moderate element, everywhere predominant in the colonies, welcomed this peaceful interlude.

7. The Boston "Tea Party"

During a three-year interval of calm, a relatively small number of “patriots” or “radicals” strove energetically to keep the controversy alive. As long as the tea tax remained, they contended, the principle of Parliament's right over the colonies remained. And at any time in the future, the principle might be applied in full with devastating effect on colonial liberties.

Typical of the patriots was their most effective leader Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, who toiled tirelessly for a single end: independence. From the time he graduated from Harvard College, Adams was a public servant in some capacity-inspector of chimneys, tax-collector, moderator of town meetings. A consistent failure in business, he was shrewd and able in politics, with the New England town meeting the theater of his action.

Adam's tools were men: his goal was to win the confidence and support of ordinary people, to free them from awe of their social and political superiors, make them aware of their own importance, and arouse them to action. To do this, he published articles in newspapers and made speeches in town meetings, instigating resolutions appealing to the colonists' democratic impulses.

In 1772, he induced the Boston town meeting to select a "committee of correspondence" to state the rights and grievances of the colonists, to communicate with other towns on these matters, and to request them to draft replies. Quickly, the idea spread. Committees were set up in virtually all the colonies, and out of them soon grew a base of effective revolutionary organizations.

In 1773, Britain furnished Adams and his co-workers with a desired issue. The powerful East India Company, finding itself in critical financial straits, appealed to the British government and was granted a monopoly on all tea exported to the colonies. Because of the Townshend tea tax, the colonists had boycotted the company's tea and, after 1770, such a flourishing illegal trade existed that perhaps nine-tenths of the tea consumed in America was of foreign origin and imported duty-free.

The company decided to sell its tea through its own agents at a price well under the customary one, thus simultaneously making smuggling unprofitable and eliminating the independent colonial merchants. Aroused not only by the loss of the tea trade but also by the monopolistic practice involved, the colonial traders joined the patriots. In virtually all the colonies, steps were taken to prevent the East India Company from executing its design.

In ports other than Boston, agents of the company were "persuaded" to resign, and new shipments of tea were either returned to England or warehoused. In Boston, the agents refused to resign and, with the support of the royal governor, preparations were made to land incoming cargoes regardless of opposition. The answer of the patriots, led by Samuel Adams, was violence. On the night of December 16 1773 a band of men disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded three British ships lying at anchor and dumped their tea cargo into the Boston Harbor.

8. The British repressions

A crisis now confronted Britain. The East India Company had carried out a parliamentary statute, and if the destruction of the tea went unheeded, Parliament would admit to the world that it had no control over the colonies. Official opinion in Britain almost unanimously condemned the Boston “Tea Party” as an act of vandalism and advocated legal measures to bring the insurgent colonists into line.

Parliament responded with new laws-called by the colonists "Coercive Acts." The first one, the Boston Port Bill, which closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for, threatened the very life of the city, for to exclude Boston from the sea meant economic disaster. Other enactments prescribed appointment by the King of Massachusetts councilors, formerly elected by the colonists; and the summoning of jurors by sheriffs, who were agents of the governor. Hitherto jurors had been chosen in colonial town meetings. Also, the governor's permission would be required for holding town meetings, and the appointment and removal of judges and sheriffs would be in his hands. A Quartering Act required local authorities to find suitable quarters for British troops.The Quebec Act, passed at nearly the same time, extended the boundaries of the province of Quebec and guaranteed the right of the French inhabitants to enjoy religious freedom and their own legal customs. The colonists opposed this act because, disregarding old charter claims to western lands, it threatened to interfere with the westward movement and seemed to hem them in to the north and northwest by a Roman Catholic dominated province. Though the Quebec Act had not been passed as a punitive measure, it was classed by the Americans with the Coercive Acts, and all became known as the "Five Intolerable Acts." These acts, instead of subduing Massachusetts, as they had been planned to do, rallied her sister colonies to her aid.