MORE PROTEST: THE TOWNSHEND ACTS

In 1766 George III appointed the aging and infirm William Pitt as prime minister. Ill health made him unable to concentrate on his duties concerning the colonies. As a result, Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had a large hand in creating policy concerning the American colonics. Townshend decided to follow the policies of Grenville and try to extract more income for the government from colonial trade. In 1767 he proposed new duties on glass, paper, and tea. These Townshend Acts were different than previous duties on colonial trade; these were for goods produced in Britain. In addition, income from these acts would be used to pay the salaries of certain ranks of British officials in the colonies; colonial assemblies had always authorized these salaries. Townshend also created new courts in the colonies, the Admiralty courts, to try smuggling cases and ordered British soldiers to be stationed in major port cities (to hopefully prevent the protests that had followed the Stamp Act).

The opposition to the Townshend Acts in the colonies was immediate and sustained. Newspaper editorials and pamphlets renounced the acts with vehemence. John Dickinson from Pennsylvania best expressed the colonial position in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767). Dickinson said that Parliament had the right to regulate colonial trade, but not to use that power to raise revenue. By this argument, only duties used to control trade or regulate the affairs of the empire were legal. Benjamin Franklin expressed a different view of the situation. Franklin stated that “Either Parliament has the power to make all laws for us, or Parliament has the power to make no laws for us; and I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those of the former.”

In early 1768 Samuel Adams in Massachusetts composed a document opposing the Townshend Acts, proclaiming that “taxation without representation is tyranny.” The Massachusetts Assembly voted to approve this document and send it along to other colonial assemblies for approval. The royal governor stated that this Circular Letter was a form of sedition, and Parliament suggested that and state assembly passing such a resolution be dissolved. Yet similar resolutions were passed in five other colonies. Boycotts of British goods again took place to protest the Townshend Acts. In 1770 a new prime minister came into power in Britain, Lord North. North repealed all of the Townshend Acts except the tax on tea; the tea-tax remained to remind the colonists that the British had the right to collect such taxes if they desired to.