Townshend Acts
Charles Townshend taxed glass, lead, paint, paper and tea in 1767 on a distinction the colonists refused to accept. He was chancellor of the exchequer, had heard the American argument that internal taxes were illegitimate and external duties on trade were not, and decided to take them at their word: duties collected at the port, which by their own reasoning they could not object to. They objected. John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, serialised in almost every colonial newspaper, made the case that the distinction was between regulating trade and raising revenue rather than between internal and external, and that a duty levied for revenue was a tax whatever it was called. The measures also did other things. They created an American Board of Customs at Boston, established vice-admiralty courts that tried smuggling without juries, permitted writs of assistance for general searches, and provided that the revenue would pay the salaries of governors and judges — removing them from the assemblies' financial control, which was the assemblies' only lever. Non-importation was revived, and imports from Britain fell by about two-thirds in the affected colonies. Troops were sent to Boston in 1768 to protect the customs officers, and were quartered in the town. Most of the duties were repealed in March 1770 on the day of the Boston Massacre. The tax on tea was kept, deliberately, to preserve the principle, and it produced the crisis of 1773. Townshend himself never saw any of it. He died of a fever in September 1767 at forty-two, before the duties took effect, leaving a policy that his colleagues had not much wanted and could not now abandon without appearing to retreat.
- Year: 1767 CE
- Category: Political
