Sunday, December 18, 2016

Road to the Revolution: British Acts On the Colonies 1765-1773

Road to the Revolution: British Acts On the Colonies 1765-1773

1.  MARCH 24, 1765 : PARLIAMENT PASSES THE QUARTERING ACT

On March 24th in 1765, Parliament passes the Quartering Act, outlining the locations and conditions in which British soldiers are to find room and board in the American colonies.
The Quartering Act of 1765 required the colonies to house British soldiers in barracks provided by the colonies. If the barracks were too small to house all the soldiers, then localities were to accommodate the soldiers in local inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualling houses, and the houses of sellers of wine. Should there still be soldiers without accommodation after all such public houses were filled, the colonies were then required to take, hire and make fit for the reception of his Majesty’s forces, such and so many uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings as shall be necessary.

In Massachusetts, British officers followed the Quartering Act’s injunction to quarter their soldiers in public places, not in private homes. Within these constraints, their only option was to pitch tents on Boston Common. The soldiers, living cheek by jowl with riled Patriots, were soon involved in street brawls and then the Boston Massacre of 1770, during which not only five rock-throwing colonial rioters were killed but any residual trust between Bostonians and the resident Redcoats. That breach would never be healed in the New England port city, and the British soldiers stayed in Boston until George Washington drove them out with the Continental Army in 1776.


2.  “No Taxation Without Representation”! / Townshend Acts 1767

In 1763, the British Empire emerged as the victor of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). Although the victory greatly expanded the empire’s imperial holdings, it also left it with a massive national debt, and the British government looked to its North American colonies as an untapped source of revenue. 

In 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, the first direct, internal tax that it had ever levied on the colonists. The colonists resisted the new tax, arguing that only their own elective colonial assemblies could tax them, and that “taxation without representation” was unjust and unconstitutional. After the British government rejected their arguments, the colonists resorted to physical intimidation and mob violence to prevent the collection of the stamp tax. (Sons of Liberty) Recognizing that the Stamp Act was a lost cause, Parliament repealed it in 1766.

Parliament did not, however, renounce its right to tax the colonies or otherwise enact legislation over them. In 1767, Charles Townshend (1725-67), Britain’s new chancellor (an office that placed him in charge of collecting the government’s revenue), proposed a law known as the Townshend Revenue Act. This act placed duties on a number of goods imported into the colonies, including tea, glass, paper and paint. The revenue raised by these duties would be used to pay the salaries of royal colonial governors. Since Parliament had a long history of using duties to regulate imperial trade, Townshend expected that the colonists would accept the obligation of the new taxes.

Unfortunately for Townshend, the Stamp Act had aroused colonial resentment to all new taxes, whether levied on imports or on the colonists directly. To express their displeasure, the colonists organized popular and effective boycotts of the taxed goods. Once again, colonial resistance had undermined the new system of taxation, and once again, the British government bowed to reality without abandoning the principle that it had rightful authority to tax the colonies. In 1770, Parliament repealed all of the Townshend Act duties except for the one on tea, which was retained as a symbol of Parliament’s power over the colonies.


3.  TEA ACT of 1773

The Tea Act of 1773 was one of several measures imposed on the American colonists by the heavily indebted British government in the decade leading up to the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). The act’s main purpose was not to raise revenue from the colonies but to bail out the floundering East India Company, a key factor in the British economy. The British government granted the company a monopoly on the importation and sale of tea in the colonies. The colonists had never accepted the constitutionality of the duty on tea, and the Tea Act rekindled their opposition to it. Their resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, in which colonists boarded East India Company ships and dumped their loads of tea overboard. Parliament responded with a series of harsh measures intended to stifle colonial resistance to British rule; two years later the war began.
 Road to the Revolution: British Acts On the Colonies 1765-1773
1.  What did the Quartering Act of 1765 require the colonists to do?
2.  What would happen if there are still soldiers without accommodations after all public houses are filled?
3.  Infer: Why do you suppose King George III sent more and more soldiers to places like Boston and New York City in the 1760s and 1770s?
4.  What made the Stamp Act of 1765 so unique to the colonists?
5.  Why did the colonists resist the Stamp Act and claim “No Taxation Without Representation”?
6.  What happened when the British government rejected the colonists’ argument about taxation without representation?
7.  What was the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767?
8.  How did the colonists react to the Townshend Acts?
9.  What was the main purpose of the Tea Act of 1773?

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