The repeal of the Stamp Act was the occasion for general rejoicing in America. Loyal addresses were voted to the king, and statues erected to commemorate the virtues and achievements of Pitt. Imperfectly aware of the conditions in England that had contributed to the happy event, it was taken by the colonists to mean that their theory of the constitution had been accepted. The Declaratory Act was thought to be no more than a formal concession to the dignity of government; and although the Mutiny Act was causing trouble in New York, and merchants were petitioning for a further modification of the Trade Laws, most men looked forward to the speedy reëstablishment of the old-time cordial relations between the two countries. The Sons of Liberty no longer assembled; rioting ceased; the noise of incessant debate was stilled. "The repeal of the Stamp Act," John Adams wrote in November, 1766, "has hushed into silence almost every popular clamor, and composed every wave of popular disorder into a smooth and peaceful calm."
And no doubt most Englishmen would willingly have let the question rest. But an unwise king, stubbornly bent on having his way; precise administrators of the Grenville type, concerned for the loss of a farthing due; egoists like Wedderburne, profoundly ignorant of colonial affairs, convulsed and readily convinced by the light sarcasms with which Soame Jenyns disposed of the pretensions of "our American colonies": such men waited only the opportune moment for retrieving a humiliating defeat. That moment came with the mischance that clouded the mind of Pitt and withdrew him from the direction of a government of all the factions. The responsibility relinquished by the Great Commoner was assumed by Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man well fitted to foster the spirit of discord which then reigned, to the king's great content, in that "mosaic" ministry. In January, 1767, without the knowledge of the Cabinet, this "director of the revels" pledged himself in the House of Commons to find "a mode by which a revenue may be drawn from America without offense." Since the Americans admit that external taxes are legal, he said, let us lay an external tax.
Backed by the king, he accordingly procured from Parliament, in May of the same year, an act laying duties on glass, red and white lead, paper, and tea. The revenue to be derived from the law, estimated at £40,000, was to be applied to the payment of the salaries of royal governors and of judges in colonial courts. A second act established a board of commissioners to be stationed in America for the better enforcement of the Trade Acts; while a third, known as the Restraining Act, suspended the New York Assembly until it should have made provision for the troops according to the terms of the Mutiny Act.
The Townshend Acts revived the old controversy, not quite in the old manner. Mobs were less in evidence than in 1765, although riots occasioned by business depression disturbed the peace of New York in the winter of 1770, and the presence of the troops in Boston, the very sight of which was an offense to that civic community, resulted in the famous "massacre" of the same year.
Yet the duties were collected without much difficulty; and although the income derived from them amounted to almost nothing, the commissioners reorganized the customs service so successfully that an annual revenue of £30,000 was obtained at a cost of £13,000 to collect. Forcible resistance was, indeed, less practicable in dealing with the Townshend Acts than in the case of the Stamp Act; but it was also true that men of character and substance, many of whom in 1765 had not been "averse to a little rioting," now realized that mobs and the popular mass meeting undermined at once the security of property rights and their own long-established supremacy in colonial politics. Desiring to protect their privileges against encroachment from the English Government without sharing them with the unfranchised populace, they were therefore more concerned than before to employ only constitutional and peaceful methods of obtaining redress.
To this end they resorted to non-importation agreements, to petition and protest, so well according with English tradition, and to the reasoned argument, of which the most notable in this period was that series of Farmer's Letters which made the name of John Dickinson familiar in Europe and a household word throughout the colonies.
If in point of action the defenders of colonial rights were inclined to greater moderation, in point of constitutional theory they were now constrained to take a more radical stand. When Franklin, in his examination before the House of Commons in 1766, was pressed by Townshend to say whether Americans might not as readily object to external as to internal taxes, he shrewdly replied: "Many arguments have lately been used here to show them that there is no difference;—at present they do not reason so; but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments."
That time was now at hand. As early as 1766, Richard Bland, of Virginia, had declared that the colonies, like Hanover, were bound to England only through the Crown. This might be over-bold; but the old argument was inadequate to meet the present dangers, inasmuch as the Townshend Acts, the establishment of troops in Boston and New York, and the attempt to force Massachusetts to rescind her resolutions of protest, all seemed more designed to restrict the legislative independence of the colonies than to assert the right of Parliamentary taxation. Franklin himself, to whom it scarcely occurred in 1765 that the legality of the Stamp Act might be denied, could not now master the Massachusetts principle of "subordination," or understand what that distinction was which Dickinson labored to draw between the right of taxing the colonies and the right of regulating their trade. "The more I have thought and read on the subject," he wrote in 1768, "the more I find ... that no middle doctrine can well be maintained, I mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us; and I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the former." Before the Townshend duties were repealed, the colonists were entirely familiar with the doctrine of complete legislative independence; and the popular cry of "no representation no taxation" began to be replaced by the far more radical cry of "no representation no legislation."
In support of argument and protest, the colonists once more resorted to the practice of non-importation. The earliest agreement was signed by Boston merchants in October, 1767. But a far more rigid association, not to import with trifling exceptions any goods from England or Holland, was formed in New York in August, 1768, and agreed to by the merchants in most colonies. Better observed in New York than elsewhere, it was so far maintained as to reduce the English importations into the Middle and Northern colonies from £1,333,000 in 1768 to £480,000 in 1769. In inducing the Ministry of Lord North to repeal the duties the association played its part; but from the point of view of the conservatives it was not without its disadvantages.
The importation of goods from Holland was forbidden in order to catch the smuggler; but the smuggler ignored the agreement as readily as he signed it. Yet for a time the association was no burden to the fair trader, who in anticipation had doubled his orders, or sold "old, moth-eaten goods" at high prices. The merchants were "great patriots," Chandler told John Adams, "while their old rags lasted; but as soon as they were sold at enormous prices, they were for importing." And in truth the fair trader's monopoly could not outlast his stock, whereas the smuggler's business improved the longer the association endured.
In the spring of 1770, the New York merchants, with their shelves empty, complaining that Boston was more active in "resolving what it ought to do than in doing what it had resolved," declared that the association no longer served "any other purpose than tying the hands of honest men, to let rogues, smugglers, and men of no character plunder their country." Supported by a majority of the inhabitants of the city, and undeterred by the angry protests of the Sons of Liberty, they accordingly agreed to "a general importation of goods from Great Britain, except teas and other articles which are or may be taxed." Boston and Philadelphia soon followed the lead of New York, and before the year was out the policy of absolute non-importation had broken down.
The adoption of the modified non-importation policy was the more readily approved by conservative patriots everywhere inasmuch as the English Government had already made concessions on its part. It was on March 5, the very day of the Boston massacre, that Lord North, characterizing the law as "preposterous," moved the repeal of all the Townshend duties, saving, for principle's sake, that on tea alone. For the second time a crisis seemed safely passed, and cordial relations seemed once more restored. British officers concerned in the massacre, defended by the patriots John Adams and Josiah Quincy, were honorably acquitted in a Massachusetts court.
The New York Assembly, recently permitted to issue bills of credit to the extent of £120,000, made annual provision for the troops, and friendly relations between soldiers and citizens were again resumed. Imports from England at once rose to an unprecedented figure. Tea was procured from Holland; the 3d. duty well-nigh forgotten. In England most men regarded the ten years' quarrel as finally composed. For three years the colonies were barely once mentioned in Parliament, and a page or two of the Annual Register was thought sufficient space to chronicle the doings of America. America also seemed content. During these uneventful years the high enthusiasm for liberty burned low, even in Massachusetts. "How easily the people change," laments John Adams, "and give up their friends and their interests." And Samuel Adams himself, implacable patriot, working as tirelessly as ever, but deserted by Hancock and Otis and half his quondam supporters, had so far lost his commanding influence as to inspire the sympathy of his friends and the tolerant pity of his enemies.
It was hardly for the purpose of restoring the prestige of Samuel Adams, though nothing could have been better designed to that end, that Lord North, rising in the House of Commons on April 17, 1773, offered a resolution permitting the East India Company to export teas stored in its English warehouses free of all duties save the 3d. tax in America. Many years later the Whig pamphleteer Almon asserted that the measure was inspired by the king's desire to "try the question with America." The statement is unsupported by contemporary evidence. Lord North said that the measure was intended solely in the interest of the Company, which had in fact but just been rescued from bankruptcy by the interposition of the Government, and the resolution was passed into law without comment and without opposition.
Information obtained from reliable American merchants determined the directors to take advantage of the opportunity thus offered. They were assured that, although there was strong opposition to the 3d. tax, "mankind are in general governed by interest," and "the Company can afford their teas cheaper than the Americans can smuggle them from foreigners, which puts the success of the design beyond a doubt." Acting upon this assurance, cargoes of assorted teas amounting to 2051 chests were sent to the four ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.
But the American merchants who advised this step had fatally misjudged the situation. The approach of the tea-ships was the signal for instant and general opposition. Smugglers opposed the East India Company venture because it threatened to destroy the very lucrative Holland trade; the fair trader because it conferred a monopoly upon an English corporation, but above all because, if the Company could sell its tea, the non-importation agreement, that favorite conservative method of obtaining redress, at once effective and legal, would have proved after all a useless measure. Unless they were ready for decisive action, the long struggle against Parliamentary taxation must end in submission. Many conservatives were content to try non-consumption agreements; but it was a foregone conclusion that if the tea was once landed, it would be sold, and a great majority were in favor of destroying it or sending it back to England. The latter method was employed in New York and Philadelphia; but in Boston Governor Hutchinson refused to issue return clearance papers until the cargoes were discharged. There the radicals, with the moral support of the great body of conservative citizens, carried the day. On December 16, 1773, undisturbed by the English ships of war, men disguised as Mohawks, "no ordinary Mohawks, you may depend upon it," boarded the East India Company's vessels and emptied its tea into Boston Harbor.
Neither the Government nor the people of England were now in any mood for further concessions. The average Briton had given little thought to America since the repeal of the Stamp Act. He easily recalled that three years before the ministers had good-naturedly withdrawn the major part of the Townshend duties, and since then had rested in the confident belief that the quarrel was happily ended. The destruction of the tea seemed to him a gratuitous insult, for it passed his understanding that the Americans should resent a measure which enabled them to buy their tea cheaper than he could himself; and he was, therefore, ready to back the Government in any measures it might take for asserting the authority of Parliament over these excitable colonists whose whims had too long been seriously regarded.
This task the Government, now for the first time effectively controlled by the king, was quite willing to undertake, all the more so on account of the recent burning of the Gaspée and the dishonorable publication of Hutchinson's letters. By overwhelming majorities Parliament accordingly passed the coercive acts, closing Boston Harbor to commerce until the town made compensation to the East India Company, remodeling the Massachusetts charter in such a manner as to give to the Crown more effective control of the executive and administrative functions of government, making provision for quartering troops upon the inhabitants, and providing for the trial in England of persons indicted for capital offenses committed while aiding the magistrates to suppress tumults or insurrection.
Drastic as these measures were, they were regarded in England as the necessary last resort, unless the Government, hitherto so indulgent and long-suffering, was prepared to ignore the most flagrant flouting of its laws and to renounce all effective control of the colonies. In the colonies, on the other hand, they were generally thought, even by conservative patriots, to be clear evidence of a bold and unblushing design, unapproved by the majority of Englishmen, no doubt, but harbored in secret for many years by the king's hireling ministers, to enslave America as a preliminary step in the destruction of English liberties. Firm in this belief, the colonists elected their deputies to the First Continental Congress, which was called to meet at Philadelphia on the 1st of September, 1774, in order to unite upon the most effective measures for defending their common rights.