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The Townshend Acts were a series of measures, passed by the British Parliament in 1767, that taxed goods imported to the American colonies. But American colonists, who had no representation in Parliament, saw the Acts as an abuse of power. The British sent troops to America to enforce the unpopular new laws, further heightening tensions between Great Britain and the American colonies in the run-up to the American Revolutionary War.

The British Crown emerged victorious from the French and Indian War in 1763, but defending the North American colonies from French expansion had proved tremendously costly to England.

Compared to Great Britain's debts, the cost of the French and Indian War to the colonists had been slight. The colonists-who arguably enjoyed a higher standard of living at the time than their British counterparts-paid less than one-twentieth the taxes of British citizens living in England.

The British government thought the colonists should help pay the cost of their protection. The British Parliament enacted a series of taxes on the colonies for the purpose of raising revenue. Early attempts, such as the Stamp Act of 1765-which taxed colonists for every piece of paper they used-were met with widespread protests in America.

Townshend Duties

The Townshend Acts, named after Charles Townshend, British chancellor of the Exchequer, imposed duties on British china, glass, lead, paint, paper and tea imported to the colonies.

Benjamin Franklin had informed the British Parliament that the colonies intended to start manufacturing their own goods rather than paying duties on imports. These particular items were chosen for taxation because Townshend thought they would be difficult things for the colonists to produce on their own. He estimated the duties would raise approximately 40,000 pounds, with most of the revenue coming from tea.

While the original intent of the import duties had been to raise revenue, Charles Townshend saw the policies as a way to remodel colonial governments. The Townshend Acts would use the revenue raised by the duties to pay the salaries of colonial governors and judges, ensuring the loyalty of America's governmental officials to the British Crown. However, these policies prompted colonists to take action by boycotting British goods.

Charles Townshend didn't live to see the measures enacted. He died suddenly in September 1767, before the detrimental effects of his signature rules could materialize.

Townshend Act Protests

The Townshend duties went into effect on November 20, 1767, close on the heels of the Declaratory Act of 1766, which stated that British Parliament had the same authority to tax the American colonies as they did in Great Britain. By December, two widely circulated documents had united colonists in favor of a boycott of British goods.

These influential pamphlets included "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania," a series of essays written by Pennsylvania legislator John Dickinson and the "Massachusetts Circular Letter," a statement written by Samuel Adams and James Otis Jr. and passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives to other colonial legislatures.

With the help of the Sons of Liberty-a secret society of American business leaders who coined the phrase "taxation without representation"-24 towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island agreed to boycott British goods in January 1768.

With the exception of necessities, such as fishing hooks and wire, New England merchants agreed not to import British goods for one year. New York followed suit in April, with an even more restrictive non-importation agreement.

In response to protests and boycotts, the British sent troops to occupy Boston and quell the unrest.

Repeal of the Townshend Acts

By 1769, more than 2,000 British troops had arrived in Boston to restore order-a large number considering only about 16,000 people lived in Boston at the time.

Skirmishes between patriot colonists and British soldiers-as well as colonists loyal to the British Crown-became increasingly common. To protest taxes, patriots often vandalized stores selling British goods and intimidated store merchants and their customers.

Tensions between the colonists and British troops finally boiled over on March 5, 1770, when British soldiers shot into an angry mob, killing five American colonists in an event known as the Boston Massacre.

Little did the colonists or British soldiers know that across the ocean on the same day as the Boston Massacre, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Lord North, had asked Parliament to repeal the Townshend Acts.

All of the Townshend Acts-except for the tax on tea-were repealed in April 1770. The tax on tea would remain a flashpoint and a contributing factor to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, in which angry colonists destroyed an entire shipment of tea in Boston Harbor. To quell resistant and punish the colonists-particularly the demonstrators in Boston-Parliament passed The Coercive Acts of 1774, which colonists referred to as the Intolerable Acts. The four Intolerable Acts included the Massachusetts Government Act, instituting an appointed government over the previously-elected, local one; the Boston Port Bill closing Boston Harbor; the Administration of Justice Act, which dictated that British officials could be tried in another colony or in England if charged with capital offenses; and the Quartering Act, which said unoccupied buildings could be used to quarter British troops. The combined force of these acts culminated in the American Revolution, which was kicked off when the " shot heard round the world" was fired on April 19, 1775, at the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

SOURCES

Charles Townshend (1725-1767); The Colonia Williamsburg Foundation.
Townshend Acts; Boston Tea Party Museum.
What we get wrong about taxes and the American Revolution. PBS News Hour. 2016.

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The Townshend Acts were a series of unpopular measures, passed by the British Parliament in 1767, that taxed goods imported to the American colonies. The laws heightened the tensions between Great Britain and the American colonists and were a precursor to the Revolutionary War.

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Britain and the Imperial Crises

Throughout most of colonial history, the British Crown was the only political institution that united the American colonies. The Imperial Crises of the 1760s and 1770s, found England saddled with crippling debt, incurred in large part by wars such as the French and Indian War.

The British government responded by increasing taxes on the American colonists, which drove the colonies toward greater unity. Americans throughout the 13 colonies united in opposition to the new system of imperial taxation initiated by the British government in 1765.

The Stamp Act of that year-the first direct, internal tax imposed on the colonists by the British Parliament-inspired concerted resistance within the colonies. Nine colonial assemblies sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress, an extralegal convention that met to coordinate the colonies' response to the new tax. Although the Stamp Act Congress was short-lived, it hinted at the enhanced unity among the colonies that would soon follow.

Did you know? Almost every significant political figure of the American Revolution served in the Continental Congress, including Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Patrick Henry and George Washington.

Colonial opposition effectively killed the Stamp Act and brought about its repeal in 1766. The British government did not abandon its claim to the authority to pass laws for the colonies, however, and would make repeated attempts to exert its power over them in the years to follow.

Taxation Without Representation

In response to the violence of the Boston Massacre of 1770 and new taxes like the Tea Act of 1773, a group of frustrated colonists protested taxation without representation by dumping 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773 - an event known to history as Boston Tea Party.

Colonists continued to coordinate their resistance to new imperial measures, but between 1766 until 1774, they did so primarily through committees of correspondence, which exchanged ideas and information, rather than through a united political body.

The First Continental Congress

On September 5, 1774, delegates from each of the 13 colonies-except Georgia, which was fighting a Native American uprising and was dependent on the British for military supplies-met at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress to organize colonial resistance to the Intolerable Acts (or Coercive Acts) recently passed by the British Parliament.

The delegates included a number of future luminaries, such as future presidents John Adams of Massachusetts and George Washington of Virginia, and future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and diplomat John Jay of New York. The Congress was structured with emphasis on the equality of participants, and to promote free debate.

After much discussion, the Congress issued a Declaration of Rights, affirming its loyalty to the British Crown but disputing the British Parliament's right to tax it without representation in the parliament. The Congress also passed the Articles of Association, which called on the colonies to stop importing goods from the British Isles beginning on December 1, 1774, if the Intolerable Acts were not repealed.

Should Britain fail to redress the colonists' grievances in a timely manner, the Congress declared, then it would reconvene on May 10, 1775, and the colonies would cease to export goods to Britain on September 10, 1775. After proclaiming these measures, the First Continental Congress disbanded on October 26, 1774.

Second Continental Congress

As promised, Congress reconvened at Independence Hall in Philadelphia as the Second Continental Congress on May 10, 1775-and by then the American Revolution had already begun.

The British army in Boston had met with armed resistance on the morning of April 19, 1775, when it marched out to the towns of Lexington and Concord to seize a cache of weapons held by colonial Patriots who had ceased to recognize the authority of the royal government of Massachusetts.

The colonists drove the British expedition back to Boston and laid siege to the town. The Revolutionary War had begun.

Fighting for Reconciliation

Although the Congress professed its abiding loyalty to the British Crown, it also took steps to preserve its rights by dint of arms. On June 14, 1775, a month after it reconvened, it created a united colonial fighting force, the Continental Army. The next day, it named George Washington as the new army's commander in chief.

The following month, the Continental Congress issued its "Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms," penned by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, a veteran of the First Congress whose "Letters from a Farmer of Pennsylvania" (1767) had helped arouse opposition to earlier imperial measures, and by a newcomer from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson.

In an effort to avoid a full-scale war, Congress coupled this declaration with the Olive Branch Petition, a personal appeal to Britain's King George III, asking him to help the colonists resolve their differences with Britain. The king dismissed the petition out of hand.

Common Sense, Divided Loyalties

For over a year, the Continental Congress supervised a war against a country to which it proclaimed its loyalty. In fact, both the Congress and the people it represented were divided on the question of independence even after a year of open warfare against Great Britain.

Early in 1776, a number of factors began to strengthen the call for separation. In his stirring pamphlet " Common Sense," published in January of that year, the British immigrant Thomas Paine laid out a convincing argument in favor of independence.

At the same time, many Americans came to realize that their military might not be capable of defeating the British Empire on its own. Independence would allow it to form alliances with Britain's powerful rivals-and France was at the forefront of everyone's mind. Meanwhile, the war itself evoked hostility toward Britain among the citizenry, paving the way for independence.

Declaration of Independence

In the spring of 1776, the provisional colonial governments began to send new instructions to their congressional delegates, obliquely or directly allowing them to vote for independence. The provisional government of Virginia went further: It instructed its delegation to submit a proposal for independence before Congress.

On June 7, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee complied with his instructions. Congress postponed a final vote on the proposal until July 1, but appointed a committee to draft a provisional declaration of independence for use should the proposal pass.

The committee consisted of five men, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania. But the declaration was primarily the work of one man, Thomas Jefferson, who penned an eloquent defense of the natural rights of all people, of which, he charged, Parliament and the king had tried to deprive the American nation.

The Continental Congress made several revisions to Jefferson's draft, removing, among other things, an attack on the institution of slavery; but on July 4, 1776, the Congress voted to approve the Declaration of Independence.

Waging the War

The Declaration of Independence allowed Congress to seek alliances with foreign countries, and the fledgling U.S. formed its most important alliance early in 1778 with France, without the support of which America might well have lost the Revolutionary War.

If the Franco-American alliance was one of Congress's greatest successes, funding and supplying the war were among its worst failures. Lacking a pre-existing infrastructure, Congress struggled throughout the war to provide the Continental Army with adequate supplies and provisions.

Exacerbating the problem, Congress had no mechanism to collect taxes to pay for the war; instead, it relied on contributions from the states, which generally directed whatever revenue they raised toward their own needs. As a result, the paper money issued by Congress quickly came to be regarded as worthless.

The Articles of Confederation

Congress's inability to raise revenue would bedevil it for its entire existence, even after it created a constitution, known as the Articles of Confederation, to define its powers. Drafted and adopted by the Congress in 1777 but not ratified until 1781, it effectively established the United States as a collection of 13 sovereign states, each of which had an equal voice in Congress (which became officially known as the Congress of the Confederation) regardless of population.

Under the Articles, congressional decisions were made based on a state-by-state vote, and the Congress had little ability to enforce its decisions. The Articles of Confederation would prove incapable of governing the new nation in a time of peace, but they did not seriously undermine the war effort, both because the war was effectively winding down before the Articles took effect, and because Congress ceded many executive war powers to General Washington.

Treaty of Paris

Congress's final triumph came in 1783 when it negotiated the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Revolutionary War. The Congressional delegates Franklin, Jay and Adams secured a favorable peace for the U.S. that included not only the recognition of independence, but also claim to almost all of the territory south of Canada and east of the Mississippi River.

On November 25, 1783, the last British troops evacuated New York City. The Revolutionary War was over and Congress had helped to see the country through.

However, the Articles of Confederation proved an imperfect instrument for a nation at peace with the world. The years immediately following the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 presented the young American nation with a series of difficulties that Congress could not adequately remedy: dire financial straits, interstate rivalries and domestic insurrection.

Legacy of the Continental Congress

A movement developed for constitutional reform, culminating in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. The delegates at the convention decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation completely and create a new system of government.

In 1789, the new U.S. Constitution went into effect and the Continental Congress adjourned forever and was replaced by the U.S. Congress. Although the Continental Congress did not function well in a time of peace, it had steered the nation through one of its worst crises, declared its independence and helped to win a war to secure that independence.
READ MORE: What Did the Three Continental Congresses Do?
Sources

Continental Congress, 1774-1781. U.S. Department of State. Office of the Historian.
First Continental Congress. George Washington's Mount Vernon.
The Continental Congress. PBS: American Experience.
Continental and Confederation Congresses. U.S. House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives.
The Second Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence. National Park Service.

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Continental Congress: First, Second & Definition - HISTORY

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Throughout most of colonial history, the British Crown was the only political institution that united the American colonies. The Imperial Crises of the 1760s and 1770s, found England saddled with crippling debt, incurred in large part by wars such as the French and Indian War.

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Parliament passes the Quartering Act | May 15, 1765 | HISTORY

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On May 15, 1765, Parliament passes the Quartering Act, outlining the locations and conditions in which British soldie…

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On the cold, snowy night of March 5, 1770, a mob of American colonists gathers at the Customs House in Boston and begins taunting the British soldiers guarding the building. The protesters, who called themselves Patriots, were protesting the occupation of their city by British troops, who were sent to Boston in 1768 to enforce unpopular taxation measures passed by a British parliament that lacked American representation.

British Captain Thomas Preston, the commanding officer at the Customs House, ordered his men to fix their bayonets and join the guard outside the building. The colonists responded by throwing snowballs and other objects at the British regulars, and Private Hugh Montgomery was hit, leading him to discharge his rifle at the crowd. The other soldiers began firing a moment later, and when the smoke cleared, five colonists were dead or dying-Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and James Caldwell-and three more were injured. Although it is unclear whether Crispus Attucks, an African American, was the first to fall as is commonly believed, the deaths of the five men are regarded by some historians as the first fatalities in the American Revolutionary War.

The British soldiers were put on trial, and patriots John Adams and Josiah Quincy agreed to defend the soldiers in a show of support of the colonial justice system. When the trial ended in December 1770, two British soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter and had their thumbs branded with an "M" for murder as punishment.

The Sons of Liberty, a Patriot group formed in 1765 to oppose the Stamp Act, advertised the "Boston Massacre" as a battle for American liberty and just cause for the removal of British troops from Boston. Patriot Paul Revere made a provocative engraving of the incident, depicting the British soldiers lining up like an organized army to suppress an idealized representation of the colonist uprising. Copies of the engraving were distributed throughout the colonies and helped reinforce negative American sentiments about British rule.

In April 1775, the American Revolution began when British troops from Boston skirmished with American militiamen at the battles of Lexington and Concord. The British troops were under orders to capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington and to confiscate the Patriot arsenal at Concord. Neither missions were accomplished because of Paul Revere and William Dawes, who rode ahead of the British, warning Adams and Hancock and rousing the Patriot minutemen. Eleven months later, in March 1776, British forces had to evacuate Boston following American General George Washington's successful placement of fortifications and cannons on Dorchester Heights. This bloodless liberation of Boston brought an end to the hated eight-year British occupation of the city. For the victory, General Washington, commander of the Continental Army, was presented with the first medal ever awarded by the Continental Congress. It would be more than five years before the Revolutionary War came to an end with British General Charles Cornwallis' surrender to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia.

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On the cold, snowy night of March 5, 1770, a mob of American colonists gathers at the Customs House in Boston and begins taunting the British soldiers guarding the building. The protesters, who called themselves Patriots, were protesting the occupation of their city by British troops, who were sent to Boston in 1768 to enforce unpopular taxation measures passed by a British parliament that lacked American representation.