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Even before the termination of the French and Indian War, visible indications had appeared of a new direction in colonial affairs. Beginning in 1759, small-scale disputes broke out between Britain and the colonies over disallowance of measures passed by the popular assemblies, over writs of assistance empowering the royal customs officials to break into homes and stores, and over judicial tenure in the colonial courts. Subsequent decisions made in London forbade \"for the time being\" western settlement beyond the Appalachian divide (the Proclamation of 1763), eliminated provincial paper currency as legal tender, bolstered the customs department, and enlarged the authority of the vice-admiralty courts in relation to enforcement of the Navigation Acts.
Taxation Without Representation
When these unpopular measures were followed almost immediately by Parliament\'s placing taxes on Americans for the first time in their history, the result was an explosion that shook the empire to its foundations. George GRENVILLE, chief minister from 1763 to 1765, did not father the idea of American taxation; it had been \"in the air\" for several years. But it was he who pushed the controversial bills through Parliament in 1764 and 1765. The Sugar Act of 1764, actually a downward revision of an earlier Molasses Act, cut the duty on imported foreign molasses from sixpence to threepence a gallon; but it was to be vigorously enforced, and it was now called a revenue measure rather than a law designed merely to regulate trade. The next year Grenville secured passage of the so-called STAMP ACT, placing taxes on all legal documents and on newspapers, almanacs, and other items. Soon afterward came a third law, the Quartering Act, a form of indirect taxation that required American assemblies to provide British troops passing through their colonies with temporary housing and an assortment of provisions.
\"Taxation without representation\" was the central issue in the imperial rupture. It raised a fundamental question concerning the limits of parliamentary power that was debated throughout the dozen or so years before the declaration of American independence. Although Americans complained about the stream of British acts and regulations after 1759, they now agreed that the constitutional issue of taxation posed the gravest threat of all to their freedom as individuals. If it was legal to take a man\'s property without his consent, as the philosopher John LOCKE wrote in defense of the GLORIOUS REVOLUTION of 1688 in England, then a man could scarcely have any liberty remaining, since property gave one a stake in society and enabled one to vote. Americans felt confident that Locke would have approved when they wrote in almost countless documents and petitions that Englishmen--in England, in Virginia, or anywhere else--could be taxed only by their own directly elected representatives.
When Parliament retreated in 1766, reducing the Sugar Act to the level of a trade duty and repealing the Stamp Act, it was responding to retaliatory colonial boycotts on British trade goods, not to the justness of American constitutional pronouncements. In 1767, Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend persuaded a Parliament already antagonistic toward the colonies to pass the TOWNSHEND ACTS. These levied new and different taxes on the American colonists: duties to be collected at the ports on incoming lead, paper, tea, paint, and glass. Besides meeting other imperial expenses such as the upkeep of the army in America, these Townshend duties might go to pay the salaries of royal governors and other crown officials who previously had been paid by the colonial assemblies, which had used this power of the purse to make the king\'s appointees somewhat responsive to their wishes. A final Townshend scheme reorganized the customs service in America, establishing its headquarters in Boston, where mounting friction between collectors and townspeople led to the dispatch of regular troops to the city to keep order in 1768.
Resistance and Retaliation
The new tensions subsided into a three-year period of calm beginning in 1770, but only because a second round of American reprisals against English trade prompted the removal of all the Townshend duties save the one on tea, which was retained to show symbolically that Parliament had not renounced its right to tax America. Additionally, the British troops, popularly known as \"redcoats,\" had been withdrawn from Boston following the embarrassing and unplanned BOSTON MASSACRE (1770). Unfortunately for the empire, those years were not used to bring about permanent agreements between Americans and Britons on such subjects as the constitutional relationship between the colonies and the mother country and what might be a reasonable way for the provinces to share the costs of imperial administration. In an atmosphere of continuing suspicion and distrust, each side looked for the worst from the other. Instead of rescinding the remaining Townshend tax and exploring inoffensive methods of aiding the financially troubled British East India Company, Parliament enacted the Tea Act of 1773, designed to allow the company to bypass middlemen and sell directly to American retailers. It was hardly a plot to persuade Americans to drink taxed tea at a low price, but the colonists interpreted it in that fashion. Everywhere there was opposition to landing the dutied brew, and in the Massachusetts capital the famous BOSTON TEA PARTY resulted in the destruction by patriots of 340 tea chests on ships in the harbor.
Parliament\'s retaliation against Massachusetts was swift and severe: the so-called INTOLERABLE ACTS closed the port of Boston, altered town and provincial government, permitted royal officials and functionaries to go to Britain for trial for any alleged crimes, and provided for the quartering of troops once again in Boston. The other colonies rallied to the defense of Massachusetts in a CONTINENTAL CONGRESS that met in Philadelphia in September 1774 and denounced the acts. Already some colonial leaders were arguing that the old federal conception of the empire would no longer protect American rights and liberties, for Britain had demonstrated its unwillingness to let the colonists manage their own internal, domestic affairs. Now, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other writers claimed that the empire should properly be viewed as one in which each colony was the equal of England in all respects, that the only tie with Britain was through the king. Here, in sum, was the COMMONWEALTH idea of the 20th century, which now unites such nations as New Zealand, Canada, and Australia with Britain, an idea then rejected by England.
Lexington and Concord
War clouds were gathering rapidly. The sending of more than 3,000 British army regulars under Maj. Gen. Thomas GAGE to Boston further exacerbated the imperial rift. When a column of these troops under Lt. Col. Francis Smith moved into the countryside to collect arms and munitions gathered by the patriot militia, hostilities erupted at Lexington and Concord on Apr. 19, 1775. Soon afterward militia contingents from places throughout New England took up positions outside Boston, putting the city under siege. Forts TICONDEROGA and CROWN POINT in upstate New York fell to other rebel parties. The misnamed Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on Breed\'s Hill across from Boston (June 17, 1775). Although Gage\'s units dislodged the rebels from their advanced positions threatening the city, the British casualties came to 42 percent of the 2,500 redcoats engaged, their heaviest losses of the war. The Second Continental Congress, then meeting at Philadelphia, took control of the New England forces opposing Gage. The lawmakers chose as commander of this \"Continental Army\" George Washington, a 43-year-old delegate from Virginia, a planter and a ranking militia officer in the French and Indian Wars.
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