PARLIAMENTARY POLICIES

Transcription

1 PARLIAMENTARY POLICIES Did Parliamentary policies toward the Thirteen Colonies after 1760 justify the American call for independence? Viewpoint: Yes. The colonial policies of Parliament violated Americans' rights as Englishmen. Viewpoint: No. Parliament was justified in tightening loopholes in its imperial administration of the Thirteen Colonies and insisting that the Americans recognize its supremacy. Between 1760 and 1774 Parliament passed a series of measures designed to replace the old British colonial system, especially its lax enforcement of trade laws, with clearer policies and more-powerful enforcement machinery. Encouraging Parliament to tighten its control was its belief that the Americans had undermined British efforts in the French and Indian War ( ) by not supplying the troops requested by Whitehall, refusing to comply with military impress orders, raising insufficient taxes, opposing the quartering of soldiers, attacking recruiters and press gangs, harboring deserters, and even smuggling with the French. While Americans were profiting from this illicit trade, the British were groaning from heavy tax burdens. By the early 1760s the British were paying approximately one-third of their annual incomes on taxes, compared with about 5 percent for the Americans. The Ministry therefore thought it only fair for the lightly taxed Americans to pay more for the administration of the colonies. To that end Parliament passed a series of acts that sought to reduce smuggling (and thus help enable customs officers to collect more money), to raise revenue through taxes, and to insist that Americans recognize its supremacy. The Americans were offended by these new imperial measures, which they interpreted as signs of ministerial ingratitude. After all, they had provided twenty-one thousand troops (about one-half the troops under British command) during the war. Instead of receiving greater respect from the home government for their contributions to British victory, however, the colonials were shocked with the stationing of ten thousand redcoats in North America, increased taxes, restrictions on their ability to settle west of the Appalachian Mountains and to print their own currency, and blanket searches of their property. Believing these acts violated both their constitutional and natural rights, colonists throughout America opposed these "tyrannical" measures by every means available to them petition, economic boycott, threats, and violence. An irritated Ministry responded with even more "coercive" measures, which only served to galvanize American resistance. These opposing perspectives on the Anglo-American dispute raise a question that many American students, weaned on a super-patriotic diet of their nation's past, find distasteful: Was Parliament's imperial policy toward the colonies in the 1760s and early 1770s so unreasonable as to justify American resistance and calls for independence? Americans find this question disturbing because it challenges the justification for the founding of their nation and the motives of the beloved Patriot leaders. For example, were the British imperial measures imposed on the colonies really passed by a "despotic" 230 home government intent on "enslaving" Americans, as Patriot leaders

2 argued? Or were the Americans simply a bunch of spoiled ingrates who wanted to continue enjoying the many benefits of living under British tutelage without having to contribute their fair share to the Empire? Thus, were the Patriots' motives in resisting Parliamentary legislation magnanimous or self-serving? Was the founding of the United States inspired by a noble or a selfish cause? Viewpoint: Yes. The colonial policies of Parliament violated Americans' rights as Englishmen. When the Seven Years' War ( ) ended, Britons on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean exulted in the victory that secured Great Britain's status as the most powerful empire in the Western world. Colonial British Americans made substantial military and financial contributions to the victory and expected to assume a more important place within the Empire after the war. British authorities, beset with the challenges of administering a vastly expanded Empire, had a different view. Between 1760 and 1774 the British government attempted to tighten the administration of its colonies in North America by imposing a series of unreasonable, restrictive administrative and legislative measures. American colonists, accustomed to relatively lenient oversight, viewed the new policies as abuses of the imperial relationship and of their constitutional rights. Ultimately, repeated threats to their constitutional rights led the Thirteen Colonies to declare their independence from Great Britain in In 1763 colonial Americans were proud members of the powerful British Empire, and they viewed British government as the best ever created to protect individual liberties. Britain's constitutional government was a balance among three elements: monarchical, represented by the King; aristocratic, represented by the House of Lords; and democratic, represented by the House of Commons. The constitutional balance was delicate, however, and could easily be disrupted. In particular, many Britons feared that the monarch and his ministers would corrupt Parliament and that tyranny would result. Earlyeighteenth-century British opposition writers, who emphasized how easily the government could degenerate into tyranny, had a powerful impact on the political thought of educated Americans. During the 1760s and 1770s colonial leaders became convinced that the King and his ministers were conspiring to destroy the delicate constitutional balance that protected their liberties and to institute despotism. Great Britain was deeply in debt and faced the mounting costs of administering a greatly expanded postwar Empire. The British government, led by George Grenville, was determined to shift some of the costs of war and the financial burdens of empire to its American colonists. Parliament passed several acts designed to raise revenue from the colonists. The American Revenue Act (1764), more commonly known as the Sugar Act, revised the Molasses Act, (1733), which imposed a duty of six pence per gallon on molasses imported into the colonies. Smugglers regularly evaded the Molasses Act, and customs officials rarely collected the duty. Under the Sugar Act the duty was reduced to three pence, but new customs officials were employed to enforce the act and collect the tax. The Sugar Act also levied new duties on other colonial imports, including textiles, coffee, and indigo. The following year Parliament passed another measure, the Stamp Act (1765), which was designed to raise even more revenue from the colonists. The Stamp Act required colonists to buy a government stamp each time that they purchased printed materials or legal documents. Because this tax targeted such a wide variety of goods, it affected most of the colonists. When news of passage of this legislation reached the colonies, Americans protested on economic and constitutional grounds Parliament's efforts to levy these taxes. Americans believed British efforts to extract revenue from them were largely unreasonable. Parliament was attempting to tax the colonists in part to pay the costs of the Seven Years' War and its aftermath, but the British did not appreciate contributions that Americans had made to the military effort during the war. As Philadelphia printer and inventor Benjamin Franklin noted in his appearance before Parliament in 1766, more than twenty thousand colonists fought alongside British regulars, and thousands more contributed directly and indirectly to the cause. Although the British were resentful because some colonies had not met their troop quotas, other colonies contributed beyond their means. Massachusetts's contributions to the British war effort burdened its residents with high taxes and a huge public debt that nearly bankrupted the province. Colonists faced a severe economic recession when wartime spending ended and they were ill situated to pay the taxes that Parliament demanded. Other Parliamentary measures exacerbated the colonists' financial difficulties. For example, in order to protect British merchants from being paid in poten- HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 231

3 AN ENGLISHMAN AND HIS RIGHTS In 1765 British politician Soame Jenyns made the following m^ponse to American arguments against the right of Parliament to tax the Thirteen Colonies: First then, that no Englishman is or can be taxed but by his own consent as an individual; this is so far from being true, that it is the very reverse of truth; for no man that I know of is taxed by his own consent; and an Englishman, I believe, is as little likely to be so taxed, as any man in the world. Secondly, that no Englishman is, or can be taxed, but by the consent of those persons, whom he has chose to represent him; for the truth of this I shall appeal only to the candid representatives of those unfortunate counties which produce cyder, and shall willingly acquiesce under their determination. Lastly, that no Englishman is, or can be taxed, without the consent of the majority of those, who are elected by himself, and others of his fellow-subjects, to represent them. This is certainly as false as the other two; for every Englishman is taxed, and not one in twenty represented; copyholders, leaseholders, and all men possessed of personal property only, chuse no representatives;... yet are they not Englishmen? Or are they not taxed? I am well aware that I shall hear Locke, Sidney, Selden, and many other great names quoted, to prove that every Englishman, whether he has a right to vote for a representative or not, is still represented in the British Parliament.,, I will ask one question.., Why does not this imaginary representation extend to America as well as over the whole Island of Great Britain? If it can travel three hundred miles, why not three thousand?... But it is urged, that the colonies are by their charters placed under distinct Governments, each of which has a legislative power within itself, by which alone it ought to be taxed... Their charters are undoubtedly no more than those of all corporations, which empower them to make bye-laws, and raise duties for the purposes of their own police, for ever subject to superior authority of parliament;... and therefore they can have no more pretence to plead an exemption from this Parliamentary authority, than any other corporation in England. It has moreover been alleged, that, though Parliament may have power to impose taxes on the colonies, they have no right to use it, because it would be an unjust tax; and no supreme or legislative power can have a right to enact any law in its nature unjust: to this, I shall only make this short reply, that if Parliament can impose no taxes but what are equitable, and the persons taxed are to be judges of that equity, they will in effect have no power to lay any tax at all [Why this argument] should not be used by Englishmen on this side of the Atlantic, as well as by those on the other side, I do not comprehend. Source; Soame Jenyns, "The Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies by the Legislature of Great Britain, briefly considered" {London, 1765) in The Works of Soame Jenyns, volume 2 f edited by Charles N. Cole (London: Cadell, 1790), pp tially less-valuable currency, and even though colonists faced a shortage of specie, Parliament passed the Currency Act (1764), which restricted the colonial assemblies from issuing legal-tender paper money. Additionally, the Proclamation of 1763, which temporarily prohibited settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains, threatened to severely circumscribe America's economic and physical expansion. More important, colonists protested British efforts to tax them on constitutional grounds. To be taxed only by their elected representatives was an important right Britons enjoyed. The central issue became whether Parliament had the right to tax the colonists or the colonists could be taxed only by their colonial assemblies. The Grenville ministry attempted to support Parliament's prerogative by citing several precedents. Colonists rejected British claims that precedents existed for such Parliamentary taxation because they insisted that raising revenue was not the primary purpose of the earlier acts. The example most often cited, the Post Office Act (1710), was effected to establish a service, not raise a revenue, and the post office did not generate surplus revenue until Colonial leaders found other so-called precedents similarly flawed, including the Molasses 232 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

4 Act, which was primarily designed to regulate trade. Clearly, before the 1760s Parliament had not taxed the colonists for the express purpose of raising revenue. Colonists also rejected the flawed British argument that Parliament had the right to tax the colonies because although the colonies, like parts of England, were not directly represented in Parliament, they enjoyed virtual representation. Colonial leaders dismissed the specious contention that members of Parliament represented the interests of all members of the Empire, not only the local voters who elected them. Instead, they argued that British and American subjects did not consistently share the same interests acts that were "oppressive and injurious" to the colonists could at the same time be beneficial for residents of Great Britain. Other colonial commentators noted that only local representatives knew what type and amount of taxes could reasonably be extracted from their constituents. In response to the British argument that even substantial communities in England were not directly represented in Parliament, James Otis of Massachusetts replied: "To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes to the colonists on the cases of Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield, who return no members? If those now so considerable places are not represented, they ought to be." Colonial assemblies met and passed resolutions stating their opposition to Parliament's efforts to tax the colonists. Virginia's representatives resolved that British efforts to undermine the colonial assemblies' exclusive right of taxation were "illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust, and had a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American liberty." Rhode Island's representatives noted that the Stamp Act was "a manifest violation of their just and long enjoyed rights. For it must be confessed by all men, that they who are taxed at pleasure by others, cannot possibly have any property... they who have no property can have no freedom, but are indeed reduced to the most abject slavery." A general meeting of the colonies was held in New York in October This Stamp Act Congress resolved that "all supplies to the Crown" were "free gifts of the people" and "denied Parliament's authority to tax the colonies." In the face of these protests Parliament relented and in 1766 repealed the Stamp Act, but it also passed the Declaratory Act (1766) that affirmed Parliament's right to legislate for the Empire. During the Stamp Act crisis, petitions clearly indicated that the colonists objected to all Parliamentary efforts to raise revenue by taxing the colonies and that they did not distinguish between internal and external taxes. Yet, Britain's new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend, deceptively suggested that the colonists were dissatisfied with the prospect of paying internal taxes only and would not object to paying external taxes. Townshend proposed a new revenue measure, the Revenue Act of 1767 (also known as the Townshend Act), which imposed external rather than internal taxes. The Townshend Act levied duties on common colonial imports, including paper, glass, lead, tea, and paint. Until 1774 colonial leaders did not deny Parliament's right to regulate imperial trade, but they did not agree that Parliament could pass trade regulations that were primarily designed to raise revenue. As Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson wrote in Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania ( ), the Townshend Act imposed taxes on goods that the colonists could legally import only from Great Britain. "If Great Britain can order us to come to her for necessaries we want, and can order us to pay what taxes she pleases before we take them away, or when we land them here, we are as abject slaves." The British relented again by repealing the Townshend duties, except for the duty on tea. Colonists saw other signs of a grand British design to strengthen executive power, weaken their representative assemblies, and destroy their individual liberties in imperial policies passed during the 1760s. The Sugar, Stamp, and Townshend Acts all included provisions to send more royal officials to the colonies to enforce British policies. The revenue raised from the new tax measures would pay their salaries and the salaries of royal governors, who had previously been dependent on the colonial assemblies for payment. Colonial revenues would also pay for the standing army of ten thousand soldiers that the British had stationed in the colonies; under the Quartering Act (1765) the colonists were forced to supply the troops with food and housing. Colonists understood that standing armies were the traditional tools that despots used to enforce their tyrannical will, and British laws were forcing them to pay and supply their potential oppressors. The legislation of the 1760s also provided for the establishment of additional Vice-Admiralty Courts and expanded their jurisdiction. These courts operated without a jury, reinforced executive power, and diminished the power of people in the justice system. The press, which kept people informed of infringements on their liberties, faced increasing challenges to its independence in Britain and America. The placemen-dominated South Carolina council, for example, prosecuted Thomas Powell in 1774 for printing a record of their proceedings. Executive attacks on the freedom of the press HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 233

5 also occurred in New York and Massachusetts during the late 1760s and early 1770s. More ominous signs of Britain's commitment to destroying colonists' rights followed. Designed to assist the failing East India Company, the Tea Act (1773) established for the company a monopoly on the sale of tea in the colonies. Although colonists could purchase tea more cheaply than before, they would still have to pay a duty. Colonial protests against this insidious attempt to get Americans to pay British taxes included refusing to unload the tea in New York and Philadelphia and destroying the tea in Boston. To punish Massachusetts for the Bostonians' actions, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts (1774), which closed the port of Boston, altered the Massachusetts charter by strengthening the power of royal officials at the expense of the elected representative assembly, and allowed any royal official who committed an offense in the colony to stand trial in England instead of in Massachusetts. Colonists correctly feared that the tyrannical provisions of the Coercive Acts might be extended beyond Massachusetts. Americans believed that the Quebec Act (1774) provided additional evidence of a British conspiracy to establish tyranny in North America. The Act provided for the administration of the North American territory that Britain acquired from France after the Seven Years' War. It expanded the territory of Quebec southward to the Ohio River and westward to the Mississippi River and established an executive government with a governor and council but made no provision for an elected representative assembly. Any colonists who moved to the territory would lose their right to representation. Moreover, the Quebec Act allowed Roman Catholics to practice their religion freely and confirmed the privileges of the Catholic Church, a religion that Protestant Britons believed supported despotism by promoting obedience to a foreign authority. Between 1760 and 1774 imperial policies provided ample evidence that the British were conspiring to strengthen royal authority at the expense of the colonists' constitutional rights. Americans feared that the unreasonable British actions were destroying the balance of the British constitution and would ultimately lead to tyranny in the colonies. They believed that the King and his ministers had corrupted Parliament and that it had become merely their tool. Many influential British officeholders agreed with the American leaders' assessment. In response, Americans resisted unreasonable British policies in an effort to save the British constitution and the liberties it protected. -KIM KLEIN, SHIPPENSBURG UNIVERSITY Viewpoint: No. Parliament was justified in tightening loopholes in its imperial administration of the Thirteen Colonies and insisting that the Americans recognize its supremacy. One of the most disturbing features of history teaching in American schools is the prevailing misconception that British rule leading up to the American Revolution ( ) was conspiratorial that the motives and policies of George III and his government were villainous and tyrannical. Such views, while satisfying a need for national self-righteousness and identity, fall far short of the truth. British schools, less prone to Jeffersonian influences, have focused more on domestic affairs (Wilkesian radicalism and the endless turnover of ministries), no doubt because their country's imperial policies resulted in abject defeat. Yet, the problem remains how Americans could have interpreted the relatively modest tax burdens imposed on them in the 1760s as an infringement of their constitutional rights and as a justification for revolution. In fact, the colonists were rebelling against a system of government that was widely regarded as the most liberal and tolerant in the Western world. Within the context of the eighteenth century, the British Parliamentary system, shaped largely by the Glorious Revolution (1688), struck an ideal balance between King, Lords, and Commons and was admired for bringing stability and prosperity through a judicious blend of freedom and order. The British constitution provided the model for Baron de Montesquieu's concept of checks and balances in The Spirit of Laws (1748), and British social norms inspired much praise from Voltaire during his exile from French absolutism in the 1720s. If the British system of political freedom and religious toleration was attractive to so many foreigners and to the vast majority of Britons, it seems incongruous that the American colonists found it so oppressive. A possible explanation is that most citizens of the Thirteen Colonies in the century and a half after the settlement at Jamestown (1607) were refugees and misfits who fled political and religious persecution in the Old World. This quality was particularly evident in New England, where no less than twenty thousand Puritans sought refuge in the 1630s. Not surprising, radicalism was strongest here in the 1760s. Similar settlements by outcast communities took place in Pennsylvania under the Quakers and in Maryland under the Catholics, and there were many other non-anglican religious groups that spread 234 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

6 throughout the colonies, including the Presbyterian Scots-Irish, Anabaptist Germans, French Huguenots, Dutch Reformers, Swedish Lutherans, and a smattering of Methodists and Jews. Whereas Dissenters (non-anglican Protestants) made up less than 10 percent of England's population, they were clearly a majority in the American colonies. While Yankee Puritans took the lead against Britain's taxation measures, the Scots-Irish, known as frontiersmen and Indian fighters, provided much of the ballast for the revolutionary cause. There were far more signers of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and leaders of the American Revolution from this ethnic group than their numbers would justify. Indeed, General George Washington once remarked that if he ever had to make a last stand for liberty, he wanted it to be with the Scots-Irish of his native Virginia. Whether these nonconformists were also more prone to violence is a moot point, but they did adhere to a seventeenth-century interpretation of the constitution that was rooted in a belief in the commonand natural-law tradition rather than the concept of Parliamentary supremacy and the rule of law that had triumphed in Britain during the Glorious Revolution. Americans, by this view, were a fringe society living in a remote region and clearly out of step with the mainstream of European civilization in the eighteenth century. Partly for this reason the British government had subscribed for most of the colonial period, and especially during the Walpole era ( ), to a policy of salutary neglect. This course of action (or inaction) had much to recommend it. Not only did it effectively separate a wayward and dissident element from current British political concerns, but it also kept administrative expenses low and avoided costly foreign entanglements. Contrary to popular beliefs, British imperial expansion was hardly a deliberate or formal process, especially in colonial times. Most scholars agree that it was largely unintentional and done on the cheap that is, until the Seven Years' War ( ). What brought about changes in a seemingly successful policy was, first, a new sense of responsibility, stemming from the Treaty of Paris (1763), for Canada and all lands extending to the Mississippi River and, second, an awareness that the North American colonies were by far Britain's most significant overseas interests. By 1750 their population exceeded a million, and by the outbreak of the Revolution the American economy had A Privy Council; an American political cartoon presenting the British government as a committee of goats, asses, and dogs, 1779 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 235

7 expanded so rapidly that it was nearly 40 percent the size of Great Britain's. Not surprising, this dynamic growth aroused fears among British officials that an economic rivalry might develop between the colonies and the mother country. Greater imperial regulation and an end to salutary neglect seemed the logical course, and conflict was never viewed as likely. The minister most responsible for imposing this new and more ambitious policy on the colonies was George Grenville, who succeeded Lord Bute as First Lord of the Treasury in Grenville, an upright and dedicated administrator with much experience in the House of Commons, had a keen desire to bring order to the colonial system and induce a greater sense of responsibility among the colonists for their own support. Most troubling to him was a national debt of nearly 140 million and the fact that the Americans had contributed little in men, money, or material in the recent conflict with the French. While the French no longer appeared to be a threat in North America, the Indians (some of whom had allied with Britain's enemy) remained a real concern, as evidenced by Ottawa war chief Pontiac's rebellion (1763). Therefore, to Grenville and his Parliamentary supporters, drawing a demarcation line along the Allegheny Mountains to prevent settlers from intruding into Indian-held territories did not seem unreasonable. As a further safeguard, he intended to station ten thousand troops in the region at a cost of 350,000 per year. To pay for this defense commitment was the object of the Sugar Act (1764); it was also designed to cover another loophole in the British imperial structure. Americans, perhaps coinciding with their freedom-loving proclivities, were notorious smugglers, especially with the Dutch and French. Recognizing that the Molasses Act (1733), which levied a duty of six pence per barrel on sugar, was unenforceable, Parliament passed the 1764 act, which lowered the duty to three pence and was enforced. Later it was reduced to just one pence. Thus, any justification for illegal trafficking by the Americans was removed. The world was hardly a free-trade zone. Likewise, Parliament sought to curtail rampant smuggling by American merchants, who had harmed the British effort during the French and Indian War ( ) by trading with the enemy. To that end, the act gave governors the right to issue writs of assistance (blanket search warrants) and to try those convicted of smuggling in Vice-Admiralty Courts rather than in civil courts, where the accused generally received favorable decisions from sympathetic neighbors. Americans also enjoyed paying their debts to British traders in paper money (printed in the colonies) that had fallen to less than its face value. To prevent this devaluation of money, Parliament passed the Currency Act (1764), prohibiting Americans from printing their own paper money. The following year Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which required the purchase of government stamps with all paper articles such as newspapers, legal documents, and playing cards that were bought in the colonies. Given the fact that Americans had shown little ability or willingness to defend themselves against the French and Indians, that the money was going to be used for their benefit, and that the tax burden of the colonists was substantially less than that of British taxpayers, the Stamp Act seemed a logical step. Besides, stamps were normal in England. Parliament also authorized the Quartering Act (1765), which was designed to help offset the cost of maintaining troops in America by obliging the colonies to provide them with suitable accommodations and other basic necessities. The King's ministers and members of Parliament were taken aback by the Americans' response to these reforms. Riots, burnings of officials' houses, and a boycott of British goods hardly seemed an appropriate reaction to what appeared in England to be reasonable measures. Behind these sometimes violent protests, however, lay the American argument that the Stamp Act was illegal because no previous Parliamentary measure had been designed solely for the purpose of raising internal revenue. Grenville was aware of such precedents with the Post Office Act of 1710 and the Molasses Act. He could also point to the fact that colonial assemblies in Massachusetts and New York had levied stamp duties that were willingly paid by their subjects. Furthermore, he estimated that revenues from his 1765 act would only pay for about one-third of the cost of garrisoning British troops in America. The remaining two-thirds would have to be borne by British taxpayers. The Americans, therefore, were acting more out of emotion than reason. Most distressing was the promulgation of the American "no taxation without representation" doctrine by the Stamp Act Congress in New York in October Few Americans appreciated the fact that they were virtually represented in Parliament, almost as well as their fellow subjects in Britain. Indeed, far fewer Britons could vote in Parliamentary elections proportionately than Americans could vote in colonial assembly elections. However quaint virtual representation sounds to modern ears, it was an accepted principle of aristocratic rule in the eighteenth century. Again, America was out of step with the times. While Parliament acquiesced to colonial protests by repealing the Stamp Act under the ensuing Rockingham ministry, it affirmed the critical concept of Britain's legislative supremacy over 236 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

8 the colonies with the passage of the Declaratory Act (1766). This principle was soon questioned with the duties on glass, lead, paper, paints, and tea that were secured in 1767 by Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer under William Pitt the Elder. The Townshend duties were intended to fund the salaries of governors and other royal officials in the colonies, but they were also regulatory trade taxes, not internal levies, and thereby designed to test the distinction the colonists had earlier made between the two concerning the Stamp Act. The colonists again failed the test of logic. As an angry storm of protests and boycotts reemerged, what kinds of taxes were levied or for what reason no longer mattered. Again, Parliament, under the Grafton ministry, backed down by repealing Townshend's duties, but the most lucrative duty on tea was retained as a way of upholding the principle of Parliamentary supremacy. By this time both sides, though not fully conscious of the seriousness of the issues at stake, were headed on a collision course. That tempers did not flare more frequently may be attributed to the separation of three thousand miles of ocean and the relative lack of provocative actions by Parliament over the next several years. The Boston Massacre (1770), of course, was an exception and showed how quickly raw emotions concerning British imperial policies could surface. What it revealed was that Boston, with its ever-present mob, remained the epicenter of radicalism and resentment of British authority, as it had been for more than a century. This resistance was evident in the most dramatic event that preceded the outbreak of revolution the Boston Tea Party (1773). It was provoked by Parliament's passage of the Tea Act (1773) that allowed the East India Company to ship its tea directly from the Far East to America, thereby resulting in substantial savings in transportation and duties from not having to ship this cargo first to England for reexport. It was a logical plan designed to conciliate the colonists, but the Americans reacted emotionally by disregarding the savings argument and viewing the whole proposition as a trick, or sugared pill, to entice them into paying a tax that they had never approved. Additionally, the plan threatened the powerful American smuggling interests because it would force dealers to sell their existing stock at a loss. Instead of responding with peaceful protests or trying to establish a dialogue, a group of American activists, disguised as Indians, boarded East India Company ships in Boston Harbor in December and destroyed 298 casks of tea worth an estimated 11,000. This climactic event led directly to the closing of the port of Boston, a restructuring of the Massachusetts Charter, and a recall of troops from the wilderness. Thus, when Americans failed to respond to the reasonableness of British Parliamentary policies, the serious application of force appeared to be the only answer. This course of action, though not premeditated, was preceded and seemingly justified by a long series of frustrations and misunderstandings in dealing with the fractious Americans, who appeared to have little appreciation for the liberties they enjoyed as British subjects. They seemed determined to pursue their own separate ways as individual colonies and to avoid imperial authority, a course made possible for many decades by the relative leniency of colonial assemblies and the British policy of salutary neglect. When the King's ministers, confronted with a new set of moral, fiscal, and defense responsibilities after the French and Indian War, attempted to reorganize and rationalize the imperial structure, the colonists balked. By all standards of comparison, the amount of cooperation (monetary and otherwise) that was expected of the Americans was exceedingly small. Furthermore, the constitutional grounds for Parliamentary actions were fully in keeping with precedent and more reasonable than those of Britain's foreign rivals. For instance, North America never had a Viceroy. Nevertheless, freedom-loving Americans had grown too accustomed to skirting British authority and not bearing their fair share of imperial responsibilities. In the end it became a test of wills. Britain was unwilling to sacrifice the principle of Parliamentary supremacy, the bedrock on which its liberties were founded. Americans acted more out of emotion, perceiving nothing but the worst possible motives behind Parliamentary policies. Alas, while the British appear to have swallowed their pride, the myth of a Parliamentary conspiracy has persisted in America for more than two centuries. -JOHN D. FAIR, GEORGIA COLLEGE References Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967). George Louis Beer, British Colonial Policy, (New York: Macmillan, 1907). Richard D. Brown, ed., Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, : Documents and Essays, second edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 237

9 Ian R. Christie, Crisis of Empire: Great Britain and the American Colonies, (New York: Norton, 1966). Christie and Benjamin W. Labaree, Empire or Independence, : A British-American Dialogue on the Coming of the American Revolution (Oxford: Phaidon Press / New York: Norton, 1976). H. T. Dickinson, ed., Britain and the American Revolution (London & New York: Longman, 1998). Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Coming of the American Revolution, (New York: Harper, 1954). Jack P. Greene, "An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution," in Essays on the American Revolution, edited by Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hudson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, (New York: Knopf, 1972). Edmund S. Morgan, The Challenge of the American Revolution (New York: Norton, 1976). Richard B. Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Clinton Rossiter, The Political Thought of the American Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). P. D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, (Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press, 1975). Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Thomas, The Townshend Duties Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 238 HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 12: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION