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The Sugar and Quartering Acts
Britain had decisively won the French and Indian War (1756-1763), as the North American portion of the Seven Years’ War was called. It defeated France and Spain and seized French territory in Canada and between the Mississippi River and the Appalachians. But the war created two problems for the British that ultimately led to the loss of thirteen of its American colonies.
The British national debt had almost doubled during the war, so it needed new sources of revenue. And it had gained control of restive populations of French Catholics in Quebec and France’s Indian allies in the West. In fact, the Ottawa tribe, led by Pontiac, fought a three-year war (1763-1766) against the British that started only three months after the Treaty of Paris had ended the French and Indian War. Thus, Britain decided to maintain a standing army in North America, instead of merely garrisoning frontier forts. But this army added to the costs of the colonies.
In April 1764, the British parliament passed the Sugar Act to fund the British army in America and to pay down the national debt. The Sugar Act actually cut the existing duty on molasses in half, but it required ship captains to keep detailed records of their cargo so they could be inspected by customs officials. It made customs violations subject to a juryless trial in admiralty court instead of a jury trial in civilian court. Instead of being tried by a jury of their sympathetic neighbors who enjoyed consuming untaxed molasses, the admiralty judges got a percentage of the cargoes that they condemned. The effect was to increase sharply the anticipated revenue from the tax and to make smuggling dangerous.
The merchants/smugglers of Boston and New York were outraged that a faraway parliament could impose a tax, especially one that could not be ignored. And they were furious that they were deprived of their right as Englishmen to a jury trial. Samuel Adams and James Otis of Boston organized protests against the Sugar Act. In response, General Thomas Gage, the commander of the British army in North America, pulled troops off the frontier and stationed most of them in New York because the New York legislature had agreed to pay for their housing and food. But the New York legislature’s generosity reached its limit after one year, and it refused to renew the financial support. Gage was stuck with several thousand troops that needed to be housed, but nowhere to put them.
Liberty Pole with a British customs agent hanged in effigy. Source: https://revolutionarywarjournal.com/liberty-trees-and-poles/
Gage asked the British parliament to do something. In a fateful move, it enacted the Quartering Act in May 1765 (260 years ago this month). It required the colonial legislatures to erect barracks or provide public housing at their own expense for the troops and to provide them with food, beer, rum, firewood, and other necessities. New York, where most of the troops were stationed, refused; so the troops had to stay in cramped and unhealthy quarters on ships in the harbor. The New York Sons of Liberty organized to protest the imposition of taxation without representation, and violence between colonials and British officials ensued. They raised a Liberty Pole on the Commons on Broadway, directly across from the barracks where some soldiers were stationed, which became the site of periodic battles between the Sons of Liberty and the British soldiers. The Liberty Pole was cut down and restored many times over the next decade. There was a stand-off between the New York legislature and the British parliament in London.
Meanwhile, in Boston, conflict arose between the customs officials and the gentlemen smugglers. Merchants and ship captains were punished for smuggling, failing to declare cargoes, and storing illicit goods in warehouses. The Sons of Liberty organized in Boston as well. Eventually, all the colonies except Pennsylvania refused to quarter the troops, and there only with some shenanigans by the governor.
In 1767, the British parliament ordered the New York governor and assembly suspended until such time as they paid for quartering the soldiers. Under duress, they agreed. The parliament passed the Townshend Acts in July 1767 to teach the colonials a lesson. Duties were imposed on the import of a wide variety of goods, the customs enforcement machinery was strengthened, and a monopoly on tea imports was given to the British East India Company.
Due to the pressure on New York, the assembly and many of its leading citizens gradually acquiesced to quartering soldiers. But the Boston Sons of Liberty had much more at stake since Boston was the center of much of America’s maritime trade, especially of its smuggling. The Massachusetts House sent a circular letter to all the other colonies to organize a boycott of British goods that were subject to the tax. The Colonial Secretary in London, Lord Hillsborough, ordered the Massachusetts House to rescind the boycott letter, which it refused to do. As a result of the unrest, the customs commissioner in Boston requested more troops, so Lord Hillsborough sent the 50-gun HMS Romney and four regiments of troops to Boston in 1768. Tensions rose.
Within two years, there would be blood on the snow on Boston streets as British soldiers fired on colonials in the Boston Massacre. Three years later, the Boston Harbor was awash with the East India Company’s tea. The Sugar Act and Quartering Act, only a few short years before, had been the first steps on the road to revolution.
Published in History
Thanks for the history lesson! I never learned about these in high school. Of course I never paid much attention in history class which I failed in 7th grade. Perhaps they ran it by us and I slept through it!
Any good books that recount the history of the the French and Indian Wars? This article shows how that conflict led into later developments, with which many authors have dealt, but how about its antecedents?
My excellent fourth grade touched on this material pretty thoroughly, and was eventually able to extract from me six pages on the events surrounding Bunker Hill. I overthought the whole exercise, researched a stack of books, and handed it in late thinking that it was awful. The grade was very good as it turned, but the penalty for being late eliminated any benefit. But they promoted me to fifth grade. By the time she was done, the teacher had taught us about the institutionalization of political objectives such as desegregation or tax reductions. And how special interests capture those organizations, co-opting the issue, and defeating their purported objectives using the contributions of the issues proponents. Not quite in those words, I’m sure. She made me sit next to the new girl who was a descendant of that Washington fellow with the wooden teeth.
Thanks for the refresher.
The world war that George Washington started?
(Good article, by the way.)
So you learned more about Bunker Hill than any other fourth grader (probably more than any high schooler), you learned to do research, you got promoted up a grade, and you learned to turn things in on time. That may have been one of the most valuable assignments you ever did!
That was my take. Later.
At least the British recognized that beer and rum were necessities . . .
A great grandad Skinner, some number of greats ago, served with George Washington in Colonel Fry’s regiment. Their shared service didn’t keep Washington from suing him for back rent some years later.
I’m intrigued by the connections of the American Revolution to other events, both its roots and contemporary events. We talk a lot about the intellectual roots of the Constitution in Montesquieu, Locke, etc.; but I learned very little in school about how the American Revolution relates to other events.
Somehow we were taught that the Boston Sons of Liberty and the British parliament suddenly got angry with each other in the late 1760s and then it was war. But the war was caused by contradictions in British grand strategy that had it opposing France and Catholicism on the European continent and around the globe. The Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution can be seen as merely episodes in that long struggle when one takes a global perspective.
I also had never learned about John Wilkes, the English radical and supporter of the American rebels. I had no idea that that the founders had hoped that Wilkes and his followers would spark a similar movement against Parliament in England.
I also had no idea that the British and French fought many battles in the Caribbean and in India during the last years of the Revolution
Of course, the war in the Thirteen Colonies proved to be the most decisive for US and world history, but there was a lot else going on that affected our little war.
You’d enjoy reading about Issac Barré , a renowned speaker in Parliament, who stood in opposition to the Stamp Act (and many more besides). He had fought alongside Americans in the French and Indian War, and counted himself as one of the few members who knew the American people.
Charles Townsend’s defense of the eponymous Townsend Acts included the question”
Barré’s response was excellent, but one turn of phrase in particular was noteworthy.
That line hit the Colonies like a thunderclap. They seized it and made use of it thenceforth.
Hay, Fast,
RE: “the intellectual roots of the Constitution…”
If You ain’t familiar, I suggest The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn and Novus Ordo Seclorum by Forrest McDonald.
Yes, those are both excellent books. I enjoyed them both.
That quote and Barre’s response captures the root cause of the revolution. The political questions (taxes, duties, etc.) between Parliament and the colonists were resolvable, but their world views were utterly incompatible. They were talking past each other in the early years when they tried to resolve their differences.