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| This Patriot cartoon depicting the Coercive Acts as the forcing of tea on an American woman (a symbol of the American colonies) was copied and distributed in the Thirteen Colonies. In the public doman; courtesy www.wikipedia.com |
The argument over what was due the Crown and Parliament from the colonies for protection was starting to become heated. Lincoln Paine, in The Sea and Civilization, continues the story: "…the conflicts of the eighteenth century were enormously expensive. To allay the cost of servicing the debt, and to pay for the continued defense of the North American colonies…the government imposed taxes designed to raise revenues and regulate trade; enforced the Navigation Acts more stringently…and transferred jurisdiction over smuggling cases from the provincial courts, where it was virtually impossible for the government to win a case, to vice admiralty courts.”
(For more on the vice admiralty courts, see Maria Dering’s blog post on the Silver Oar.)
In the spring of 1773, Parliament gave the East India Company permission to get a tax refund on tea exported to Ireland and North America. Using this device, they could price their tea cheap enough to undercut the smugglers. Why did Parliament do this? For a variety of reasons, including incompetent management and bad investments, the British East India Company was losing money, and the government deemed it (stop me if you heard this) TOO BIG TO FAIL.
However, this cost the treasury 60,000 pounds a year; an amount that it could not afford to lose; hence, the new taxes. The colonists were having none of it; result- the Boston Tea Party, and similar acts of defiance.
Paine picks up the story: “In retaliation, Parliament passed the Intolerable (or Coercive) Acts, which annulled the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter, closed the port of Boston, allowed legal cases against agents of the crown to be heard in England, and required private citizens to quarter soldiers in their homes.”
That’s what you call an overreaction. Paine goes on:
“All but the last applied to Massachusetts alone, but in solidarity many of the colonies closed their ports to ships from England… In February 1775, Parliament tightened the noose with the passage of the Restraining Act, which prohibited New England fishermen from ‘carrying on any Fishery…upon the banks of Newfoundland…or any other part of the Coast of North America.’”*
So there it is. Both sides considered their grievances just, and cooler heads did not prevail. Two months later, Lexington and Concord.
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*Paine, Lincoln. The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (486-87).
