Between 1764 and 1775 a quarrel over taxes turned into a war. Neither side planned it that way. Each step looked reasonable to the people who took it, and each step made the other side angrier. Following the sequence closely shows how a constitutional argument can harden until compromise no longer seems possible.
The Stamp Act crisis
The first measures came from George Grenville, the prime minister charged with the war debt. The Sugar Act of 1764 actually lowered the duty on foreign molasses but meant to collect it, which hit New England distillers and smugglers. The next year brought something new. The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed printed paper such as newspapers, legal documents, licenses and playing cards, each of which needed a stamp bought from royal agents. It was the first direct tax Parliament had laid on the colonies, and it touched lawyers, printers and merchants, the people best placed to make noise.
The noise was loud. In Virginia, Patrick Henry pushed resolutions through the House of Burgesses denying Parliament's right to tax. In Boston, crowds organized by a group soon called the Sons of Liberty wrecked the property of the stamp distributor and gutted the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Merchants signed agreements to stop importing British goods. In October 1765 delegates from nine colonies met in New York. The Stamp Act Congress declared that only the colonists' own assemblies could tax them, while professing loyalty to the king and accepting Parliament's power to regulate trade.
The British answer: virtual representation
Ministers had a reply. Most people in Britain could not vote either; great towns like Manchester sent no members to Parliament. Yet no one called them unrepresented. Under the idea of virtual representation, Parliament spoke for all British subjects, whether or not they voted, because each member served the whole realm rather than one district. Colonists answered that this was a fiction: members elected in England paid the taxes they imposed on America, while Americans paid taxes they had no voice in setting. The slogan "no taxation without representation" summed up their view.
British merchants hurt by the boycott lobbied for relief, and in 1766 Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. It paired repeal with the Declaratory Act, which stated that Parliament could bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." Colonists celebrated the repeal and mostly ignored the principle. That was a mistake, because London meant it.
Townshend duties and a massacre
In 1767 Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the exchequer, placed duties on glass, lead, paint, paper and tea entering colonial ports. Townshend reasoned that colonists had objected to internal taxes, not trade duties. But the Townshend revenue was meant to pay royal governors and judges, freeing them from dependence on colonial assemblies. John Dickinson's widely read Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania argued that duties laid to raise revenue were taxes all the same. Boycotts returned, and women spun homespun cloth to replace British goods.
Troops arrived in Boston in 1768 to keep order, and friction grew. On 5 March 1770 a crowd taunted and pelted a squad of soldiers outside the customs house; the soldiers fired, and five men died in what Patriots called the Boston Massacre, among them Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native descent. Parliament soon repealed every Townshend duty except the one on tea.
Tea and the road to war
After a quiet spell, committees of correspondence began linking towns and colonies in 1772. Then came the Tea Act of 1773, designed to rescue the struggling East India Company. It made legal tea cheaper than smuggled tea, so its opponents had to argue from principle: the Tea Act upheld Parliament's tax on tea and handed the company a monopoly. On 16 December 1773 men disguised as Mohawks dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbor.
Parliament punished Massachusetts with what colonists called the Intolerable Acts. The Boston Port Act closed the harbor until the town paid for the tea, and other acts curbed town meetings and the colony's charter. Other colonies saw Boston's fate as their own. In September 1774 the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and adopted a sweeping boycott. On 19 April 1775 British troops marching to seize militia supplies at Concord exchanged fire with militia at Lexington, and the war began.
Worked example: the soldiers' trial
After the Boston Massacre, Captain Thomas Preston and eight soldiers faced murder charges in a city furious at them. No lawyer wanted the case until John Adams, already a Patriot, agreed to defend them. He argued that a mob had threatened the soldiers' lives, telling the jury that "facts are stubborn things," whatever people's wishes or passions. Preston and six soldiers were acquitted; two were convicted of manslaughter and branded on the thumb. Consider what the case shows. Patriots used the shooting as propaganda, while Paul Revere's famous engraving showed soldiers firing in a neat line at peaceful citizens. Yet a Patriot lawyer insisted that even hated soldiers deserved a fair trial, and a Boston jury agreed. A cause that claims to defend rights is tested by how it treats its enemies (see LAW 101 on due process).