The Townshend Act Lays Duties on Glass, Paper and Tea

Two years after the Stamp Act was repealed, Parliament passed a new act for "granting certain duties in the British colonies and plantations in America." It is known as the Townshend Act, and it set duties, to be paid on arrival in the colonies, on goods imported from Great Britain: glass, red and white lead, painters' colours, tea at three pence a pound, and a long schedule of grades of paper. The duties took effect on November 20, 1767, the date the act itself names and the date the Yale Avalon Project uses to label its text. The sources opened for this entry do not state the date the act was passed, so this entry is dated to when the duties began.

The act's preamble says what the money was for. It declares it expedient that a revenue be raised in America to provide for "the administration of justice, and the support of civil government" where necessary, and to help defray the cost of defending the colonies. After the costs of collection, the proceeds were to be applied to those purposes, and the Crown was empowered to direct the money to them by warrant. The American Battlefield Trust summarizes the same point: the revenue would pay colonial governors and judges. The act also tightened enforcement. It required masters of vessels to report their cargoes at the custom house, and it provided that the superior or supreme courts in each colony could grant writs of assistance, which let customs officers search for and seize prohibited or uncustomed goods.

The Stamp Act had been a tax on printed paper; this act laid duties on goods imported from Great Britain, with the proceeds earmarked for colonial government and the courts. The Office of the Historian of the State Department records that the repeal of the Stamp Act quieted colonial protest only temporarily, and that there was renewed resistance to the new taxes of 1767 under the Townshend Acts. The question of who could tax the colonies was not settled, and it runs through the events that led to the First Continental Congress and, in time, to a written constitution.