page_title: Townshend Acts
section_title: Unrest in Boston
hierarchical_section_title: Townshend Acts / Reaction / Unrest in Boston
caption_attribution_description: A view of the Town of Boston in New England and British ships of war landing their troops, 1768
context_page_description: The Townshend Acts or Towshend Duties, refers to a series of British acts of Parliament passed during 1767 and 1768 relating to the British colonies in America. They are named after Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who proposed the program. Historians vary slightly as to which acts they include under the heading "Townshend Acts", but five are often listed:
  The New York Restraining Act 1767 passed on June 5, 1767
  The Revenue Act 1767 passed on June 26, 1767
  The Indemnity Act 1767 passed on June 29, 1767
  The Commissioners of Customs Act 1767 passed on June 29, 1767
  The Vice Admiralty Court Act 1768 passed on July 6, 1768
  The purposes of the acts were to:
  raise revenue in the colonies to pay the salaries of governors and judges so that they would remain loyal to Great Britain
  create more effective means of enforcing compliance with trade regulations
  punish the Province of New York for failing to comply with the 1765 Quartering Act
  establish the precedent that the British Parliament had the right to tax the colonies
  The Townshend Acts were met with resistance in the colonies, which eventually resulted in the Boston Massacre of 1770.
context_section_description: The newly created American Customs Board was seated in Boston, and so it was there that the Board concentrated on strictly enforcing the Townshend Acts. The acts were so unpopular in Boston that the Customs Board requested naval and military assistance. Commodore Samuel Hood complied by sending the fifty-gun warship HMS Romney, which arrived in Boston Harbor in May 1768.
  On June 10, 1768, customs officials seized the Liberty, a sloop owned by leading Boston merchant John Hancock, on allegations that the ship had been involved in smuggling. Bostonians, already angry because the captain of the Romney had been impressing local sailors, began to riot. Customs officials fled to Castle William for protection. With John Adams serving as his lawyer, Hancock was prosecuted in a highly publicized trial by a vice-admiralty court, but the charges were eventually dropped.
  Given the unstable state of affairs in Massachusetts, Hillsborough instructed Governor Bernard to try to find evidence of treason in Boston. Parliament had determined that the Treason Act 1543 was still in force, which would allow Bostonians to be transported to England to stand trial for treason. Bernard could find no one who was willing to provide reliable evidence, however, and so there were no treason trials. The possibility that American colonists might be arrested and sent to England for trial produced alarm and outrage in the colonies.
  Even before the Liberty riot, Hillsborough had decided to send troops to Boston. On 8 June 1768, he instructed General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief, North America, to send "such Force as You shall think necessary to Boston", although he conceded that this might lead to "consequences not easily foreseen". Hillsborough suggested that Gage might send one regiment to Boston, but the Liberty incident convinced officials that more than one regiment would be needed.
  People in Massachusetts learned in September 1768 that troops were on the way. Samuel Adams organized an emergency, extralegal convention of towns and passed resolutions against the imminent occupation of Boston, but on 1 October 1768, the first of four regiments of the British Army began disembarking in Boston, and the Customs Commissioners returned to town. The "Journal of Occurrences", an anonymously written series of newspaper articles, chronicled clashes between civilians and soldiers during the military occupation of Boston, apparently with some exaggeration. Tensions rose after Christopher Seider, a Boston teenager, was killed by a customs employee on 22 February 1770. Although British soldiers were not involved in that incident, resentment against the occupation escalated in the days that followed, resulting in the killing of five civilians in the Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770. After the incident, the troops were withdrawn to Castle William.
caption: Paul Revere's engraving of British troops landing in Boston in 1768
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