Each State was governed by an Assembly elected by its own people and by a Governor appointed by the Crown. The States had their "charters"—documents in which were drawn up their rights and their duties—and so long as they acted within the provisions of those characters the Governor had no right or reason to interfere. The right of taxing themselves for the purpose of administering their own affairs was given them. The home Government derived a revenue from the colonies by the duties charged on articles which they imported by sea. And the colonies were obliged by their charters to engage in no trade overseas except with the home country.
This last provision had not been faithfully observed, and a considerable trade was going on illicitly between the British and the Spanish colonies. Britain, short of money by reason of the cost of the Seven Years' War, raised the import duties and enforced the prohibition against trading with the Spaniards.
Certain of the expenses of the war had been incurred for the protection of the colonies, and though they might not welcome this action of the home Government they could not legally resist it. Nor did they. But then the king and his minister Grenville imposed, or sought to impose, on them a tax which surely was illegal and which surely they were within their rights in resisting.
The Stamp Act
It was imposed by the piece of legislation known as the Stamp Act, because its object was to levy money from the colonists by making it illegal for them to buy and sell certain articles within the colonies themselves unless they bore a government stamp; for which stamp payment had to be made to the home Government.
It was a manifest breach of the agreement which had been made with the colonists, and the principal effect of the passing of this Stamp Act in 1765 was that the colonists called together a Congress of delegates from all the colonies and passed a protest against the Act and a demand for its repeal. More than that; when the ship came into Boston harbour carrying the first batch of the stamps to be used for the new tax, they had the stamps seized and retained. It was open defiance. It was defiance by something like three millions of determined people, the population having nearly doubled itself since the beginning of George III.'s reign. Pitt's generous comment upon it is well known: "Three millions of people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest."
It was chiefly Pitt's influence which led to the repeal of the Act in 1766; but much of the good effect of its repeal must have been spoiled by a measure called the "Declaratory Act," passed at the same time, declaring that the power of the British Parliament was supreme over the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." It was as much as to say, "We yield on this particular point, but we maintain that our right over you is despotic whensoever we think fit to exercise it." It did, in fact, claim to enslave, as Pitt indicated, these people, because, as we have seen all through the story, it was by insistence on the right to tax themselves that Britons had painfully won liberty: it was a right expressed in the words "no taxation without representation": and here was a declaration directly opposed to that right, for it declared that the home Government might tax the colonists, although they had no representation in the home Government!
But for the moment the trouble passed. The colonists had all the substance of victory in the repeal of the Stamp Act: they could afford to disregard the shadowy threat of the Declaratory Act. They may have thought that, since the king and Parliament had yielded to their resistance once, they were not likely to challenge that resistance again. But King George appears to have been incapable of learning. Seven years later the trouble broke out anew, again provoked by the question of taxation. The colonists protested against import duties which they considered illegal and oppressive, and their protest was met by the withdrawal of all the duties objected to except that on tea. They accepted this withdrawal, and this exception, amicably; but they countered the exception by generally refusing to drink tea, so that no tea was imported and no duty on it was payable. It was a situation which would be laughable if the consequences had not been so tragic.
Opposition to the tea duty
Despite the non-tea-drinking resolution, English ships laden with tea put into Boston harbour towards the end of 1773, doubtless with a view to landing it. Whether or no it would have been landed we can never know, for the ships while in harbour were boarded by a mob disguised as wild Indians and all the tea-chests were thrown into the sea.