Townshend Acts tax imports (glass

In 1767, Parliament adopted the Townshend Acts at the urging of Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend, placing import duties on glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea brought into the American colonies. The statutes also created an American Board of Customs Commissioners in Boston and expanded mechanisms for enforcing trade laws. Because the duties were laid on imports rather than directly on stamped paper, British ministers hoped colonists would accept them as a more defensible exercise of parliamentary authority.

Americans answered that the constitutional principle had not changed: Parliament was still raising revenue from colonists who had no representatives in Parliament. John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania argued that external duties levied for revenue threatened liberty as surely as the Stamp Act had done, and colonial assemblies adopted nonimportation agreements in response. The customs board in Boston then made the dispute more combustible, because stricter enforcement brought merchants, smugglers, customs officials, and eventually soldiers into repeated conflict.

The Townshend crisis led directly to the occupation of Boston in 1768 and formed the immediate background to the Boston Massacre in 1770. Even after most duties were repealed, the surviving tax on tea kept the imperial argument alive until the Tea Act and the Boston Tea Party revived it with greater force.