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By Root 7583 0

because the Assembly refused on principle to requisition salt, vinegar, and beer for them as required by the Quartering Act—no taxation without representation, it said—His Majesty’s forces were spoiling for trouble. One day in August 1766 fed-up soldiers from the barracks poured into the Common and chopped down the liberty pole erected there in May. When Isaac Sears and a party of Liberty Boys tried to put it up again, they were driven off. Sears and his men returned in strength to raise an even grander pole, after which they pressured local retailers, tradesmen, tavern keepers, and householders to shun all military personnel. Again the redcoats destroyed the liberty pole—now obviously a vital symbol for both sides—and again Sears and company replaced it.

Toward the end of November 1766, summoned by the reactivated Sons, 240 merchants signed a lengthy petition to Parliament explaining (again) why the West Indian trade was vital to the city’s long-term prosperity and should not be sacrificed for the short-term purposes of raising revenue. Arriving at the same time as news that the New York Assembly still refused to comply with the Quartering Act, the petition was ill received in London. “Highly improper,” harrumphed Prime Minister Chatham, “most absurd. . . most excessive. . . most grossly fallacious and offensive. What demon of discord blows the coals in that devoted province I know not.”

Charles Townshend, the new chancellor of the exchequer, asked Parliament to suspend the New York Assembly. Because the Lords and Commons had recently slashed the land tax, throwing the government further into the red, Townshend also urged Parliament to create a new Board of Customs Commissioners to stiffen enforcement of the Navigation Acts and improve the collection of revenues from the colonies. Finally, he proposed the imposition of new taxes on paper, lead, glass, ink, paints, and tea imported into the colonies. By June 1767 his program had become law.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLITICS

Boston, roused over the late summer and early autumn by the oratory and organizational skills of James Otis and Samuel Adams, led the opposition to Townshend. Its merchants drew up the first in a new series of colonial nonimportation agreements, and early in 1768 the Massachusetts House of Representatives adopted a Circular Letter, inviting coordinated American protest against the Townshend program. Unwilling to back down a second time, Parliament and ministry responded with a show of force. The Massachusetts legislature was summarily dissolved—the second such body in as many years to fall before imperial wrath—and troops were dispatched to Boston as well to quell what was being referred to in London as a virtual insurrection.

For New York, the events of 1767 and 1768, though less dramatic than what took place in Boston, were no less tumultuous. In December 1767, at one of many protest meetings, residents chose a committee to devise yet another plan for promoting local manufactures, employing the poor, and encouraging frugality. The following April, the city’s merchants organized its first Chamber of Commerce and agreed to join the nonimportation movement providing their counterparts in Philadelphia did likewise. In late August 1768 “Nearly all the Merchants and Traders in town” signed an agreement to begin nonimportation on November 1. Artisans and tradesmen, rallied by the Sons of Liberty, pledged to support the agreement and to use “every lawful Means in our Power” to see that everyone else did too. By the end of the year business in the city had once again come to a halt.

Two back-to-back elections for the provincial assembly had meanwhile strained long-established political practices and institutions to the breaking point. Although it escaped dissolution by Parliament on a technicality, Governor Moore dissolved the provincial assembly for objecting to the Townshend Duties, which led to an election in March 1768. Then he dissolved it again, for endorsing the Massachusetts Circular Letter and issuing a bold “Declaration of Rights,” and another