Intolerable Acts

Impact

The response of Lord North's ministry and the British parliament to the Boston Tea Party was unprecedented. Legislation included the closure of Boston's port, changes to the colony's government, and substantial alterations to its judicial system. These changes appeared to policy makers in Whitehall and Westminster as just the kind of sweeping yet decisive action needed to restore harmony and calm to British America.

It seems clear today that Lord North and his ministers were wrong in almost every way. In fact, the Intolerable Acts appear to have been carefully designed to justify every radical argument about the rampant corruption that had eaten away the heart of the glorious British constitution, turning its institutions into tools of tyranny. The Massachusetts Government Act attacked a colonial charter, the foundational instrument of government cherished by many colonists as the bulwark of their own liberty and property. The Administration of Justice Act threatened the sacred, ancient right of trial by jury, raising the specter of secret courts and illegal condemnations. The Boston Port Act required vessels of the Royal Navy sent from one British port to engage in what many saw as an act of civil war by blockading another British port, though one in America. The Quebec Act resurrected traditional fears of popish plots and Jesuitical schemes to undermine Protestantism by protecting the Catholic Church in Canada, while it also struck at more banal but no less potent concerns held by land speculators who saw the source of their future wealth—western land—vanishing into a distant and “foreign” jurisdiction. Nearly every colonial fear was given form in these acts.

Along with miscalculation was an almost complete lack of practical foresight on the part of the British ministry. Parliament showed that it could pass the Intolerable Acts, but whether it could enforce them remained in question. Moreover, the Massachusetts Government Act, unlike the others, could be enforced in only two ways: through cooperation or by force. Because cooperation was unlikely, force became inevitable. Even so, it took almost a year before Lord North's government attempted to turn the language of the legislation into real punishment for Boston. During the delay, the explicit threat posed to the other colonies by the Intolerable Acts generated a flurry of activity in all of the colonies to defend themselves.

This growing sense of a common threat created a wellspring of support for Massachusetts Bay and a sense of solidarity that had never before existed in British America. In every colony and in defiance of royal governors, calls went out for a halt to trade with Britain and the convening of a congress. The attack upon the Massachusetts charter, in particular, shook each colony's sense of the security of its liberties. Virginia's role in rallying to the cause of Boston as the cause of America was especially important, perceived as Virginia was on both sides of the Atlantic as the steadiest and most loyal colony in the British world. Despite the dissolution of the assembly by a tendentious governor, Virginia's political leaders—moderates and radicals alike—met on their own to establish a ban on British imports and to join the clamor for a continental congress. Thomas Jefferson articulated the radical view of the dispute in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, arguing that the only connection that existed, or that had ever existed, between the colonies and Britain was in the person of the sovereign; there had never been a place in that relationship for Parliament. Throughout the summer of 1774 committees and conventions met in each colony to elect delegates to a general congress and spell out their goals and hopes for its work.

The most important product of the First Continental Congress that met in September 1774 was the adoption of the Continental Association. The agreement called for the immediate repeal of a list of parliamentary acts and brandished nonimportation and nonexportation as the weapons with which they would fight for the repeal. The Association directed towns and counties in every colony to establish committees of inspection that would enforce the trade restrictions. These committees, in no small way, formed the basis of the government that would grow out of the Revolution.