How tariffs helped spark the American Revolution

A long time ago, long before William McKinley and even longer before Donald Trump, tariffs drove Americans to war.

Today, we call that war the American Revolution.

We’re all familiar with the clarion call of “no taxation without representation.” The taxation in question in the tumultuous years leading up to 1776 mostly involved tariffs. They were called “import duties” then, but they were the same thing — taxes on imports. This is what led to more than a decade of growing estrangement between Great Britain and some (though not all) of the North American Colonies, culminating in the Boston Tea Party and, ultimately, the Declaration of Independence.

With tariffs now back in public debate, it’s worth looking at how a series of unpopular tariffs imposed on Americans more than 250 years ago led them to rebel against their government and create their own country.

If you’ve been following our Cardinal 250 project, where we tell the stories of little-known aspects of Virginia’s role in that revolution, some of these details may be familiar to you. If not, I’ll invite you now to sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter, the next one of which goes out next week. It will include stories about a spy from Botetourt County and a new book about Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s last royal governor, that raises three provocative questions that challenge our traditional understanding of his actions.

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To understand how tariffs — or, if you prefer, import duties — led to the American Revolution, we must go back several decades prior to that conflict. In the 1750s, both the British, which had colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, and the French, which had Quebec, were pushing westward and found themselves both laying claim to places such as the future Pittsburgh — Fort Duquesne to the French, Fort Pitt to the British. Of course, various Native American tribes also inhabited all those lands, but the French were on better terms with them than the British. The French generally wanted trade, the British just wanted the tribes out of the way by whatever means necessary.

The result was what we remember today as the French and Indian War — and a British victory that saw the French forced to give up Quebec to the British and Louisiana to the Spanish. This is where Britain and the American Colonists started to diverge in a serious way. The Colonists felt that victory meant the western lands beyond the Appalachians should now be open to them (never mind the native tribes that still lived there). The British came out of the war with their debt doubled. Wars are expensive. The British wanted to hold down security costs in North America, so they did two things that proved very unpopular on this side of the Atlantic: First, they forbade settlement west of a certain line — the Proclamation of 1763 that cut through modern-day Southwest Virginia. That was intended to minimize contact and therefore conflict between land-grabbing colonists and Native Americans. The second thing Britain did was to extract more taxes from the Colonists.

Before we get worked up over those taxes, let’s consider how this looked to the British. Woody Holton, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, son of former Virginia Gov. Linwood Holton and an award-winning author about the revolution, wrote this in his book “Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia”: “When peace came, British politicians listened avidly as army officers returning from America told of the fabulous wealth abounding there. Here were more than two million British subjects that — at a time when English, Welsh and Scottish taxpayers reeled under a load of taxes and often resisted them — did not pay a penny in direct taxes.” 

From London’s point of view, it was time for Colonists to pay up. Prime Minister George Grenville’s solution: the Stamp Act, which required Colonists to buy a tax stamp to affix to certain documents. From the Colonists’ point of view, this was a violation of the English Bill of Rights because they hadn’t elected any of the parliamentarians who voted for it — and they still thought of themselves as Englishmen, so they did what any right-thinking Englishman would have done in those times when liberties were infringed. They rioted. In Virginia, 400 armed men marched through Tappahannock to the home of a prominent merchant who had vowed to uphold the act. They threatened to strip him shirtless, tie him to a cart and put him on public display.

The Grenville administration regrouped and decided that import duties might be less objectionable to the Colonists. Hint: They weren’t.

What followed were a series of British laws imposing import duties, collectively known as the Townshend Acts after Charles Townshend, the chancellor of the exchequer. Protests, and more riots, followed. Nobody likes paying taxes, and Colonists especially didn’t like paying ones imposed by people they had no role in electing. Those import duties also struck at the heart of the Colonial economic system, which Colonists were starting to chafe against.

The basic economy of the times was this: The Colonies were there to export raw goods to Britain. In the case of Virginia, that was primarily tobacco. British merchants then exported luxury goods to the Colonies that the Colonies couldn’t, or didn’t, produce on their own. The British felt that this was a fine arrangement and that they were helping the Virginia economy, in particular, when they banned British farmers from growing tobacco (not that Britain had a great climate for the leaf). 

The Colonists, particularly those in Virginia and Massachusetts, didn’t see it that way. The reason that “debtors” makes its way into the title of Holton’s book is telling. He wasn’t talking about Dickensian debtors living in squalor; he was talking about the Virginia gentry, which found itself constantly in debt to British merchants. Those gentlemen farmers were almost totally dependent on the price of their tobacco exports — which varied wildly — but had to keep up appearances by continuing to import British goods (or so they thought; appearances were very important to them, Holton writes). Various British laws also restricted what the Colonies could produce and how they could sell it. At various times, the British banned the Colonies from making their own iron; Colonists could only sell woolen clothing within their own colony — they couldn’t export it. For anything they did export, such as that precious tobacco, it had to be done on British ships. 

That meant Virginia planters couldn’t sell tobacco on the European market, they could only sell it through British middlemen, and those middlemen were the ones who profited most. That merchant class in London was growing in political power at home, so parliament was inclined to listen to what the merchant class wanted, while those Virginia farmers across the ocean had no vote at all. The British felt they were being “indulgent” with their North American Colonies when Parliament repealed the hated Stamp Act. The Fairfax County lawyer-planter George Mason was one who didn’t see it that way at all: “Is the indulgence of Great Britain manifested by prohibiting her colonies from exporting to foreign countries such commodities as she does not want and from importing such as she does not produce of manufacture …?” He was complaining about the restriction on trade; the addition of import duties on what Colonists felt they had to import made matters worse. In modern parlance, the Colonists wanted free trade for their agriculture-based economies. (To this day, the ag industry tends to be skeptical of tariffs on imports because they fear retaliatory tariffs from other countries that will put a crimp in farmers’ export sales. But back to Colonial times …)

When the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 objected to the Townshend Acts, the royal governor felt compelled to dissolve the legislative body. The legislators were no longer swayed by royal authority. They simply regrouped at the Raleigh Tavern and held an unofficial session in which they took a dramatic act: They voted to boycott any British goods on which they’d have to pay an import duty. That meant they’d need to make their own clothing, a duty that fell to women and girls, especially those who were enslaved. This is one of many ways in which the participants in the American Revolution spanned ages, genders and races — it wasn’t simply about guys in white wigs. For our purposes today, the import duties had the effect of encouraging domestic manufacturing — exactly what President Donald Trump hopes his tariffs will do today. However, the boycott didn’t work. In “Virginia: The New Dominion” by the historian Virginius Dabney, we learn that “in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, imports actually increased. Most of the Virginia and Maryland merchants were Scots ‘who had no sympathy with colonial liberties.’” Presumably, those Scottish merchants had customers willing to pay the higher prices, or they wouldn’t have risked making the orders. The boycott ultimately proved an economic failure but a political success because it gave Colonial leaders experience in working together.

As the price of imported goods rose, some Colonial merchants turned to smuggling to evade those import duties. New Englanders were quite adept at this. Way back in 1733, the British had slapped heavy tariffs on sugar imports from the French West Indies to encourage Colonists to buy sugar from Britain’s Caribbean Colonies instead — sugar that was higher priced without the tariffs. New Englanders responded by smuggling in the French sugar, duty-free. When more import duties were created in the 1760s and 1770s, the New England merchants began smuggling even more — and the British resorted to stricter enforcement to try to stop them. At one point, the Boston merchant John Hancock was charged with smuggling, although charges were eventually dropped. In 1772, a British frigate that was enforcing customs laws ran aground off the coast of Rhode Island while chasing a suspected boat of smugglers. Rhode Islanders responded by burning the naval vessel. As you might imagine, the British were not amused.

In 1773, the British East India Company ran into some financial difficulties and, under the theory of “too big to fail,” the British government gave it a bailout of sorts. At the time, Britain required the company to sell its tea to merchants in London, who could then resell it to the Colonies. (Those London merchants had a powerful lobby.) Under the Tea Act of 1773, Britain allowed the company to sell directly to the colonies. This would, in theory, allow the company to sell its product at a lower rate in the Colonies and generate more sales. Colonists loved the British East India Company tea; it was said to have a better flavor than the illicit tea that was smuggled in. However, the Townshend Acts import duties still applied to the tea, and that soured the taste. Bostonians flung the tea into the harbor in what we know today as the Boston Tea Party.

Infuriated British authorities started cracking down on those rebellious Bostonians, an infringement of civil liberties that spiraled out of control. Not quite two years later, on April 19, 1775, came the armed confrontations between the British and Americans at Lexington and Concord. 

There were lots of other things that sparked the American Revolution, but longstanding Colonial unhappiness over tariffs was the powderkeg for all that followed. None of that is to say we should start flinging tea — or Teslas — into the harbor to protest tariffs. There are some key differences between then and now. Colonists objected to tariffs being imposed by a government they didn’t elect; Americans elected Trump, who made quite clear during the campaign that he wanted to raise tariffs. However, one point does hold across the centuries: Tea wasn’t a product the Colonists could grow on their own, so if they wanted it (and they did), they had to import it. They just didn’t want to pay a tariff on it.