First editions of the “Intolerable Acts” of 1774

“Now is the time to proceed with firmness and without fear.  They will never reform until we take a measure of this kind."

—Lord North in Parliament speaking in favor of the Boston Port Act  

“Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions [of rights], born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it.  They and we, and their and our ancestors, have been happy under that system...Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always done it.  Do not burthen them by taxes; you were not used to doing it from the beginning...Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience.”

—Edmund Burke in Parliament, speaking against the Massachusetts Government Act

The “Intolerable Acts” of 1774, known to the British as the Coercive Acts, were four  exceedingly severe Acts passed in 1774 expressly to punish the colonists for the Boston Tea Party.  The most important of these, the Boston Port Act, closed Boston’s port to all commerce except for food and fuel—and provisions for the Royal army.  The Act stipulated that the port could not be re-opened until the colonists had paid for the tea that had been destroyed in the Boston Tea Party.  The Massachusetts Bay Regulating Act substituted a governing council appointed by the king for the council elected by the people of Massachusetts.  This Act also greatly extended the power of the crown-appointed governor: the governor could make and alter judicial appointments entirely at his own discretion; in addition, Boston town meetings could not be convened without the governor’s prior consent.  The Administration of Justice Act empowered the governor to, at his own discretion, relocate trials of royal officials who were indicted for murder as a result of efforts to suppress riots or enforce customs laws.  Thomas Jefferson’s wrote of this Act that “the cowards who would suffer a countryman to be torn from the bowels of their society, in order to be thus offered a sacrifice to parliamentary tyranny, would merit that everlasting infamy now fixed on the authors of the act!” 

The Quartering Act of 1774, an amendment to the Quartering Act of 1765, gave royal military officers the power to quarter troops wherever they pleased, even in private homes.   In passing these Acts, Parliament hoped to punish and subdue the Massachusetts Bay Colony for the Tea Party.  In Lord North’s view,  which he articulated in the House of Commons, “The rest of the colonies will not take fire at the proper punishment inflicted on those who have disobeyed your (Parliament’s) authority.”  Contrary to Lord North’s prognostications, the severity of the Intolerable Acts was felt throughout the colonies, as the following excerpt from  a letter by George Washington indicates: “Since the first settlement of this Colony (Virginia) the Minds of People in it never were more disturbed or our situation so critical as at present; arising as I have said before from an Invasion of our Rights and Privileges by the Mother Country” (letter to George William Fairfax, 10-15 June, 1774).   In September of 1774 the Americans responded formally by convening the First Continental Congress of 1774 where they declared the Acts to be “impolitic, unjust, and cruel, as well as unconstitutional, and most dangerous and destructive of American rights.”     The colonists complained that “the present unhappy situation of our affairs is occasioned by a ruinous system of colony administration, adopted by the British ministry about the year 1763, evidently calculated for enslaving these colonies, and with them, the British Empire.  In prosecution of which system, various Acts of Parliament have been passed for raising a revenue in America, for depriving the American subjects, in many instances, of the constitutional trial by jury, exposing their lives to danger, by directing a new and illegal trial beyond the seas, for crimes.”  The colonists resolved to a complete suspension of trade with Britain until the offending Acts were repealed: “Repeal of them is essentially necessary in order to restore harmony between Great Britain and the American colonies” (Declarations of the First Continental Congress, 1774).  General Thomas Gage wrote to the King suggesting that a temporary suspension of the Intolerable Acts was needed to restore order in Massachusetts.  King George III took a very different view of what was necessary:   “His [General Gage’s] idea of suspending the Acts appears to me the most absurd that can be suggested...We must either master them or totally leave them to themselves and treat them as Aliens.” 

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