=The Gaspee Affair and the Virginia Resolutions of 1773.=—­On sea as well as on land, friction between the royal officers and the colonists broke out into overt acts.  While patrolling Narragansett Bay looking for smugglers one day in 1772, the armed ship, Gaspee, ran ashore and was caught fast.  During the night several men from Providence boarded the vessel and, after seizing the crew, set it on fire.  A royal commission, sent to Rhode Island to discover the offenders and bring them to account, failed because it could not find a single informer.  The very appointment of such a commission aroused the patriots of Virginia to action; and in March, 1773, the House of Burgesses passed a resolution creating a standing committee of correspondence to develop cooeperation among the colonies in resistance to British measures.

=The Boston Tea Party.=—­Although the British government, finding the Townshend revenue act a failure, repealed in 1770 all the duties except that on tea, it in no way relaxed its resolve to enforce the other commercial regulations it had imposed on the colonies.  Moreover, Parliament decided to relieve the British East India Company of the financial difficulties into which it had fallen partly by reason of the Tea Act and the colonial boycott that followed.  In 1773 it agreed to return to the Company the regular import duties, levied in England, on all tea transshipped to America.  A small impost of three pence, to be collected in America, was left as a reminder of the principle laid down in the Declaratory Act that Parliament had the right to tax the colonists.

This arrangement with the East India Company was obnoxious to the colonists for several reasons.  It was an act of favoritism for one thing, in the interest of a great monopoly.  For another thing, it promised to dump on the American market, suddenly, an immense amount of cheap tea and so cause heavy losses to American merchants who had large stocks on hand.  It threatened with ruin the business of all those who were engaged in clandestine trade with the Dutch.  It carried with it an irritating tax of three pence on imports.  In Charleston, Annapolis, New York, and Boston, captains of ships who brought tea under this act were roughly handled.  One night in December, 1773, a band of Boston citizens, disguised as Indians, boarded the hated tea ships and dumped the cargo into the harbor.  This was serious business, for it was open, flagrant, determined violation of the law.  As such the British government viewed it.

RETALIATION BY THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT