Sugar Act

Before the American Revolution, the British Parliament believed strongly in its right to legislate for the economy of the American colonies for the benefit of Britain. The Sugar Act was a law Parliament passed in 1764 with an overwhelming majority as a replacement for the Molasses Act of 1733. The new Act restructured the customs taxes on sugar and luxury goods to increase revenue and reorganized the customs system in North America to decrease corruption. It faced fierce opposition in the northern colonies.

Brief History

After the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, the British Parliament was looking for ways to raise money to pay off the large debt Britain had incurred. The necessity of paying for the garrisoning of the new territories acquired by the war meant that Britain was not experiencing a "peace dividend" after the war. The prime minister of the time, George Grenville, was particularly interested in restoring Britain to a sound financial condition. One solution was raising taxes on the British colonies in North America, a rising economic force. From the British point of view, it made sense for the colonies to pay for the increased British military establishment in North America that followed the war, and raising taxes on the Americans would avoid the storm of parliamentary opposition an attempt to further raise taxes in Britain would evoke. Among these laws to increase revenue from America was the American Duties Act of 1764, usually referred to as the Sugar Act or the Plantation Act. The preamble to the act explicitly stated its purpose to support British armed forces in North America.

The Molasses Act that the Sugar Act superseded had taxed American colonial imports of sugar and its derivative, molasses, from outside the British Empire. Molasses, an intermediate product made from sugar and usually further transformed into rum, one of the most popular drinks in the colonies, was taxed at the high rate of six pence per gallon. The goal of the Molasses Act had been to protect the sugar grown in the slave colonies of the British Caribbean, such as Jamaica and Barbados, from competition with cheaper sugar produced in the slave colonies of the French Caribbean such as Saint-Domingue, later known as Haiti. The act had been easily circumvented, however, with French sugar and molasses falsely labeled British and widespread smuggling in every American port with a distillery for making rum. Corruption among customs officials had become institutionalized and meant that the tax provided little revenue to the British government.

The Sugar Act actually lowered the tax on foreign molasses from six pence to three pence per gallon, but heavily taxed coffee, wine, silk and other luxury goods imported directly from places outside the British Empire. It absolutely barred French Caribbean rum from American markets. The Sugar Act also included provisions to eliminate corruption and improve the efficiency of the customs service. It protected customs officers from lawsuits brought by merchants or ships’ captains protesting unauthorized seizures. The act strengthened local vice-admiralty courts based on the prerogative of the crown at the expense of local common law courts, where smugglers with local connections often received favorable treatment. The act also created a new vice-admiralty court with jurisdiction over all the British colonies in America. The new court was located in the British garrison town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the judges would be under the watchful eye of British armed authority and safe from colonial mob intimidation. It established a new and much more bureaucratic regime, modeled on that of Britain itself, to regulate shipping, combat smuggling, and ensure that the tax was paid on all imported commodities.

Impact

The act aroused opposition among some Americans, particular in the northern centers of trade, New York and Boston. (The South was much less involved in the sugar trade and did not generally concern itself with the act.) In addition to raising the effective rate of taxation through vigorous enforcement, it was feared that the act would harm trade to the French Caribbean, important to many American industries, including New England’s large fishing industry. The debate initially focused on the immediate economic impact of the act more than the question of the British Parliament’s right to legislate for the American colonies. The establishment of the new customs regime further raised opposition, particularly as the strengthened vice-admiralty judges were likely to be British officials with few connections to the local communities in the colonies.

However, some opposition did evoke larger issues of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. James Otis of Massachusetts attacked the Sugar Act in a pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764). Otis’s work was particularly influential in setting forth the principle of no taxation without representation. The future Revolutionary leader Samuel Adams of Massachusetts was another opponent of the act. The New York Assembly petitioned Parliament against the act, claiming that the colonies had the right to consent to their own taxation. Massachusetts was the only other colony to petition against the act. It took a less extreme stance than New York, complaining against the harm that the act would allegedly do to the trade of its ports rather than claiming that the act violated its rights.

Although colonial opposition to the Sugar Act was never as great as opposition to the later Stamp Act, it did have some effect. Colonial protest led to the lowering of the tax on non-British sugar. The Sugar Act was repealed in 1766 and replaced with the Revenue Act of 1766, which lowered the tax to one penny per gallon and applied it to all sugar and molasses, British or foreign. Along with other acts of the British Parliament establishing new taxes on the North American population such as the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act helped alienate the colonies from Britain, eventually leading to the American Revolution.

Bibliography

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Cohen, Andrew Wender. Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century. New York: Norton, 2015.

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Dickinson, Harry Thomas. Britain and the American Revolution. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Johnson, Allen S. "The Passage of the Sugar Act." The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History (1959): 507–514.

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Ubbelohde, Carl. The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution. Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1960.