SUGAR ACT (1764)

The Sugar Act of 1764 was passed by the Parliament of Great Britain, in part, to cut down on smuggling between the West Indies and the American colonies and also to tighten England's grip on its empire. But mostly the Act was approved to raise money to pay England's national debt caused by the French and Indian War (1754–1763). It was for that reason that the law was also known as the Revenue Act. The Act had three major parts. First, the measure created a complicated system of loading and unloading cargo for merchant ships in order to make smuggling more difficult. Second, the Act made certain foreign goods (including sugar, coffee, indigo dye, and wines) more expensive in the colonies because the tax would boost the retail price. Third, it cut the importation duties on molasses in half, in an attempt to make the tax easier to collect.

Parliament's motivation in passing the Sugar Act was to correct an earlier, failing piece of legislation. The 1733 Molasses Act tried to discourage colonists from buying molasses from French and Dutch West Indian planters by placing a high duty of sixpence per gallon on it. New England merchants, traders, and their agents had developed a thriving trade in rum, a popular alcoholic drink, which they distilled from molasses. They shipped the rum to ports in West Africa, where they exchanged it for African slaves. The same traders then carried the slaves to plantations in the Caribbean, where they were exchanged for molasses—the socalled "Triangular Trade." Because the New England rum distilleries were generating so much business, colonial traders were scouring the West Indies for molasses; they often found French or Dutch molasses cheaper than that from British plantations. Parliamentary representatives believed that the steep tax on foreign molasses would help British sugar producers. (However, it could instead have ruined the New England rum industry had it been collected as planned.) In most cases, customs officials preferred not to collect the tax and allowed the colonial traders to import molasses from whatever areas they chose.

George Grenville, the author of the Sugar Act, wanted to use the estimated £40,000 per year he expected the tax to generate to help pay the costs of keeping 10,000 British soldiers on the American frontier. He did not anticipate the strong resistance he encountered from the colonists. They had never been expected to pay these kinds of taxes to this extent before, and they protested loudly. Bostonian Samuel Adams used the crisis to try to unite the merchants of the cities with the small farmers of the countryside. Lawyer James Otis Jr., in a pamphlet titled Rights of the Colonies Asserted and Proved, argued that Great Britain had no right to tax the colonists at all. Even solid Tories like Governor Francis Bernard protested the three pence tax, claiming that it would be difficult to collect and, if collected, would ruin colonial businesses. Similar protests were lodged in New York and Rhode Island. For the most part, however, complaints were limited to small special interest groups throughout the colonies. The Sugar Act was not the issue that would galvanize the colonists and turn them toward independence. It was an irritant in the relationship between the colonial officials of Great Britain and the colonists, but nowhere near as volatile an issue as the Stamp Act turned out to be a year later.

SUGAR ACT (1764)

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