Episode Details

When the colonists beat the Stamp Act, they drew a careful line: Parliament could tax their trade, but not reach inside the colonies for revenue. In 1767, a brilliant, reckless Chancellor of the Exchequer named Charles Townshend took that line and turned it into a trap, taxing America with America’s own argument. This is the story of how the quarrel reignited, and how a quiet Philadelphia lawyer changed it forever.

Posing as a humble farmer, John Dickinson published the most widely read essays in colonial America, collapsing the distinction the colonists had leaned on and warning that to accept a small tax was to “walk deliberately into the snare that is set for us, praising the neatness of the workmanship.” The colonies answered with the Glorious Ninety-Two, with homespun and boycott, with the seizure of John Hancock’s sloop Liberty. And London answered them with regiments. By the autumn of 1768, redcoats marched off the ships at Long Wharf into a town that had sworn never to submit.