The Townshend Acts are one of the many factors of North American colonies rebelling against the British. The Townshend Acts were named after Charles Townshend, the chancellor of British affairs. The acts went into act in November 20, 1767, but Townshend died of a fever in September of 1767 and did not see his acts put into order.
The Townshend Acts were made mostly because of the fact that Britain was spending too much money protecting North American colonies from French expansion. After the British were successful in the French and Indian war, it became very expensive for the British to give their land to North American colonies to protect them from French expansion. This was extremely expensive for the British. However, the colonies payed the British little and it cost very little to them to be protected by the British.
To make North American colonies repay the British, Parliament taxed some specific British imported goods. These goods included glass, lead, paper, paint, china, and tea. These items were chosen because they would be hard for the colonies to reproduce on their own. Townshend approximated that the acts would raise $40,000, most of the profit from the taxes on tea.
With new rules, comes rebellions. Many of the colonies were not happy about the new taxes they had to pay. Benjamin Franklin told Parliament that the colonies would manufacture their own goods no matter what. Popular and widespread documents soon brought together North American colonies to boycott British goods by December. With exceptions of fishing hooks and wire, which were necessities, Britain would not import anything for a year. In April, New York pronounced an even more strict agreement on not importing British goods. In 1769, Britain sent troops to Boston to quell the protests, boycotts, and unrest. Over 2,000 troops occupied Boston and skirmishes between patriotic colonists, colonists who were loyal to Britain, and British soldiers broke out.
The end of the Townshend Acts came in 1770. On March 5th, 1770 the Boston Massacre, also known to the British as the Incident on King Street, happened while colonists were harassing soldiers. All of a sudden, someone shouted, “Fire!” and that’s exactly what the soldiers did. Several colonists were shot and killed, and that ended the acts. Little did the soldiers know, across the ocean, on that very same day, Lord North, Great Britain’s Prime Minister at the time, had requested to repeal the acts. All taxes were repealed in April 1770 except for the tea which contributed to the Boston Tea Party, in which colonists in the Boston Harbor snuck into a ship and destroyed a whole shipment of British tea.
In conclusion, The Townshend acts, originally intended to just make the colonists pay back the British for their protection, ended in lots of chaos and anger from both sides, the British and the North American colonies, and was a large factor in all the hatred and wars that were to happen in the future.