Quartering Act, (1765), in American colonial history, the British parliamentary provision (actually an amendment to the annual Mutiny Act) requiring colonial authorities to provide food, drink, quarters, fuel, and transportation to British forces stationed in their towns or villages
- After the French and Indian War, several acts were passed by the British Parliament to overcome the challenges of the British Empire.
- One of these acts was called the Quartering Act and was passed in 1765 and then again in 1774.
- The Quartering Act was passed primarily to solve the problems of accommodating the British soldiers in colonial America. It was a part of a 200 year-long series of acts called the Mutiny Acts.
- The seven-year-long war with the French and Native Americans had drained the British resources and plunged her into debt.
- The parliament tried to exact the losses of the war by levying taxes on the American colonists.
- Though the Quartering Act did not directly tax the colonists in the form of money, it did impose the cost of food and housing for the soldiers on the legislative assemblies of every state.
- The American colonists deeply resented the Quartering Act as they felt forced to pay for soldiers that they did not need.
- The American colonists refused to comply with the Quartering Act because they felt that it was a sly tactic to force them to pay taxes to the British government.
- The Quartering Act was one of the 4 acts passed by the British parliament after the Boston Tea Party in 1773.
- The acts were punitive in nature and passed with the intention to exert control on the American colonies.
- Hence, they came to be known as Intolerable Acts in America and the Coercive Acts in England.
- The Quartering Act together with the other Intolerable Acts laid the foundation for organized resistance against the British Empire.
- The tensions caused between the colonists and the government in London as a result of these acts ultimately led to the American Revolutionary War and the independence of the United States from Great Britain.
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