Repeal of the Townshend duties brought an end to nonimportation. Trade boomed in 1770 and 1771, driven by pent-up demand. Moreover, the leaders of the popular movement seemed to be losing their power. Samuel Adams, for example, ran for a minor local office and lost to a conservative merchant. Then in 1772, several incidents again brought the conflict with Britain into sharp focus. One was the burning of the Gaspée, a Royal Navy ship pursuing suspected smugglers near Rhode Island. A British investigating commission failed to arrest anyone but announced that it would send suspects, if any were found, to Britain for trial on charges of high treason. This ruling seemed to fly in the face of the traditional English right to trial by a jury of one’s peers.

When news of the Gaspée investigation spread, it was greeted with disbelief in other colonies. Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee in the Virginia House of Burgesses proposed that a network of standing committees be established to link the colonies and pass along alarming news. By mid-1773, all but one colonial assembly had set up a “committee of correspondence.”

Massachusetts, the continuing hotspot of the conflict, developed its own rapid communications network, with urgency provided by a new proposal by Lord North to pay the salaries of county court justices out of the tea revenue, reminiscent of Townshend’s plan for paying royal governors. By spring 1773, more than half the towns in Massachusetts had set up committees of correspondence to receive, discuss, distribute, and act on political news. The first message to circulate came from Boston; it framed North’s salary plan for judges as the latest proof of a British conspiracy to undermine traditional liberties: first taxation without consent, then military occupation and a massacre, and now a plot to subvert the justice system. Express riders swiftly distributed the message, which sparked ordinary townspeople to embrace a revolutionary language of rights and constitutional duties. Eventually the committees of correspondence would foster rapid mobilization to defend a countryside feeling under literal attack.

The paramount incident shattering the relative calm of the early 1770s was the Tea Act of 1773. After nonimportation ended, Americans had resumed buying the taxed British tea, but they were also smuggling much larger quantities of tea obtained from Dutch sources, greatly undercutting the sales of Britain’s East India Company. To reverse this trend, Parliament lowered the colonists’ tax on East India Company tea and, at the same time, allowed the Company to sell its product directly to a few selected merchants in four colonial cities, cutting out British middlemen. The combined effect was to lower the retail price of the East India tea well below that of smuggled Dutch tea, thus motivating Americans to obey the law.