Quartering Act is the name of at least two acts of the Parliament of Great Britain.
Act of 1765
This first Act (citation 5 Geo. III c. 33) occurred on 15 May 1765, and provided that Great Britain would house its soldiers in
American barracks and public houses, as by the Mutiny Act of 1765, but if its
soldiers outnumbered the housing available, would quarter them "in inns, livery stables, ale houses, victuallinghouses, and the
houses of sellers of wine and houses of persons selling of rum,
brandy, strong water, cider or
metheglin", and if numbers required in "uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings",
requiring any inhabitants (or in their absence, public officials) to provide them with food and alcohol, and providing for fire, candles, vinegar,
salt, bedding, and utensils for the soldiers "without paying any thing for the same". When
New York refused to comply, Parliament suspended their governor and legislature.
Act of 1774
On June 2, 1774, Parliament passed a group of laws that
colonists called the Intolerable Acts. The acts were designed to restore imperial
control over the American colonies. While several of the acts dealt specifically with the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the new Quartering Act applied to all of the colonies.
In the previous act, the colonies had been required to provide housing for soldiers, but colonial legislatures had been
uncooperative in doing so. The new Quartering Act allowed a governor to house soldiers in other buildings if suitable quarters
were not provided. While many sources claim that the 1774 act allowed troops to be billeted in occupied private homes, historian
David Ammerman argued that this is a myth, and that the act only permitted troops to be quartered in unoccupied buildings. He
writes, "It did not, as generations of American school children were taught, permit the housing of troops in private
homes."[1]
According to Ammerman, although many colonists found the Quartering Act objectionable, it generated the least protest of the
Intolerable Acts.
Modern relevance
Both Acts led directly to the Third Amendment to the
United States Constitution, which expressly prohibited the military
from peacetime quartering of troops without consent of the owner of the house. A product of their times, the relevance of the
Acts and the Third Amendment has greatly declined since the era of the American Revolution, having been the subject of one case
in 200+ years (Engblom v. Carey).
References
- ^ David Ammerman, "The Tea Crisis and its Consequences, through 1775", in
Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Malden, Massachusetts:
Blackwell, 1999), p. 20.
External links
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