You can imagine how insulting and humiliating the colonists found this arrangement. As subjects of the Crown, they felt entitled to the legal rights enjoyed by their brethren across the ocean, yet the king had functionally relegated them to second-class status. British subjects in Britain experienced one set of rights; British subjects in the colonies experienced a lesser set.
Late in his life John Adams reflected that the writs had bestowed upon any government official, no matter how lowly in the colonial order, the authority to rifle through the property of any colonist. Writs of assistance, he wrote,
enable[d] the custom house officers . . . to command all sheriffs and constables to attend and aid them in breaking open houses, stores, shops, cellars, ships, bales, trunks, chests, casks, packages of all sorts, to search for goods, wares and merchandizes, which had been imported against the prohibitions.
The use of the writs was oppressive and disruptive. Every policing regime must choose just how tightly to enforce a given law, either explicitly or as the logical conclusion of other decisions. When citizens come to expect and understand a certain level of enforcement, they tailor their behavior accordingly. I have a keen sense that if I park in any of the various illegal spaces in my neighborhood, I’ll probably get a ticket, and when I do, I understand it as the cost of the illegal action that I knowingly took. But if you’re looking to make a community furious, then arbitrarily fiddle with enforcement norms, and see what happens.
As an example, imagine if suddenly the Cambridge, Massachusetts, authorities were to import the law enforcement approach used in central Harlem to police Harvard University. A massive police presence would be visible on every quad and in front of every dorm. Cops would stop and frisk students on their way to class; they would search the swank homes of parents of students caught with drugs; and they would monitor social media accounts to bust drug deals. The student body and their very powerful parents would revolt.
In the American colonies, the backlash was intense and only grew more so as British authorities—finding their efforts sabotaged and evaded—responded with ever more force.
At first the smugglers and their allies in the revolutionary hotbeds of New England port towns like Newport and Boston mounted legal challenges. James Otis, Jr., a Harvard-trained Boston lawyer and charismatic orator, rose to prominence as the chosen advocate of the smuggler class. He had been a lawyer for the colonial administration, initially called upon to defend the writs of assistance, but rather than do so, he resigned his post. In 1761, representing merchants pro bono, Otis appeared before the Superior Court of Massachusetts to argue against the British use of writs of assistance, calling them the “worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law-book,” and “a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.”
His argument would stretch to five hours. John Adams, who was among those who’d packed into the courthouse to hear Otis, would later say:
Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary rule of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.
Opposition to the crackdown wasn’t limited to the courts: petitions and pamphlets tumbled forth with ever-mounting indignation and fury. Mob violence was a central feature of the burgeoning revolutionary movement. Customs officials found themselves surrounded, jeered at, and harassed as they attempted to execute their official duties. Often mobs would simply steal back the confiscated contraband. Not surprisingly, the British did not take kindly to this behavior. They responded by doing everything short of declaring formal war on smugglers and on everyone who supported them.
The problem that King George III faced would bedevil authorities for centuries, from the revenuers of Prohibition to the modern Drug Enforcement Administration: when the state declares some popular good illicit, a good that enjoys widespread normalized usage, the state must pursue ever more draconian means to snuff it out.
As customs officials were granted more and more power to extinguish illicit trade, inevitably they began to abuse it. Often they actually made their money as a percentage of the value of the goods they confiscated, putting them in the same position as pirates, but with the entire force of the British Crown behind them. (It’s not so different from today’s police departments funding their budgets through civil forfeiture.) Abuse and corruption were widespread, and as enforcement ratcheted up, so did colonial hatred of the men doing the enforcing.
When extra customs officials proved insufficient to the task, the British authorities called in the navy. Now military vessels and sailors boarded and searched ships suspected of smuggling. The spectacle of this militarized policing enraged the colonists. Ben Franklin, with biting sarcasm, attacked the folly of turning the tools of war-making on civilians: