Quartering Act

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Quartering Act is the name of at least two acts of the Parliament of Great Britain.

1 Act of 1765
2 The quartering act
3 Modern relevance
4 External links

[edit] Act of 1765

This first Act (citation 5 Geo. III c. 33) occurred on 24 March 1765, and provided that Great Britain would house its soldiers in America first in 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, cyder 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".

[edit] The quartering act

On June 2, 1774, Parliament passed a group of laws entitled the Coercive Acts (the colonists called them the Intolerable Acts) designed to restore imperial control over the American colonies. All the Coercive Acts dealt specifically with the Province of Massachusetts Bay, except one, a new Quartering Act, which applied to all thirteen colonies. This Quartering Act extended the provisions of the earlier legislation; it required that troops be housed not only in commercial and empty buildings but in occupied dwellings as well. The law was bitterly protested, symbolizing as it did to the colonists the potential dangers and abuses of standing armies. It said that they had to pay for the basic needs of the soldiers as well, which were bedding, cooking utensils, clothing, and a few others.

[edit] Modern relevance

Both Acts led directly to the Third Amendment to the United States Constitution, which expressly prohibited the military from quartering 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).