The merchants opposed, not only the duty on slaves, but any other duty which they thought might lessen imports. The Assembly repeatedly passed laws to place duties on rum, brandy, wine, cider, beer, and ale, not because they thought they would debauch the people, but to raise revenue to meet the needs of the government without resorting to the hated poll tax. They finally persuaded the merchants that light duties on liquors would do them no harm. And perhaps the King was persuaded to give his assent by the urgings of Gooch. "The revenue arising from the duty on liquors is the best expedient to raise money for defraying the contingent charges of the government and the chief support of the College of William and Mary," he wrote. "By it most of the public debts are paid and the people eased of an intolerable poll tax, which many of the poorer sort would be unable to pay."
But in 1730 the Assembly went too far when, in the revenue bill of that year, they exempted Virginia owners from half the tax in a rather forlorn attempt to build up local shipping. The merchants were indignant. It was a very partial procedure, they thought, for the colonists to tax his Majesty's subjects at large to a higher degree than themselves. Moreover, it set up the shipping of Virginia in opposition to and in great prejudice to the navigation of Great Britain. Needless to say the act was disallowed.[27] It was now the turn of the planters to be indignant. Gooch wrote the Board: "I cannot conceal from your Lordships the resentment of the people against the merchants."[28]
The Virginians, like the peoples of the other colonies, were angered at the passage of the Molasses Act, which placed prohibitive duties on the trade between the British colonies on the American continent and the foreign West Indies. Virginia's stake in the trade to the French and Spanish islands was much less than that of New England, but it was great enough to draw a protest from Gooch. And the good Governor seems to have winked at the violations of the act. In 1734 he wrote the Lords of Trade: "As to trade, upon the strictest inquiry I can make I can find none ... but with Great Britain, the British islands in the West Indies, and the island of Madeira."[29] The Board might well have asked why it was, if this were true, that so many Spanish pieces of eight and so many pistoles and French guineas and crowns were circulating in the colony.