History
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act was a British tax law imposed on the American colonies in 1765, requiring them to pay a tax on all printed materials, including legal documents, newspapers, and playing cards. This act was met with widespread opposition and protests in the colonies, as it was seen as an infringement on their rights and autonomy, ultimately contributing to the tensions that led to the American Revolution.
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eBook - ePubRevolutionary America, 1763-1815
A Political History
- Francis D. Cogliano(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
4The Stamp Act forced Americans to articulate their view of the colonial relationship with Britain. News of the act reached the colonies in April 1765. Initially there was little reaction in the colonies to this unprecedented legislation. It was not until the end of May that a young firebrand in the Virginia House of Burgesses ignited the storm of protest against the act, beginning a sequence of events that would culminate in revolution. Patrick Henry was a twenty-nine-year-old self-taught lawyer who had been a member of the House of Burgesses for all of nine days when he rose to present a series of resolutions condemning the Stamp Act on May 29, 1765. Henry, a renowned orator, passionately attacked the Stamp Act, and he proposed that the assembly (which had only one-third of its members in attendance because it was the end of the session) adopt a series of seven resolutions in defense of liberty. The Burgesses adopted the four mildest of Henry’s resolutions, asserting that they possessed the rights of Englishmen, their rights were guaranteed by royal charter, they could only be taxed if they had proper representation, and colonists had the right to give consent to their laws. They debated and rejected a set of more radical resolutions, which asserted that the House of Burgesses had the sole right to tax Virginians, Virginians were not obliged to obey any law designed to tax them without their consent, and support for such taxes rendered the supporter an enemy to the colony. Although the rump session of Burgesses only adopted the resolutions that were roughly congruent with the previous year’s objections to the Sugar Act, many colonial newspapers printed all of the resolutions, which made the actions of the Virginians seem more radical. As a consequence, the Virginia Resolves energized the movement against the Stamp Act. By the end of 1765 the assemblies of eight other colonies had passed resolutions condemning the Stamp Act for reasons similar to those debated in Virginia.
eBook - ePub- Richard P. Kollen(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- The History Press(Publisher)
Over time, Boston merchants continuing to market foreign molasses found customs officials susceptible to bribes. But the act further damaged a depressed economy in New England ports. In 1766, Parliament repealed the Sugar Act, replacing it with a milder Revenue Act that placed a one-penny duty on French or British imported sugar.Grenville intended the Stamp Act to fund the British army remaining in the North American colonies after the war. The act required that stamps be affixed to all public and legal documents, newspapers, licenses, playing cards and almanacs. Henceforth, commercial and legal business simply could not be conducted without paying the tax. The American public regarded this as an indisputable direct, internal tax without even a faint resemblance to a trade regulation. Further, it affected both country and port towns. American Whig leaders believed that the Stamp Act posed an ominous threat to fundamental English rights. For the first time, public meetings resounded with cries of “no taxation without representation.” So pernicious appeared Parliament’s latest legislative innovation that furious Boston leaders urged other Massachusetts towns to join in resisting it.When a significant issue required a town’s formal response, town meeting customarily furnished its elected delegate to the General Court with written instructions. In this way, residents spoke literally through their representative. Such thoughtful expositions enable later generations to access a town’s collective mind on public issues. Lexington’s town meeting formally instructed Representative Benjamin Reed regarding the town’s position on the Stamp Act crisis. Clearly, the most qualified man to craft such a document was Reverend Jonas Clarke. But his clerical position seemed to preclude his participating directly in government. Even so—according to Charles Hudson in 1868, the chronicler of Lexington’s early history—the Stamp Act instructions and later town positions “flowed from his pen.” Hudson claimed to have in his possession one such document in Clarke’s handwriting. It is no longer extant.
eBook - ePub- Bill Offutt(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- The University of North Carolina Press(Publisher)
Charging more for a product in a time of scarcity or urgent need on the part of a buyer was considered a type of fraud, of receiving excess and unearned profits merely due to circumstance. A just price reflected and compensated the seller for the labor value he had put into the good, which was independent of (and less than) what a market might bear. Colonial Resistance While previous British acts of 1763 and 1764, designed to bring the colonies into more regular obedience to the Empire, provoked little overt opposition, the Stamp Act of 1765 set off a firestorm of protest in the midst of a severe colonial depression. The Stamp Act’s purpose was to help reestablish British control of its wayward colonies by taxing colonists to pay the cost of British administration, including the army. All potential elements of revolution came into play during those six months before it was to take effect. There was harm to the economic elite (who used many legal documents that required stamps), and average town dwellers and farmers would incur significant costs during an already difficult time (building on farmers’ existing fear of debt and poverty). Amplifying those monetary inspirations for opposition were the multiple signs of a political POWER conspiracy found in the Stamp Act. Loss of ancient rights was present in the lack of self-government, ability to consent to taxes, and trial by jury; a new swarm of officials would be needed to collect the taxes (placemen); and a standing army needed to be financed. Elite Patriot leaders argued successfully that the time to call on the political virtue of a republican people was now
eBook - ePubChatham's Colonial Policy
A Study in the Fiscal and Economic Implications of the Colonial Policy of the Elder Pitt
- Kate Hotblack(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter XVI The Stamp Act“The true cause of the discontent of the Americans has arose from the rigour and hardship of the Stamp Act. It stands upon a principle that it is politic to call upon the plantations to pay a perpetual revenue and tax in aid of the Mother Country.“Now the true connection between the colonies and Great Britain is commercial.”—Lord Camden, in the debate in the House of Lords on the second reading of the Bill for the Repeal of the Stamp Act, March 11, 1766.The Stamp Act is the supreme test of Pitt’s economic theories and colonial policy. In the early months of 1766 he spoke with unrivalled knowledge and mature judgment. His generous behaviour after the events of 1761 had given men confidence in his criticisms. No longer could he be accused of desiring to embarrass the party in power for private ends. His personal ambition was half satisfied and consciously limited. During the last years of the reign of George II, Pitt had ruled a kingdom and won an empire. After 1761 he knew that he could never regain the position he had lost. Sir William Pynsent’s bequest had removed that desire for the emoluments of office which might have influenced Pitt as husband and father. Finally, the disease which often crippled his limbs had not yet impaired the vigour of his intellect. Unshackled by office, party, or faction, Pitt spoke with the scientific detachment of an expert. The dictum of 1766 must not be confused with the rhetoric of 1739.The Stamp Act problem was one which could only be solved by a statesman who possessed an intimate knowledge of American affairs. It was no petty quarrel over colonial liability for the war debt, but a question which concerned the fundamental principles of the complicated commercial and political systems by which England governed her plantations. There is as much history as politics in most of the Stamp Act speeches; they abound in references to charters and appeals to precedents. This line of argument appears at first to obscure the real points at issue ; but though pedantic in form it is scientific in spirit, for the quarrel between Great Britain and her colonies started when the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth. The New Englanders owed both the strength and the weakness of their provincial character to early adversity. Driven from one country by religious bigotry, they suffered bitterly while wresting homes from the hostile inhabitants of another. The descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers were not the sons of good citizens, but of men who had worked out their own political salvation. A sturdy race developed self-reliant but suspicious, narrow with the zeal of conviction. In the eighteenth century, when England began to take a tardy interest in her colonies, she tasted the bitter fruits of ill-treatment and neglect. The suspicions of the colonists made the governor’s work irksome and ineffective ; while the mutual jealousy between the different provinces made any united effort against their common enemies almost impossible. It was the continual sordid struggle over supplies between the colonial assemblies and their governors that induced Sir William Keith to submit a proposal to George II that a revenue should be gained from America by a tax on stamped paper. Sir William Keith had been Deputy-Governor of Pennsylvania for many years, and the “Short Discourse on the present state of the Colonies in America with respect to the Interest of Great Britain,”1
eBook - ePub- James Lincoln Collier, Christopher Collier(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Blackstone Publishing(Publisher)
In fact, the Stamp Tax was financially meaningless—it would have amounted to about a shilling a year per American at a time when a normal wage was two or three shillings a day. It was not the money; it was the principle of the thing. And so it was with the British: they were willing to drop the tax, so long as it was understood that they had the right to impose it. In any case, tempers cooled and trade between England and the colonies revived. C HAPTER III : T AXES AND T EA B UT NOTHING WAS really settled. The Stamp Act was repealed, but as one historian puts it, ". . . the candles that burned in celebration of repeal had scarcely stopped smoking when the colonists found themselves in a new quarrel with the mother country." This was triggered when the British government, still eager to get money out of the colonists, decided to make the colony governments pay for food and housing for the British troops stationed in America. Once again, it seemed reasonable for the Americans to help support troops that were there for their protection, and many Americans generally accepted that idea, though some questioned why soldiers whose mission was to fight Indians were quartered in coastal cities. They smelled a rat: the new regulation reminded them suspiciously of a sneaky way of taxing them. In most places they responded by either coming up with only a portion of the money or by saying that they were giving the food and lodging as a gift of their own free will. But in New York, Sons of Liberty clashed with bayonet-wielding soldiers, an action that was repeated several years later with injuries on both sides at the Battle of Golden Hill. This attitude annoyed—indeed angered—a lot of the British, even many in Parliament who had voted to repeal the Stamp Act. The English were aware that, burdened with the large war debt, they were paying much heavier taxes than the Americans were
eBook - ePub- R. R. Palmer(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law, written in 1765, just before the Stamp Act, contains a theory of the meaning of America already fully worked out: “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design of Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” In Virginia the feeling was less exalted. Important Virginians did not think of their forefathers as humble or impoverished fugitives, destined to save the world; they saw them rather as gentlemen of means who had emigrated voluntarily at their own expense, but who, on setting up in America, brought all English liberties with them, including an assembly which in its own sphere was the equal of Parliament. According to a recent study of this elusive subject, during the arguments over the Stamp Act the peculiarly New England view of American origins spread to the colonies as a whole, entering deeply into the formation of American nationality. Forced to reflect upon themselves, the Americans developed a “legend of the Founding Fathers,” or belief that from the very beginning America had been the refuge of political liberty. But enough such feeling already existed, in 1765, to produce an immediate, concerted, and excited resistance to the Stamp Act.At any event, most politically conscious Americans, in all the colonies, from the moment the implications were clearly presented to them, agreed in seeing no authority in England above them except the King himself; and if Americans were still stoutly loyal in a legal sense, it may be strongly suspected (since the same was true of England in the early Hanoverian era) that they were lacking in true royalist warmth. All the arguments aimed at the British—that Parliament could levy external but not internal taxes in America, that it could levy external taxes for trade regulation, but not for revenue, etc.—were in the nature of rationalizations; the Americans really did not wish to be actually governed by the British Parliament at all, though they naturally were a little slow in saying so plainly.17 On this there may have been more unanimity in 1765 than on any subsequent question, including independence when it came, by which time much violence had occurred, and conservatism had had a chance to form.Resistance to the Stamp Act began in Virginia, where the house of burgesses forwarded a protest to England in May 1765, and at Boston, where in June the house of representatives, by a circular letter to the other colonial assemblies, invited them to send some of their members to a general meeting at New York, at which a common front might be presented to Parliament. During the summer staid Boston saw unedifying scenes, which were in fact revolutionary in character. A group of men of the shopkeeping and artisan class, calling themselves first the Loyal Nine and then the Sons of Liberty, and maintaining a discreet contact with prominent merchants and with a few members of the assembly (including John Adams on at least one occasion) served as intermediaries between upper and lower classes in the city. They persuaded certain rougher elements, which had staged a kind of gang warfare on the preceding Guy Fawkes day, that the Stamp Act was a threat to their liberties, and that their physical energies might find a worthier and more patriotic outlet. Someone made an effigy of Andrew Oliver, who was to be distributor of stamps under the Act, and hung it on a tree. A mob seized the effigy, paraded it about, and beheaded it. Another mob broke into the vice-admiralty court, one of the courts involved in Grenville’s general reorganization, and authorized to enforce the Stamp Act. The court records were destroyed. When Thomas Hutchinson, a Bostonian of old family, who was Chief Justice and Lieutenant Governor, tried to stop these depredations, the mobs attacked his house, a new mansion in the Georgian style, systematically wrecked it, broke up the furniture, cut down the trees, and stole £900 in cash. In the face of these disturbances, and lesser ones elsewhere, the stamp distributors throughout the colonies were intimidated into resigning. The Stamp Act Congress met in New York, in more or less open defiance of the colonial governors, with these commotions ringing in their ears. Nine colonies had sent delegates, of whom the most vehement were the most influential. “It’s to be feared," reported General Gage, “that the Spirit of Democracy is strong amongst them.”18
eBook - ePub- Lewis Henry Boutell(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Braunfell Books(Publisher)
CHAPTER V.—Stamp Act. MR. SHERMAN took his seat in the General Assembly of Connecticut, as a deputy from New Haven, at the October session of 1764. It was in the midst of the excitement caused by the announcement of the British ministry that they proposed to collect a revenue from the American Colonies by means of a Stamp tax. Notice of this intended action was sent to the Connecticut Assembly, at its May session, 1764, by Richard Jackson, its agent in London. The Assembly thereupon appointed Ebenezer Silliman, George Wyllys, and Jared Ingersoll a committee to set forth the objections to this proposed tax. This committee made its report to the Assembly, at its October session, 1764, setting forth the “Reasons why the British Colonies in America should not be charged with internal taxes.” This report was adopted, and ordered to be forwarded to the agent of the colony in London, to be presented, with an address from the Governor, to the Parliament. As Jared Ingersoll was about to sail for England, he was ordered to assist Mr. Jackson, the agent of Connecticut. The remonstrances of the colonies were of no effect, and on the 22 nd of March, 1765, the Stamp Act received the royal assent. Instantly a storm of indignation swept over the country. Taxation without representation was everywhere denounced as a badge of slavery which the colonies would not endure. On the 7 th of October, 1765, the delegates from nine colonies met in the City Hall at New York, and adopted a declaration of rights and grievances, an address to the King, a memorial to the House of Lords, and a petition to the House of Commons
eBook - ePub- Carl L. (Carl Lotus) Becker, William Edward Dodd, (Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to shift the issue in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the multiplied resentments accumulated by two years of hostile legislation. It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance, round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect without its material symbols—concrete and visible bundles of stamped papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and the very appearance of which was a challenge to action.While all Americans agreed that the Stamp Act, like the Sugar Act, was unjust, or at least inexpedient, not all affirmed that it was illegal. Hutchinson was one of many who protested against the law, but admitted that Parliament had not exceeded its authority in passing it. But the colonial assemblies, and a host of busy pamphleteers who set themselves to expose the pernicious act, agreed with Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, with the conciliatory John Dickinson, and the learned Dulaney, that the colonists, possessing all the rights of native-born Englishmen, could not legally be deprived of that fundamental right of all, the right of being taxed only by representatives of their own choosing. Duties laid to regulate trade, from which a revenue was sometimes derived, were either declared not to be taxes, or else were distinguished, as "external" taxes which Parliament was competent to impose, from "internal" taxes which Parliament could impose only upon those who were represented in that body. And the colonies were not represented in Parliament; no, not even in that "virtual" sense which might be affirmed in the case of many unfranchised English cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool; from which it followed that the Stamp Act, unquestionably an internal tax, was a manifest violation of colonial rights.
- Harry T Dickinson(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
ANON., CONSIDERATIONS ON THE AMERICAN Stamp Act
DOI: 10.4324/9781003113713-4Anon., Considerations on the American Stamp Act, and on the Conduct of the Minister who Planned it (London: W. Nicoli, 1766). British Library, shelfmark Mic.F.232.This pamphlet offers a critique of Grenville's Stamp Act and supports the Rockingham administration's proposal to repeal it. Although the author eschews any discussion of Parliament's constitutional right to levy such an internal tax on the American colonies, he is convinced that it is unjust, oppressive and inexpedient. He insists that the colonies gave very considerable military and financial assistance to Britain during the recent war with France, but they have been poorly served, by Grenville's administration ever since the end of that war in 1763. Britain should remember that she gains far more by the different branches of the Atlantic trade with the American colonies than was ever likely to be raised by the Stamp Tax. These commercial benefits have been put at risk at great cost to British manufacturers, merchants, seamen and poor workers. It is not the colonial protests so much as the boycott of trade that is the most serious threat to British interests. It would therefore be better to repeal the Stamp Act rather than persist with such a damaging policy.It is not known who wrote this pamphlet, but the author holds views very close to those of the Rockingham administration. He plays down the constitutional issue and stresses the economic impact of the Stamp Act. Like the new ministers, he is also ready to see Parliament's right to levy such a tax asserted (as with the Declaratory Act of 1766), as long as this assertion is not used to justify such a tax in future. He believes that repealing the Stamp Act is the surest way of restoring good relations with the American colonies. The Rockingham ministry coached British merchants into advancing such arguments when they gave evidence before the House of Commons before the repeal of the Stamp Act and the passing of the Declaratory Act, and they may have encouraged the writing of this particular pamphlet.
- John Dickinson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
necessity will subject us, if this act continues in force, to the payment of the duties now imposed.Why was the Stamp-act then so pernicious to freedom? It did not enact, that every man in the colonies should buy a certain quantity of paper—No: It only directed, that no instrument of writing should be valid in law, if not made on stamp paper, &c.The makers of that act knew full well, that the confusions that would arise upon the disuse of writings would COMPEL the colonies to use the stamp paper, and therefore to pay the taxes imposed. For this reason the Stamp-act was said to be a law THAT WOULD EXECUTE ITSELF . For the very same reason, the last act of parliament, if it is granted to have any force here, will execute itself, and will be attended with the very same consequences to American Liberty.Some persons perhaps may say, that this act lays us under no necessity to pay the duties imposed, because we may ourselves manufacture the articles on which they are laid: whereas by the Stamp-act no instrument of writing could be good, unless made on British paper, and that too stampt.Such an objection amounts to no more than this, that the injury resulting to these colonies, from the total disuse of British paper and glass, will not be so afflicting as that which would have resulted from the total disuse of writing among them; for by that means even the stamp-act might have been eluded. Why then was it universally detested by them as slavery itself? Because it presented to these devoted provinces nothing but a choice of calamities, imbittered by indignities, each of which it was unworthy of freemen to bear. But is no injury a violation of right but the greatest injury? If the eluding the payment of the duties imposed by the stamp-act, would have subjected us to a more dreadful inconvenience, than the eluding the payment of those imposed by the late act; does it therefore follow, that the last is no violation of our rights, though it is calculated for the same purpose that the other was, that is, to raise money upon us , WITHOUT OUR CONSENT
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