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The
Stamp Act of 1765
—John
Adams
—Virginia Stamp Act Resolutions |
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The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first direct tax on the colonies levied by Parliament. It required that a stamp be affixed to all commercial and legal papers, newspapers, pamphlets and almanacs. The Act was implemented after a contentious debate in the House of Commons in which one particularly vocal opponent of the measure, Colonel Isaac Bare (who had served as an officer in the colonies and held the Americans in high regard), presciently warned his fellow members of the House against underestimating the Americans: “Remember I this day told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompany them still...The [American] people are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has, but a people jealous of their liberties and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated” (from Jared Ingersoll’s account of the debate on the Stamp Act, 11 February 1765). Grenville’s Stamp Act was nonetheless passed and, in the view of many on both sides of the Atlantic, violated the Americans’ liberties. When news of the Act reached America, the colonists’ ‘spirit of freedom’ ignited and opposition was broad-based, bitter and effective. Whereas opposition to the Revenue Act was largely limited to a handful of farseeing colonial leaders, the opposition to the Stamp Act was spontaneous and general. Colonial merchants organized a boycott of goods from England while mobs of angry citizens rioted and demonstrated from Virginia to New York to Massachusetts. At the suggestion of the Massachusetts legislature, it was decided that each of the colonial legislatures would send delegates to New York to construct a formal and unified response to the British Parliament. The result was the Declarations of the Stamp Act Congress. |
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The
following are excerpts from the Declarations
and underscore the extent to which the colonists viewed the Stamp Act
crisis as a violation of their rights and privileges as British
subjects:
....That it is inseparably
essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted right of
Englishmen, that no taxes should be imposed on them, but with their own
consent, given personally, or by their representatives....
....That trial by jury
is the inherent and invaluable right of every British subject in these
colonies....
....That the late Act
of Parliament, entitled, An Act for granting and applying certain Stamp
Duties, and other Duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in
America, etc., by imposing taxes on the inhabitants of these colonies,
and the said Act, and several other Acts, by extending the jurisdiction
of the courts of admiralty beyond its ancient limits, have a manifest
tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists.... The Stamp Act was a watershed event in American history, for it brought the common man and the political elite together in unified opposition against the British for the first time: “The passage of the Stamp Act transformed American opposition to British policies... It was of enormous importance in that it produced at least a surface unity among the colonies, for almost every political leader, whatever his political principles, was opposed” (Jensen, The Founding of a Nation). |