STAMP ACT

STAMP ACT. The formal title of the Stamp Act is seventy words long. Prime Minister George Grenville indicated his intention to impose it in 1763, but it was not enacted until 22 March 1765, to take effect on 1 November. The act's mode of raising taxes was familiar to Britons of the time and was still in limited use at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Colonials understood stamp duties too. For a given document to be legal, a stamp of appropriate value had to be purchased from an official distributor and affixed to the document.

The mode may have been familiar, but the act's avowed purpose of raising revenue directly from colonials by act of Parliament was not. The only precedent also was part of Grenville's program of colonial reform. The Sugar

Act (or Revenue Act) of 1764 provoked sporadic protest but did take effect. Grenville was not prepared for colonial protest. Neither were eminent colonials such as Benjamin Franklin, who was in London at the time and who nominated his friend John Hughes as stamp distributor for Pennsylvania. Virginia's future militant Richard Henry Lee sought the same post for his province.

Nonetheless the Stamp Act seemed as if it had been designed to provoke protest. The burdens it imposed may have been lighter than their British equivalents, but to colonials they weighed heavily. The act taxed all legal documents, from bills of lading for outbound ships, to indentures of apprenticeship, to marriage licenses. It taxed books, newspapers, advertisements in newspapers, dice, and decks of cards. No free white person in the colonies could live a normal life without paying one or another stamp duty. The duties had to be paid in gold or silver, both of which were in short supply in the colonial economy of barter, paper currency, and private bills of exchange. Violators of the act were subject to trial in a vice admiralty court. The judge would be a royal appointee holding his post "at the King's pleasure," meaning that too many acquittals could bring his dismissal. No jury would address the traditions and procedures that made up "English" liberty.

One goal of the Stamp Act was to reach deep into the economies of the American provinces, possibly for the sake of putting a brake on their development into potential rivals of Britain. But the act was not intended to strip the colonies of their precious metals. On the contrary, money raised would recirculate after paying the costs of royal governorships, Crown courts, and British troops stationed in America.

Even that change, however, was major, especially to elite colonials, who had grown used to the idea that the Virginia House of Burgesses or the Massachusetts Assembly were local equivalents of the House of Commons, fully able to run the affairs of their own provinces. The Stamp Act presented a fundamental challenge not only to the power and the self-image of the colonial elites but also to the material well-being of every free participant in colonial society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bullion, John L. A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1775. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

Thomas, Peter David Garner. British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

EdwardCountryman

See alsoSons of Liberty (American Revolution) ; andvol. 9:Stamp Act .