Stamp Act

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Stamp Act

STAMP ACT. (22 March 1765–18 March 1766) and Stamp Act Congress (7-25 October 1765). The Stamp Act was one of the measures Parliament enacted in the wake of the final French and Indian War to increase imperial supervision of and control over the existing British colonies, the French territories conquered during the war, and the Native Americans in the Ohio Valley who faced a rising tide of encroachment by colonial settlers. Imperial officials decided to keep in North America some of the regular troops who had spearheaded the conquest of New France, initially at least to keep the peace in the areas formerly under French control, especially west of the Appalachians. While not a clearly thought through part of the plan, regular troops would also serve to support imperial authority by reminding restive American colonists of the power and reach of the British Empire.

Supporting this military establishment was expensive. Since imperial officials faced a vastly increased national debt at home and believed that the troops protected (and thus benefited) the colonies, they not unreasonably expected Americans to help pay part of the cost. Prime Minister George Grenville intended the Stamp Act to raise a revenue of £60,000 a year in the colonies to pay part of the estimated £350,000 cost of maintaining 10,000 British troops in North America. The act, which passed through Parliament with little debate and no understanding that it would meet colonial resistance, extended to the colonies a form of taxation already in use in Britain. (Imperial officials were not deterred by the fact that a similar tax that had been enacted earlier by the colonial legislatures in New York and Massachusetts had proved so unpopular that it was quickly abandoned.) Taking effect on 1 November 1765, the Stamp Act taxed various types of printed matter (newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets), all types of legal documents, and even included dice and playing cards. Taxes were to be paid in specie (a significant problem in societies where hard money was scarce), transactions made in violation of the act would be deemed invalid, and penalties for infringements could be imposed by vice-admiralty courts as well as by colonial common law courts. In an attempt to win support for the act in the colonies, Grenville appointed Americans as stamp agents. Richard Henry Lee and other prominent colonists eagerly sought the posts, which paid £300 a year and offered patronage possibilities.

The Stamp Act was the first direct tax Parliament had levied on the colonies. Since it followed other measures (the Sugar Act and the Currency Act) and contained provisions like expanded jurisdiction for the vice-admiralty courts, many Americans came to believe that the new era of increased imperial supervision would restrict their economic freedom and curtail their civil liberties. They contended that they had contributed significant financial resources to Britain's victory in the final French and Indian War (thereby ignoring substantial subsidies the colonies had received from Parliament), and they believed that because they were suffering through a postwar depression partly because of those exertions, they would be unable to pay such a tax. More troubling was Parliament's assumption that it had a right to impose taxes on the colonies without the consent of their local legislative assemblies, a position opponents summarized in the slogan "taxation without representation is tyranny." Moreover, the authority granted to the vice-admiralty courts to decide customs enforcement cases without trial by jury seemed to pose a serious threat to civil liberties. The Stamp Act generated opposition in all geographical sections of America and from many diverse and influential groups, including lawyers (whose business would be particularly hard hit), printers, tavern keepers, land speculators, merchants, and ship-owners. The fact that Grenville proposed the stamp tax almost a year before Parliament enacted it gave colonial leaders additional time to think about the nature of the colonies' relationship with the mother country.

Opponents of increased imperial supervision moved swiftly to organize resistance. They took to the public prints to explain their objections and to generate support. Attorney Daniel Dulany of Maryland argued in Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies (1765) that the act was illegal because the colonies were not actually represented in Parliament. Other activists took a stand in their legislative assemblies. Patrick Henry first rose to prominence when he introduced the Virginia Resolves into the House of Burgesses in May 1765. John Adams, too, gained notoriety by drafting instructions that his home town of Braintree, Massachusetts, gave to its assembly delegates to object to the Stamp Act. Still others acted extralegally in ways that were a familiar part of the political process. They gathered together in groups called the Sons of Liberty and were not averse to using intimidation and mob action to force all the stamp agents to resign their commissions in the autumn of 1765. The opponents were so successful that only in Georgia, whose governor was the remarkable Sir James Wright, was the Stamp Act ever put into effect, and there it was only enforced to a limited degree. Elsewhere, colonial courts initially closed rather than use the stamps, and they later resumed business without stamps, an open violation of the act. In Rhode Island, where the governor refused to execute the Stamp Act, the courts never closed.

Opposition to the Stamp Act forced colonists to consider their place in the empire, and perhaps most importantly in the long term, broke down intercolonial differences by promoting communication and cooperation among like-minded leaders in all colonies. A significant step in that process was initiated by James Otis of Massachusetts, who, understanding that the colonies' objections would be taken more seriously if they acted together, proposed that each colonial assembly send delegates to meet in a congress and explore the possibility of concerted opposition. His proposal won the support of the Massachusetts assembly and was endorsed by the assemblies in South Carolina, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Maryland; these six colonies sent official delegates to the Stamp Act Congress. The assemblies in New Jersey, Delaware, and New York took no formal action, but did send delegates. Virginia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Georgia did not participate.

Twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies met in the Stamp Act Congress at New York City on 7-25 October 1765. They formulated fourteen resolutions in a Declaration of Rights and Grievances (drafted by John Dickinson) that denied Parliament's right to tax the colonies and condemned the extension of vice-admiralty-court jurisdiction. The Congress delivered its resolutions in the form of petitions to the king and both houses of Parliament. None of these appeals caused imperial officials to rethink their position that Parliament had a fundamental right to legislate in all matters for the colonies, including the right to impose taxes to support regular troops and imperial administrators.

In Britain, doubts about the wisdom of the Stamp Act had been building even before it took effect. Grenville advocated the enforcement of his act by military force, but he had been replaced as prime minister in July 1765, and the new prime minister—the marquis of Rockingham—was reluctant to support such a drastic and expensive response. In December 1765 Parliament received numerous petitions for repeal from British merchants, who feared a loss of trade with the colonies as a result of nonimportation and an American austerity program. In January 1766 William Pitt, the single most influential political figure in Parliament, called for repeal of the Stamp Act, but at the same time he expressed the widely held opinion that Parliament ought to assert its "sovereign authority over the colonies … to extend to every point of legislation whatsoever, that we may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exercise every power whatsoever, except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent." Benjamin Franklin, then a colonial agent in London, gave Commons cogent testimony in February 1766 that the colonies not only should not but could not pay, and he warned that military action might cause rebellion.

Repeal of the Stamp Act received royal assent on 18 March, to take effect on 1 May 1766. Opponents of increased imperial control rejoiced when the news reached American shores on 26 April. They overlooked or ignored the significance of the position outlined by Pitt. Those ideas had been forcefully expressed in the Declaratory Act, which Parliament had passed as a prelude to repealing the Stamp Act.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Knollenberg, Bernhard. The Origin of the American Revolution: 1759–1766. New York: Macmillan, 1960.

???????. Growth of the American Revolution, 1766–1775. New York: Free Press, 1975.

Morgan, Edmund S., and Helen M. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953.

Thomas, P. D. G. British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: The First Phase of the American Revolution, 1763–1767. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1975.

revised by Harold E. Selesky

Encyclopedia of the American Revolution: Library of Military History