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THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
Lecture 6: The Stamp Act Crisis

The Stamp Act Crisis

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Patrick Henry

Stamp Act mob

     In King George's roundabout of ministers, it fell to George Grenville in 1763 to find a solution to the financial quandary left behind by the French and Indian War. First, Grenville looked at the books and saw a glaring fact: no one had bothered to consistently enforce existing Navigation Acts in the American colonies. Tens of thousands of pounds of potential revenue had already been lost. Given the fact that Great Britain had just fought a war to free the American colonies from the French threat, and continued to bear the burden of protecting American colonists from the Indian threat, Grenville saw nothing amiss in the idea that the Americans should bear part of the financial burden of paying off the war debt and keeping up British troops in the colonies. So Grenville ordered that British officials in the colonies should start enforcing the existing Navigation Acts. Then, he asked Parliament to pass some more legislation to produce revenue--and, not coincidentally, regulate trade in favor of the mother country.

      On September 1, 1764, Parliament passed the Currency Act, effectively assuming control of the colonial currency system. The act prohibited the issue of any new bills and the reissue of existing currency. Parliament favored a "hard currency" system based on the pound sterling, but was not inclined to regulate the colonial bills. Rather, they simply abolished them. The colonies protested vehemently against this. They suffered a trade deficit with Great Britain to begin with and argued that the shortage of hard capital would further exacerbate the situation. Another provision of the Currency Act established what amounted to a "superior" Vice-admiralty court, at the call of Navel [sic] commanders who wished to assure that persons suspected of smuggling or other violations of the customs laws would receive a hearing favorable to the British, and not the colonial, interests.

      In 1764, Parliament passed the Sugar Act. In addition to the duties placed on other colonial products by existing Navigation Acts--tobacco, hide, iron, timber--the Sugar Act placed duties (taxes) on cloth, sugar, indigo, and wine imported into the colonies. It also eliminated the refunds of duties that had previously been made in England on foreign goods re-exported to America. The Act lowered the duty on molasses (the raw material for making sugar), hoping that this would induce Americans to import the stuff legally from British colonies in the Caribbean rather than smuggling it in from the Indies. [The Molasses Act of 1733 had placed a duty on molasses, which the colonists avoided by smuggling molasses from French and Dutch islands.]

     The passage of the Sugar Act carried numerous repercussions for all the colonies, but hit Massachusetts especially hard. As a general principle, the passage of the Act signified Britain's turn of policy, away from salutary neglect toward a more interventionist and authoritarian role. Specifically for Massachusetts, and its main port of Boston, any tax on molasses hurt a major local industry: the production of rum. Boston stood at one corner of the great "triangular trade": Boston ships carried rum to Africa in payment for slaves, then carried slaves from Africa to the Caribbean for molasses (sugar), then on the final leg brought the molasses back to Boston for conversion into rum. Boston traders had largely ignored existing duties, buying molasses from the cheapest possible source, be that source English, French, or Dutch. Now that changed. Britain's duty on any other source outside of British domain raised the cost of doing business for rum distillers.

     In addition to the Sugar Act, Parliament also passed the Quartering Act. The Quartering Act of 1765 did not assuage American feelings. The Act said that the colonial legislatures would have to pay for the upkeep of British troops on the American frontier. This seemed only fair to the British, since Americans were reaping the benefits of British protection. However, the passage of another act this same year raised American suspicions--and also stirred the incipient flames of rebellion. The Stamp Act of 1765 placed a direct tax on paper. Every piece of paper used by the colonists would bear a stamp attesting that the tax had been paid. It further directed that anyone accused of violating the law be tried in Admiralty Courts, rather than normal courts. Finally, the justification for the tax was to raise revenue for...paying for the upkeep of British troops in America!

      Americans immediately protested the contradiction of the Quartering and Stamp Acts. If they had to obey the former to pay for the troops, then what need for the latter act? Someone was playing "fast and loose"--effectively "double-taxing" Americans for the same service. But this was not the main objection of Americans to the Stamp Act. For their entire existence, Americans had been taxed by their own colonial legislatures--taxes that went to pay for, among other things, fighting three colonial wars whose origins lay in Europe but then spread to the colonies. Americans could manage their own affairs very well, thank-you-very-much! However, it was the principle involved: English custom going back to Magna Carta placed the power to tax in the hands of the people's representatives rather than the Crown (i.e., Parliament): no taxation without representation. This was the custom of American colonists as well. They elected representatives to their colonial assemblies, which in turn controlled taxation. This "power of the purse" provided the foundation for the status quo between royal governors and colonial legislatures.

     On paper, royal governors had great power: they could summon the militia, appoint judges, make treaties with Indians, hand out land grants. Yet once they arrived in the colonies, governors soon realized that all the power printed on royal paper didn't amount to anything without money. Indeed, making money was just about the only reason anyone ever agreed to accept a governorship in America, which the British considered a backwater post at best (which explains why Americans often found themselves the recipients of the dregs of British officialdom: drunkards, wastrels, and incompetents whose only card to play in life came from being born on a noble blanket). Quickly, any governor who wanted to sock away money for any kind of future came to an understanding with the colonial leadership: accept the legitimacy of colonial assembly in return for inside information and "sweetheart deals." (One need look no further than Virginia's Governor Robert Dinwiddie and his relationship with the Ohio Valley Company for a classic example. Why else was Dinwiddie so "hell bent for leather" to settle that backcountry area? Because he stood to make a bundle in kickbacks from the rich Virginians to whom he had granted the land! One hand washed the other.)

      The Stamp Act changed all this. It represented the first time Parliament had ever passed a direct tax on the colonists. As far as Americans were concerned, this was a violation of their rights as Englishmen, which said they couldn't be taxed except by their representatives.

     The issue of representation: if you don't grasp any other concept, grasp this one, because it more than anything else, led to the War of Independence. The question was this: who represented the colonists? For Americans, it was simple: the men from their own communities whom they sent to Williamsburg, or Albany, or Philadelphia, or Boston. Who else would know their needs and be able to represent them fairly? However, this concept of direct, or actual, representation was foreign to the British. In Britain, then as now, the man who represented your district could not reside in that district. This was supposed to insure fairness and objectivity. By having an outsider represent the district, it was assured (in theory) that he would not be unduly "corrupted" by local interests. He would, in short, balance the needs of all the people in the district with all the people in the nation. In this system of indirect, or virtual, representation, all Britons were represented in Parliament--inclduing colonists. This idea was foreign to Americans.

      ...and there were have it. It's that simple (and that complicated). Each side was arguing about taxation without representation, but they were in fact using two completely different contexts to define what was meant by representation, and didn't even realize it.

     As if that were not enough, however, there was the issue of the Admiralty Courts. Another right of Englishmen was the right to a trial by a jury of peers, and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. This was not the case in Admiralty Court. As the name implied, these courts existed to try crimes that occurred on the high seas. They had no juries. There was no presumption of innocence: if charged, one was guilty until proven innocent! The subtext was clear: the British did not consider Americans fellow Englishmen, or else they would not trample their rights.

     The combination of the representation issue and the right to a jury trial inflamed colonial opinion. Although Parliament passed the Stamp Act in April of 1765, they did not schedule enforcement to begin until November 1, 1765. The purpose for this delay was to construct the necessary infrastructure within the colonies to collect the tax and prosecute violators. But this delay also inadvertently provided the colonists with a window of opportunity in which to foment a powerful protest.

     In Virginia, members of the House of Burgesses, the colonial assembly, met to discuss their response to the Stamp Act. A young firebrand named Patrick Henry reminded his listeners of their rights as Englishmen, and how this act represented a strike against those rights. "No taxation without representation!" he thundered.

      Other colonies also protested the Stamp Act. At the urging of James Otis, Massachusetts sent out a circular letter to the other colonies calling for an intercolonial meeting to discuss their response to the Stamp Act. On October 7, representatives from nine of the thirteen colonies convened in New York City to protest the Stamp Act. Unlike the Albany Congress nine years ago, nothing divided the colonists this time. They all agreed that the Stamp Act was intolerable, and so agreed to draft a Declaration of Rights and Grievances to send to Parliament as a protest. For some, sending a protest to Parliament was not enough. They called on all colonists to observe a non-importation agreement: they would refuse to purchase any item that bore the hated tax.

     While the Stamp Act Congress had no authority to enforce such an agreeement, others took enforcement into their own hands. Vigilante gangs, like Boston's Sons of Liberty, wandered the streets to enforce the agreement, visiting violence against dissenters as well as British officials charged with enforcing the law. Lacking any voice in Parliament, the colonists thus hoped to nullify the Stamp Act, insuring that Britain would not collect any money from the colonies.

     The economic pressure from the colonial boycott had its desired effect. British merchants whose business depended upon the colonial trade felt the financial pinch and went to members of Parliament asking them to repeal the Stamp Act. Parliament responded. By the time the Stamp Act was supposed to go into effect (November), no British customs officials remained in the colonies to collect the taxes anyway: the vigilante violence of the mobs had worked very effectively.)

      Under pressure from British mechants, Parliament finally caved and voted to repeal the Stamp Act. The colonists had won. They had upheld their rights as Englishmen. They would not be taxed without representation, nor would they have to suffer trial without a jury. This colonial victory imparted an invaluable lesson to the colonists: resistance worked--and not just political action but political resistance combined with economic action.

     Yet Parliament had not given up its position in the fight, for even as the repealed the Stamp Act, it passed a Declaratory Act. The latter act stated basically that Parliament reserved the right to tax any British subject, anywhere, anytime.

Model of Resistance

     The Stamp Act Crisis proved a model of resistance for the incipient colonial rebellion. The methods, the actions, the articulation of rights--all provided the foundation for the colonists' resistance against British attempts to tax the colonies. Whenever things flared up again between the colonies and the mother country, colonial leaders returned to the proven remedy of resistance--returned to it and expanded it, for if one dose worked effectively, then a double- or even triple-dose should work even better!

     One lesson no one learned in the Crisis, however, was the true nature of the conflict dividing the two sides. Neither the British nor the colonists realized that they were "talking past one another" when it came to the vital issue of representation. The issue was more than a political matter: it was social and cultural. American colonists had, of necessity, taken care of themselves over the years, and now resented British attempts to reign in their de facto independence. For their part, the British did not understand or respect American customs and pride. During the French and Indian War, British officers had demonstrated scarce respect for colonial militias: their leadership, their advice, or their tactics. (For example, George Washington's advice to General Braddock concerning the march towards Fort Dusquese went unheeded, resulting in a military disaster--and Braddock's death.) They viewed the colonists as rude, crude, and undisciplined.

     Parliament's repeal of the Stamp Act and passage of the Declaratory Act achieved nothing, then, except a temporary respite. The colonists were now alert to British plans and awaited the next move.

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