Stamp Act Crisis
Parliament taxed every printed sheet in the American colonies in 1765 and repealed it within a year. The act required a stamp on newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents, licences, playing cards and dice, payable in specie, which the colonies were short of. The revenue was intended for the ten thousand troops stationed in America after the Seven Years' War, and the reasoning in London was straightforward: the war had doubled the national debt, it had been fought largely for colonial security, and Britons at home paid far higher taxes. The colonial objection was not the amount. Previous parliamentary levies had been duties on trade, which could be argued to fall under the regulation of commerce; this was an internal tax on colonists by a body in which they had no representative, and the phrase that emerged was no taxation without representation. The response was better organised than anyone expected. Nine colonies sent delegates to a Stamp Act Congress in New York, merchants agreed non-importation, and crowds calling themselves the Sons of Liberty made the distributors resign — the Massachusetts distributor's house was destroyed and the lieutenant-governor's library thrown into the street. Almost no stamps were ever sold. Parliament repealed it in March 1766 under pressure from British merchants losing their market, and passed the Declaratory Act on the same day asserting the right to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever. Both sides took the repeal as a vindication, which is the beginning of the misunderstanding. The act also created a network. The committees of correspondence, the intercolonial congress and the Sons of Liberty all date from 1765, and colonies that had never cooperated on anything discovered that they could.
- Year: 1765 CE
- Category: Political
