19. Passage of the Stamp Act

Upon introducing the American Revenue Act in Parliament in March 1764, George Grenville strongly hinted that a stamp tax on the colonies might become necessary. He asked for postponement of any such tax for a year, but still induced Parliament to resolve that it “may be proper” to levy the tax. By doing this, Grenville carefully paved the way for a stamp tax the following year, prepared the colonies for the severe blow, and put Parliament on record of its constitutional right to levy such a tax. In this way, he shrewdly brought Parliament’s strong sense of its own unchecked prerogatives into play while presumably allowing time to soften the blow for the colonies.

Grenville tried to cover his tracks and assume a mask of benevolence by hinting to, but never officially informing, the Americans that he was willing to listen to alternative modes for the colonists to raise the money themselves. But preparations for a stamp tax proceeded apace. We have already seen the leading role of Henry McCulloh in drafting a proposed stamp act in late 1763, and now Grenville assigned Thomas Whately, secretary of the treasury, the task of drawing up the bill. In this task, Whately was aided by McCulloh. Too, Grenville was particularly enchanted with the idea of a stamp tax; it would be uniform throughout the colonies, affecting not only merchants in seaport towns but farmers as well. Moreover, it would be in a sense self-executing, since instead of search and seizure for contraband goods, every document and paper would require a specially stamped paper the citizen would have to buy himself. As early as August 1764, the Earl of Halifax, the powerful secretary of state for the Southern Department, sent a circular letter to all the colonial governors announcing the parliamentary resolution for a potential stamp tax, and asking for a list of instrumentalities and transactions that might require a stamp. On the basis of the replies, Whately prepared a detailed list of stamp duties, and the list was approved by the Treasury Board in mid-December. The die for a stamp tax had been cast. Most of the proposed rates were lower than those of the English stamp tax, since the rates could later be raised after the Americans had become accustomed to the tax. But the taxes on entry into college and to the bar were far higher than in England (the taxes for matriculation and college degrees were set at two pounds in America, but two shillings in England; for entry to the bar, ten pounds in America and six pounds in England). Whately’s reason for setting such high rates in America was brutally frank: “It would be better indeed if they were raised... considerably in order to keep mean persons out of those situations in life which they disgrace.”

While these preparations were secretly under way, the colonies did their best to explore Grenville’s hint that he would forgo a stamp tax if the colonists were willing to raise an equivalent sum themselves. But when Grenville met with the colonial agents in mid-May 1764, he pushed aside the crucial question of how much he wanted the colonies to pay to England. Dismissing the possibility of self-taxation, he proposed instead that they simply give their advance approval to the stamp tax. So much for the sincerity of the Grenville offer! When Israel Mauduit, representing Massachusetts, gently asked how the colonies could possibly give advance approval to a bill they knew virtually nothing about, Grenville answered that the details were unimportant since the bill was to follow the model of the stamp tax in England. It was clear that Grenville was interested only in securing an advance blank check from the colonies, and not in soliciting any colonial criticism of his plan.

Yet the bemused colonial agents could not bring themselves to face the iniquity of George Grenville, and they clung to the hope that his hinted offer had been genuine. The Boston members of the Massachusetts Assembly asked Governor Bernard for a special session to forestall an English stamp tax by imposing one themselves. Bernard realized that no such alternative tax could be enacted until the Crown decided how much it wanted the colonies to pay—a disclosure it kept refusing to make. In fact, many of the colonies, including Franklin-Galloway—dominated Pennsylvania, signified a willingness to tax themselves any sum that might be requested. But the Crown, of course, never bothered to make such a request. Grenville’s state of mind at this point has been acutely summed up by the Morgans:

It is evident... that Grenville was determined upon a stamp tax. Though he was willing to make magnanimous gestures, he had no intention of allowing the colonies to prevent passage of his measure.... They would not thwart him by levying a substitute tax themselves; by withholding the necessary information he made sure of that. Nor would he be troubled by the objections: thanks to his foresighted resolution he could safely predict Parliament’s unsympathetic reaction here. Grenville must have felt comfortably satisfied with all his maneuvers. He made it useless for the colonies to attempt any action to avert the tax, and yet he had carried out his interview so smoothly, and expressed his affection for the colonies so convincingly, that the agents did not perceive... the hopelessness of their efforts.*

In addition to a few pathetic efforts to appease Grenville by offering to tax themselves, many colonies sent protests against any projected stamp tax along with their reactions to the Sugar Act. The Connecticut resolution of May—June 1764, selecting a committee of protest, singled out a stamp tax as the gravest threat on the horizon. The South Carolina House’s instruction of protest, in August, against the American Revenue Act singled out a stamp tax for special hostility. And the Rhode Island legislature’s protest of November was confined to “stamp duties and other internal taxes.”

Colonial protests, general and specific, against a stamp tax came not only from official bodies but from private sources as well. Jared Ingersoll, an influential Tory lawyer from Connecticut and one of that province’s agents to England, warned Whately in the summer of 1764 that the people were “filled with the most dreadful apprehension” over any stamp tax. Ingersoll warned of the great difficulty that would be met in collecting a tax that was “in the opinion of most of the people contrary to the foundation principles of their natural and constitutional rights and liberties.” Even some of the wealthiest citizens, he added, threatened to emigrate in the event of such a tax. The other colonial agents joined in the advance agitation, but the protests only succeeded in hardening the Crown’s determination to put the annoying colonies in their supposedly appointed place. The agitation also made it easier to appeal to Parliament’s sensitivity to its own power and right to impose such a tax.

By early 1765 the year of grace was over, the colonists had presumably had time to absorb the shock, and the Crown was set to ram the hated stamp tax down the throats of the colonies. A last-minute attempt to head off the stamp bill occurred on February 2, at a conference between four official and unofficial colonial agents and George Grenville. The four agents—Charles Garth, MP, agent for South Carolina; Richard Jackson, now agent of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts; Benjamin Franklin; and Ingersoll—made a final try at appeasement by offering a self-imposed tax by the colonies. Jackson voiced a common and perceptive colonial fear that the Crown would be able to use colonial funds to support its armed forces and the royal governors in America, and thus free the governors from the Assembly control so precious to the colonies. Grenville replied with the same hocus-pocus and double-talk of the year before, now revealed as patently insincere.

But Benjamin Franklin proved indomitable in his determination to toady to the Crown. Franklin had three alternative plans of his own devising to offer—each of which would have yielded to the principle of English taxation of the colonies, and each of which would also have aggrandized central imperial control at the expense of American home rule. One was a cute way to make a mockery of the principle of colonial self-taxation: to provide some colonial representation in Parliament. A second was to return to his imperialist and centralizing Albany Plan of 1754, which would have imposed a royally appointed American council to levy taxation on the colonies. A third plan—which Franklin strongly urged—called on Parliament to establish a single loan office in America to issue a common colonial paper currency, part of which would go to Britain as a hidden and therefore less provocative form of taxation on the colonies. In that way, centralization and imperial control in America could make giant strides; paper-money inflation would recover nicely from the hard blow of Parliament’s rather restrictive Currency Act of the previous year; and Franklin, if luck went his way, would have a healthy share in the lucrative contract for printing the new paper issues. Indeed, Franklin persuaded his old friend, former governor Thomas Pownall of Massachusetts, to propose the plan and to present it jointly with him to Grenville. Pownall and Franklin also eagerly offered their services in the well-paying task of putting their grandiose scheme into operation.

Thomas Pownall incorporated Franklin’s proposal into the second edition of his influential book, The Administration of the Colonies, originally published in 1764. In view of Pownall’s close collaboration with Franklin, it is instructive to note the views expressed in Pownall’s work on imperial-colonial relations. Pownall’s crucial objective was to reimpose imperial control by making the governors and other Crown officials independent of the elected assemblies for their salaries. Without such independence, the officials’ actions would remain subservient to the people of the colonies. The means to accomplish this end would be the levying of a British tax on the colonies, which tax could then be used to pay the salaries of the Crown officials. In that way, the American colonists themselves would be forced to pay for the subversion of their own rights by the British rulers. A neat trick indeed!*

But Grenville scorned evasions and halfway measures. Sure of victory in Parliament and anxious to smash signs of self-reliance in the colonies, Grenville finally introduced a stamp bill into Parliament on February 6, 1765.

Opposition to the bill in the Commons was mobilized by the hard-core Whigs. The Whigs did their best, but were demoralized by the recent death of their leader, the Duke of Devonshire, and by one of the periodic bouts of insanity of William Pitt, who held the narrow view that Parliament should not impose internal taxation on the colonies. The early opposition was led by Alderman William Beckford, from the City of London, who alone and courageously denied the right of Parliament to tax the colonies. The others were content, doubtless for strategic reasons if no other, to deny the equity and expediency of the tax. The most eloquent and famous speech was delivered by the old Wilkite Colonel Isaac Barré. Barré had advocated no tax, or if a tax, at least the opportunity for the colonies to tax themselves. He had been answered by the renegade Whig Charles Townshend, who loftily and arrogantly asked: “And now will those American children planted by our care, nourished by our indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy... burden...?”

Barré now rose and spontaneously gave a superb and prophetic rebuttal, one soon to resound throughout the American colonies:

They planted by your care? No! Your oppression planted ‘em in America. They fled from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and unhospitable country—where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable... actuated by principles of true English liberty, they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own country, from the hands of those who should have been their friends.

They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of ‘em: as soon as you began to care about ‘em, that was exercised in sending persons to rule over ‘em, in one department and another... sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions and to prey upon ‘em; men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them....

They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defense, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and labourious industry for the defense of a country, whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument. And believe me, remember I this day told you so, that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first, will accompany them still.... The people I believe 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—but the subject is too delicate and I will say no more.

Beckford and Barré moved to block consideration of the bill, but were defeated by a vote of 245–49. The bill itself came to debate in mid-February, as several Whigs tried desperately to present petitions against the stamp tax. Rose Fuller, a West Indies merchant, presented a petition of London merchants reflecting their alarm at drastic action that might be taken by their American debtors; Charles Garth, agent for South Carolina, worked up a petition that he induced a few South Carolinians to sign; Richard Jackson presented a Connecticut petition, but Parliament refused to hear any of them on the ground that the petitions questioned Parliament’s authority. No one dared to introduce the New York petition, which was deemed “dangerous” and “inflammatory”; but the petition of Virginia’s agent was submitted by a leading Whig, Sir William Meredith. Virginia’s right to petition was defended by General Henry Seymour Conway, a Wilkite and the Whig leader in Commons, who had been one of the main Pelham innocents “massacred” at the end of 1762. Conway was the brother of the influential Lord Hertford and related to the Walpole family. Conway recalled that the colonies had been asked by Grenville to submit their proposals, and then he proceeded to deny the right of Parliament to tax the colonies at all. But Parliament, led by the renegade Whig Charles Yorke, rejected the Virginia petition by a large majority.

The rest was mere formality. The stamp bill easily passed Commons on February 27, the House of Lords on March 8, and became the law of the land on November 1.

The Stamp Act imposed a comprehensive schedule of taxes on all manner of colonial legal and commercial documents and transactions. These included court actions, wills, contracts, licenses, leases, deeds and land grants, mortgages, insurance policies, ship clearings from ports, pamphlets, newspapers, dice, and playing cards. The highest tax was ten pounds for a license to practice law. Also extremely high was the tax of two shillings apiece for all newspaper advertisements—often amounting to a huge 200 percent tax. In addition, a steep tax of one-half penny was levied on each copy of the newspaper itself. All payments had to be made in English sterling or its equivalent, valued at the very high rate of five shillings sixpence per ounce of silver.

Almost every transaction of the colonies requiring the use of paper now had to carry an official treasury stamp. Or rather, all transactions must be conducted on officially stamped paper, which had to be purchased by the user from officially appointed distributors selected by the Crown’s Board of Stamp Commissioners. The corollary effect of this was to give the board a monopoly of the sale of all paper in the colonies.

The Stamp Act thus had a devastating impact on virtually the entire economic and social life of the colony; in short, on nearly everyone. No tax could have been better calculated to inflame nearly everyone in the colonies regardless of location or social position. The particularly heavy taxes on the legal and the newspaper professions, as well as the taxes on tavern licenses, were certain to mobilize the intense opposition of the most articulate opinion-molding groups in the colonies. Even Benjamin Franklin was alarmed, being sure that the new taxes would destroy half the circulation and advertising of the American newspapers. There were other ominous provisions in the act. For one thing, no newspaper or pamphlet could be published without bearing the name of the printer or author, obviously in order to intimidate critics of government by forcing them to publicize their names. In another area, the Stamp Act imposed taxes on documents in ecclesiastical courts. The specter of an ecclesiastical court presided over by an Anglican bishop was thus conjured up to arouse the colonies.

The penalties were severe. Unstamped evidence was inadmissible in any court. Violations could be tried in the colonial admiralty courts without trial by jury—and especially subject to prosecution were officials or lawyers not using stamps, and any sales of unstamped pamphlets or newspapers. In contrast, government officials sued for enforcing the Stamp Act could automatically collect triple damages from their victims! The vice admiralty courts, hitherto largely the concern of merchants, were now hated by all groups in America. Whereas the Navigation and Sugar acts could conceivably if tortuously be interpreted as dealing with the sea and therefore relating to admiralty courts, the stamp tax obviously could not. Thus, constitutional and economic questions, violations of political (and perhaps religious) rights, and economic prosperity, all merged in the Stamp Act into one comprehensive and massive assault on the liberty, property, and well-being of the colonists in America. Great Britain had smashed at America with a mailed fist. The die was cast. The colonists were faced with a fateful choice: abject submission or open resistance.

*Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 83–84.

*On Pownall’s goals and strategy, see Robert E. Brown, Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691–1780 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 201–3. On Franklin’s plotting with Pownall, see Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), p. 109.