20. Initial Reaction to the Stamp Act

The time for mere protest had passed. The colonists were faced with a hard choice among a few stark alternatives. They could meekly submit and pay the stamp tax; but this, it soon developed, few Americans were prepared to do. Or, they could refuse to pay; but such refusal in turn could take two sharply contrasting paths. The conservative path was to keep within the law by simply ceasing to transact any business involving paper documents. But such a reaction, while “moderate” in the sense of remaining within the law, could only ruin the colony by bringing all trade and virtually all economic life to a halt. The only practical path was the radical one of outright defiance: to continue to carry on business, legal, and social life while ignoring the stamp law. Such a course was in effect mass civil disobedience; and civil disobedience to the broad scope of the stamp tax was tantamount to—revolution.

The colonies had some precious months before the law was to go into effect—time to work out their tactics and strategy, time to plan their reactions to the tax itself. The Stamp Act was passed in early March and received the inevitable signature of the king near the end of the month. The news reached America in April. The colonists had less than seven months to decide what to do.

All the conditions now existed in America for precipitating a revolutionary-crisis situation; in the midst of the rapidly accumulating, vast tinderbox of constitutional, economic, political, and even religious grievances, nothing could have been better calculated than a stamp tax to unify the bulk of the colonists against the British government and to spur the intense opposition of the opinion-molding groups in society. But now that the culminating blow had been struck, the final ingredient tossed in, one condition alone was still lacking: articulate leadership. This emphatically did not mean that leaders were needed to create a revolutionary temper in the minds of the people. Contrary to the absurd conspiracy view of revolution, this is not the way that revolutions are or ever can be made. Ultimately, revolutions are mass phenomena, and cannot succeed without the support—indeed the active and enthusiastic support—of the great majority of the population. True, an existing government can indefinitely peg along in command of only the “support” of the passive resignation of the majority of its subjects. But the existing government is already in command of the power apparatus in society. In contrast, a revolution, an upheaval against the wielders of power, must command the active support of the great majority. Otherwise it will not even make a respectable showing, much less take and keep the reins of government. But the masses will not move, will not erupt, if they lack aggressive leaders to articulate their grievances and to point the path for them to follow. The leaders supply the necessary theoretical justification and analysis of the revolution’s short- and long-term goals. Unaided by leaders, the masses tend to accept each act of tyranny, not out of willing agreement, but from failure to realize that successful opposition can be mounted against the status quo. The articulation by the leaders is the final necessary spark that ignites the tinderbox of revolution.

At first, the general reaction was, naturally enough, a kind of numb despair and grudging resignation. In the beginning the colonists simply assumed that they would have to pay the stamp tax; open defiance seemed hopeless and out of the question. Only one or two scattered incidents broke the general colonial reaction of stunned silence. Many newspaper printers sullenly sent each other wooden shoes “as a proper badge of the slavery the Stamp Act must reduce all printers in America to.” The first thing to break the “silent consternation” was an article in the liberal Providence Gazette of May 11 under the pen name of “A Plain Yeoman.” The Gazette was the organ of retiring Governor Stephen Hopkins and it has indeed been intimated that the Plain Yeoman was none other than Hopkins himself.

The Plain Yeoman carried the theory of the protesting Americans to a far higher pitch, which was to resound and take hold in later years. After denouncing the parliamentary invasion of the American right to be free of English taxation, and castigating parliamentary refusal to hear American protests, the author went straight to the British charge that Americans were seeking independence. Here Plain Yeoman expounded the new theory that the colonies were indeed not dependents of Britain or the British Parliament; instead, America and Britain were only equal common subjects of the king. “I know of no dependence in relation, only that we are all the common subjects of the same King....” The implication (though not yet openly asserted) was that Parliament had no right to impose any legislation—not merely taxation—upon the colonies.* The independence of not being taxed without consent was to be maintained as part of the “birthright of all the King’s free subjects without distinction.”

The Plain Yeoman also leveled a brilliant blast against the argument of the Tories that various precedents already existed for parliamentary taxation of the colonists. He attacked the common legal notion that a precedent clearly establishes a point “whether the precedent be footed on justice and reason or on whim and arbitrariness.” And here he quoted, as Hopkins was wont to quote, from the witty and perceptive aperçus of Dean Jonathan Swift: “It is a maxim among these men [lawyers], that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made, even those which have, through ignorance or corruption, contradicted the rules of common justice, and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, and thereby endeavour to justify the most iniquitous opinions....”

The ringing article of the Plain Yeoman drew some attention in the colonies and was reprinted in such papers as the Maryland Gazette, but it remained for a brief time an isolated expression. Meanwhile, a leader was about to arise in Virginia who was destined to blow the whole explosive situation apart.

*A previous statement of this position appeared—also in the Providence Gazette—during the Sugar Act protest of the preceding August.