29. Official Protests

By November 1765 the stamp distributors and the stamped paper had been put out of action by the direct revolutionary mass action of the people, who increasingly formed themselves into Sons of Liberty in the separate colonies. Even if the various colonial assemblies had not been so timorous and conservative, there was little that they could have done. To nullify the Stamp Act, the first essential step was to put the stamp masters out of commission. This was a revolutionary act that the assemblies could hardly have done openly—especially since they were in most cases subject to the veto of a royal governor.

But one function the assemblies could perform: send off official protests to Britain asking for repeal of the noxious Stamp Act. Not much importance should be laid to these official resolves, which could only play a minor supplementary role in the great American struggle against the stamp tax.

The exception to the minor importance of official resolutions was, of course, Patrick Henry’s Virginia Resolves, which, helped by the shrewd publication of the final resolutions, ignited the spark of the whole resistance struggle. The first colony to imitate Virginia’s example of official protest was, not surprisingly, Rhode Island, where the Assembly adopted the call to disobedience that everyone believed the Virginia Assembly had passed. The resolution also denied Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies at all, although it modified the disobedience clause to include only an internal tax such as the stamp tax. Moreover, the Rhode Island Assembly went further—directing all officers of the colony to proceed as if the stamp tax did not exist, the Assembly promising to idemnify them for any penalties incurred in following such a course. Rhode Island’s courageous resolutions, passed in September, were touched off in mid-August by similar resolves of the Providence Town Meeting, followed by several other towns, including Newport. The Rhode Island Resolves were largely drawn up by Henry Ward, secretary of the colony, and Moses Brown, a leading merchant of Providence. They represented a living embodiment of the unity on this question of the Ward and Hopkins factions in Rhode Island.

None of the other colonial assemblies, however, had the courage to go as far as little self-governing Rhode Island. None dared either to call for disobedience or to order officials to disregard the Stamp Act. Almost all the assemblies, however, issued resolves during the last third of 1765, denying the authority of Parliament to levy taxes (internal or external) upon the colonies, and most of them denied the authority of Parliament to extend the domain of the hated admiralty courts. Colonies such as Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, which had not in the previous year strongly challenged the parliamentary authority to tax, now took steps to correct their former hesitation. The only colonial assemblies that did not issue such resolves were Georgia, Delaware, New Hampshire, and North Carolina, and the last was not allowed to meet by edict of the royal governor.