Episode 10: The Stamp

 Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode Ten: “The Stamp”

Written by Jim Ambuske
Published 9/13/2024

JIM AMBUSKE: A crowd gathered in Boston’s South End under a great elm on the morning of August 14, 1765. They called it “The Liberty Tree,” and from its branches they had come to hang a man, charged with enforcing a hated law.

AMBUSKE: Andrew Oliver was 59 years old on that Wednesday morning, when he was condemned to die. A portrait of Oliver by the British American artist John Singleton Copley reveals a man with a prominent forehead, a sharp nose, and confident, commanding eyes. Pursed lips give the slightest hint of a smile, though some might have called it a smirk.

AMBUSKE: Oliver had been born in Boston to a prominent, and wealthy merchant family. In the 1720s, he joined the family business, and together with his brother, Peter, began importing wine and textiles on the city’s Long Wharf.

AMBUSKE: Public office was a logical next step. Over the years, Oliver served as town auditor, tax collector, overseer of the poor, three terms in the House of Representatives, and held a seat on the governor’s council. Ten years before his execution, the governor named him Secretary of the Province.

AMBUSKE: But it was the office that Oliver claimed he had never asked for nor wanted that drew the ire of King George III’s subjects in Boston and a group of men calling themselves “The Loyal Nine.”

AMBUSKE: In June 1765, British American newspapers began reporting that His Majesty had been pleased to appoint Oliver as Stamp Master for the colony of Massachusetts Bay. Only a few months early, Parliament had passed “An Act for granting and applying certain Stamp Duties, and other Duties, in the British Colonies and Plantations in America.”

AMBUSKE: Britons throughout the empire simply called it “The Stamp Act.”

AMBUSKE: From Nova Scotia to Jamaica, the King had named men in each colony to safeguard and distribute paper imported from Britain, stamped with a special mark. The stamp signified that British Americans who purchased the paper, whether to license attorneys, conduct court business, print newspapers, issue customs clearances, or even make playing cards, had paid the legally required tax. And it signaled their submission to Parliament’s supreme authority.

AMBUSKE: Andrew Oliver was chosen to be the King’s man in Boston, tasked with carrying out Parliament’s will.

AMBUSKE: For the Loyal Nine, a group of Boston artisans and tradesmen, and for the vast majority of white British Americans who believed that they lived in an Empire of Liberty, the Stamp Act was an abhorrence. To them, the act of Parliament, set to take effect on November 1, 1765, was an affront to their British privileges, an attack on their English liberties, and a tax to which none of them had given their consent. And as the King’s loyal subjects, they believed they had a duty to defy it.

AMBUSKE: Whether the men calling themselves the Loyal Nine were themselves present under the Liberty Tree that August morning, or whether they thought it best not to be seen amongst the rabble, remains uncertain. What is clear, is that they convinced a shoemaker named Ebenezer McIntosh to stir up the growing crowd, and hang tyranny by the neck until it was dead.

AMBUSKE: Fortunately for Andrew Oliver, his flesh was not destined for the gallows, only his image in effigy. From the Liberty Tree, the Loyal Nine hung Oliver’s false body. To his chest, they pinned the image of a boot, with a Devil crawling out of it, a subtle swipe at Lord Bute, the former British Prime Minister, who some saw as one of the architects of these alleged crimes.

AMBUSKE: While Governor Francis Bernard and his council debated what to do, Thomas Hutchinson, who served as both the colony’s Lt. Governor and its Chief Justice, ordered the sheriff to cut down the effigy of his brother-in-law. But the crowd surrounding the Liberty Tree intimidated the sheriff into retreat.

AMBUSKE: In the early evening hours, as Governor Bernard and his council met in the Town House, what we now call the Old State House, they heard a commotion growing outside in the streets. The mob - as Bernard called it – had marched to the seat of British authority in the colony, carrying Oliver’s effigy. They shouted three huzzahs to make sure the men inside knew just who ruled Boston that night, before setting their sights on a new building that Oliver had only recently constructed on Kilby Street.

AMBUSKE: Ever the merchant, Oliver had hoped to divide his new building into shops and rent them to enterprising women and men. The mob ended that dream in five minutes. They pulled down the building, and then headed for Oliver’s home, in search of the real man whose fictive body they carried.

AMBUSKE: Much to the crowd’s disappointment, Oliver had fled, leaving his house in the care of a few trusted friends, but the mob still had its fun. They beheaded Oliver’s effigy, carried its remains to nearby Fort Hill, and using some of the timber from his demolished shop, built a fire, and burned it.

AMBUSKE: And yet, the mob remained unsated. They returned to Oliver’s home, beat on the windows and the doors, before forcing their way in, and helped themselves to some of the liquor in the would-be Stamp Master’s cellar. They destroyed some of his furniture and “a looking glass said to be the largest in North-America.” The crowd was heard to say that if they found Oliver, they would kill him.

AMBUSKE: Finally, at around midnight, quiet returned to the streets, but not before the crowd greeted Lt. Governor Hutchinson and the sheriff with a “volley of stones & bricks” when they tried to restore order.

AMBUSKE: The next day, on the afternoon of August 15th, the Loyal Nine finally found and confronted Oliver, and urged him to resign his post. Ironically, Oliver had no office to surrender. His commission as Stamp Master had not yet arrived from Britain; he had been given no official orders. But that mattered for very little. Fearing for his family and his property, Oliver saw no choice but to give in to their demands. Despite his loyalty to the king, a loyalty he shared with the men who opposed him, Oliver agreed not to distribute the detested stamps.

AMBUSKE: That night, as Governor Bernard wrote with alarm to the Board of Trade from within the protective walls of Castle William in Boston Harbor, he could see another bonfire raging in the distance.

AMBUSKE: And as Andrew Oliver picked through the pieces of his ransacked home, and came upon the shattered remains of his looking glass, surely he must have wondered, what was happening to British America?

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution. Episode 10: The Stamp

AMBUSKE: In July 1764, three months after Parliament passed its new Sugar Act to protect the British Caribbean’s lucrative sugar trade from colonial smuggling and French competition, and begin the work of repairing Britain’s perilous finances after the Seven Years’ War, an essay appeared in Boston that at once praised Parliament’s benevolence and feared for the empire’s future.

AMBUSKE: James Otis, Jr. had risen to modest fame in recent years for his defense of Boston merchants against “writs of assistance,” legal orders that allowed authorities to search property without a warrant. He was a gifted orator and lawyer, one whose mind would later be robbed by insanity, but in the summer of 1764 he was among a number of British Americans who worried that Parliament’s defense of the sugar trade was but a portent of things to come.

AMBUSKE: In his pamphlet, which he called, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, Otis argued that British Americans were a devoutly loyal people:

 JAMES OTIS, JR.: “Their loyalty has been abundantly proved, especially in the late war. Their affection and reverence for their mother country is unquestionable. They yield the most chearful and ready obedience to her laws, particularly to the power of that august body the parliament of Great-Britain, the supreme legislative of the kingdom and in dominions. These I declare are my own sentiments of duty and loyalty.”

AMBUSKE: Parliament’s supremacy had been hard won. In 1688, English Whigs - men who opposed arbitrary power – believed that the Catholic King James II longed to rule as an absolutist monarch. To counter the threat of a papist dynasty after the birth of the king’s son, some Englishmen entreated the king’s Protestant son-in-law to invade England. From the Netherlands, Prince William of Orange arrived with an army in November 1688. To France, James II fled. Parliament invited William and Mary, his wife and the king’s daughter, to take the throne, on the condition that they governed their realms and dominions according to Parliamentary law.

AMBUSKE: This “Glorious Revolution” cemented Parliament’s right to rule alongside the crown while ensuring the survival of England’s Protestant Empire.

AMBUSKE: But that supremacy was not absolute.

AMBUSKE: As Otis argued in his pamphlet, it was based on a contract between the rulers and the ruled. That itself was built on a foundation of natural law and inherent rights, including the right to be taxed with the consent of the governed. British Americans, however, had no direct representation in Parliament. And in Otis’s view:

 OTIS, JR: “I can see no reason to doubt, but that the imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or on land, or houses, or ships, on real or personal, fixed or floating property, in the colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the Colonists, as British subjects, and as men. I say men, for in a state of nature, no man can take my property from me, without my consent: If he does, he deprives me of my liberty, and makes me a slave.”

AMBUSKE: British Americans believed Parliament had the right to regulate their trade, but not impose taxes to raise revenues. And if the reports coming from Britain that summer were true, that Parliament, led by Prime Minister George Grenville intended to lay more, direct taxes on British America, including stamp duties, then the Sugar Act was just the first light illuminating a much darker path.

AMBUSKE: So, why did Parliament believe the Stamp Act of 1765 was a vital measure to defend British America? And why did Britons throughout the Atlantic world resist it as a threat to their revolutionary glorious Empire of Liberty?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to London, where George III’s fears of a future war with France compelled him to draw up plans for a standing army in America. We’ll then head down the road to Whitehall, where the king’s ministers began debating ways to pay for the soldiers who would defend Britain's American empire, before considering why Britons on both sides of the Atlantic challenged Parliament’s right to tax the colonies at all.

AMBUSKE: In the closing months of the Seven Years’ War, George III, and his soon-to-be former prime minster, the Earl of Bute, were under no illusions of a permanent peace with France.

JON KUKLA: The feeling on the part of the king and Bute is that there's going to be another war, it's just a matter of when. They're trying to buy the best situation, you can prepare for the fact that this peace treaty negotiated in 1762, and signed in 63, isn't going to last.

AMBUSKE: That’s Jon Kukla, a historian of early America.

KUKLA: One of the things that comes out of this is that George the Third, in 1762, decides that he himself is going to make plans for the future defense of North America. He starts in September of 1762. And by Christmas, he has come up with a plan that would involve having 10,542 officers and men organized in 21 battalions, at an estimated annual cost. There's some variation in these estimates, but basically 225,000 pounds annually. The rest of his plan is that the British government will pay for this during 1763. But starting in 1764, somehow or other, the colonies will be taxed by Parliament to pay for it.

AMBUSKE: The king’s plan was but one element of an emerging British blueprint to more effectively manage its empire for the common imperial good. That strategy included direct oversight of settlement in colonies like Nova Scotia and East Florida, new laws and regulations to improve the empire’s trade and its finances, and the establishment of a Proclamation Line in the backcountry to divide British from Indigenous America. The king’s intended standing army would help keep the peace between British settlers and native peoples, and dissuade former subjects of the French king from rebelling against their new royal master.

 AMBUSKE: As the 24-year-old king told Lord Bute:

GEORGE III: “If we don’t take precaution, I will venture to affirm whenever a new war breaks out we shall run great risk of losing the great advantages we are at this hour to be blessed with by this great, noble, and perfect definitive treaty.”

KUKLA: Basically, from that point on from Christmas of 1762, before the treaty is even signed. Young George the Third has committed himself to a plan for defending North America against the anticipation that France is going to resume the war at some point. He's committed himself to a plan that involves imposing taxes on North America in some form or other.

AMBUSKE: Criticism over Bute’s handling of the peace negotiations with France and Spain, an unpopular tax on domestic cyder, and anti-Scottish rhetoric drove him from office in April 1763. In his place, the king appointed George Grenville as the new prime minister.

KUKLA: Granville is, an absolute establishment politician. I think you could argue he’s probably not got a first-rate mind. George III complained that that he had the mind of a clerk. He's incredibly well attuned to how Parliament works. He's a very very skillful parliamentarian. In fact, if he hadn't been brought into the Ministry, by Georgia third, his aspiration really was to become Speaker of the House. He was also hardworking. They used to make jokes about the fact that, that he would take essentially like budget documents to the opera and things like that. One of the sub ministers in the administration in the 1760s say that say that he aroused the Americans because he read the American reports that nobody else had.

AMBUSKE: Grenville was in his early 50s when he became prime minister. And he believed, like the Earl of Halifax, that Parliament ought to exercise greater control over the colonies.

KUKLA: I think it's very clear that Grenville is in some ways a protege of Halifax, and there's this conflict or this tension in terms of how to approach the management of the colonies.

AMBUSKE: Some British politicians argued that trade alone would sustain the empire, but others, like Grenville and Halifax, believed that colonists’ own self-interest would tear the empire apart.

KUKLA: Grenville and Halifax embrace this kind of authoritarian outlook, we need to get tough with the American colonies, and we need to impose our authority. The irony is that, starting in the 1740s, when they when they formulate these, these ideas, their fear is that the colonies are going to grow, and eventually they'll become independent.

KUKLA: When George Grenville comes to the Prime Ministership, he neither he, neither Granville or any of the others, at any of the other leaders have second thoughts about what the king has planned. That's just a given. The question that they have is, where are we going to get the money. And so they kick around various ideas. And ultimately, Grenville comes up with the with with with the great idea of imposing a stamp tax on on the colonies.

AMBUSKE: Grenville first began thinking about a stamp tax in the summer of 1763. In many ways, it wasn’t a novel idea.

AMBUSKE: Stamp duties had been a regular part of life in Great Britain since the late seventeenth century. They were an effective way of raising revenue for the Treasury. Anyone reading the London Gazette or the Caledonian Mercury, for example, would have seen a small, but ornate red-inked stamp with an image of a crown and the words “half penny,” the tax levied on newspapers. 

KUKLA: Basically, by 1760, the Brits were completely accustomed to stamp duties. it's not something that you thought about.

AMBUSKE: And they were just one of a number of reform measures Grenville contemplated as he mapped out a plan to improve the empire’s finances and defend it.

KUKLA: Now, there's other things that they do, they adjust various other taxes on, on linens, and they, they, they they reintroduce the tax on sugar, and they adjust those sorts of things. But basically, Grenville’s idea is that in order to fund the king's plan for sending troops to defend North America, in the face of the likely likelihood of French hostility, and also their perceived likelihood that the French are going to stir up the Native American tribes against the English. So in order to fund that plan, Grenville ultimately decides that he's going to first announce and then and then legislate a Stamp Tax.

AMBUSKE: Grenville began that work on March 9, 1764. In a series of resolutions he offered to the House of Commons, the prime minister laid out his proposals for the Sugar Act, and new duties on Madeira, lumber, and other goods. In the fifteenth resolution, he proposed stamp duties for the colonies.

AMBUSKE: As he told the House, he would delay introducing formal legislation until the next session of Parliament, so that he might consult with leading officials, colonial agents, and other knowledgeable men about the most effective and least burdensome ways to levy stamp duties on British Americans. He even suggested that the colonies might avoid Parliamentary action if the provincial assemblies all agreed to levy taxes themselves to support the army in North America.

AMBUSKE: But the prime minister wanted to make one thing very clear. Watching from the gallery, Edward Montague, the agent who lobbied Parliament on Virginia’s behalf, heard Grenville express his hope that:

GEORGE GRENVILLE: “the power and sovereignty of Parliament, over every part of the British dominions, for the purpose of raising or collecting any tax, would never be disputed.”

AMBUSKE: For Grenville and other like minded men, it wasn’t just about what Parliament could do to deal with the empire’s war debts, support an army in the colonies, or take charge of settlement in places like Nova Scotia, but what it had the fundamental right to do:  

KUKLA: He links it to the sovereignty of the British Parliament. He basically says this is the question is whether parliament is going to rule North America, or whether the colonial legislatures are going to rule North America. And we need to insist upon parliamentary taxation as an expression of the sovereignty of the nation and our control of North America.

PATRICK GRIFFIN: And nearly most leaders this time would regard themselves as good Whigs. What that simply means is that they believe this thing, the Glorious Revolution, at the end of the 17th century was a good thing, that was a good thing because it if you will circumscribe the powers of the king to a certain extent, and made sure that Parliament was going to be supreme.

GRIFFIN: 1:05:58 My name is Patrick Griffin, I’m Madden-Hennebry Professor at the University of Notre Dame

GRIFFIN: What the Glorious Revolution did was make Parliament supreme, and they applauded this, and they understand and appreciate it. Now, not everybody agrees with what this means. But it's just understood that Parliament's going to be supreme. Now, what you find is after the Seven Years’ War, because it was such a momentous period of time, because it was a period of unprecedented kind of euphoria and anxiety, people start to say, Okay, what does sovereignty mean? How are we going to hold the whole together? And I think what you find immediately after 1763, is an extraordinary debate in Britain about what parliamentary supremacy, what it actually means. And could it be extended across an ocean? It becomes a real live question.

AMBUSKE: The vast majority of white British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic approached this contentious debate with a common set of values.

 BRAD JONES: In the middle of the 18th century what I call Protestant, British Whigs, or even just generally speaking, the British society, they lived under a constitutional monarchy, a representative monarchy, a system of government in which they celebrated as providing them with a degree of freedom unmatched, they thought, at least in the Western world.

JONES: My name is Brad Jones. I'm a professor of history at California State University Fresno

JONES: The king, himself existed at post glorious revolution within this government, he was not an absolutist, George III, he, in many ways, held very little power, or was able to express very little power, and that the vast majority of power and authority came from Parliament. So they celebrated this. And they sort of carried that tradition to the colonies and elsewhere in the empire in terms of representative governments in the American colonies, across the Atlantic. So that was something that British subjects celebrated as, as one of the great tenants of being British.

AMBUSKE: But even if Britons on both sides of the Atlantic could all agree in principle on what it meant to be British, what that meant in practice, as Parliament attempted to tackle the very real problems of empire after the Seven Years’ War, was a much more difficult question. This was especially true for subjects living in Britain's older American colonies. Here’s Patrick Griffin:

GRIFFIN: Americans, of course, their colonies were not established under parliament, their colonies predated the Glorious Revolution. And so some of the arrangements they have are ones that were based upon the crown. And so agreements that had been kind of forged with the Crown had established these colonies. And so as they look at it from like a legal perspective, like, yeah, we understand parliament, they're not fools, we understand the Glorious Revolution, we consider ourselves heirs to the Glorious Revolution as well. You know, we too, are Protestant, commercial, maritime and free that was kind of more or less with the Glorious Revolution kind of put in place. But at the same time, we have different relationships to the center.

AMBUSKE: In the seventeenth century, the crown had granted corporate charters to create colonies like Virginia and Massachusetts Bay. Those charters conferred on settlers and their descendants the same rights as their fellow subjects in England. And in the case of conquered colonies like Jamaica, the crown issued royal proclamations to confirm those rights. For British Americans, Parliament might well be supreme, but they were connected to the British Empire through the crown.

AMBUSKE: As James Otis, Jr. argued in the months surrounding the passage of the Sugar Act:

OTIS, JR.: “Every British subject born on the continent of America, or in any other of the British dominions, is by the law of God and nature, by common law, and by act of parliament, (exclusive of all charters from the Crown), entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great-Britain.”

AMBUSKE: For Otis, those rights included the right to taxation with representation, something British Americans didn’t have in Parliament.

AMBUSKE: Yet, Grenville argued that the colonies did have representation. They were “virtually represented” in Parliament by virtue of living in the king’s American dominions. In that sense, they were no different than the vast majority of British subjects who owned no property, and could not vote, something very common in the eighteenth century, and yet were represented in Parliament by men who did own property.

AMBUSKE: And few British politicians doubted Parliament’s supreme authority. In fact, when Grenville first introduced the idea of stamp duties in March 1764, he shrewdly asked the House of Commons if any member wished to speak publicly against Parliament’s assumed right to tax the colonies. Unsurprisingly, no one did.

AMBUSKE: But just how far they should exercise that right remained in question. The differences between William Pitt, the de facto prime minister in the late 1750s who had borrowed enormous sums of money to win the war, and Grenville, who had to contend with the financial aftermath of Pitt’s decisions, show us how.

GRIFFIN: William Pitt, he's just like, No, no, Parliament is absolutely supreme, nobody debates that whatsoever. But we have to be careful how we're going to apply it because as he famously put it, the people in America are not the bastard children of England, they have rights to, and we have to recognize that so we have to kind of like era a little bit on that side. And then you have people like Grenville, he's just going to basically say, Oh, they've rights rights, forget about it. You know, Parliament is supreme Parliament supreme, here parliament is supreme there case closed, we can do whatever we want to do for the colonies. That's it. The stamp act is a good idea. We got to keep boots on the ground in America, this is the simplest way of paying for it. We sacrifice so much for these colonies. It's important that they pay up something and it's a pittance compared to what we're paying in the Metropole to kind of pay down the debt.

AMBUSKE: The British American reaction to the mere possibility of stamp duties – of direct taxes in the colonies – was anything but subtle:

KUKLA: The Americans get wind of this, and they go, Oh, my God, this is a dangerous precedent. We can't let him do this. Because if he can establish a Stamp Tax, then he can tax us for anything.

AMBUSKE: As the Edward Montague wrote to Williamsburg:

EDWARD MONTAGUE: “Every Mention of the parlim’ts Intention to lay an Inland Duty upon us gives us fresh apprehension of the fatal Consequences that may arise to Posterity from such a precedent.”

KUKLA: Virginia's immediate reaction in spring of 7864, when they get word through their colonial agent, that that Granville has announced the possibility of imposing stamp duties. Virginia's top legislators, Council and top people from the House of Burgesses meet together, And their immediate reaction in 7064, is this is horrible, this is a dangerous is a fatal precedent. It's just, you know, this is awful, do everything you can to to fight against it.

AMBUSKE: In London, colonial agents scrambled to meet with Grenville. In May 1764, they asked the prime minister if he was serious about his suggestion that the provinces tax themselves, and how much they would need to raise, in order to avoid Parliamentary action. Grenville was serious, he said, but before he gave the agents a figure, he wanted them – and by implication their respective assemblies – to acknowledge Parliament’s right to tax them. In his mind, this was the key to cementing British authority over the colonies and creating a pathway toward alleviating the empire’s war debt.

KUKLA: That's the under underlying issue. One of the reasons that he fastens upon the use of stamp duties is that they're not regulatory. Here's where, where he may have those larger debts in mind, because his notion is that if we can establish a clear precedent for taxing North Americans under the Stamp Act, once we've established that precedent, we can tax them as much as we want for anything.

AMBUSKE: Grenville’s conference with the colonial agents ended without their acknowledgment of Parliament’s absolute supremacy, or an agreement on the precise figure the colonies would need to raise to head off a stamp tax, only the need for further discussion.

AMBUSKE: The prime minister’s apparent unwillingness to provide an estimate of the revenue needed stifled colonial attempts to tax themselves anyway. In August 1764, the Massachusetts legislature urged Governor Francis Bernard to call a special session of the assembly toward that very end. But the governor refused. Like most royal governors, Bernard believed he had a duty to uphold Parliament’s will, although he could see the logic in the legislature’s request. Even so, as he wrote to a friend in London:

AMBUSKE: In other words, Grenville needed to tell the 26 British American colonies how much they would each need to contribute to the common imperial good.

AMBUSKE: But in some ways, that was beside the immediate point. There was no proposed act of Parliament for the colonial assemblies to pour over – only the suggestion of stamp duties and Grenville’s assertion of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. It wasn’t even until that August that Lord Halifax, the minister with oversight of the colonies, asked the provincial governors for a list of documents that might be made subject to stamp duties. 

KUKLA: And Grenville may have thought that he was being clever and secretive, but the Americans saw the danger immediately. One of the things that makes the Stamp Act crisis, so important in the long run, is that, we look at the the sequence of events in in March of 1764, in a budget speech, Granville says, we're thinking about stamp duties for next session. The Americans begin to react to this. Everything blows up.. It's not until March of 1765, that he actually submits legislation. So it's not until that spring of 1765, after a year of argumentation, it's not until this spring, that anybody can argue about the details of the legislation in the way that for example, they argued about sugar, should it be two pence? Should it be three pence? Should it be this or this this? None of those kinds of detailed provisions are at hand to be debated. All they can debate is the abstract principle of the abstract constitutional principle.

AMBUSKE: As Autumn gave way to a winter of discontent, British Americans condemned the prospect of stamp duties in public and private, petitioned Parliament and the King against it without answer, and waited for news of what taxes the dawn of spring might bring. They learned their fate in the weeks following March 22, 1765, when Parliament passed the Stamp Act.

KUKLA: And by that time, you know, the Americans have been arguing against this unconstitutional principle for for a year. And now all of a sudden, they see the thing. It's 55 clauses. They're taxing everything. The only information that the Grenville administration wanted from the colonial governors was, let's make sure we get an F A complete list of all the documents that we could tax. They don't ask them like, how are people going to react, nah. What can we tax. I can't imagine what it must have felt like if you were an 18th century American, you pick up a newspaper, and you see an entire page devoted to all the taxes and we're going to do this on this, and another of the taxes, you're gonna have a tax on the newspaper, there's also going to be a tax on every advertisement in the newspaper.

KUKLA: The Stamp Act as it was adopted, required payment in hard currency. Many Americans don't have hard currency, they don't have coins in their pockets to pay this stuff.

AMBUSKE: Here’s Brad Jones.

JONES: the Stamp Act was virtually hated everywhere. It was, it was despised. It was a bad piece of legislation. It was not just the 13 colonies it was. It was not even just the 26 colonies, I would argue even mainland Britian didn't like the Stamp Act. It was a bad piece of legislation for a couple of reasons. One is certainly the way we understand it was bad was that it was politically a problem. It was an attempt to directly tax American colonists without their consent. And that's a narrative picked up across the British Atlantic that's not unique to the 13 colonies. Haligonians understood that Kingstonians understood that and I would argue any of the other colonies outside of the 13 Americans sort of colonists would have understood that but it was also understood that was also understood and mainland Britain. Glaswegians understood it to be politically a bad piece of legislation a dangerous precedent to allow a government to tax its people without their representation or without their consent. It was also economically problematic, the fear was that particularly when colonists began to resist the tax it was disrupting the prosperous British trade Atlantic trade.

JONES: There's a real fear amongst Glaswegian tobacco traders, that this could jeopardize their valuable trade.

KUKLA: As a matter of the practical terms the Stamp Act as a matter of public relations, it’s a disaster.

KUKLA: Just thinking about newspapers and American papermakers. Under the Stamp Act as it was adopted in 1765, they were expected to get the paper imported from Great Britain and use that. That's not going to be real popular with American paper manufacturers. It's certainly not popular with newspaper editors. Now similarly, there's all kinds of levels of stamps from from a half Penny all the way up to 10 shillings a 10 shilling stamp would go on on a college diploma. And then in between, there's all kinds of legal documents that order to be regarded as legitimate, the document has to have a stamp tax on it. The Stamp Act is going to alienate the attorneys. It's going to alienate the printers.

KUKLA: You're alienating the people who are most likely to shape opinion.

AMBUSKE: In North America, Virginians led the initial resistance movement, though somewhat unexpectedly. On May 29, 1765, a new member of the House of Burgesses named Patrick Henry, who had a penchant for oratory and theatricality, rose to speak in the house.

KUKLA: The Assembly of Virginia happens to be in session when the Abode arrives in Williamsburg, carrying the text of the Stamp Act. And the senior leadership of the House perceiving that there's just a few few few days left in the legislative session, we're already on record as opposing this. We don't have to react to it. It may be horrible, but we don't have to. They essentially don't do anything. Henry  is new to the house. Perhaps not aware of what previously had been done. And Henry, possibly with the assistance of a guy named Johnson, drafts, seven resolutions against the Stamp Act and begins to introduce them in in the House of Burgesses. He would introduce one and they debated and adopted and he introduced the second one, and they debate and each of these got more and more radical. And eventually, five of his seven resolutions get adopted. The fifth was by like one vote.

AMBUSKE: Henry’s fifth resolution declared that “the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the inhabitants of this Colony and that every Attempt to vest such Power in any person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.”

AMBUSKE: In 60 words, the Virginia House of Burgesses explicitly denied Parliament’s right to tax the king’s subjects in the colony.

AMBUSKE:  Henry spoke forcefully in favor of the resolutions on the floor of the House. Historians still debate precisely what he said. We have only one surviving eyewitness account,  the diary of an unknown person said to be a Frenchmen who was traveling in the colonies at the time. Various accounts of the speech circulated in private and print in the days and weeks that followed, but they generally agree on the basic shape of Henry’s words:

KUKLA: Caesar had his Brutus, Charles had his Cromwell and George the Third, and at that point, somebody Christ treason, and Henry says, and George, the third may profit by their example.

KUKLA: And the next day the house comes together and by this time Henry has gone home, and the house comes together and they rescind the fifth one so they actually only passed four And that's at that point that Governor Fauquier leans on the local printer to keep him from publishing the resolutions that were passed by the by the House of Burgesses. So he doesn't publish them. And as a result of that, Henry and his friends circulate all seven of their resolutions to other printers. It gets first printed in in Rhode Island, and it gets picked up everywhere else. Basically, the seventh resolution is saying, essentially, that this is an unconstitutional action and that anybody in in the colonies who disagrees on that point as an enemy of the people. Henry's resolutions get circulated.

KUKLA: And the Virginia resolves against the stamp acts sort of electrify the colonies in the spring of 1765.

AMBUSKE: The king’s ministers learned of the Virginia assembly’s actions and a growing colonial resistance movement to their considerable dismay.

KUKLA: They were horrified, absolutely horrified. And in fact, Grenville corresponds with one of his lieutenants, essentially, have you read what the Virginians said, my God. They were just absolutely horrified because this was a complete affront to parliament's authority.

AMBUSKE: In Rhode Island, lawyer and politician Martin Howard tried to persuade his fellow British Americans that Parliament was in the right. Howard was a member of the Newport Junto, a group of men who had very specific imperial aims. Here’s Abby Chandler, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

CHANDLER: The Newport Junto is an organization that comes into existence in 1764. Martin Howard is the best known of the group, and certainly the most outspoken of the group and they are supporting and advocating for various causes. Their original cause was advocating for Rhode Island to become a Royal Colony instead of a charter colony. Rhode Island's internal politics are extremely tense at this period. And there are huge battles between different political factions for the position of Governor. And Howard and the other members of the Newport Junto thought that if Rhode Island became a Royal Colony, their governor would be appointed by the king, and that this might cut down on internal tensions.

AMBUSKE: From Howard’s point of view, Prime Minister Grenville was right to argue that the colonies enjoyed “virtual representation” in Parliament. In 1765, Howard published a pamphlet to defend the Sugar and Stamp Acts, entitled A letter from a gentleman at Halifax, to his friend in Rhode-Island.

CHANDLER: One of the things he does in this pamphlet is to define his idea of how political rights work, for subjects in the British Empire. And he explains that all British subjects have personal rights, and then they have political rights. He quotes John Locke, that all British subjects are titled to life, liberty, and estate.

CHANDLER: Political rights, however, Howard believes are tied to political entities, rather than the individual. And so a colony has certain political rights. And Howard argues that if Parliament had intended the individual colonies to have direct representation of Parliament, than they would have set it up that way. So part of what Martin Howard is doing is calling out his fellow British North American colonists saying you're demanding something that most people in Britain don't even have, this is the system. This is how it works be happy with your personal rights of life, liberty, and estate.

AMBUSKE: But Howard was in the extreme minority. Here’s Jon Kukla:

KUKLA: Steven Johnson, in Connecticut, wrote a pamphlet that basically outline the American position very well. “If the British parliament have a right to impose a Stamp Tax, then they have the right to lay on us a poll tax, a land tax, a malt tax, a cider tax, a window tax, a smoke tax, and why not tax us for the light of the sun, the air we breathe and the brown ground we're buried in?”

AMBUSKE: Prime Minister Grenville stood firm on the question of Parliament’s supreme authority. Unfortunately for this able parliamentarian, by July 1765, the king’s patience with the man had worn out.

KUKLA: Grenville is thrown out of office doesn't have anything to do with the Stamp Act, it has to do with the fact that George III is just so annoyed with him that he wants to get him out of it. He just doesn't want to have to deal with his man anymore. And so he, fires Grenville and then looks around, looks around to try to find the next guy who can who can run the government for him. And he ends up with Earl of Rockingham, as the next prime minister.

AMBUSKE: Rockingham inherited a government trying to implement a complicated new tax law in a matter of mere months. 

KUKLA: The Stamp Act is is set up in the legislation, which passes in March of 1765. It's set up to go into effect in the colonies on November 1, 1765. They're going to try, they're gonna try to, to recruit and send 26 stamp officers, to the colonies to impose this incredibly unpopular tax on the American people in the course of a few months. I've seen correspondence from the bureaucrats in London in the stamp office. Who are badgering Grenville and his assistants, please, we need you to name the next guys. This is the summer, three, four months before this thing's supposed to take effect. There's at least a couple of vacant stamp officer positions. Now mind you, when you're a stamp officer, you need to take oaths and you need to post 1000 pound bond. And all that paperwork has to be taking into effect before you can administer the law. And then there's the fact that, you've just got that summer essentially, for the stamp bureaucrats to design the stamp, get them printed.

AMBUSKE: The stamps designed for the colonies looked similar to British stamps - a small, but ornate red-inked stamp with an image of a crown, but with the word “America” at the top. The amount of tax to be paid was at the bottom. The Pennsylvania Journal mocked the new stamp and the law by printing a stamp in the form of a skull and crossbones.

KUKLA: It’s just patently absurd that you're gonna try to do this, impose this kind of a detailed regimen of 3000 miles away.

KUKLA: When they're going to send this stuff over, it's huge, about just enormous amounts of stuff, we think of the stamp itself, it's like, maybe an inch, inch square, but you get enough of them, and particularly for the newsprint. So there were these huge shipments of, material that had to be brought from London during the summer of 1765 to the colonies, usually in, in Royal Navy vessels. 

AMBUSKE: With the Stamp Act scheduled to go into effect in November, British Americans faced the prospect of paying higher prices on newspapers, wills, playing cards, and land grants. In Nova Scotia, a colony largely funded by Parliament, a land boom, and the curious case of an Irish-born veteran of the Seven Years’ War named Alexander McNutt, helps us to understand what stamp duties meant in real terms.

ALEXANDRA MONTGOMERY: In the 1760s especially right before peace is declared. You start to see a lot of interest in Nova Scotia coming from Philadelphia, of all places. And this is new prior to this, most interest from the other colonies in Nova Scotian land was coming from New England, which is natural enough.

MONTGOMERY: I'm Dr Alexandra Montgomery. I am the manager of the Center for Digital History at Mount Vernon.

MONTGOMERY: But starting in the early 1760s you start seeing huge numbers of Philadelphians, wealthy Philadelphians, famous Philadelphians were talking about but Benjamin Franklin were talking about various mayors start to become really interested in the possibility of Nova Scotian land. This is largely led by a gentleman named Alexander McNutt. He is not a Philadelphian. He grows up in sort of back country, Virginia. He's a classic Scots Irish kind of guy, and he has connections in Nova Scotia and Alexander McNutt is a very colorful figure, to put it mildly. He is a guy who so he grows up in this sort of classic frontier environment in the Shenandoah Valley, and he ends up being posted in Nova Scotia during the war. And he almost has, like a religious experience. I imagine him sort of posted in Fort Cumberland, gazing out onto the land. And just you know, the scales fall from his eyes, and he sees his true vision, because he spends the rest of his life on a messianic voyage to spread the good word about Nova Scotia. He truly believes that it is his goal in life to make Nova Scotia into this Protestant, preferably Presbyterian, settler Paradise, and he takes this zeal with him in attempting to recruit all of these leading Philadelphia businessmen with quite a bit of success. He is able to create or get himself involved in many, many companies. And he is personally involved in the sale of at least a million acres of land in Nova Scotia in the mid 1760s

MONTGOMERY: I like to contrast Alexander McNutt with the Earl of Egmont. Alexander McNutt represents this sort of Empire of Liberty, nation of small holding farmers. McNutt feels incredibly strongly that land should be divided up. The purpose of the government is to expeditiously dispatch this land to families who will own land in Freehold, who will farm the land, who will practice religious freedom. For Protestants, you know, the limits of his religious freedom are quite clear. It should be for distributing as much land as possible to white smallholding families who will own that land. This is a very familiar vision. It's a very American Vision in a lot of ways.

MONTGOMERY: The Earl of Egmont represents a very different vision. So he is an aristocrat, as you might have guessed by his title. You know, it's not just for show, and what he wants to do is essentially create feudal land holdings in the colonies. He sees the colonies as an opportunity to recreate a style of landholding that, while still much more robust in the United Kingdom than it ever becomes in the colonies, is maybe on its way out. It's sort of a consciously retrograde idea about the creation of these manners, to the extent that Egmont is invoking, literally William the Conqueror, as he's talking about how he wants to divide up his land. He has this. There's this fantastic map of these land holdings that he gets in Nova Scotia, in the area that's around what's now to door, where he's divided it up into these neat little squares. And he's got all of these notes on the side that are basically like, I'm going to give this amount of land because this is the amount of land that the William the cooker gave to His followers to reward them, and in return, they will owe me service. I kind of see him as the weird vanguard of a bunch of people who are also much more interested in this land as creating manners in some sense, or at least landlordism, right being landlords. A lot of Nova Scotia counselors who are able to get really plum land grants, much to McNutt’s chagrin. They're imagining renters. They're imagining tenants. It's a very fundamentally different vision about how the Empire should work. It's an empire of strict hierarchy. It's an empire in which people who are close to power have the most control over the land, not necessarily people who are living on the land themselves. And it's these two visions that are really clashing.

AMBUSKE: But these two competing visions of empire in Nova Scotia could not escape the fact that if Nova Scotians obeyed the Stamp Act:

MONTGOMERY: It just makes things a lot more expensive, specifically land transactions. These kinds of transactions are some of the transactions that are specifically targeted by the Stamp Act for this additional cost, this additional duty. So from a very practical perspective, when the Stamp Act passes, costs are going to go way up.

AMBUSKE: With November 1st looming, it became a race against time for land speculators to secure land grants from the provincial government in Halifax.

MONTGOMERY: What ends up happening is in kind of a compromise between the British and Nova Scotian counselors who are who are signing the paperwork, is this all gets rushed through really quickly. And it gets rushed through on terms that are not great. And it's not really clear if the crown is going to agree, but it all gets pushed through as fast as possible, right on October 31 right before the Stamp Act comes into effect. So 2.5 million acres of Nova Scotian land gets granted away in a two week period before October 31 and the vast majority is sort of on the 29th 30th, 31st itself, just to try to push this all through, get over with not have to deal with either the sort of the taint or the practical extra cost of the Stamp Act.

AMBUSKE: The land speculators were right to worry. Unlike most of the mainland colonies, Nova Scotia administered the Stamp Act.

KUKLA: It was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that we have some newspapers that were printed in accord with the Stamp Act, and they ran out of paper

AMBUSKE: Here’s Brad Jones:

JONES: They are vocally critical in that they share in this kind of empire wide opposition to the Stamp Tax. But the local circumstances are such that it's very hard to resist it. Halifax is a British military outpost. There are several 1000 soldiers stationed there.

MONTGOMERY: And also, more importantly, I think, even in the presence of the military, is the fact that Parliament is paying all of the bills, like parliament is literally funding the existence of Nova Scotia.

JONES: So as a result of that the local government is kind of beholden to Parliament in ways that the 13 colonies aren't.

AMBUSKE: The new colony of East Florida administered the Stamp Act as well. So did Caribbean colonies like Jamaica.

KUKLA: There is a sharp distinction between the mainland colonies and the Caribbean colonies. The reason mostly has to do with the fact that the Caribbean islands perceive themselves as needing the force of the British Navy and Army in defending these small minorities of whites against large, large number of enslaved people. There's that fear that under undercuts the efforts on the part of the people who want to resist.

JONES: Jamaica is about 15,000 White colonists amongst about 200,000 enslaved Africans. So they also have fears that any kind of riots or popular assemblies or opposition provide opportunities for slaved Africans to revolt. So these very particular kind of local contexts, make it difficult for them to resist the tax but verbally or in print, they are critical of the tax. And it seems like other places understand that there's evidence suggests that colonists in the American colonies or even back in Britain understand the difficulties that Haligonians or Kingstonians are having resisting the tax. Some are critical some aren't of their behavior. They live in very different circumstances than certainly New York.

MONTGOMERY: My favorite little story about the Stamp Act coming to effect that involves Nova Scotia, is in New York in 1765, in December, the Nova Scotia, the new Nova Scotia papers arrived to the port of New York, and the reporting on this is just like so overblown, so incredibly scandalized. And it includes my favorite quote possibly ever from any publication, which is this one writer in the New York Gazette. He's talking about the appearance of the stamped Halifax paper, and he refers to it as quote, “the most noble, ignorable tragedy that could ever be tragedized since the creation of man,” which is just such an over-the-top quote, I think it really speaks to the height of the passions that people are feeling about the Stamp Act.

AMBUSKE: Local circumstances may have prevented Haligonians or Kingstonians from openly resisting the Stamp Act, but in the majority of the mainland colonies, passionate British Americans chose violence.

AMBUSKE: In the summer of 1765, newspapers began reporting the names of the men whom the king had appointed to distribute stamps in the colonies. If impassioned political arguments or petitions to London couldn’t put a stop to the Stamp Act, then perhaps mob action and rioting would.

KUKLA: What the Americans decide to do is they say, we've tried to argue against this, for all the period, you went ahead and adopted it anyway. Okay, now you enforce it, we're going to do two things. We're going to force the stamp officers to resign. And we're going to prevent any of the stamp materials from being brought ashore.

KUKLA: That's what they do. So starting in August of 1765, when the Bostonians intimidate Andrew Oliver into resigning. And, and up until early November, when the Virginians in early November of 1765. forced the resignation of their stamp officer between that time stamp officers all up and down the East Coast are being basically run out office with either threats of physical violence, or sometimes with physical violence.

KUKLA: At the few places where they're actually able to bring the stamps ashore, like in New York, they have to put them in, a castle at the foot of Manhattan and hide them away in order to keep the mob from getting them and burning them.

AMBUSKE: Here’s Abby Chandler.

CHANDLER: The actual actions taken in Rhode Island bear a very close resemblance to the actions taken around that same time in Boston. The men who are the Stamp Tax masters, so that's Andrew Oliver in Massachusetts, Augustus Johnston, who by the way is a member of the Newport Junto in Rhode Island, are under attack. We're going to hang people in effigy, do bad things to it are going to attack their houses that's consistent between the Stamp Act riots in Boston and the Stamp Act riots in Rhode Island.

CHANDLER: The thing that makes the Stamp Act riots in Rhode Island different is in most of the British colonies. The battle over the Stamp Act is between the royally appointed governors like Bernard in Massachusetts, and the locally elected legislature. The Royal Lee appointed governors are pro Stamp Act legislatures or anti but the thing with Rhode Island is it's a charter colony. The governor's locally elected and Samuel Ward is anti-Stamp Act. And the Rhode Island legislature is anti Stamp Act and the Stamp Act should not have been an issue in Rhode Island because of that. The thing that makes Rhode Island different is you have that pesky group, the Newport Junto. So you have private citizens advocating for the Stamp Act in Rhode Island, which makes the riots an even more intimate affair, because this isn't colonists attacking people appointed by the king. This is colonists attacking other colonists.

AMBUSKE: On August 26, the threat of violence forced Newport Junto members Martin Howard, Thomas Moffat, and Stamp Master Augustus Johnston to find refuge aboard the HMS Cygnet in Newport Harbor. Rioters hung effigies of the three men from gallows set up in the front of the courthouse, with a label affixed to Howard’s image calling him “That fawning, insidious, infamous miscreant and paracide.”

AMBUSKE: The mob later sacked Howard and Moffat’s homes. Johnston’s home was spared only because he pledged to resign his office. Not long after, Howard and Moffat sailed for Britain.

AMBUSKE: In October, New York rioters carried their protests right to the British government’s symbolic door step on the southern tip of Manhattan, where the governor’s residence and Fort George stood on Bowling Green. Here’s Wendy Bellion, the Biggs Chair in American Art History at the University of Delaware.

WENDY BELLION: The area of Bowling Green becomes very interesting. At the time of the Stamp Act. British colonists start to take action. They create a protest that involves a parade down to Bowling Green and includes effigies of the lieutenant governor who was called Cadwallader Colden together with the devil. They appear at Bowling Green, they rattle at the gates of the governor's house, they managed to get a hold of his carriage, and they bring the effigies and the carriage together to the center of Bowling Green, the space that is so closely associated with the Crown presents in lower Manhattan, and they light everything on fire.

AMBUSKE: George Mercer arrived home from London to an equally rude awakening. Mercer had been in the imperial capital lobbying the British government on behalf of the Ohio Company. Much to his family’s dismay, Mercer applied to Grenville for the position of Virginia’s stamp distributor, a decision he came to quickly regret. Cassandra Britt Farrell, Senior Map Archivist at the Library of Virginia, explains why

CASSANDRA FARRELL: He was well aware of the opposition to the Stamp Act, but he thought that because it was being enforced by the crown, and because they were British citizens, that the Virginia colonists would have come around and abide by the policies of the Stamp Act. He thought that they would eventually accept it, but I don't think he was aware of the real antagonistic opposition to it until he arrived in Williamsburg in October 1765.

AMBUSKE: Nearly two months before Mercer arrived home, he was already present in the northern Virginia town of Dumfries.

 FARRELL: In Dumfries on September 2, parade effigies of the Prime Minister George Grenville and the Crown appointed stamp direct distributor, George Mercer. They parade effigies of both men throughout town, and George Mercer's effigy is placed on a horse. Of course, he's not facing the front of the horse. He's facing the back of the horse, and there's a copy of the Stamp Act tied around his neck with a halter and the effigies are paraded through Tom freeze and they are keen. They're whipped, they're pillared, they're cropped, they're maimed, and they are burned.

AMBUSKE: Three weeks later, on September 24th, Grenville and Mercer paid a visit to the Westmoreland County Court House.

FARRELL: The effigies of Grenville and Mercer are placed in a cart. And that in itself is symbolically significant, because you would never, ever find Mercer or Granville being carted around. These are men who come from higher positions within the colony, wealthier families, and they would be riding on a horse, and they would have enslaved people with them, or servants. So there's no way that you would ever find them in a cart. And the effigies George Mercer has in his hand a slip of paper that says, “money is my God.” In the other hand he apparently has a slip of paper that's inscribed “slavery, I love.” And then on his breast, the effigies breast is displayed the phrase, “I am George Mercer, collector of stamps in Virginia,” and, of course, Granville, in the same cart his they have a message on the breast of his effigy that says, “infamous projector of American slavery.”

AMBUSKE: Few white Virginians watching the parade would have given much thought to the apparent contradiction between the political slavery they feared, and the actual slavery they wielded over Black people who were no doubt also in the crowd that day.

AMBUSKE: When Mercer entered Williamsburg on October 30th, he was confronted not by a mob of artisans and tradesmen as Andrew Oliver had been in Boston, but by a crowd of angry gentlemen.

FARRELL: The General Court is about to go into session on November 1. So you have a lot of people in town. You have members of the general court. You have attorneys who are representing their clients at the general court. You have merchants who are meeting. It's a great time to meet if you're a Virginia merchant, because you'll be meeting not only with other merchants, but with attorneys, Justices, it'd be a good time to meet with the lieutenant governor Fauquier, and so this is what he's walking into. And Governor Fauquier gives a the best account. He describes a situation where Mercer walks up and he's immediately confronted by Virginians who are unhappy, very unhappy, with the Stamp Tax, and they are very interested in finding out when he's going to resign from his position as and stamp distributor. He's trying to walk up the Capitol Street, and the lieutenant governor is at the coffee house waiting for him to arrive. And of course, he's not the only one in the coffee house. He describes merchants and members of the general court. And they're waiting, they're in drinking coffee too. And he describes hearing a code word when other people see Mercer show up, and this code word is used in the coffee shop. And all of a sudden, these folks leave, and then they end up confronting Mercer on the street, asking him questions. And of course, Mercer he's not answering questions to their satisfaction. At one point they actually start to rush him, and Fauquier has stepped to the side of the porch and come to his defense verbally. as it comes closer to five o'clock and night begins to fall, Fauquier asked Mercer to accompany him back to the governor's palace, where Fauci here was residing, and it's there that they had a conversation, Fauquier encouraged him not to resign, out of fear, necessarily, because he knew that Mercer's family, who was indeed concerned for his safety, was strongly encouraging him to resign, and Mercer had told the crowd that he would give them an answer about whether or not he was going to resign before the Stamp Act went into effect. The next day he does announce his resignation to the public in Williamsburg.

AMBUSKE: Mercer’s resignation closed the general court.

FARRELL: The courts couldn't operate without stamped paper, and because Mercer was not going to distribute the paper, that it shut down the general court. And so the General Court adjourned until April 1766, and other county courts did not meet, whether for whether or not they did not agree, because in Westmoreland, they announced they thought it was unconstitutional and they weren't going to abide by it, and therefore they weren't going to meet. But a lot of the county courts did not meet. And so you have, justice delayed in Williamsburg and in Virginia because the Stamp Tax can't be distributed.

AMBUSKE: While British Americans harassed would-be-stamp distributors, burned prime ministers and colonial officials in effigy, and destroyed property, some members of the colonial elite gathered in New York City to discuss the crisis.

AMBUSKE: In June, the Massachusetts assembly circulated a letter calling for a congress of delegates to present a united front against the Stamp Act. In the mid-eighteenth century, the word “congress” simply meant “a meeting.” When elected delegates from nine colonies met in New York that October, the Stamp Act Congress had no legal or constitutional powers, nor did it claim any.

AMBUSKE: The governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia refused to convene their assemblies to elect delegates, leaving those colonies unrepresented. Nova Scotia and New Hampshire declined to send representatives. And without assemblies of their own, Quebec, and East and West Florida had no means to elect delegates anyway.

AMBUSKE: But the delegates who did assemble in New York produced a series of resolutions that captured the sentiments of most British Americans, even if local circumstances shaped how their individual colonies responded to the Stamp Act.

AMBUSKE: In a series of fourteen, carefully worded resolutions, the delegates affirmed their allegiance to George III, and acknowledged the colonies’ subordination to Parliament, but stated plainly that without representation, Parliament had no right to tax them without their consent.

AMBUSKE: But if Parliament remained unconvinced by constitutional arguments about its own supremacy, then perhaps it would listen to arguments about trade. As the delegates noted, “as the Profits of the Trade of these Colonies ultimately center in Great-Britain, the Restrictions imposed by several late Acts of Parliament on the Trade of these Colonies, will render them unable to purchase the Manufactures of Great-Britain.”

AMBUSKE: In other words, if everyone could agree that trade contributed to the common imperial good, then Parliamentary laws that ground trade to a halt hurt all the king’s subjects. During the crisis, British Americans did engineer some trade boycotts with modest success, yet loose enforcement and the willingness of merchants and ship captains to put to sea anyway without stamped papers muted their effect. Nevertheless:    

KUKLA: There's a wonderful sense in which yet another stupidity about the Stamp Act is that it helps the Americans enforce the boycott,

KUKLA: If you don't use stamps, technically, you can't make these transactions, because the papers that are supposed to go along with the goods that you're exporting should have stamps on them.

AMBUSKE: Despite all the violence and all the principled rhetoric, trade brought the Stamp Act crisis to an end where it began: in London.

AMBUSKE: Although the king’s ministers refused to entertain the Stamp Act Congress’s petition, the Marquis of Rockingham, the new and politically weak prime minister, began searching for a resolution to the imperial crisis. And pressure from British merchants offered him a way out.

KUKLA: Two things happen with Rockingham. one is he's inclined to try to bring this crisis to an end. And the second thing is that he and Ben Franklin and a bunch of others, essentially arrange for a whole series of hearings. Now they're not listening to the Americans, but they are listening to British artisans and manufacturers in places like Manchester and Leeds and such who have been thrown out of work by the fact that the Americans are boycotting British goods. These are people who are making socks, and China and ceramics and linens.

KUKLA: Between those hearings, and the Rockingham administration's policies they bring about a repeal of the Stamp Act, in 1766.

AMBUSKE: Parliament repealed the Stamp Act on March 18, 1766, just over two years since George Grenville first mentioned the possibility of stamp duties in the House of Commons. Here’s Brad Jones:

JONES: Remarkably, when it's repealed in 1766. Everyone celebrates. There are parades in Glasgow, to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act, the largest celebration of the repeal, the Stamp Act occurs in London. The Stamp Act crisis is not just the story of the passage of the Stamp Act, it's also the story of the repeal of the Stamp Act. And that is hugely important in the minds of British subjects. They saw themselves as members of a free and representative, government and society, and that they celebrated the monarchy and the British Constitution, and this kind of represented or constitutional monarchy. They still were convinced 18th century British subjects that humans are innately corrupt and prone to self-interest. That meant that people with power had tried to consume it. And in that context, we would have tyranny. They weren't naive about this, they believe they created a system of government that was best able to protect against the sort of natural tendencies of man. But here's the beauty of the stamp back crisis. They did something really bad, in the eyes of British subjects everywhere that was tyrannical, that was oppressive, was arbitrary. But then they repeal it, and the king actually is paraded to Parliament to sign the repeal the Stamp Act like evidence that sure, government's going to do bad things. That's the nature of man but if we speak up, if we turn to newspapers and write essays and editorials, if we share those essays, essays and editorials, or reports of riots and protests across the Atlantic, that we can get our government to recognize their mistakes. And so the repeal is really a vindication of the greatness of this British Protestant Whig identity.

 AMBUSKE: British Americans everywhere rejoiced at the Stamp Act’s repeal. They had defended their rights and the rights of the king’s subjects everywhere. Boston learned of the repeal on May 16th, 1766. Three days later, Bostonians illuminated public buildings, Governor Bernard entertained guests, and a wealthy merchant named John Hancock supplied the common rabble with 126 gallons of Madeira wine.

AMBUSKE: In New York, the general assembly voted to commission an equestrian statue of King George III, whom they credited with helping to end the Stamp Act crisis, and one of William Pitt, who had treated the colonies so well during the Seven Years’ War, and who had urged the Stamp Act’s repeal in Parliament.

AMBUSKE: In their euphoria, in their toasts, in their parades, and in their general merriment, British Americans hardly noticed a second act of Parliament, passed on the same day as the hated act’s repeal.

AMBUSKE: It was called “The Declaratory Act,” and it declared that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I’m your host, Jim Ambuske. Head to r2studios.org for a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading. Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick. Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent. Our lead audio editor is Curt Dahl of CD Squared. Amber Pelham and Alexandra Miller are our graduate assistants. Our thanks to Jon Kukla, Patrick Griffin, Brad Jones, Abby Chandler, Alexandra Montgomery, Wendy Bellion, and Cassandra Britt Farrell for sharing their expertise with us in this episode. Thanks also to our voice actors Adam Smith, Mills Kelly, and Beau Robbins. Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.