The Blanchard House Blog

What do you do when you disagree with a new tax?  Do you write angry letters?  Stage protests?  Demolish a government official’s private home?  Threaten those same officials with bodily harm (or worse)?

These sound like things that happen elsewhere, but they’re not.  Americans in 1765 did just that to protest the Stamp Act imposed on them by the British Parliament.  Those and other less dramatic reactions are covered in Edmund S. Morgan & Helen M. Morgan’s 1953 book The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution.

As the Morgans demonstrate, reaction to the Stamp Act was not all tar and feathers – in fact it generated a range of reactions on both sides of the Atlantic; not every Englishman favored it, and not every American was against it. It was less a debate about taxes as a question about who possessed the right to tax and, more to the point, how Americans fit into the British Empire.

There are several stories here that weren’t included in our school history books.  For one, some Americans (particularly provincial governors) believed that Parliament had a right to tax Americans, but they had not sufficiently established that right.  To do that a few people (including Massachusetts’ governor Francis Bernard) wrote suggesting that all private colonial charters be revoked and each of the colonies reestablished as a Royal colony.  The counter argument said Parliament did not have the right to tax colonial Americans because there could not be taxation without elected representation (there’s more to it than that, but it’s close).  However, it was generally agreed that Parliament could pass legislation that affected colonial America, just not laws that included taxes (which some saw as contradictory and others thought was perfectly rational).  And this was just the beginning.

Beyond the political debates, the Morgans explore the actions and inactions of Lord Grenville (author of the act who never got around to officially informing the Americans about the Stamp Act’s passage, what it was supposed to do, or how much money they were supposed to raise with it), how the Sons of Liberty formed and worked behind the scenes controlling the mob violence which scared colonial officials from enforcing the act, and finally how the separate colonies started to work together to oppose the act (even though it was really concerned British merchants who swayed Parliament to repeal the act).

No matter which side of the argument they favored, you’ll find the Morgans’ Stamp Act Crisis is really the story of British subject behaving badly for a good reason.