HIST-116: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Lecture 5 - Outraged Colonials: The Stamp Act Crisis [January 26, 2010]

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Albany Congress of 1754 [00:00:00]

Professor Joanne Freeman:…So let's just look for a few minutes at what happened in that Albany Congress before we move on to the events that end up surrounding the Stamp Act. I think I mentioned at the very end of the lecture that nine colonies were invited to the Albany Congress: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. …Colonies further to the south weren't invited because they were viewed as being too far away from the probable cause of conflict to invite, and New Jersey and Virginia decided not to come because it seemed too expensive to send delegates, which again tells you how even at a time where people thought there was some kind of a crisis.

The Albany Plan of Union was the most detailed proposal to create a union among the American colonies ever attempted before the Revolution. However, the ending of this will not be surprising. Colonial legislatures were not too excited by this idea for two reasons. Some colonial legislators denounced it as an attack on the authority of the King. Others were afraid that it would undermine colonial charters, so although it tried to address both halves of this equation, people protested for both reasons. So not surprisingly, it failed, and as Benjamin Franklin put it at the time — He was extremely frustrated. Right? He had the idea. Franklin's probably thinking 'oh, I had this idea. It seemed like a good idea. It might actually go into effect.' No. So as he put it at the time, "Everyone cries a union is necessary but when they come to the manner and form of the union their weak noodles are perfectly distracted." That's a very Franklinesque kind of comment. "Weak noodles" is also not a phrase you see in that many sort of [laughs] documents from the time period. So Albany Plan of Union, for one reason or another, fails like other attempts at colonial unity that sort of faded away.

The cartoon appeared along with Franklin's editorial about the "disunited state" of the colonies, and helped make his point about the importance of colonial unity. At the time, there was a superstition that a snake which had been cut into pieces would come back to life if the pieces were put together before sunset. APStudent.com

Chapter 2. British Budget Post-French and Indian War, and the Sugar Act [00:09:34]

As we're going to see in lectures coming up and even partly in today's lecture, it would end up taking a crisis that threatened not just colonial well-being, but also what colonists perceived to be their rights, to inspire the colonists to really band together in shared purpose as British-American colonists. And that brings us to the real topic of today's lecture, which is the Stamp Act crisis.

Now as I mentioned before — I think it's one or two lectures ago — before this crisis, with the close of the French and Indian War, colonial love and respect for things English was at a real high because during that war the colonists had fought alongside English soldiers against England's long-time enemy, the French, and had won. So the colonists after the French and Indian War are at a moment of high patriotism, but of course what they couldn't foresee was the chain of events that were going to be set off by the French and Indian War. The Crown had spent vast amounts of money on the war — money that somehow was going to have to be regained — and this sort of basic economic reality was going to end up launching a debate about colonial rights and privileges that obviously down the road is going to have some pretty big consequences.

And now we're going to basically look at what happens in response to this budgetary crisis about all the money spent in fighting the French and Indian War, and it begins with the opening of the 1764 budget debate in the House of Commons and so — It always begins — It begins with a budget. It begins with a budget problem, and George Grenville, who is the King's Prime Minister, is the cause. And Grenville is given the task of figuring out how to fund this enormous war debt.

…So he established new taxes on stamps; he taxed windows — and actually those of you who have been to England and you've probably seen some buildings where the windows were bricked in; that was to avoid the window tax. Right? [laughs] 'I don't want to pay a tax on my window, so I will eliminate my window by covering it over.' …And even the King reduced his household expenses. Right? Oh, [laughs] even the King decided not to buy the really expensive kind of whatever it is he was buying. 'I'll go down one grade.' I don't know how much he reduced his expenses but he tried, so the moral of this is — England is taxed first.

But next, logically enough, Grenville turned to the colonies. Now he didn't think and he didn't argue that the colonies should be paying for, generally speaking, the English national debt. However, there was a standing army of ten thousand men that had been left behind in the colonies after the war to protect the colonies from the French that were still there, to protect them from Native Americans, maybe to protect them from the Spanish that were also somewhere there on the continent. And Grenville did feel that the colonies should help pay for that — for that army left behind. He also thought that colonial taxes were relatively low, and he knew that smuggling with the French during the war with the French had been a little bit rampant in the colonies during the French and Indian War. It's not a good thing.

So Grenville decided that he would try to get some revenue from the colonies to support the standing army that's in the colonies. And the first thing that he did, a sort of a logical thing to do based on what I just told you, he decided he was going to try to stamp out smuggling. He was going to try and at least stop something that shouldn't be happening — and money was leaking out through smuggling. But once he began to focus on this problem, it became easy to see why smuggling was so widespread.

Colonial customs collectors, who were supposed to be in the colonies attending to their duties, collecting customs, often left the colonies and went back to England and left their deputies in charge back in the colonies…There were some of them that just allowed the smuggling to happen, rather than collecting customs fees. So you have a leaky system. So Grenville — looking at what's going on here, discovers the source of the smuggling problem — orders the collectors to get back to the colonies. 'Please. This is your job. You must go back to the colonies. I'm really sorry but you must go back and do your job.'…

Now these are pretty mild steps. Right? 'Smuggling isn't supposed to be happening so I am going to act against smuggling.' It's not an enormous strike by Grenville, but still, it certainly would have indicated to the colonists that this period of salutary neglect of colonial trade might be shifting into something else. Customs collectors had to do their job; smuggling needed to be suppressed; and people who were caught violating trade laws had to travel for their trial to a Vice-Admiralty court in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Okay. That was highly unpopular, not that Nova Scotia is — anything wrong with Nova Scotia. However, if you are a person who is now being caught for doing something you've always been doing, smuggling, and some official decides he's going to sort of come after you and make you pay for that, you needed to have a trial in Nova Scotia. You needed to post bond yourself for the cost of the trial, and at these trials, a Vice-Admiralty court does not have a jury. We're going to come back to that, but obviously for all of these reasons this would not be a popular thing. Clearly, Grenville was serious about clamping down on smuggling.

So lump together all of those things: all of those duties, all of the new duties, the changes in the cost of imported goods and the things that no longer were going to be allowed to be imported in to the colonies. That all gets known under the sort of big name, the Sugar Act of 1764. The Sugar Act of 1764. In England it was also known logically enough as the American Revenue Act. [laughs] It's a good way to remember exactly what it was supposed to be doing…

So Grenville thinks 'oh, okay, probably this act all in all might balance itself out; it won't be so bad.' But the colonists only saw that the English suddenly seemed to be putting teeth into the imperial system to really enforce rules and regulations. And in enforcing these rules and regulations, they were demanding that violators travel to Nova Scotia at their own cost, posting bond for their own trials even if they were innocent, and as I mentioned before this Vice-Admiralty court in Nova Scotia, which basically is a court for crimes at sea, did not have a jury.

At about the same time in 1764, Grenville also decided he's going to clamp down on colonial currency, because during the war several colonies and especially Virginia had issued vast amounts of paper money. And Grenville basically — He's trying to assert control over the monetary system too. So in 1764, he passes the Currency Act, and the Currency Act says the colonies can't issue money; that any act passed by a colonial legislature that violates this act is null and void; and that any colonial governor who consented to such an act on the part of the colonies — any colonial governor that allows his colony to produce currency — would be fined a thousand pounds, which is a huge amount of money at that point, would be dismissed from office, and would be ineligible from any public office in future. Okay. That's obviously a serious — 'We really, really, really mean this about the whole currency issue. We're putting some serious punishments on the line here.'

Chapter 3. Colonial Responses to the Early Acts, and the Stamp Act [00:22:25]

…So first, obviously they're alarmed at the sudden clamping down on what in their eyes at least had been a working system. Right? 'Everything has been okay. The system's working. We're profiting from what we're doing. The Crown, the empire, is profiting too. It's working perfectly well.' Now all of a sudden things are being changed and teeth are being put in where there weren't teeth before. Second, informed that they had to go to Nova Scotia if they smuggled and that there'd be no jury during their trial, they began to feel like second-class citizens being denied a basic fundamental British right of a trial by jury. Third, they were alarmed at the implications of the Currency Act because the implications are, if you think about it, Grenville basically saying he can nullify an act passed by a colonial assembly. That's — in the minds of the colonists — a pretty alarming precedent. And then finally, fourth, colonists were also alarmed that these new duties and these new acts that are being enforced were largely intended to fund a standing army in the colonies, a standing army that Parliament saw as being protective, but you can also see how the colonists might have seen this as a threat. Right? 'Well, if we don't listen to all of this stuff, there is a standing army here that we're actually funding.' So the colonists could have seen that armed force as a sign of tyranny, as a threat to enforce colonial cooperation.

… Clearly, the main problem here isn't just financial. We don't have a lot of people who are just irked that they have to pay more money. More important, it's the meaning of what's going on that's upsetting the colonists. It's the ways in which their rights, as that petition put it, as natives of Britain, seemingly are being violated as well as the sense on the part of these colonists that they can't figure out yet quite how to voice their grievances. They don't have a direct representative in Parliament, they're upset, they're trying to figure out what to do about it — but I think that little hole in the system was also revealing itself at this point.

…Grenville continued along with his revenue plan, and in March of 1765 he proposed and Parliament passed the Stamp Act. The Stamp Act said that stamped paper had to be used for all kinds of documents, for legal documents, for college diplomas, for land deeds, for contracts, for

bills of sale, for liquor licenses, for playing cards, pamphlets, newspapers, almanacs, broadsides. All kinds of paper products now needed to be using this special stamped paper — and this special stamped paper cost more. So basically, the Stamp Act is placing a tax on all of these items by making people buy stamped paper for them, and stamped paper is more expensive.

So what's significant about the Stamp Act: It's the first direct tax levied by Parliament directly upon the colonists. It's not a duty on shipping. It's a tax levied by Parliament directly upon the colonists and what they're purchasing in the colonies. So basically, if you needed a legal document, if you were printing newspapers, you had to buy stamped paper from special stamp agents who were appointed by the Crown.

Chapter 4. Limited Liberties in Virtual Representation and the Stamp Act [00:30:50]

Now back to Grenville, Mr. Stamp Act. He's passing multiple acts trying to get some control over colonial finance. And from his point of view, he's doing this to pay for the protection of the colonies themselves. So the money being raised from all of these things actually would have gone into a fund for defense of the colonies — and even when you take all of these fundraising activities together, all of the money from all of these duties and taxes added up to only about a third of the cost of maintaining that colonial military establishment. But to the colonists, they were being taxed without their consent, and their rights to some basic fundamental British rights were being abridged; their basic rights as English subjects were being attacked.

And this is important to note because I think we all have 'no taxation without representation' sort of running through our head. Right? That's what the Revolution is about — as though the Revolution is all about people who are angry about paying taxes. But obviously it's about much more than that. We're talking about fundamental rights being violated, people feeling that there's something more than just, 'I don't like paying taxes' — but it's what that means, what this whole way of operating suggests and implies about fundamental rights about the position of the colonists within the empire.

Now, the British response to colonial grumbling about these measures was to argue that colonists were virtually represented in Parliament — virtual representation — that in Parliament there were members who represented the entire British realm, and so the colonists were virtually represented. And the argument would have been: there were also people in England proper who did not get to directly vote for their own representatives in Parliament, so colonial rights of representation aren't under attack. What's happening in the colonies isn't that different from what happened to some people who would have been in England proper.

Library of Congress

This image depicts Britain’s constraining of colonial rights. The figure that represents Britain is aiming a rifle at the figures that represent the colonies and is demanding that they deliver their property to England.

As someone argued at the time, in England such an assertion about virtual representation might be true because a member of Parliament probably had similar interests to other inhabitants of England, but what would a member of Parliament know of colonial interests? And even worse, as some colonists reasoned, maybe members of Parliament might actually have interests that were opposed to the colonists'. Maybe they'd actually want to tax the colonies more, so that they themselves would have to pay less.

So basically at the heart of these colonial grievances were assumptions about British rights and British liberties. Liberties were rooted in property. At the time, a slave would have been defined as someone who depended entirely on the will of others, so to be free and to be independent you needed to be in control of your own property. Directly taxing without consent seemed to threaten colonial property rights and — again — to fundamentally attack basic English liberties.

We have the first direct tax from parliament on colonists, and it might be the precedent for more such things. We have violation of colonial rights to a trial by jury. We have a seeming attack on the colonial economy, where things are suddenly being regulated in some way that they haven't seemed to be before. We have the threat of directly overriding colonial legislation and legislatures.

So you can see why all of these things would have been pretty alarming, but there were also two important unintended outcomes of the Stamp Act, in addition to all of those raised fears. Unintended outcome number one: Because the Stamp Act attacked all of the colonies equally, it actually helped to join them together in shared cause. And second, unintended outcome number two: by attacking people who used paper particularly — right? — lawyers using legal documents, newspaper writers and printers, merchants, ship owners — the act also attacked, specifically, the most vocal and prestigious colonists, in addition to everybody else. So it was attacking people who had the means to protest, to say what they were upset about legally — in

writing — so it was easy for people — they were logically the people who would make the loudest protest.

Chapter 5. Patrick Henry on the Stamp Act and Conclusion [00:36:02]

So now in this climate of increasing anxiety on the part of the colonists, we arrive at a Revolutionary War moment that most Americans know: Patrick Henry. Patrick Henry's dramatic declarations in the Virginia House of Burgesses on May 30th and 31st of 1765. And what he's doing at the time — We all know "Give me liberty or give me death," but we don't really focus on why he says that. He actually was protesting against the implications of the Stamp Act. Ultimately in May of 1765, the Virginia House of Burgesses did end up passing some resolutions that are ultimately known as the Virginia Resolutions.

And the Virginia Resolutions said that the colonists had come to Virginia with equal rights to all British subjects and that they still retained them; that Virginians alone had the right to directly tax Virginians; and that only those who would be affected by taxes had the right to pass them. I'll repeat that one more time. Virginia Resolutions, May 1765 — the colonists had come to Virginia with equal rights to all British subjects; they still retained them; Virginians alone had the right to directly tax Virginians; and only those who would be affected by taxes had the right to pass them.

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