R.J. White On The Stamp Act Of 1765

R.J. White, A Short History of England

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1967), pp. 207-211.

When George Grenville, a pedantic, lawyerly man, highly respected by the House of Commons, took charge of [King George III’s] affairs in succession to Lord Bute in 1763, there were soon to be heard the first faint but ominous crepitations of revolution beyond the seas.

Grenville's Stamp Act, levying a duty on stamped paper, passed unobtrusively enough through a Parliament athirst for an American revenue.

It was thought that the colonists should help to foot the bill for the war which had removed the French menace in North America and to maintain an army of 10,000 men against the resurgence of French power and the depredations of the Indian tribes, very real dangers with Choiseul’s expansion of the French navy and the Pontiac rising of 1763.

Grenville wanted £60,000 from the Americans as a contribution to the total of £350,000 per annum required for the maintenance of a defence force in North America.

The National Debt stood at £140,000,000 in 1763 [equal to £1,586,000,000,000 today, Ed.], and it weighed to the extentof £18 per head on Englishmen as compared with 18 shillings per head per annum on the colonists.

Country gentlemen paying a land tax of 4 shillings in the £ thought themselves to be the most highly taxed people in the world, and American taxation was sweet music in their ears.

There was no question of the British Parliament’s right to tax the colonies.

If they did not send representatives to Parliament, nor did a great many other tax-paying people in the King’s dominions. The Solicitor-General had given a perfectly clear and correct ruling on that as long ago as 1724. And when Lord Rockingham repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, the repeal was accompanied by a Declaratory Act reasserting the theoretical right of Parliament to tax the colonies. . . .

Grenville’s Stamp Act was one item in a whole series of measures by which he proposed to increase the revenue from America: most of them were directed to the reduction of smuggling and the cost of collection of duties. . . .

As for the stamp duty itself, he summoned the colonial agents in London and asked them to propose alternative suggestions. They failed to do so, and only then did he go ahead. That it aroused large-scale opposition was not because it was ‘the last straw’ but rather because it was, along with all his other measures, in such strong contrast with the policy of ‘salutary neglect’ which had prevailed vis-à-vis the colonies for a hundred years.

It was particularly ill conceived as a revenue-raising measure in that it was calculated especially to aggravate the most lively and vocal element in colonial society those people who had occasion to require stamp-bearing paper, attorneys, journalists, publicans, all persons who had a hand in shaping public opinion. . . .

As regards sovereignty, the Americans were agnostics. They had stopped thinking with John Locke, for whom all government was limited government.

They were not simply opposed to the Stamp Act or the imposition of taxation without representation.

They refused to be taxed by anyone, and they wanted America to themselves.

They had shown their consciousness of what later was to be called America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ in their inimical attitude to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 imposing limits upon their westward expansion.

By the Quebec Act of 1774 the British government sealed its infamy in American eyes by continuing the undemocratic government of the old French province by an appointed governor and council, by extending the frontier to the Ohio River and the Mississippi, by restoring French civil law, and (most sinister of all to New England Puritans!) pledging the British government to religious toleration for the Roman Catholics of Quebec.

The fear that ‘hordes of Popish slaves’ in Canada would infect the liberal, enlightened, New England Dissenters (the sons of Protestant freedom who had left England to get away from the crypto-Popery of Laud), possibly nay, probably instituting the Inquisition in Philadelphia with a St Bartholomew’s massacre to follow after, was perhaps less influential than the prospective ruin of Philadelphia merchants (among whom were such men as George Washington and Patrick Henry) by the extension of the southern boundary of Quebec to the Ohio River. Once more, western land speculators felt the stranglehold laid upon them previously by the Proclamation of 1763.

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