What Was the Colonists Main Objection to the Stamp Act?
The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first internal taxation levied directly on American colonists by the British Parliament. The act, which imposed a revenue enhancement on all paper documents in the colonies, came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years' State of war (1756-63) and looking to its Northward American colonies as a revenue source.
Arguing that merely their own representative assemblies could tax them, the colonists insisted that the deed was unconstitutional, and they resorted to mob violence to intimidate stamp collectors into resigning. Parliament passed the Postage Act on March 22, 1765 and repealed it in 1766, but issued a Declaratory Human activity at the same time to reaffirm its authority to pass any colonial legislation it saw fit. The issues of taxation and representation raised past the Stamp Deed strained relations with the colonies to the point that, 10 years subsequently, the colonists rose in armed rebellion against the British.
Why The Postage stamp Act Was Passed
British Parliament passed the Postage Deed to help replenish their finances after the costly Seven Years' War with France. Part of the revenue from the Stamp Act would be used to maintain several regiments of British soldiers in N America to maintain peace between Native Americans and the colonists. Moreover, since colonial juries had proven notoriously reluctant to find smugglers guilty of their crimes, violators of the Postage stamp Act could be tried and convicted without juries in the vice-admiralty courts.
Raising Revenue
The Vii Years' War (1756-63) ended the long rivalry between France and Britain for command of North America, leaving Britain in possession of Canada and France without a footing on the continent. Victory in the war, however, had saddled the British Empire with a tremendous debt. Since the war benefited the American colonists (who had suffered 80 years of intermittent warfare with their French neighbors) equally much as anyone else in the British Empire, the British government decided that those colonists should shoulder part of the war's cost.
U.k. had long regulated colonial trade through a system of restrictions and duties on imports and exports. In the commencement half of the 18th century, however, British enforcement of this organization had been lax. Starting with the Sugar Human action of 1764, which imposed new duties on saccharide and other goods, the British government began to tighten its reins on the colonies. Shortly thereafter, George Grenville (1712-lxx), the British beginning lord of the treasury and prime government minister, proposed the Stamp Act; Parliament passed the deed without contend in 1765.
Curlicue to Continue
Instead of levying a duty on trade goods, the Postage stamp Human action imposed a directly revenue enhancement on the colonists. Specifically, the act required that, starting in the autumn of 1765, legal documents and printed materials must acquit a revenue enhancement stamp provided by commissioned distributors who would collect the tax in commutation for the stamp. The law practical to wills, deeds, newspapers, pamphlets and even playing cards and dice.
The Roots of Colonial Resistance
Coming in the midst of economical hardship in the colonies, the Postage Human activity angry vehement resistance. Although most colonists continued to take Parliament's authority to regulate their trade, they insisted that only their representative assemblies could levy straight, internal taxes, such equally the one imposed by the Stamp Act. They rejected the British government'southward argument that all British subjects enjoyed virtual representation in Parliament, fifty-fifty if they could not vote for members of Parliament.
The colonists also took exception with the provision denying offenders trials by jury. A vocal minority hinted at dark designs behind the Stamp Human action. These radical voices warned that the taxation was office of a gradual plot to deprive the colonists of their freedoms and to enslave them below a tyrannical regime. Playing off traditional fears of peacetime armies, they wondered aloud why Parliament saw fit to garrison troops in North America merely after the threat from the French had been removed. These concerns provided an ideological ground that intensified colonial resistance.
Colonists React to the Postage stamp Act
An angry mob protest against the Stamp Act by carrying a banner reading 'The Folly of England, the Ruin of America' through the streets of New York.
MPI/Getty Images
Parliament pushed forrad with the Stamp Act in spite of the colonists' objections. Colonial resistance to the act mounted slowly at first, but gained momentum every bit the planned engagement of its implementation drew near. In Virginia, Patrick Henry (1736-99), whose peppery orations against British tyranny would soon make him famous, submitted a serial of resolutions to his colony'southward assembly, the Business firm of Burgesses. These resolutions denied Parliament'south right to taxation the colonies and chosen on the colonists to resist the Stamp Human activity.
Newspapers throughout the colonies reprinted the resolutions, spreading their radical message to a broad audience. The resolutions provided the tenor for the proclamations of the Stamp Act Congress, an extralegal convention composed of delegates from nine colonies that met in October 1765. The Stamp Act Congress wrote petitions to the king affirming both their loyalty and the confidence that simply the colonial assemblies had the ramble authority to taxation the colonists.
While the Congress and the colonial assemblies passed resolutions and issued petitions against the Stamp Deed, the colonists took matters into their ain hands. The most famous popular resistance took place in Boston, where opponents of the Stamp Act, calling themselves the Sons of Freedom, enlisted the rabble of Boston in opposition to the new law. This mob paraded through the streets with an figure of Andrew Oliver, Boston's stamp distributor, which they hanged from the Freedom Tree and beheaded before ransacking Oliver's abode. Oliver agreed to resign his commission as stamp distributor.
Similar events transpired in other colonial towns, as crowds mobbed the postage stamp distributors and threatened their physical well-being and their property. By the first of 1766, well-nigh of the stamp distributors had resigned their commissions, many of them nether duress. Mobs in seaport towns turned abroad ships carrying the stamp papers from England without allowing them to discharge their cargoes. Determined colonial resistance fabricated it impossible for the British government to bring the Stamp Deed into effect. In 1766, Parliament repealed it.
The Stamp Human activity's Legacy
The finish of the Stamp Deed did not stop Parliament'south confidence that information technology had the potency to impose taxes on the colonists. The British government coupled the repeal of the Stamp Human activity with the Declaratory Act, a reaffirmation of its power to pass any laws over the colonists that information technology saw fit. Withal, the colonists held firm to their view that Parliament could not tax them. The issues raised by the Stamp Human action festered for x years before giving ascent to the Revolutionary War and, ultimately, American independence.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/stamp-act
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