Taxation Without Representation

The Stamp Act was supposed to take effect on November 1, 1765. By that morning, almost every man appointed to sell the stamps in the thirteen colonies had resigned, most of them after crowds burned them in effigy or wrecked their property. The tax had been modest, expected to raise about £60,000 a year, a fraction of what the army in America cost. Colonists fought it anyway, because they believed Parliament had no right to tax them at all. Over the next ten years, that disagreement over who could tax whom turned into a disagreement over whether Parliament could govern the colonies at all.

Why Parliament taxed, and why colonists said it couldn't

Topic 3.2 explained the setup: after 1763 Britain carried a debt of about £133 million and kept about 10,000 troops in North America. George Grenville's ministry decided the colonies should help pay for that army.

The Sugar Act (1764) actually cut the duty on foreign molasses, from six pence to three pence a gallon, but Grenville meant to collect it. Before, smugglers had bribed customs officers or slipped past them. Now accused smugglers could be tried in a new vice-admiralty court at Halifax, Nova Scotia, before a judge with no jury. The act said openly that its purpose was raising revenue, not just regulating trade. The Currency Act (1764) stopped colonies from issuing paper money as legal tender, squeezing colonists already short of gold and silver. Then the Stamp Act (1765) required that newspapers, legal documents, licenses, pamphlets and even playing cards carry a stamp bought from royal agents. It was the first direct tax Parliament had laid on the colonies, and it hit lawyers, printers and merchants, the people best able to make noise.

The heart of the dispute was representation. Colonists elected no members of Parliament. British defenders of the tax, such as Grenville's secretary Thomas Whately, answered with virtual representation: every member of Parliament represented the whole empire, just as he represented the many Britons who could not vote, including whole cities such as Manchester that sent no members. Colonists replied that only their own elected assemblies could tax them, since only those assemblies were chosen by them and answerable to them.

Colonial leaders built that case from four kinds of argument, and you should be able to name each:

1. The rights of British subjects. Since Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689, Englishmen could be taxed only with the consent of their representatives, and they were entitled to trial by jury. Colonists claimed those rights fully.
2. Local self-rule. Colonial assemblies had voted their own taxes for a century or more. Parliament's taxes threatened what colonists saw as their own small constitutions.
3. The rights of the individual. James Otis's pamphlet The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764) argued that some rights, such as property, belonged to people by nature, so no legislature could take them away without consent.
4. Enlightenment ideas. Writers such as John Locke taught that government exists to protect life, liberty and property and rests on the consent of the governed. Topic 3.4 follows how these ideas grew into a case for independence.

In October 1765, twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies met as the Stamp Act Congress in New York, the first time colonies had acted together against British policy. Their resolutions pledged loyalty to the Crown and "all due subordination" to Parliament, while denying that Parliament could tax them.

Action and reaction, 1765 to 1774

The next decade followed a pattern: Parliament asserted its authority, colonists resisted, Parliament backed down on the tax but not on the principle, and the next measure started the cycle again with less trust on both sides.

Three moments in the table deserve more than a line.

The Declaratory Act passed on the same day as the Stamp Act's repeal in March 1766. Colonists celebrated the repeal and mostly ignored the declaration, but it stated plainly that Parliament had given up nothing. The Boston Massacre grew out of daily friction: off-duty soldiers took part-time jobs from Boston workers, and a brawl at a ropewalk days earlier had set the town on edge. Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native descent, was among the five killed. John Adams defended the soldiers in court, and six were acquitted and two convicted of manslaughter, a reminder that Patriot leaders wanted resistance to look lawful. And the Coercive Acts of 1774 punished all of Massachusetts for the Tea Party: the Boston Port Act closed the harbor until the tea was paid for, and the Massachusetts Government Act made the colony's council royally appointed and limited town meetings. Colonists elsewhere concluded that if Parliament could suspend one colony's charter, it could suspend any. The Quebec Act, passed the same year, extended Quebec's borders into the Ohio country and protected the Catholic Church there, which Protestant colonists read as part of the same design.

The cycle changed what colonists were arguing about. In 1765 they denied Parliament's power to tax. By 1774, many denied that Parliament had any authority over them at all, beyond regulating trade. In September 1774, fifty-six delegates from twelve colonies (all but Georgia) met as the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They rejected Joseph Galloway's plan for an American legislature under Parliament, endorsed Massachusetts's resistance, and adopted the Continental Association, an agreement to stop importing British goods from December 1, 1774, enforced by committees elected in every county and town.

Who resisted

Resistance was led from the top and pushed from below.

Leaders. Lawyers, merchants and planters wrote the pamphlets and resolutions: Samuel Adams in Boston, Patrick Henry in Virginia, John Dickinson in Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin shows how the crisis turned loyal men into revolutionaries. As Pennsylvania's agent in London in 1765, he did not foresee the uproar over the Stamp Act and even recommended a friend as stamp distributor, and a Philadelphia crowd nearly attacked his house. In February 1766 he restored his standing by testifying before the House of Commons that the colonists would never submit to the tax. Then in 1774, after he leaked letters in which Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson urged limits on colonial liberties, he was publicly humiliated before the king's Privy Council and fired as deputy postmaster general. He returned to America in 1775 a committed Patriot, and he later served on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence and won the French alliance (Topic 3.5).

Artisans and laborers. The crowds that made the Stamp Act unenforceable were made up of shoemakers, sailors, dockworkers and apprentices. In Boston, the Sons of Liberty grew out of a small club of artisans and shopkeepers, and the shoemaker Ebenezer MacIntosh led the crowd that hanged stamp distributor Andrew Oliver in effigy on August 14, 1765. Oliver resigned the next day. Twelve days later a crowd gutted Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson's mansion. Artisans also had economic stakes: boycotts of British goods helped colonial craftsmen, and competition from soldiers for jobs fed the Massacre. In Philadelphia and New York, committees of mechanics (the period's word for skilled craftsmen such as carpenters, smiths and printers) became some of the strongest voices for independence by 1776.

Women. Boycotts only worked if households stopped buying, and households were run largely by women. The Daughters of Liberty held public spinning bees, where dozens of women spun yarn for homespun cloth, turning a household chore into a political statement. Women gave up British tea for herbal substitutes. In October 1774, fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, signed a pledge to support the Continental Association, and British cartoonists mocked them for it.

Historians disagree about what drove all this. Carl Becker, writing in 1909 about New York, argued that the Revolution was two contests at once: one over home rule within the empire and one over "who should rule at home," as rival factions of the colony's elite competed for power and, to win, drew unenfranchised mechanics and small farmers into politics. Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) stressed ideas: colonists read each British measure as evidence of a conspiracy against liberty. Gary Nash's work on urban laborers and T. H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution (2004), which argues that boycotts of shared consumer goods taught colonists to act together, put ordinary people and their purchases at the center.

Feeding the cause: money and supplies

Resistance cost money and goods, and once war began in 1775 it cost far more. Boycotts created shortages of cloth, tea and manufactured goods. The British closed Boston's port in 1774, besieged the city through 1775, and later occupied New York (1776 to 1783) and Philadelphia (1777 to 1778). Patriots responded by organizing people in huge numbers.

When the Port Act cut off Boston's trade, towns across the colonies sent sheep, grain, rice and cash. Committees of safety collected gunpowder and organized militia. Men served in militias for weeks or months at a time and supplied the army with food, wagons and horses, often paid in Continental paper money that lost most of its value by 1780. Women ran farms and shops while men served, made cloth and bullets, and followed the army as cooks and nurses. When merchants hoarded scarce goods, crowds, sometimes of women, forced them to sell at fair prices.

The best-documented example is the Ladies Association of Philadelphia. In June 1780, with the Continental Army unpaid and badly clothed, Esther DeBerdt Reed published a broadside, The Sentiments of an American Woman, calling on women to raise money for the soldiers. Its argument was a political claim about women's place in the cause:

We are at least certain, that he cannot be a good citizen who will not applaud our efforts for the relief of the armies which defend our lives, our possessions, our liberty?

Philadelphia women went door to door and raised over $300,000 in paper currency. Washington asked that the money buy linen, and the women sewed more than 2,000 shirts for the army. Similar associations formed in New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

This topic's skill is sourcing: multiple-choice sets on documents such as the Stamp Act Congress resolutions, the Declaratory Act, or a Revere engraving ask about the creator's point of view, purpose, situation and audience, and the DBQ awards a point for explaining how those features of at least two documents matter to your argument. Short-answer and essay prompts may ask why colonial resistance grew between 1763 and 1775; expect to use the cycle of measures and responses as evidence, with specific dates.