Did the Stamp Act Make Britain a High Power Again
The Postage Human action of 1765 was the commencement internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British Parliament. The human activity, which imposed a tax on all paper documents in the colonies, came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and looking to its North American colonies as a acquirement source.
Arguing that only their own representative assemblies could taxation them, the colonists insisted that the act was unconstitutional, and they resorted to mob violence to intimidate stamp collectors into resigning. Parliament passed the Stamp Deed on March 22, 1765 and repealed information technology in 1766, but issued a Declaratory Act at the same time to reaffirm its dominance to pass any colonial legislation it saw fit. The issues of tax and representation raised past the Postage stamp Human action strained relations with the colonies to the point that, ten years afterward, the colonists rose in armed rebellion against the British.
Why The Stamp Act Was Passed
British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to assistance replenish their finances after the costly Seven Years' State of war with French republic. Part of the revenue from the Postage Act would be used to maintain several regiments of British soldiers in North 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 Stamp Human action 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 United kingdom for command of Due 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 fourscore years of intermittent warfare with their French neighbors) as much as anyone else in the British Empire, the British government decided that those colonists should shoulder part of the war's cost.
Britain had long regulated colonial merchandise through a system of restrictions and duties on imports and exports. In the showtime half of the 18th century, all the same, British enforcement of this arrangement had been lax. Starting with the Sugar Act of 1764, which imposed new duties on sugar and other goods, the British government began to tighten its reins on the colonies. Shortly thereafter, George Grenville (1712-70), the British first lord of the treasury and prime government minister, proposed the Stamp Act; Parliament passed the act without debate in 1765.
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Instead of levying a duty on merchandise goods, the Stamp Deed imposed a directly revenue enhancement on the colonists. Specifically, the act required that, starting in the fall of 1765, legal documents and printed materials must bear a revenue enhancement postage provided by commissioned distributors who would collect the tax in exchange for the stamp. The law applied to wills, deeds, newspapers, pamphlets and even playing cards and dice.
The Roots of Colonial Resistance
Coming in the midst of economic hardship in the colonies, the Stamp Act aroused vehement resistance. Although most colonists continued to have Parliament'due south authority to regulate their trade, they insisted that only their representative assemblies could levy direct, internal taxes, such as the 1 imposed by the Stamp Act. They rejected the British regime's argument that all British subjects enjoyed virtual representation in Parliament, even if they could not vote for members of Parliament.
The colonists also took exception with the provision denying offenders trials by jury. A song minority hinted at night designs behind the Postage stamp Act. These radical voices warned that the tax was part 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 basis that intensified colonial resistance.
Colonists React to the Stamp Act
An angry mob protest confronting the Stamp Act by carrying a banner reading 'The Folly of England, the Ruin of America' through the streets of New York.
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Parliament pushed forrard 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 presently make him famous, submitted a serial of resolutions to his colony'south assembly, the Firm of Burgesses. These resolutions denied Parliament's correct to tax the colonies and chosen on the colonists to resist the Stamp Act.
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 Postage stamp Act Congress wrote petitions to the king affirming both their loyalty and the conviction that simply the colonial assemblies had the ramble say-so to revenue enhancement the colonists.
While the Congress and the colonial assemblies passed resolutions and issued petitions confronting the Postage Act, the colonists took matters into their ain hands. The most famous popular resistance took identify 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 effigy of Andrew Oliver, Boston'due south stamp distributor, which they hanged from the Liberty Tree and beheaded before ransacking Oliver'southward home. Oliver agreed to resign his committee as stamp distributor.
Similar events transpired in other colonial towns, every bit crowds mobbed the stamp distributors and threatened their physical well-being and their property. Past the offset of 1766, most of the stamp distributors had resigned their commissions, many of them under duress. Mobs in seaport towns turned abroad ships carrying the postage 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 Act into outcome. In 1766, Parliament repealed it.
The Postage stamp Act'south Legacy
The end of the Stamp Human action did non finish Parliament'due south confidence that it had the authorization to impose taxes on the colonists. The British authorities 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 it saw fit. However, the colonists held firm to their view that Parliament could not tax them. The bug raised by the Stamp Act festered for 10 years before giving rise to the Revolutionary War and, ultimately, American independence.
Source: https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/stamp-act
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