The Stamp Act 1765, also known as the Duties in American Colonies Act 1765, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which imposed a direct tax on the British colonies in America and required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper from London which included an embossed revenue stamp. Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not in colonial paper money.
The House of Burgesses was the elected representative element of the Virginia General Assembly, the legislative body of the Colony of Virginia.
The Intolerable Acts, sometimes referred to as the Insufferable Acts or Coercive Acts, were a series of five punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party. The laws aimed to punish Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in the Tea Party protest of the Tea Act, a tax measure enacted by Parliament in May 1773. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts. They were a key development leading to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in April 1775.
The American Colonies Act 1766, commonly known as the Declaratory Act, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act 1765 and the amendment of the Sugar Act. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act because boycotts were hurting British trade and used the declaration to justify the repeal and avoid humiliation. The declaration stated that the Parliament's authority was the same in America as in Britain and asserted Parliament's authority to pass laws that were binding on the American colonies.
The governments of the Thirteen Colonies of British America developed in the 17th and 18th centuries under the influence of the British constitution. After the Thirteen Colonies had become the United States, the experience under colonial rule would inform and shape the new state constitutions and, ultimately, the United States Constitution.
The Townshend Acts or Townshend Duties were a series of British acts of Parliament passed during 1767 and 1768 introducing a series of taxes and regulations to fund administration of the British colonies in America. They are named after the Chancellor of the Exchequer who proposed the programme. Historians vary slightly as to which acts they include under the heading "Townshend Acts", but five are often listed:
The Stamp Act Congress, also known as the Continental Congress of 1765, was a meeting held in New York City in the colonial Province of New York. It included representatives from some of the British colonies in North America. It was the second gathering of elected representatives from British American colonies after the Albany Convention of 1754. The Congress sought to devise a unified protest against new British taxes by the British Parliament, which passed the Stamp Act, requiring the use of specialty stamped British paper for legal documents, playing cards, calendars, newspapers, and dice for virtually all business in the colonies starting on November 1, 1765.
The Sugar Act 1764 or Sugar Act 1763, also known as the American Revenue Act 1764 or the American Duties Act, was a revenue-raising act passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on 5 April 1764. The preamble to the act stated: "it is expedient that new provisions and regulations should be established for improving the revenue of this Kingdom ... and ... it is just and necessary that a revenue should be raised ... for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same." The earlier Molasses Act 1733, which had imposed a tax of six pence per gallon of molasses, had never been effectively collected due to colonial evasion. By reducing the rate by half and increasing measures to enforce the tax, Parliament hoped that the tax would actually be collected. These incidents increased the colonists' concerns about the intent of the British Parliament and helped the growing movement that became the American Revolution.
"No taxation without representation" is a political slogan that originated in the American Revolution and which expressed one of the primary grievances of the American colonists for Great Britain. In short, many colonists believed that as they were not represented in the distant British parliament, any taxes it imposed on the colonists were unconstitutional and were a denial of the colonists' rights as Englishmen.
A stamp act is any legislation that requires a tax to be paid on the transfer of certain documents. Those who pay the tax receive an official stamp on their documents, making them legal documents. A variety of products have been covered by stamp acts including playing cards, dice, patent medicines, cheques, mortgages, contracts, marriage licenses and newspapers. The items may have to be physically stamped at approved government offices following payment of the duty, although methods involving annual payment of a fixed sum or purchase of adhesive stamps are more practical and common.
The Massachusetts Circular Letter was a statement written by Samuel Adams and James Otis Jr., and passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives in February 1768 in response to the Townshend Acts. Reactions to the letter brought heightened tensions between the British Parliament and Massachusetts, and resulted in the military occupation of Boston by the British Army, which contributed to the coming of the American Revolution.
Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway. Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.
The Virginia Resolves were a series of resolutions passed on May 29, 1765, by the Virginia House of Burgesses in response to the Stamp Act of 1765, which had imposed a tax on the British colonies in North America requiring that material be printed on paper made in London which carried an embossed revenue stamp. The act had been passed by the Parliament of Great Britain to help pay off some of its debt from its various wars, including the French and Indian War fought in part to protect the American colonies.
"On American Taxation" was a speech given by Edmund Burke in the British House of Commons on April 19, 1774, advocating the full repeal of the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. Parliament had previously repealed five of the six duties of this revenue tax on the American colonies, but the tax on tea remained. The speech was given during the debates on the Coercive Acts, when Rose Fuller proposed that the Townshend duty on tea be repealed to decrease resistance to the new acts. Burke's speech was in support of this motion. According to historian Robert Middlekauff, "The speech is memorable for its wit and its brilliant reconstruction of the government's dismal efforts to bring order into colonial affairs without the advantage of a coherent policy."
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of essays written by the Pennsylvania lawyer and legislator John Dickinson (1732–1808) and published under the pseudonym "A Farmer" from 1767 to 1768. The twelve letters were widely read and reprinted throughout the Thirteen Colonies, and were important in uniting the colonists against the Townshend Acts in the run-up to the American Revolution. According to many historians, the impact of the Letters on the colonies was unmatched until the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776. The success of the letters earned Dickinson considerable fame.
Daniel Dulany the Younger was a Maryland Loyalist politician, Mayor of Annapolis, and an influential American lawyer in the period immediately before the American Revolution. His pamphlet Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, which laid out the grievances associated with the taxation without representation argument, it has been described as "the ablest effort of this kind produced in America".
The Petition to the King was a petition sent to King George III by the First Continental Congress in 1774, calling for the repeal of the Intolerable Acts. The King's rejection of the Petition, was one of the causes of the later United States Declaration of Independence and American Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress had hoped to resolve conflict without a war.
The Braintree Instructions was a document sent on September 24, 1765 by the town meeting of Braintree, Massachusetts to the town's representative at the Massachusetts General Court, or legislature, which instructed the representative to oppose the Stamp Act, a tax regime which had recently been adopted by the British Parliament in London. The document is significant because, following the Virginia Resolves, it was among the earliest in British America to officially reject the authority of Parliament over the colonies in North America. The instructions were written by John Adams, who would ten years later become a key figure in the American Revolution and ultimately be elected the second President of the United States in 1796.
Zachariah Hood was an Annapolis businessman who in 1765 was given the job of stamp collector for the Province of Maryland, collecting the duty payable under the new Stamp Act. Returning to Maryland from England in August 1765, he was attacked by an angry mob, and was forced to flee to New York for his life, in what may have been the first forcible resistance in America to British taxation in the years preceding the American Revolution. Hood returned to Maryland but, finding himself persona non grata, he left for the West Indies. In 1774 he was appointed comptroller of the Port of Philadelphia, but he fared little better and in May 1775 he was forced again to flee, this time to England, where he was granted a salary by Prime Minister Lord North.
The Petition to His Majesty, The Memorial to the House of Lords and The Remonstrance to the House of Commons, commonly referred to collectively as the 1768 Petition, Memorial and Remonstrance, are a series of imprints that record a protest by the Virginia House of Burgesses in April 1768 that was sent to the British government by then-acting Lieutenant Governor John Blair.
