Stamp Act

Relations were never quite the same between England and America ever more suspicious of the other. Little over a year later, Parliament passed a new collection of taxes, the Townshend duties. Crowds had long gathered in the colonies for public purposes, such a closing houses of prostitution or rolling back exorbitant price increases. Another crisis ensued, lasting until an American boycott of British goods forced repeal of most of the new duties. “The minds of the freeholders,” wrote one observer, “were inflamed…by many a hearty damn of the Stamp Act over bottles, bowls, and glasses. icans he would faid, vigorously disagreed, and so did some members of Parliament.

Unlike the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act had an equal impact throughout the colonies, and the response to it was swift and vociferous. ” Parliament, Americans were convinced, did nor represent them. In August 1765, a Boston crowd led by Ebenezer Macintosh, a volunteer fireman with engine company number nine and a shoemaker, demolished property belonging to a revenue agent, and another mob sacked Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutdunson’s house. Newspapers and pamphlets were filled with denunciations of the supposedly unconstitutional measure, and in taverns everywhere outraged patrons roundly condemned it. Or so they told themselves every March 18, the anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act. Virginia’s lower house was the first to act, approving Patrick Henry’s strong resolutions against the Stamp Act.

British authorities had not given up the idea of taxing the colonies with the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. Popular protest also expressed widespread outrage of the stamp Act. Its members did not share their economic interests and would not pay the taxes that they imposed on Americans.