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An action
followed by a reaction
By Susan Olling
This year has seen a number of “speed limit” anniversaries of historic
events. It’s been 800 years since the Magna Carta was
signed in Runnymede, England. It’s been 600 years since the
Battle of Agincourt (the next cross-channel invasion would occur over
500 years later). It’s been seventy years since the end of World
War Two and fifty years since the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam.
Another event, two-hundred-fifty years ago, was significant in U.S.
history.
It was called the Stamp Act. This minor piece of legislation
became law in March 1765 and was supposed to go into effect in the
thirteen colonies on 01 November 1765. A long list of paper
documents, including wills, newspapers, ship’s logs, and playing cards,
had to carry the stamp. For which you would pay a tax. The
British government had accumulated a large debt fighting the Seven
Years’ War. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That same government
quite logically decided that their subjects here should help pay down
the debt. After all, the Seven Years’ War started on the western
frontier of the thirteen colonies. The tax wasn’t a great deal of money
compared to the tax burden of Londoners, for example. No, it was
the origin of the tax that angered people here. The colonial
legislatures were the source of tax legislation. This new law
came from London and turned into a piece of political dynamite.
By spring, as news of the Stamp Act reached places like Boston,
Massachusetts, and Williamsburg, Virginia, reaction was
swift. Preachers railed against the law from their
pulpits. Town meetings passed resolutions against it.
Virginia’s House of Burgesses passed the Virginia Resolves. By
summer, stamp agents were being hanged in effigy. Real violence
followed. Homes belonging to two colonial officials in
Boston, Andrew Oliver, the stamp agent for Massachusetts, and Thomas
Hutchinson, Chief Justice for the colony, were destroyed by mobs. The
destruction was incredibly thorough. After destroying most
of the fabric of Mr. Hutchinson’s home, one of the most elegant in
Boston, the angry crowd finished the job by trying to tear down the
roof. Mr. Oliver resigned as stamp agent as did stamp agents in
other colonies. And Bostonians weren’t the only ones committing
acts of violence; unrest flared in cities and towns up and down the
coast.
Benjamin Franklin, who was living quite happily in London at the time,
was as surprised as anyone in that great city at the reaction on this
side of the Atlantic to the Stamp Act. His wife, who had stayed
in Philadelphia, defended their house from a mob bent on trying to
destroy it. Mr. Franklin was thought by his fellow Philadelphians
to have had a hand in this illegal tax.
The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, which was good news here.
Unfortunately with this good news came bad news. After repealing
the Stamp Act, Parliament immediately issued a Declaratory Act that
asserted their right to tax the thirteen colonies “in all cases
whatsoever.” A Declaratory Act that sounded very similar to this
one was enacted earlier in the century to subjugate Ireland.
The road to revolution came quicker with the passage of the Townshend
Acts, taxes on a long list of items that were imported from Great
Britain. These were repealed, except for a small tax on
tea. Who could complain about a couple of pennies’ tax on
tea? We know the answer to that: the Boston Tea Party. The
response in London: the Coercive Acts, known here as the Intolerable
Acts. The Coercive Acts were a punishment for Boston and
Massachusetts. However, reasoned their brethren in their sister
colonies, if the British government could do something so punitive to
one colony, they could do the same thing to any of the others.
The First Continental Congress followed. Then came bloodshed in
Massachusetts, a Second Continental Congress, and the Declaration of
Independence. Sounds like a good science experiment to me.
An action followed by an opposite reaction.
John Adams believed that there had to be a revolution in peoples’ minds
and hearts prior to any fighting. The Stamp Act was the
start of the revolution he described, ten years before Lexington and
Concord.
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