Ch. 1.2. The Sugar and Stamp Acts, 1764-66
Adapted from Yirush, pp. 220-33.
The Sugar Act, 1764
In March 1764, with strong parliamentary majorities, Grenville passed the Sugar Act, which cut the duty on foreign molasses from sixpence to three, enough, Grenville thought, to make smuggling less attractive while still raising a substantial revenue. The Sugar Act also strengthened the customs service in the colonies by allowing officials to sue violators of the Navigation laws in a new vice-admiralty court in Halifax, Nova Scotia, rather than in the local courts where convictions were much harder to come by. It also placed the burden of proof upon the accused in all cases and limited the damages that customs officers could face if they were successfully sued by a merchant wrongly accused of smuggling. Merchants and ship captains also had to post bonds to ensure their compliance with the act, and, as in previous reforms, the governors were required to take oaths to uphold the law.
The Stamp Act (1765)
Most explosively, in the spring of 1765, with strong majorities in both the Lords and the Commons, the Grenville ministry passed the Stamp Act, which required the settlers to purchase special stamped paper before they could enter into a contract, print a newspaper, make a will, fill out a customs form, or even purchase a pack of playing cards. Also in 1765, the ministry passed a Quartering Act compelling the colonial assemblies to provide accommodations and supplies for the army in America.
The reforms that the Grenville ministry passed in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War were an attempt to realize the long-standing metropolitan vision – stretching back to Martin Bladen and before him to the seventeenth century – of a more centralized empire. The ministry (along with the Board of Trade) strengthened the Navigation Acts, stationed an army in the colonies, attempted to direct the pattern of settlement from London, set aside land for the Native Americans, and levied taxes that would be used to bolster royal authority in the empire. But unlike previous attempts at reform, Grenville’s emanated from the ministry, not the royal bureaucracy, and thus had the full legal force of Parliament behind them.
The Stamp Act Crisis and Debates About Settlers’ Rights
As news of Grenville’s reforms crossed the Atlantic in the spring and summer of 1764, a wide-ranging debate began over Parliament’s right to tax the colonies; and more broadly, over what the exact relationship was between the center and periphery of this constitutionally indeterminate transatlantic empire. In responding to these reforms, settler elites, both in the official pronouncements of the assemblies and in an increasingly rich pamphlet literature, drew on the long tradition of thinking about their rights in the empire that had originated in the late seventeenth-century resistance to the Stuarts.
Although cautious at first, their response eventually transcended the narrow question of taxation to address the broader issues of self-government and sovereignty. And faced with an increasingly intransigent assertion of Parliament’s sovereignty, they began to articulate a federal vision of the empire, in which authority was based entirely on the natural rights of settlers who had voluntarily migrated to the New World conceived of as a state of nature. In this account of the empire’s constitution, their relationship to Parliament was based solely on a delegated authority to regulate the trade of the empire. In all other respects, the colonies were free states bound solely to the person of the king, who provided them protection in return for allegiance.
Beginning in the fall of 1764, the colonial assemblies produced numerous petitions and resolves protesting both the Sugar Act and the proposed Stamp Act. In almost all cases, they denied that Parliament had the right to levy taxes on them without their consent. For example, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Patrick Henry presented his Virginia Resolutions, which opposed the Stamp Act and claimed that only the Virginia assembly could legally tax Virginia residents.
More widespread protests were organized by the Sons of Liberty, an informal movement of those opposed to the Stamp Act. They were especially active in coastal cities and in the northern colonies. They published pamphlets and broadsides (posters), and, in some cases, they intimidated stamp agents and American merchants (to block import of British goods). Collection of the stamp tax virtually stopped. The Daughters of Liberty emerged about the same time; they focused on encouraging the domestic production of clothing and other products, in order to support the boycott of imported goods that owed the new duties.
As the protests against the Stamp Act became increasingly violent in the summer and fall of 1765, nine of the colonies gathered in the Stamp Act Congress in New York in October. Not surprisingly, the Declaration of the Stamp Act Congress mirrored the resolves of the colonial assemblies.
Thomas Whately’s “Virtual Representation”
The Grenville ministry commissioned Thomas Whately, an undersecretary of the Treasury and one of the drafters of the Stamp Tax, to answer the settlers’ objections. Whately argued that “the zealous exertion of the civil, the military, and the naval powers in the colonies” was necessary for the security of the empire; and that this required revenue, hence the need “to charge certain Stamp Duties in the plantations.”
Whately did, however, agree that the colonists had “the privilege, which is common to all British subjects, of being taxed only with their own consent, given by their representatives.” However, Whately argued, there was no lack of consent in the empire, for the colonies were “virtually represented in Parliament.” This was because “every Member of Parliament sits in the House, not as representatives of his own constituents, but as one of that august assembly by which all the Commons of Great Britain are represented.” The fact that the colonies had their own assemblies did not, according to Whately, affect Parliament’s right to levy taxes on them. After all, he argued, the “Citizens of London” were also represented “in their Common Council,” and yet they were still subject to the “general superintendance” of Parliament.”
The confrontation with this metropolitan conception of parliamentary sovereignty shaped settler thought in decisive ways in the crucial decade following the Sugar and Stamp Acts. The most sophisticated attempt to do so was that of Richard Bland, who, in his 1766 Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, built his argument around a distinction between internal and external spheres of authority.
In Bland’s account, the settlers chose to make a compact with the English king, who granted them a royal charter with all “the rights and privileges of Englishmen,” in return for which they had expanded the royal dominions. For Bland, then, the settlers had, by the law of nature and by the terms of their compact with the king, a right to control “their internal Government.” But he did not dispute that the “Colonies are subordinate to the authority of Parliament.” Bland conceded that Parliament could levy “taxes or impositions” upon the colonies’ “import and export trade.”
Repeal of the Stamp and Sugar Acts (1766)
Widespread protests in the colonies led to the repeal of both the Sugar and Stamp Acts by the new Rockingham ministry in the spring of 1766. New revenue acts would be attempted the next year that would replace the Stamp Act, which was the main focus of colonial protest. Despite the repeal of this law, even those members of Parliament who were sympathetic to the colonies’ claim to be exempt from parliamentary taxation agreed that it had the right to bind them by legislation. As Lord Mansfield argued, “the British legislature, as to the power of making laws, represents the whole British empire.” In fact the Sugar Act was replaced first, by the Revenue Act of 1766, which further reduced the tax on imported molasses from three pence to one pence per gallon. This reduction seems to have succeeded in taking attention away from this tax, at least temporarily. By 1767, a different set of taxes would become the focus of debate.
The Declaratory Act (1766)
To secure a majority to repeal the Stamp Act, the Rockingham ministry passed the Declaratory Act, which proclaimed “That the said colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain.”