What effects did British taxes have on the American colonists before the Revolution Inquizitive?

[1] In Harbottle Dorr Collection of Annotated Massachusetts Newspapers, 1765-1776, Vol. I, pp. 111, 114, //www.masshist.org/dorr/.

[2] Jayne E. Triber, A True Republican: The Life of Paul Revere (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 41-42.

[3] Ed., Jack P. Greene, Colonies to Nation, 1763-1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 12-44; Edmund S. And Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York and London: Collier Macmillan, 1963), Chapter Five; I. R. Christie, Crisis of Empire: Great Britain and the American Colonies, 1754-1783 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), Chapter 3.

[4] Text of Stamp Act: //avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/stamp_act_1765.asp

[5] Boyle’s Journal of Occurrences in Boston, 1759-1788, New England Historical and Genealogical Register Vol. 84 (April 1930), 148-149 (on Quebec and Montreal), 162 (on peace); Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648-1815 (London and New York: Longman, 1983), 192-200; Christie, Crisis of Empire, Chapter Two.

[6] Revere’s reminiscences of military service, fragment, second copy, April 27, 1816, Roll 3, Revere Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS); Triber, A True Republican, 21-25; Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 1-12, 26-39, 168-180.

[7] McKay and Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, pp. 197-200; Greene, Colonies to Nation, 12-14; Lawrence Henry Gipson, The Coming of the American Revolution, 1763-1775 (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 55-57.

[8] Marc Egnal, A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 126-135; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 246-250.

[9] Nash, Urban Crucible, 250-263.

[10] Boyle’s Journal of Occurrences, 84, 164.

[11] On the smallpox epidemic, see Christian Di Spigna, Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero (New York: Broadway Books, 2018), 62-66. Revere’s income, in Waste Book and Memoranda, Vol. I, Roll 5, Revere Family Papers, MHS. See also, Triber, A True Republican, 37-41.

[12] Ed., William H. Whitmore, Report of the Record Commissioners of Boston, Boston Town Records, 1758-1769 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1886), 119-122 (quotes on p. 120, 121-122).

[13] Christie, Crisis of Empire, 39-46; John L. Bullion, “Security and Economy: The Bute Administration’s Plans for the American Army and Revenue, 1762-1763, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 45 (July 1988), 499-504.

[14] For at least two decades before Grenville’s tax plan, Board of Trade records document colonial smuggling. See Christie, Crisis of Empire, 31-32, 39-46; Gipson, Coming of the American Revolution, 55-59; Thomas C. Barrow, “Background to the Grenville Program, 1757-1763,” William and Mary Quarterly, V. 22, No. 1 (Jan. 1965), 93-104 (p. 95 on 1759 trade investigation); Don Cook, The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies, 1760-1785 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), 58.

[15] Gipson, Coming of the American Revolution, 22-27.

[16] Christie, Crisis of Empire, 46-48; Gipson, Coming of the American Revolution, 55-59. On the role of rum in the New England slave trade, see Jared Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), 26-28, and “The Slave Trade,” Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), African Americans and the End of Slavery.

[17] For full text of the Sugar Act, see //avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/sugar_act_1764.asp. For more on the Sugar and Currency Acts, see Greene, Colonies to Nation,12-16, 25-26; Christie, Crisis of Empire, 46-48; Morgan and Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, Chapter 3.

[18] Text of Sugar Act, relating to enforcement, starting with Article XX, in //avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/sugar_act_1764.asp. See also, Greene, Colonies to Nation, 12-16; Christie, Crisis of Empire, 48-49; Morgan and Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 39-41.

[19] Harbottle Dorr Collection, Vol. I, p.5, //www.masshist.org/dorr/.

[20] Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, in Greene, Colonies to Nation, 28-33; Arthur Savage, Jr., to Samuel Phillips Savage, February 8, 1765, S. P. Savage II Papers, MHS; Triber, A True Republican, 39-40.

By Stefanie Kunze

The Stamp Act of 1765 was ratified by the British parliament under King George III. It imposed a tax on all papers and official documents in the American colonies, though not in England.

King George III imposed a tax on official documents in American colonies

Included under the act were bonds, licenses, certificates, and other official documents as well as more mundane items such as plain parchment and playing cards. Parliament reasoned that the American colonies needed to offset the sums necessary for their maintenance. It intended to use the additional tax money to pay for war expenses incurred in Great Britain’s struggles with France and Spain.

Many American colonists refused to pay Stamp Act tax

The American colonists were angered by the Stamp Act and quickly acted to oppose it. Because of the colonies’ sheer distance from London, the epicenter of British politics, a direct appeal to Parliament was almost impossible. Instead, the colonists made clear their opposition by simply refusing to pay the tax.

Prominent individuals such as Benjamin Franklin and members of the independence-minded group known as the Sons of Liberty argued that the British parliament did not have the authority to impose an internal tax. Public protest flared and the ensuing violence attracted broad attention. Tax commissioners were threatened and quit their jobs out of fear; others simply did not succeed in collecting any money. As Franklin wrote in 1766, the “Stamp Act would have to be imposed by force.” Unable to do so, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act just one year later, on March 18, 1766.

American separatist movement grew during protest of Stamp Act

The colonists may well have accepted the stamp tax had it been imposed by their own representatives and with their consent. However, the colonists’ emerging sense of independence — nurtured by the mother country and justified by their multiple interactions with other trading nations — heightened the colonists’ sense of indignation and feelings of injustice. Even had they submitted to it, there is little doubt that many would have been troubled by the negative impact of a tax on the free press.

Scholars contend that the American separatist movement gained a great deal of influence as a result of its success in protesting the Stamp Act.

Stamp Act aftermath influenced constitutional safeguards, First Amendment

The act and the violence that erupted with its passage remained fresh in the young country’s memory. The crafters of the Constitution were careful to include safeguards against usurpations of freedom and the violence such acts could breed. Article 5 provides for a constitutional amending process, allowing for changes in the laws without resort to violent revolution.

The First Amendment secures freedom of speech, the right to peacefully assemble, and the right to petition government. It also protects the freedom of the press.

This article was originally written in 2009. Stefanie Kunze has a PhD in Political Science and is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Kunze specializes in perpetrators of ethnocide, and more specifically Native American experiences with settler colonialism.

Page 2

Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957) stands as the first U.S. Supreme Court case to expound upon the concept of academic freedom though some earlier cases mention it.

Most constitutional academic freedom issues today revolve around professors’ speech, students’ speech, faculty’s relations to government speech, and using affirmative action in student admissions. 

Although academic freedom is regularly invoked as a constitutional right under the First Amendment, the Court has never specifically enumerated it as one, and judicial opinions have not developed a consistent interpretation of constitutional academic freedom or pronounced a consistent framework to analyze such claims.