Stamp Act 1765 Quotes

The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life,” Adams wrote in his diary that December. “The enormous engine fabricated by the British Parliament for battering down all the rights and liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread through the whole continent a spirit that will be recorded to our honor, with all future generations.

As a result, when the British found themselves unsatisfied with the revenue coming from the Sugar Act, Parliament followed it with the Stamp Act of 1765, also known as the “Duties in American Colonies Act of 1765.”  Unlike the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act was a direct tax that required many of the documents produced as part of the everyday legal and business activities of the colony to be printed on specially embossed and stamped paper only produced by the British government.  Among the items required to bear this stamp were legal documents, newspapers and magazines.  To make matters worse, this paper could only be purchased with British sterling certificates, not the paper money used in the colonies.  Since Parliament controlled the exchange rate, they also controlled how much each page actually cost. While

It took the Stamp Act crisis to make this leadership aware of its dilemma. A political group in Boston called the Loyal Nine—merchants, distillers, shipowners, and master craftsmen who opposed the Stamp Act—organized a procession in August 1765 to protest it. They put fifty master craftsmen at the head, but needed to mobilize shipworkers from the North End and mechanics and apprentices from the South End. Two or three thousand were in the procession (Negroes were excluded). They marched to the home of the stampmaster and burned his effigy. But after the “gentlemen” who organized the demonstration left, the crowd went further and destroyed some of the stampmaster’s property. These were, as one of the Loyal Nine said, “amazingly inflamed people.” The Loyal Nine seemed taken aback by the direct assault on the wealthy furnishings of the stampmaster. The rich set up armed patrols. Now a town meeting was called and the same leaders who had planned the demonstration denounced the violence and disavowed the actions of the crowd.

In 1765, Great Britain passed a new tax on its American colonies. This was nothing new, as the colonists were all British subjects and expected to be loyal to King George III. But this new tax made many colonists angry. The Stamp Act said that every piece of paper had to have a special stamp on it. Those stamps cost the colonists

The Stamp Act of 1765 which taxed every piece of printed paper or document was the catalyst that set the stage for serious colonial protest and the formation of the Sons of Liberty.

passage of the Stamp Act, a tax meant to defray the costs incurred during the French and Indian War. The day the act was to take effect, November 1, 1765, a group of angry New Yorkers headed down Broadway to Fort George, torches in hand, to demand justice. While acting governor Cadwallader Colden hid in the fort with the stamps, the mob hoisted an effigy of Colden on the gallows. Then they tore down the fence surrounding the Bowling Green, lit a bonfire, and burned Colden’s valuable winter sleighs. Six

passage of the Stamp Act, a tax meant to defray the costs incurred during the French and Indian War. The day the act was to take effect, November 1, 1765, a group of angry New Yorkers headed down Broadway to Fort George, torches in hand, to demand justice. While acting governor Cadwallader Colden hid in the fort with the stamps, the mob hoisted an effigy of Colden on the gallows. Then they tore down the fence surrounding the Bowling Green, lit a bonfire, and burned Colden’s valuable winter sleighs. Six months later, the Stamp Act was repealed. While the Sons of Liberty continued to jeer at all signs of British authority, the Loyalist citizens of New York, such as the DeLanceys, raised the cash to erect a gilded equestrian statue of George III to stand on the very spot in Bowling Green where the mob had rallied. In August 1770, the new gold statue of King George was unveiled by the Loyalists to great acclaim.

Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and Lexington a decade later, one of the colonists’ most widespread tools of resistance against arbitrary taxation without representation was boycotting British imports, particularly luxury items. While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it’s worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped basil leaves in boiling water to make the same point. What’s more valiant: littering from a wharf or years of doing chores and looking after

The Mayflower landed in 1620,” Owen pointed out. “There were European settlements in North America before then, more than a few of them, but we’ll let that go for now. Things really started moving toward revolution with the Stamp Act, which was in in 1765. There’s a hundred and forty-five years between those dates. It was a hundred and forty-five years between the second inauguration of George Washington and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I think a few events happened in between those two.