Prof: So today I do want
to finish discussing the good,
old Albany Congress of 1754.
 
I introduced it at the end of
Thursday's lecture--
and then we are moving on to
the Stamp Act,
and by the end of today's
lecture we will have worked our
way towards yet another
congress.
We're going to have a
bookend--a congress bookend
lecture.
 
We're going to have worked our
way to the Stamp Act Congress by
the end of this lecture which--
as you'll see over the course
of the lecture--
ends up being a step towards
colonial unity.
 
But as I did mention in
Thursday's lecture,
colonial unity was definitely
not a foregone conclusion in
this time period--
and I mentioned a total of
three attempts at colonial unity
last week.
One of them was the Dominion of
New England,
which was not prompted by
actions that the colonists took,
but the other two were
prompted by the colonists and
they were both prompted by fears
and a sense of a need for
self-defense.
 
And the first that I mentioned
was the United Colonies of New
England,
which first met in 1643 and was
largely centered on fears of
Dutch expansion and fears about
hostile Native Americans,
and then I ended by talking
about the Albany Congress which
met in 1754,
also in part because of fears
about Native Americans--
again self-defense.
 
So let's just look for a few
minutes at what happened in that
Albany Congress before we move
on to the events that end up
surrounding the Stamp Act.
 
I think I mentioned at the very
end of the lecture that nine
colonies were invited to the
Albany Congress:
Massachusetts,
New Hampshire,
Connecticut,
Rhode Island,
New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and Virginia.
 
I'll read that again for you
guys: Massachusetts,
New Hampshire,
Connecticut,
Rhode Island,
New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and Virginia.
Colonies further to the south
weren't invited because they
were viewed as being too far
away from the probable cause of
conflict to invite,
and New Jersey and Virginia
decided not to come because it
seemed too expensive to send
delegates,
which again tells you how even
at a time where people thought
there was some kind of a
crisis--
even that in some cases didn't
inspire people to join in on
this sort of joint colonial
effort.
 
Now the different delegates to
the Albany Congress had
different instructions from
their various colonies about
what they were supposed to be
doing,
and this ends up being a really
common problem with joint
colonial meetings,
this problem of having
different colonies even agree
fundamentally on what's supposed
to be happening at the
congresses when they meet.
And we're for sure going to see
this happen again at the
Constitutional Convention --
where, as we'll see,
you end up with a lot of
different instructions about
what's supposed to be happening
there,
and people sort of have to
figure out what direction to go
based on interpreting each
different set of instructions.
So of the colonies that were at
the Albany Congress,
only Massachusetts authorized
its delegates to go beyond
Indian affairs and intercolonial
defense to at least discuss the
possibility of entering into
what they called "Articles
of Union and Confederation"
with the other colonies that
were represented,
for purposes,
as they put it--this was in
their instructions --
"for the general defense
of his Majesty's subjects and
interests in North America,
as well in time of peace,
as of war."
 
So Massachusetts is the only
colony that includes that,
but it's not as though that
ideas at least about the
possibility of the union had
never occurred to anybody before
that poin,t and particularly
among several people.
Benjamin Franklin--several
years before actually,
as early as 1751--Franklin had
been one of a number of people
who had thought maybe it makes
sense to at least think about
some way of unifying the
colonies,
and he had come up with his own
plan.
He envisioned some kind of a
governor-general that would sort
of preside over this sort of
layer of government that would
exist over the colonies,
and the governor-general he
thought would be paid for by the
crown,
and then he also saw a kind of
general council that would
represent all the colonies and
it would be--
have delegates in it chosen by
colonial assemblies.
So Franklin invents this thing,
1751, that he's--you could see
he's kind of trying to balance
royal authority and colonial
power.
 
And that's his idea.
 
So now a few years later,
1754, the Albany Congress at
least investigates the idea of
some kind of a union of
colonies,
and they actually appointed a
committee to prepare basically a
memorandum outlining what might
be a proposed union.
 
And the memorandum has a really
eighteenth-century kind of title
attached to it;
the memorandum is titled
Short Hints Towards a Scheme
for a General Union of the
British Colonies on the
Continent,
which is one of the
wonderful--Actually,
that's short compared with some
eighteenth-century pamphlet
titles that go on;
when you're making footnotes
you have these titles that go on
for five lines.
But we'll call it "Short
Hints," which will be much
easier.
 
So "Short Hints"
is this memorandum drawn up by
this committee,
and "Short Hints"
starts out by setting forth the
basic problem of thinking about
what to do to even consider some
kind of form of colonial union.
What they say at the beginning
of this document is,
"In such a scheme (in a
scheme of colonial union) the
just prerogative of the Crown
must be preserved or it will not
be approved and confirmed in
England,
and the just liberties of the
people must be secured or the
several colonies will disapprove
of it and oppose it."
Okay.
 
It's a pretty tricky balancing
act that we're talking about.
So to accomplish both of these
things,
"Short Hints"
proposed preserving individual
colonial charters and,
sort of along the lines of what
Franklin had envisioned,
erecting a sort of new
structure of government above
the colonial charters.
So it does propose a Grand
Council which would have two
members from each colony,
and these members would be
chosen by colonial assemblies--
so they're basing power in the
colonies--
and these members of the Grand
Council would serve for three
years.
And, there would be a President
General that would be appointed
by the Crown,
paid for by the British
government,
who could veto or approve acts
of the Grand Council,
and would have the duty to
carry them out.
 
And the authority and power of
both the President and this
Council would extend to Indian
affairs,
the purchase and settlement of
lands that are outside the
boundaries of an existing
colony,
and common defense.
 
And each colony would
contribute to financing this new
level of government based on
some kind of a quota that they
would all agree on.
 
So basically there--the
"Short Hints"
is suggesting something along
the lines of what Franklin
imagined.
 
It's balancing royal authority
and the power of the colonial
legislatures,
trying to sort of pay homage to
both,
making a limited sphere in
which this level of government
can operate.
And Franklin,
not surprisingly,
ultimately was asked to
finalize a plan of union based
on what's laid out in
"Short Hints."
And the Albany Congress
actually approved of this plan
in July of 1754 and the Congress
then sent a copy to the colonial
assemblies for their
consideration.
So, they come up with a plan;
they pass the plan;
and they actually pass it along
the colonies,
which was a significant step.
 
And this came to be known as
the Albany Plan of Union,
which makes sense--Albany
Congress, Albany Plan of Union.
The Albany Plan of Union was
the most detailed proposal to
create a union among the
American colonies ever attempted
before the Revolution.
 
However, the ending of this
will not be surprising.
Colonial legislatures were not
too excited by this idea for two
reasons.
 
Some colonial legislators
denounced it as an attack on the
authority of the King.
 
Others were afraid that it
would undermine colonial
charters,
so although it tried to address
both halves of this equation,
people protested for both
reasons.
 
It's going to undermine the
Crown;
it's going to undermine the
colonies, the colonial
legislatures.
 
So not surprisingly,
it failed, and as Benjamin
Franklin put it at the time--He
was extremely frustrated.
Right?
 
He had the idea.
 
He actually watched the Albany
Congress kind of move in the
direction, passes it,
goes out to the colonies.
Franklin's probably thinking
'oh, I had this idea.
It seemed like a good idea.
 
It might actually go into
effect.'
No.
 
So as he put it at the time,
"Everyone cries a union is
necessary but when they come to
the manner and form of the union
their weak noodles are perfectly
distracted."
That's a very Franklinesque
kind of comment.
"Weak noodles"
is also not a phrase you see in
that many sort of [laughs]
documents from the time period.
So Albany Plan of Union,
for one reason or another,
fails like other attempts at
colonial unity that sort of
faded away.
 
As we're going to see in
lectures coming up and even
partly in today's lecture,
it would end up taking a crisis
that threatened not just
colonial well-being,
but also what colonists
perceived to be their rights,
to inspire the colonists to
really band together in shared
purpose as British-American
colonists.
And that brings us to the real
topic of today's lecture,
which is the Stamp Act crisis.
 
Now as I mentioned before -- I
think it's one or two lectures
ago--
before this crisis,
with the close of the French
and Indian War,
colonial love and respect for
things English was at a real
high because during that war the
colonists had fought alongside
English soldiers against
England's long-time enemy,
the French, and had won.
 
So the colonists after the
French and Indian War are at a
moment of high patriotism,
but of course what they
couldn't foresee was the chain
of events that were going to be
set off by the French and Indian
War.
The Crown had spent vast
amounts of money on the war--
money that somehow was going to
have to be regained--
and this sort of basic economic
reality was going to end up
launching a debate about
colonial rights and privileges
that obviously down the road is
going to have some pretty big
consequences.
 
And now we're going to
basically look at what happens
in response to this budgetary
crisis about all the money spent
in fighting the French and
Indian War,
and it begins with the opening
of the 1764 budget debate in the
House of Commons and so--
It always begins--It begins
with a budget.
 
It begins with a budget
problem, and George Grenville,
who is the King's Prime
Minister, is the cause.
And Grenville is given the task
of figuring out how to fund this
enormous war debt.
 
So first, before 1764,
before the moment we're talking
about here, Grenville actually
had taxed people in England to
help pay for this enormous debt.
 
So he established new taxes on
stamps;
he taxed windows--and actually
those of you who have been to
England and you've probably seen
some buildings where the windows
were bricked in;
that was to avoid the window
tax.
 
Right?
 
[laughs]
'I don't want to pay a tax on
my window, so I will eliminate
my window by covering it over.'
So Grenville established a
number of taxes in England.
He established some duties on
domestic goods.
And even the King reduced his
household expenses.
Right?
 
Oh, [laughs]
even the King decided not to
buy the really expensive kind of
whatever it is he was buying.
'I'll go down one grade.'
 
I don't know how much he
reduced his expenses but he
tried, so the moral of this
is--England is taxed first.
But next, logically enough,
Grenville turned to the
colonies.
 
Now he didn't think and he
didn't argue that the colonies
should be paying for,
generally speaking,
the English national debt.
 
However, there was a standing
army of ten thousand men that
had been left behind in the
colonies after the war to
protect the colonies from the
French that were still there,
to protect them from Native
Americans,
maybe to protect them from the
Spanish that were also somewhere
there on the continent.
 
And Grenville did feel that the
colonies should help pay for
that--for that army left behind.
 
He also thought that colonial
taxes were relatively low,
and he knew that smuggling with
the French during the war with
the French had been a little bit
rampant in the colonies during
the French and Indian War.
 
It's not a good thing.
 
So basically he put all of that
together and he decided it would
be both fair and necessary to
clamp down on colonial trade.
So Grenville decided--and you
could see the logic behind what
he's doing here--
that he would try to get some
revenue from the colonies to
support the standing army that's
in the colonies.
 
And the first thing that he
did, a sort of a logical thing
to do based on what I just told
you, he decided he was going to
try to stamp out smuggling.
 
He was going to try and at
least stop something that
shouldn't be happening--and
money was leaking out through
smuggling.
 
But once he began to focus on
this problem,
it became easy to see why
smuggling was so widespread.
Colonial customs collectors,
who were supposed to be in the
colonies attending to their
duties,
collecting customs,
often left the colonies and
went back to England and left
their deputies in charge back in
the colonies.
 
I mentioned before that not
everybody was really excited to
be based in the colonies,
and so here there were some
people at least who went back to
England and sort of left things
in their deputies' control.
 
So not surprisingly,
what this meant in part was,
some of the people left in
charge were probably less than
focused on their duties.
 
There were some of these
deputies who actually collected
bribes.
 
There were some of them that
just allowed the smuggling to
happen, rather than collecting
customs fees.
So you have a leaky system.
 
So Grenville--looking at what's
going on here,
discovers the source of the
smuggling problem--orders the
collectors to get back to the
colonies.
'Please. This is your job.
 
You must go back to the
colonies.
I'm really sorry but you must
go back and do your job.'
And he told colonial governors
to watch over what's happening
and to report to him any
smuggling that they might see.
Now clearly,
to the colonists,
the British now seemed to be
paying attention to colonial
affairs a little bit more than
they were used to,
and taking action in ways that
perhaps they had not taken
action before.
 
Now these are pretty mild
steps.
Right?
 
'Smuggling isn't supposed to be
happening so I am going to act
against smuggling.'
 
It's not an enormous strike by
Grenville,
but still, it certainly would
have indicated to the colonists
that this period of salutary
neglect of colonial trade might
be shifting into something else.
 
Customs collectors had to do
their job;
smuggling needed to be
suppressed;
and people who were caught
violating trade laws had to
travel for their trial to a
Vice-Admiralty court in Halifax,
Nova Scotia.
 
Okay.
 
That was highly unpopular,
not that Nova Scotia
is--anything wrong with Nova
Scotia.
However, if you are a person
who is now being caught for
doing something you've always
been doing,
smuggling, and some official
decides he's going to sort of
come after you and make you pay
for that,
you needed to have a trial in
Nova Scotia.
You needed to post bond
yourself for the cost of the
trial, and at these trials,
a Vice-Admiralty court does not
have a jury.
 
We're going to come back to
that, but obviously for all of
these reasons this would not be
a popular thing.
Clearly, Grenville was serious
about clamping down on
smuggling.
 
Now, Grenville also established
some duties on foreign goods
shipped in to the colonies,
like sugar.
Foreign rum,
French wine:
both were prohibited from
import in to the colonies.
Items like iron and animal
hides were added to the general
list of goods that had a duty
attached to them.
There were new higher duties
placed on coffee,
on indigo, on certain kinds of
wine--all of these things
largely non-British goods.
 
And goods that had to pass
through England on their way to
the colonies had their duty
doubled.
The one little ray of sunshine
here amidst all of these duties
is that the duty on foreign
molasses was reduced by half--
and molasses was really central
to New England distilleries
producing rum,
so I think Grenville probably
thought well,
that might be a good thing.
Right?
 
Yeah.
 
'There's a lot of duties on
foreign imports but I'm reducing
the duty on foreign molasses,
so those New Englanders at
least should be pleased.
 
It'll be a little cheaper for
them to produce rum.'
So lump together all of those
things: all of those duties,
all of the new duties,
the changes in the cost of
imported goods and the things
that no longer were going to be
allowed to be imported in to the
colonies.
That all gets known under the
sort of big name,
the Sugar Act of 1764.
 
The Sugar Act of 1764.
 
In England it was also known
logically enough as the American
Revenue Act.
 
[laughs]
It's a good way to remember
exactly what it was supposed to
be doing.
And, as I said,
Grenville thought 'well,
that whole molasses thing means
it's not going to be that
objectionable to the colonists
because I'm actually offering
them something as I'm charging
them more on some other things.'
Now a side note here.
 
We're going to see more of this
later, but I'm going to mention
it here.
 
What we're seeing here is a
hint of a pattern that's going
to reveal itself over the course
of the semester--
is that clearly the British and
in this case Grenville is trying
to anticipate the colonial
reaction to his actions,
to what he's doing to British
policy.
But here, as we'll see--there
are later examples as well--
he's wrong about the colonial
understanding of the British
imperial system,
and of the colonists'
understanding of their place in
it.
So what we're going to see
again and again and again in one
way or another is:
the British assume that the
colonists are going to do one
particular thing or that they're
going to think in a particular
way,
and the colonists end up doing
or thinking something different.
Which in a sense makes sense
because you have royal officials
in England;
they're an ocean away.
They don't necessarily
understand the evolving colonial
mindset.
 
It's not like the colonists
themselves have been standing
back and saying,
'We are evolving a different
mindset.' Right?
 
Things are sort of percolating
along and now,
the events that we're beginning
to talk about today are going to
begin to reveal differences in
opinions and ideas.
So, an ocean away they're
assuming that the colonists are
going to act in a certain way,
the colonists don't
necessarily, and it's part of
the point--
part of the problem to the
colonists.
These people are an ocean away,
and as we'll see,
don't necessarily understand
what's going on in the
colonies--
or certainly,
what the colonists are thinking
about what's going on.
I'm going to come back to that
again in today's lecture.
So Grenville thinks 'oh,
okay, probably this act all in
all might balance itself out;
it won't be so bad.'
But the colonists only saw that
the English suddenly seemed to
be putting teeth into the
imperial system to really
enforce rules and regulations.
 
And in enforcing these rules
and regulations,
they were demanding that
violators travel to Nova Scotia
at their own cost,
posting bond for their own
trials even if they were
innocent,
and as I mentioned before this
Vice-Admiralty court in Nova
Scotia,
which basically is a court for
crimes at sea,
did not have a jury.
At about the same time in 1764,
Grenville also decided he's
going to clamp down on colonial
currency,
because during the war several
colonies and especially Virginia
had issued vast amounts of paper
money.
And Grenville basically--He's
trying to assert control over
the monetary system too.
 
So in 1764, he passes the
Currency Act,
and the Currency Act says the
colonies can't issue money;
that any act passed by a
colonial legislature that
violates this act is null and
void;
and that any colonial governor
who consented to such an act on
the part of the colonies--
any colonial governor that
allows his colony to produce
currency--
would be fined a thousand
pounds, which is a huge amount
of money at that point,
would be dismissed from office,
and would be ineligible from
any public office in future.
Okay.
 
That's obviously a serious --
'We really, really,
really mean this about the
whole currency issue.
We're putting some serious
punishments on the line here.'
So taken altogether,
Americans--colonists--drew
several not-so-happy conclusions
from all of these actions.
So first, obviously they're
alarmed at the sudden clamping
down on what in their eyes at
least had been a working system.
Right?
 
'Everything has been okay.
 
The system's working.
 
We're profiting from what we're
doing.
The Crown, the empire,
is profiting too.
It's working perfectly well.'
 
Now all of a sudden things are
being changed and teeth are
being put in where there weren't
teeth before.
Second, informed that they had
to go to Nova Scotia if they
smuggled and that there'd be no
jury during their trial,
they began to feel like
second-class citizens being
denied a basic fundamental
British right of a trial by
jury.
 
Third, they were alarmed at the
implications of the Currency Act
because the implications are,
if you think about it,
Grenville basically saying he
can nullify an act passed by a
colonial assembly.
 
That's--in the minds of the
colonists--a pretty alarming
precedent.
 
And then finally,
fourth, colonists were also
alarmed that these new duties
and these new acts that are
being enforced were largely
intended to fund a standing army
in the colonies,
a standing army that Parliament
saw as being protective,
but you can also see how the
colonists might have seen this
as a threat.
Right?
 
'Well, if we don't listen to
all of this stuff,
there is a standing army here
that we're actually funding.'
So the colonists could have
seen that armed force as a sign
of tyranny, as a threat to
enforce colonial cooperation.
So for all of these reasons,
these acts are problematic,
threatening,
frightening and get people
thinking.
 
As Massachusetts radical James
Otis said,
"The passage of the Sugar
Act set people a thinking,
in six months,
more than they had done in
their whole lives before."
 
Right?
 
It's like, 'wow,
that was a lot,
and suddenly we really are
evaluating how things are
working here.'
 
And obviously what people are
thinking about is their basic
rights as English subjects.
 
Now logically enough,
there was a colonial response
to Grenville's actions and--as
we'll see, and also a
pattern--Massachusetts led the
way.
So one example:
There was a Boston town meeting
that met and decided to inform
the Massachusetts Colonial
Assembly that they objected to
Grenville's actions and that
they proposed united action in
the colonies to protest.
Now this is just a town meeting
saying,
'well, we the town of Whatever
don't like what's going on and
we think the colonies should
unite and protest.'
So it's not necessarily a
proposition that's going to get
acted on.
 
Nothing really happens to this,
but it does represent a pretty
radical suggestion and,
as I've already discussed,
it's a radical suggestion that
is being launched for what feels
like reasons of self-defense.
 
So--but even though this
doesn't get passed,
the language of this petition
that comes from this town
meeting really reveals a lot
about some of the fundamental
fears of the colonists,
and I'm going to just quote a
sentence or two from it.
 
"But what still heightens
our apprehensions is that those
unexpected proceedings may be
preparatory to new taxations
upon us.
 
This we apprehend annihilates
our charter right to govern and
tax ourselves.
 
It strikes at our British
privileges which as we have
never forfeited them we hold in
common with our fellow subjects
who are natives of
Britain."
That's a pretty strong
statement.
Clearly, the main problem here
isn't just financial.
We don't have a lot of people
who are just irked that they
have to pay more money.
 
More important,
it's the meaning of what's
going on that's upsetting the
colonists.
It's the ways in which their
rights,
as that petition put it,
as natives of Britain,
seemingly are being violated as
well as the sense on the part of
these colonists that they can't
figure out yet quite how to
voice their grievances.
 
They don't have a direct
representative in Parliament,
they're upset,
they're trying to figure out
what to do about it--
but I think that little hole in
the system was also revealing
itself at this point.
Now the British government
didn't really listen to colonial
protest as it was,
they didn't really sort of pick
up on the tone of things going
on in the colonies.
And in fact Grenville continued
along with his revenue plan,
and in March of 1765 he
proposed and Parliament passed
the Stamp Act.
 
The Stamp Act said that stamped
paper had to be used for all
kinds of documents,
for legal documents,
for college diplomas,
for land deeds,
for contracts,
for bills of sale,
for liquor licenses,
for playing cards,
pamphlets, newspapers,
almanacs, broadsides.
All kinds of paper products now
needed to be using this special
stamped paper --and this special
stamped paper cost more.
So basically,
the Stamp Act is placing a tax
on all of these items by making
people buy stamped paper for
them, and stamped paper is more
expensive.
So what's significant about the
Stamp Act: It's the first direct
tax levied by Parliament
directly upon the colonists.
It's not a duty on shipping.
 
It's a tax levied by Parliament
directly upon the colonists and
what they're purchasing in the
colonies.
So basically,
if you needed a legal document,
if you were printing
newspapers, you had to buy
stamped paper from special stamp
agents who were appointed by the
Crown.
 
Now I can't resist adding here
only because -- I probably
mentioned something like this
before.
As an early American historian,
you don't get to sort of live
your history that often.
 
Right?
 
It's pretty far away.
 
I look for opportunities to
live my history but it doesn't
happen that often.
 
I've actually shot off a
dueling pistol.
I tried to learn to ride.
 
I tried basically to be an
eighteenth-century gentleman.
Right?
 
I took fencing lessons--I took
riding lessons--
I shot off dueling pistols--and
I determined that I would have
died a thousand times in the
eighteenth century.
[laughter]
I was just bad on all counts.
But in this case I wasn't
trying to be an
eighteenth-century gentleman.
 
I actually was doing research
and I went down to the island of
Nevis in the Caribbean,
which is where Alexander
Hamilton is from.
 
I was doing research on
Hamilton and I wanted to get in
to this courthouse on the island
which is where they had the
papers that related to the
history of the island.
And I was told when I went to
do this--
I showed up at the courthouse
and they said,
'Well, you need to go see the
stamp man before you can come
here because you need to buy a
stamp and then you need to put
it in a book and you need to
swear an oath,' and there was a
whole bunch of stuff I needed to
do.
Nevis used to be a British
island, so I needed to find the
stamp man.
 
Okay, but--And oddly enough,
I didn't yet connect with what
I was going to be experiencing
yet.
I'm just like:
must find stamp man.
[laughter]
So the stamp man I was told,
I think, was in the--logically
enough in the post office.
However, the stamp man's hours
were unclear to me.
I couldn't figure out when he
was there.
It took me a long time to find
the stamp man and to buy the
stamp, and then I had to go back
to the courthouse and I did.
I had to paste it in a book and
I had to swear an oath of some
kind.
 
And there was this whole sort
of colonial experience I was
having.
 
But in the middle of this,
when I couldn't find the stamp
man--
and I was dying to do this
research--
it was not until I actually
said out loud,
"Curse that stamp
man" that it was like:
okay,
I'm living the Revolution.
 
[laughter] Hate that stamp tax.
 
It took me a long time to
realize I was having my own
little personal revolutionary
moment.
And I should say that I don't
want Nevis to look bad.
Actually, it was a wonderful
place to visit and the people
were wonderful on that island to
me.
It was just--I couldn't find
the stamp man and it--I just had
a Revolution flashback.
 
And I ultimately did the whole
ritual and got to use the
records and they were great,
but I had my own little
personal stamp tax moment which
kind of blew my mind at the
time,
not -- it would not be the
first thing I think I would get
to experience here in--
I guess at the time--in the
twentieth century.
Okay.
 
So Stamp Act--I understood the
rage of the Stamp Act.
Now back to Grenville,
Mr. Stamp Act.
Clearly, all these things I'm
talking to you about--He's
passing multiple acts trying to
get some control over colonial
finance.
 
And from his point of view,
he's doing this to pay for the
protection of the colonies
themselves.
So the money being raised from
all of these things actually
would have gone into a fund for
defense of the colonies--
and even when you take all of
these fundraising activities
together,
all of the money from all of
these duties and taxes added up
to only about a third of the
cost of maintaining that
colonial military establishment.
But to the colonists,
they were being taxed without
their consent,
and their rights to some basic
fundamental British rights were
being abridged;
their basic rights as English
subjects were being attacked.
And this is important to note
because I think we all have 'no
taxation without representation'
sort of running through our
head.
 
Right?
 
That's what the Revolution is
about--as though the Revolution
is all about people who are
angry about paying taxes.
But obviously it's about much
more than that.
We're talking about fundamental
rights being violated,
people feeling that there's
something more than just,
'I don't like paying
taxes'--but it's what that
means,
what this whole way of
operating suggests and implies
about fundamental rights about
the position of the colonists
within the empire.
Now, the British response to
colonial grumbling about these
measures was to argue that
colonists were virtually
represented in Parliament--
virtual representation--that in
Parliament there were members
who represented the entire
British realm,
and so the colonists were
virtually represented.
 
And the argument would have
been: there were also people in
England proper who did not get
to directly vote for their own
representatives in Parliament,
so colonial rights of
representation aren't under
attack.
What's happening in the
colonies isn't that different
from what happened to some
people who would have been in
England proper.
 
But in the colonies,
where colonial representatives
often got direct instructions
from town meetings--
where you're really seeing some
really direct representation--
virtual representation was not
always a convincing argument.
And actually,
as one Maryland petition at the
time put it, virtual
representation is,
quote, "fantastical and
frivolous."
Right?
 
I love the alliteration there,
fantastical and frivolous.
This whole virtual
representation thing,
they weren't necessarily
buying.
As someone argued at the time,
in England such an assertion
about virtual representation
might be true because a member
of Parliament probably had
similar interests to other
inhabitants of England,
but what would a member of
Parliament know of colonial
interests?
And even worse,
as some colonists reasoned,
maybe members of Parliament
might actually have interests
that were opposed to the
colonists'.
Maybe they'd actually want to
tax the colonies more,
so that they themselves would
have to pay less.
So basically at the heart of
these colonial grievances were
assumptions about British rights
and British liberties.
Liberties were rooted in
property.
At the time,
a slave would have been defined
as someone who depended entirely
on the will of others,
so to be free and to be
independent you needed to be in
control of your own property.
 
Directly taxing without consent
seemed to threaten colonial
property rights and--again--to
fundamentally attack basic
English liberties.
 
Okay.
 
So now we have a whole list of
grievances here bundled up under
the idea of threatened liberties
and rights.
Right?
 
We have the first direct tax
from parliament on colonists,
and it might be the precedent
for more such things.
We have violation of colonial
rights to a trial by jury.
We have a seeming attack on the
colonial economy,
where things are suddenly being
regulated in some way that they
haven't seemed to be before.
 
We have the threat of directly
overriding colonial legislation
and legislatures.
 
So you can see why all of these
things would have been pretty
alarming,
but there were also two
important unintended outcomes of
the Stamp Act,
in addition to all of those
raised fears.
Unintended outcome number one:
Because the Stamp Act attacked
all of the colonies equally,
it actually helped to join them
together in shared cause.
 
And second, unintended outcome
number two: by attacking people
who used paper particularly--
right?--lawyers using legal
documents,
newspaper writers and printers,
merchants,
ship owners--the act also
attacked,
specifically,
the most vocal and prestigious
colonists,
in addition to everybody else.
 
So it was attacking people who
had the means to protest,
to say what they were upset
about legally--
in writing--so it was easy for
people--
they were logically the people
who would make the loudest
protest.
 
So now in this climate of
increasing anxiety on the part
of the colonists,
we arrive at a Revolutionary
War moment that most Americans
know: Patrick Henry.
Patrick Henry's dramatic
declarations in the Virginia
House of Burgesses on May
30^(th) and 31^(st) of 1765.
And what he's doing at the
time--We all know "Give me
liberty or give me death,"
but we don't really focus on
why he says that.
 
He actually was protesting
against the implications of the
Stamp Act.
 
Now, I'm sure we all have
pictures in our head,
images in our head.
 
There are a lot of bad
Revolutionary War movies but
probably even some of the bad
Revolutionary War movies have
scenes of Patrick Henry.
 
Well, it's another one of the
founders doing this.
Patrick Henry;
that's what he does.
'Give me liberty or give me
death.'
So we have a lot of images in
our head about what happened
there--
and then of course we have
people crying "Treason,
treason,"
and Henry doing a variety of
brave things and saying a
variety of brave things as he
makes his bold statement.
Now it's true that actually
Henry was a dramatic speaker.
He actually was.
 
Even Thomas Jefferson thought
so, and Thomas Jefferson did not
like Patrick Henry.
 
He thought Henry was lazy.
 
He didn't think Henry was
interested in reading books,
which to Jefferson would be a
very bad sin.
He thought Henry was a little
reckless--
and Henry was a little bit of a
sort of rough and ready
character--
but even Jefferson had to admit
that Henry had a huge impact on
his audience,
that he really--when he spoke,
he swayed people's emotions.
And Jefferson also,
it must be said,
was a notoriously bad public
speaker.
Right?
 
He had this quiet voice,
he mumbled, he was nervous,
he hated speaking in front of
groups, so probably he was also
a little bit jealous of Henry.
 
That didn't help him in his
attitude towards Patrick Henry.
So Henry was actually a great
speaker,
but rather than stick with
legend and the great orator with
the finger in the air,
I'm going to offer you here an
eyewitness account of Henry's
speech from an unnamed French
traveler who actually was
standing in the lobby of the
Virginia House of Burgesses--
and Jefferson was there
too--watching the proceeding.
 
So this is how this French
traveler describes what he saw.
"Arrived at Williamsburg
at 12 where I saw three Negroes
hanging at the gallows for
having robbed Mr. Waltho of
300 pounds' sterling."
 
So that's the first sight that
greets him.
"I went immediately to the
Assembly which was seating,
where I was entertained with
very strong debates concerning
duties that the Parliament wants
to lay on the American colonies,
which they call of style stamp
duties.
Shortly after I came in,
one of the members stood up and
said he had read that in former
times Tarquin and Julius had
their Brutus,
Charles had his Cromwell,
and he did not doubt that some
good American would stand up in
favor of his country;
but says he in a more moderate
manner,
and was going to continue,
when the Speaker of the House
rose,
and said, 'The last that stood
up had spoke treason' and he was
sorry to see that not one of the
members of the House was loyal
enough to stop him before he had
gone so far.
Upon which the same member
stood up again"
and it says in parenthesis
"(I think his name is
Henry) and said that if he had
affronted the Speaker of the
House he was ready to ask pardon
and he would show his loyalty to
His Majesty King George the
Third at the expense of the last
drop of his blood,
but what he had said must be
attributed to the interest of
his country's dying liberty
which he had at heart.
 
And the heat of passion might
have led him to say something
more that he intended;
but, again, if he said anything
wrong he begged the speaker and
the House's pardon.
And some other members stood up
and backed him on which the
affair was dropped."
 
Okay.
 
So that's the eyewitness
account, which is not quite like
the legend,
but the fact is actually Henry
did speak pretty boldly and he
did talk about his country's
dying liberty,
which says a lot about what
we're talking about right now,
that--the colonial perception
of lost English liberties.
 
And ultimately in May of 1765,
the Virginia House of Burgesses
did end up passing some
resolutions that are ultimately
known as the Virginia
Resolutions.
And the Virginia Resolutions
said that the colonists had come
to Virginia with equal rights to
all British subjects and that
they still retained them;
that Virginians alone had the
right to directly tax
Virginians;
and that only those who would
be affected by taxes had the
right to pass them.
 
I'll repeat that one more time.
 
Virginia Resolutions,
May 1765--the colonists had
come to Virginia with equal
rights to all British subjects;
they still retained them;
Virginians alone had the right
to directly tax Virginians;
and only those who would be
affected by taxes had the right
to pass them.
I will stop there.
 
We will go on.
 
We are just--I keep saying
we're going to get to the Stamp
Act Congress.
 
We're so close.
 
We will begin with the Stamp
Act Congress,
which will lead logically into
the topic of the next lecture,
which is: what's going on in
Boston,
and the continued buildup.
 
We'll see how the Virginia
Resolutions spread to other
colonies,
and how resistance begins to
build because of the Stamp Act
and how events continued to
unfold after that point.
 
I will see you all on Thursday.
 
 
 
