What was the Stamp Act?

The Stamp Act was a 1765 British law that taxed colonists by requiring an embossed revenue stamp on most printed materials, including newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents, contracts, court papers, ship clearances, licenses, almanacs, college diplomas, and even playing cards and dice. Parliament passed the Act on March 22, 1765 under Prime Minister George Grenville and set it to take effect on November 1, 1765. Britain was carrying about £130 million in war debt from the Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763), and Grenville reasoned that the colonies should help pay for their own defense and the 10,000 troops Britain stationed in North America after 1763. Unlike earlier external duties on imported goods, the Stamp Act was an internal tax that touched daily life in every colony, and unlike sugar duties it was paid in scarce hard currency.

Colonial reaction was swift and coordinated. On May 30, 1765 Patrick Henry rose in the Virginia House of Burgesses with seven resolves declaring that only colonial assemblies could tax Virginians; some printed versions implied that resistance to tyranny was lawful. In October 1765 nine colonies sent 27 delegates to a Stamp Act Congress at Federal Hall in New York City, the first intercolonial political gathering since the failed Albany Congress of 1754. The delegates issued a Declaration of Rights and Grievances that distinguished trade duties from internal taxation and asserted that the colonists were entitled to all the rights of Englishmen.

On the streets, Sons of Liberty groups led by Samuel Adams in Boston, Isaac Sears in New York, and similar leaders elsewhere intimidated stamp distributors into resigning. A Boston mob ransacked the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson on August 26, 1765 and forced stamp distributor Andrew Oliver to abdicate his post. Merchants signed nonimportation agreements, cutting British exports to the colonies by roughly 14 percent in 1765.

Parliament repealed the Stamp Act on March 18, 1766 under intense pressure from British merchants, but on the same day passed the Declaratory Act asserting that Parliament had authority to bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." That assertion would soon collide with the Townshend duties of 1767, the Tea Act of 1773, and the Coercive Acts of 1774. The Stamp Act crisis taught colonists how to organize across colony lines, gave Sons of Liberty networks practical experience, and crystallized the constitutional argument that taxation required the consent of the governed.