AMERICAN RESISTANCE | Mar 22—The Stamp Act

George Grenville (1712-1770)

March 22, 2017 — This day in 1765 the British Government imposed the Stamp Act on the American colonies, provoking serious Resistance.

The Act lasted only until the next year, but in the meantime it angered so many of the colonists that it started stiff opposition to the Crown that resulted in American independence.

The British Government at that time was led by two Georges, George III and George Grenville.

A previous Prime Minister, savvy William Pitt the Elder (alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford) had been popular in the colonies. Pitt had urged the King to relinquish his obsession with what was happening in the German duchies and had the vision to see the value of securing the North American continent by using British troops to defeat the French and Indians. The colonists were so grateful to Pitt they named Pittsburgh after him. That was where the last battle of the formidable Gen. Edward Braddock took place. Before his death, Braddock gave his general's sash to his second-in-command, Col. George Washington.

Although victorious against the French, the British Government ran up debts to  send over their redcoats and faced having to borrow more to defend the vast new American territories won in the French and Indian War (known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War, 1756-1763).

The parliament of George Grenville therefore passed the Stamp Act as a revenue-raising attempt, following on the Sugar Act of 1764.

Grenville entered Parliament in 1741, one of the men interrelated by blood or marriage dubbed Cobham's Cubs who united in opposition to Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole was the first person to be considered by historians to have the primus inter pares status of Prime Minister and he held this power from 1721 to 1742 — a length of service not subsequently equalled. Walpole practiced a policy of benign neglect toward the American colonies, which had the advantage of not costing the Crown any money.

Grenville was a graduate of Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. His ministry 22 years after the end of Walpole lasted only two years (1763–65). It was disastrous. He never developed a close relationship with the king because George III continually consulted with Bute, who had recommended Grenville as his successor.

The Stamp Act levied a tax on all materials printed for commercial and legal use in the colonies, from newspapers and pamphlets to playing cards and dice. This was a common fundraising vehicle in England, but stirred up protest in the colonies, which had already been burdened with three new major taxes: the Sugar Act (1764), adding duties on imports of textiles, wines, coffee and sugar; the Currency Act (1764), which reduced the value of paper money used by colonists; and the Quartering Act (1765), which required colonists to provide room and board to British troops.

The Stamp Act raised the issue for the colonists of taxation without representation. They started to organize against the British government. By October of 1765, nine of the 13 colonies sent representatives to the Stamp Act Congress, where they drafted a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances.”

Grenville’s ministry ended in the year he pushed through the Stamp Act. Realizing that it would be more expensive to enforce the Act, Parliament abolished it in 1766. But it was too late. The damage had been done. Resistance to the Mother Country had started and did not stop until the Treaty of Paris was signed.

Most important of the organizing groups was the Sons of Liberty in Boston and other ports. In the south, wealthy landowners were the leaders.  Societies continued to meet to address what they saw as the abusive policies of George III and the newly consolidated British empire.

Frederick North (1732-1792) was the son of the Earl of Guilford. Like Pitt, he was an alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford. He served in the Treasury from 1759 to 1766, when the government of George Grenville fell following the disaster of the Stamp Act (not to mention other stumbles). North became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the second ministry of Pitt the Elder, and then became Prime Minister during the years when the American colonies broke away.

Sources include (besides links) - http://www.ouramericanrevolution.org/index.cfm/people/view/pp0031 and  Encyclopedia Britannica

EC HISTORY | Origins of 1776 (Updated Dec.14, 2015)

The American colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. Land speculation
by Virginians was a crucial motivator. Source: Maps ETC.

Aug. 14, 2014–I just received the July 2014 issue of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology (73:3), edited by Cliff Cobb.

The entire issue is a forum for an update of what is called the "Curtis Thesis" – the idea that  key reasons for the American Revolution were economic.

Two new British rules broke with the established economic order:

1. They created  trade monopolies and 2. They changed the way lands obtained from the French would be sold.

The Curtis Thesis is  an extension of Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, published in 1913.

My reaction to the new issue is: Bravo, Curtis! Bravo Cobb!

It should not detract from our admiration of George Washington that he was a land speculator along with other Fathers of Our Country like Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin. After all, Washington's profession had been land surveying, before he joined the military during the French and Indian War.

The Founding Fathers engaged in brave and thoughtful initiatives - they succeeded in uniting the 13 colonies and in forming a new country with a durable constitution. It should not shock us to find that they had significant self-interest in the independence from the British Crown of the newly united American colonies.

The Curtis thesis is propounded by Thomas D. Curtis, a retired professor of economics with an interest in economic history and the history of economic thought. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Indiana University and has taught there and at the University of South Florida and elsewhere. He and his wife live in Temple Terrace, near Tampa, Fla. The thesis elaborated in the new issue of the Journal is challenging. The main points are:

• The taxation issue associated with Boston Tea Party was not the central issue for many of the principal actors of the American Revolution. 
• The more important issue for the traders was the monopolization of the tea trade in the hands of the East India Company.
• For the Virginians who were a major force at the center of the unification of the 13 colonies, the key issue was the Quebec Act, which transferred settlement rights to the Crown, which sought to add them to Quebec

The elimination in 1763 of French claims west of the
colonies opened up huge areas for speculation.

I have noted elsewhere that William Pitt the Elder, alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford, made possible the American Revolution by defeating the French in North America (starting with the attack on Fort Duquesne), and that Lord North, another Trinity, Oxford alumnus, made the Revolution inevitable through his tax and land policies.

The feud between John Wilkes and John Stuart (Earl of Bute), both of them alumni of the University of Leiden, also played a part.

More generally, Oxford alumni (especially south of New York) and Cambridge alumni (especially in New England) had an abiding influence on the emergence of the American colonies.

Curtis shows exactly how Lord North created the perfect storm for the colonies and united them against George III. The British Crown and Parliament, which in 1773 represented England, Wales, Ireland and since 1707 Scotland, introduced policies that were anathema to the colonies.

Taxes were not the most important issue. Yes, the colonies were expected to pay for the war on their behalf. But, Curtis says, "the colonists successfully overturned [the tax] measures [so that] taxation was a superficial problem." He goes on, in the abstract of his thesis:

But in 1773 ... [Britain] imposed a commercial monopoly on tea sales, and in 1774, when it cut off settlement in western lands, the colonists saw no choice but to rebel and create their own nation.

In other words, the British Government saw an easy way to obtain revenues from the colonies without imposing direct taxes on them. They would monopolize trade and collect taxes from the monopoly, and they would put up western land sales claimed as Virginian for auction instead of allowing the colonies to collect revenue from the sales. However, the newly imposed indirect methods of raising revenue were more abhorrent to the leaders of the colonies than the ones they replaced. And the French and Indian War had trained colonial military leaders such as General Washington, who made resistance to London a real possibility.