Ramping up to Revolution

The English monarchy had incurred an enormous debt through financing the Seven Years War, one of approximately 150 million pounds (the equivalent of trillions of today’s dollars). “Interest on the debt absorbed half the government’s annual revenue” (Liberty 180) so clearly a new way to generate federal income was needed. Taxes like the Sugar and Stamp acts would address the problem, but colonists were against it. Not because they didn’t feel they had to pay taxes to support their home empire, but because they felt inadequately represented in the House of Commons back in England. “No taxation without representation” became one of their rallying cries.

British residents of America and her other colonies of India and Canada felt they deserved and demanded the same rights as Britons living back home. The empire and its leaders assigned to the American colonies, however, disagreed and saw the monarchy as “a system of unequal parts in which different principles governed different areas, and all were subject to the authority of Parliament” (Liberty 182). As a result, giving up the ability to tax the American colonies most likely would have brought about similar demands for exemption from all of England’s other colonies, and as such could not be allowed.

Colonists were outraged over the Stamp Act because it, unlike the Sugar Act, affected every colonist, from the richest down to the poorest. This united all in crying foul and led to their organization and rallying together. In their view, the Stamp Act represented the empire’s attempt to dictate and control the spending and collecting of colony money, and they had done it without consulting colonial leaders or seeking the input of colonists at all. Colonists felt, like most Britons, that they had the right to not be taxed by people other their own elected representatives.

As a result, though the monarchy eventually deferred on several key policies – including the Stamp Act – they were soon unwilling to concede any further, particularly in the aftermath of the “Boston Tea Party.” They attempted to instate something very near to martial law by sending troops, sealing the harbors, allowing soldiers into private homes, and enacting what the colonists dubbed the “Intolerable Acts.” War was on the way.

The House of Burgesses rejected the final three resolutions because they called for people to directly resist any taxation not coming from King James or his “substitutes,” which was too radical an idea for them to support. The final resolution also boldly states that “any person who … shall assert or maintain that any person or persons other than the General Assembly of this colony, have any right or power to impose or lay any taxation on the people here, shall be deemed an enemy to his Majesty’s colony” (Liberty 92), which was probably going a little too far at the time. While conceding at the end that it was indeed “his Majesty’s colony,” it was basically calling the King himself an enemy if he attempted to tax colonists without the approval of local colonial leadership.