PART III.

Parlia

taxation.

ORIGIN AND CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION.

ed by your care? no, your oppression planted them in mentary America. They fled from tyranny to a then uncultivated and inhospitable country, where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable, and among others to the cruelties of a savage foe, the most subtle, and I will take upon me to say, the most formidable of any people on the face of the earth. And yet, actuated by principles of true English liberty, they met all hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own country from the hands of those who should have been

their friends. They nourished by your indulgence? The Stamp They grew up by your neglect of them: As soon as you Act, 1765. began to care about them, that care was exercised in Speech of Col. Barré, sending persons to rule them in one department and

another, who were perhaps the deputies of deputies to some members of this house, sent to spy out their liberties, to misrepresent their actions, and to prey upon them; men whose behavior, on many occasions, has caused the blood of these sons of liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest seats of justice, some who, to my knowledge, were glad, by going to a foreign country, to escape being brought to the bar of the court of justice in their own. They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a surprising valour, amidst their constant and laborious industry, for the defence of a country whose frontier was drenched in blood, while its interior part yielded its little savings to your emolument: And believe me; remember I this day told you so; that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany them still. But prudence forbids me to explain myself further. God knows, I do not at this time speak from any motives of party heat. What I deliver are the genuine sentiments of my heart. However superior to me in general knowledge and experience the respectable body of this house may be, yet I claim to know more of America than most of

THE REVENUE SYSTEM OF TAXATION.

PART III.

you, having seen and been conversant in that country. ParliaThe people, I believe, are as truly loyal as any sub-mentary jects the king has, but a people jealous of their liberties, and who will vindicate them if ever they should be violated-but the subject is too delicate; I will say

no more."

Sir Ed

Burke on the Stamp

Sir Edmund Burke, on the part of the opposition to the bill, rose and said "The great contests for free- Speech of dom in England were from the earliest times chiefly mund upon the question of taxing. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been Act, 1765. exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in argument defended the excellence of the English constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside in a certain body called a House of Commons. They went further; they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that in theory it ought to be so, from the very nature of a House of Commons as an immediate representation of the people, whether the old records delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist. The colonies draw from you, as with their life blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty as with you, is fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars, without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse, and as they found that beat they thought themselves sick or sound. And your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through

1

PART III.

Parlia

ORIGIN AND CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION.

wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination mentary that they as well as you had an interest in these common principles."

taxation.

under

II.

Taxation Charles I. attempted, during his reign, to levy shipCharles I. money and other taxes, without the intervention of parand James liament, and the attempt was resisted as an infringement of the liberties of the people, as well as a violent invasion of the rights secured to them by the English constitution. It involved him in a passionate controversy with his subjects which terminated in bringing his neck to the block. James II. undertook to exercise a similar policy, but, as we have seen, it resulted in his expulsion from the throne and a transfer of his crown to William and Mary, the prince and princess of Orange.

Developments of

These were some of the phases in which the political the revolu- elements of freedom embraced in the protestantism

tion of 1688.

of the puritans were developed. And accordingly as they reached a more distinct and tangible form, the religious aspect of the controversy died away, and in its place arose those more disastrous conflicts between the political liberties claimed by the people on the one side, and the assumed prerogatives of the crown on the other; which ended only in the establishment of those fundamental principles of civil liberty which were the basis of the English constitution, and which declare "that it was the undoubted right of English subjects, being freemen or free-holders, to give

their property only by their own consent, that the Principles House of Commons exercised the sole right of granting established the money of the people of England because that House by the rev- alone represented them: that the taxes were the free gift

of freedom

olution of

1688.

of the people to their rulers: that the authority of the sovereign was to be exercised only for the good of his subjects that it was the right of the subjects, of the people, peaceably to meet together and consider their grievances, and to petition for a redress of them; and if intolerable grievances were unredressed, if petitions

THE REVENUE SYSTEM OF TAXATION.

PART III.

and remonstrances failed to produce relief, they had the Parlia right to seek it by forcible means, by revolution.

mentary taxation.

While the struggles which resulted in the establishment of these principles were going forward in the parent state, the colonies were forming in America. They had imbibed, and incorporated into their own organizations, all these notions of liberty. The idea therefore of their submitting to such an infringement of their constitutional rights as was now proposed, it seems could hardly have been seriously entertained by the advocates of the measure. "It must have been supposed," says governor Bernard of Massachusetts Opinion of Bay, "that such an innovation, as a parliamentary tax-Bernard. ation, would cause great alarm, and meet with much opposition in most parts of America. It was quite new to the people and had no visible bounds to it."*

Governor

* Winterbotham.

Dr. Franklin was in Boston when governor Shirley communicated to him the profound secret, the great design then entertained, of taxing the colonies by act of parliament. In remarking upon the proposed scheme, Opinion of Dr. Franklin denied the right of parliament to impose lin, in antiany tax, or to compel the colonies to pay money for cipation of their own defence, without their consent. He then declared that all America would deny it, insisting at the same time, "if parliament is to tax the colonies, their assemblies of representatives may be dismissed as useless; that taxing the colonies by parliament for their own defence against the French, would not be more just, than it would be to oblige the cinque-ports, and other parts of Great Britain, to maintain a force against France, and tax them for this purpose, without allowing them representatives in parliament; that the colonies have, at the hazard of their lives and fortunes, extended the dominions and increased the commerce and riches of the mother country; that therefore the colo- * See Life nists did not deserve to be deprived of the native right of John Adams, of Britons, the right of being taxed only by representa- vol. iv. tives chosen by themselves."*

PART III.

Parlia

mentary

taxation.

ORIGIN AND CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION.

"We had considered ourselves," says John Adams, "as connected with Great Britain, but we never thought Opinion of parliament the supreme legislature over us. We never John Ad- generally supposed it to have any authority over us, but ams. from necessity, and that necessity we thought confined

Duties on

to the regulation of trade, and to such matters as concerned all the colonies together. We never allowed

them any authority in our internal concerns. Duties trade, why for regulating trade we paid, because we thought it just

submitted

to.

* Life of John Adams, vol. iv.

and necessary that they should regulate the trade which their power protected. As for duties for a revenue, none were ever laid by parliament for that purpose until 1764, when, and ever since, its authority to do it, has been constantly denied."* In the same year Mr. Otis, in his Rights of the Colonies, showed conclusively that it was inconsistent with the right of British subjects that they should be taxed but by their own representatives. And now, while the Stamp Act was yet pending in parliament, petitions against the measure were sent to the king, and remonstrances were addressed to parliament, by the several colonial assemblies, through the medium of the Board of Trade in London. These papers were committed to the agency of Dr. Franklin and others who added their personal protest against the measure. But they were ungra

ciously received, the mad policy was persisted in, the Passage of Stamp Act was passed, and every variety of stamped the Stamp paper designated by it was transported in large quantities to America, to be placed in the hands of British agents to be sold.

Act.

The publication of the act in the colonies produced the greatest excitement. And it is a singular fact in the history of the controversy it originated, that the

first demonstration of opposition to its provisions should strations have emanated from Virginia, the most royal, and peragainst it in Virginia. haps, too, the most truly loyal colony in all America. See PART I. Yet if we refer back to her early experience we will