On 12 February 1765, a quiet day in the House of Commons, a Bill was passed that was intended to tap American wealth by imposing stamp duty on American property transactions. As colonial business rarely aroused much interest, it was nodded through with minimal opposition.
But the Stamp Act would set America alight.
On 30 May, with the influential Lee family in the lead, the legislative assembly of Virginia passed the first resolution against the Act. This solemnly declared that 'the taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen to represent them … is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, without which the ancient constitution cannot exist.' This was Whig language, turned against the British Parliament that had invented it.
Less decorously, as the date for the coming into operation of the Stamp Act approached, Richard Henry Lee organised a protest procession, featuring his own slaves in costume and the mock-hanging of the collector of stamp duties. Similar resolutions and protests, many of them violent, spread like wildfire across the colonies, and British America became ungovernable.
Wholly unprepared for this reaction, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. But at the same time, it tried to preserve the principle of British parliamentary sovereignty by declaring that Westminster was competent to pass laws for the British colonies 'in all cases whatsoever'. There only remained the little matter of translating that principle into practice.
This every succeeding British government tried to do and failed. American resistance continued and the net yield of American taxation, at few hundred pounds a year, was derisory.
A final attempt was made in 1773. The usual British duty on tea of 12 pence a pound was lifted and a low American duty of 3 pence imposed. The effect was to make tea cheaper in America than in Britain.
The 'Sons of Liberty', as the American radical opposition called themselves, were afraid that Americans might sell their liberty for a cheap cuppa. To forestall them, in December the rebels perpetrated the 'Boston Tea Party', in which some 40 'patriots', disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships in the harbour and threw overboard 343 chests of tea worth the equivalent of $1 million.
Goaded beyond endurance, the British government finally took a hard line. The port of Boston was closed, the Massachusetts assembly remodelled and British troops exempted from trial by American juries. On 19 April 1775, on the village green of Lexington, Massachusetts, the redcoats of the British fired on American militiamen – 'the shot heard round the world' – and the American Revolution had begun.
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 A Summary of the 1765 Stamp Act
www.history.org/History/teaching/tchcrst
a.cfm
The Act was a direct attempt by England to raise money in the colonies without the approval of the colonial legislatures. It met with great resistance in the colonies and was never effectively enforced.
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The Boston Tea Party by Benjamin Woods Labaree (Northeastern University, 1979)
A chronicle of the events leading up to the Boston Tea Party and eventual independence.
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