The First American by H.W. Brands

Author:H.W. Brands
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307754943
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2000-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

The riots gave bite to demands by the opponents of the Stamp Act for a coordinated rejection of the stamps. As few souls dared incur the wrath of the mobs, and as the stamps were necessary for the conduct of most legal and commercial transactions, daily life was thrown into confusion. Joseph Galloway, writing from Philadelphia in late November, three weeks after the date on which the Stamp Act had been scheduled to take effect, informed Franklin of the situation:

It is difficult to describe the distress to which these distracted and violent measures have subjected the people of this province and indeed all North America. Here are Stamp papers, but the mob will not suffer them to be used, and the public officers of justice and of trade, being under obligation of their oaths and liable to the penalties of the statute, will not proceed in their duties without them.

A stop is put to our commerce, and our Courts of Justice is shut up. Our harbours are filled with vessels, but none of them, save those cleared out before the 2d. of November dare to move, because neither the Governor or Collector will clear them out, and if they would, the men of war threaten to seize them as forfeited for want of papers agreeable to the laws of trade.

Our debtors are selling off their effects before our eyes, and removing to another country, with innumerable other mischiefs brought on us by this fatal conduct, from which I can see no relief but from an immediate repeal of the Act.

However emotionally satisfying, the rejection of the stamps had little effect on Parliament, as it inflicted most of its injury on the colonies, whose influence with Parliament on this subject was demonstrably nil. Another mass action, one that hit closer to the homes of the honorable members, appeared more promising. Upon the passage of the Sugar Act the previous year, calls for an embargo against British imports arose here and there among the American colonies. But not until the Stamp Act galvanized opposition to Parliamentary taxation—and the stamp riots suggested a formidable mechanism for enforcing an embargo—did concerted nonimportation take hold. Just as the Stamp Act was to go into effect, some two hundred New York merchants pledged to have nothing to do with British imports. Philadelphia merchants followed suit, as did those of Boston.

Almost immediately nonimportation evoked the desired response. British merchants petitioned Parliament for repeal of the Stamp Act. For them the niceties of constitutionalism were irrelevant; what mattered were their vanishing sales. The point of empire was profit, and without sales there would be no profits.

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