(Stamp Act) | The infamous Stamp Act: fuel on the fire of Revolution

(Stamp Act)

Anno Regni Georgii III… An act for granting and applying certain Stamp Duties, and other Duties, in the British Colonies and Plantations in America, towards further defraying the Expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same…London: Printed by Mark Baskett, by the Assigns of Robert Baskett, 1765

Folio (306 x 200 mm). [2] 279-310 pp. Title-page with woodcut royal arms; a few stray spots. Disbound. Half blue morocco folding-case, gilt.

The official British folio printing of the infamous Stamp Act, which levied duties on a wide range of legal and commercial documents, was intended not only to raise revenue, but, in the words of British Treasury minister Thomas Whateley, to establish "the Right of Parliament to lay an internal Tax upon the Colonies." To the colonists, however, it was "taxation without representation" and further fuel on the fire of Revolution.

The Act was presented to Parliament in February 1765, and passed by that body almost without debate. By the time the Act took effect, opposition was so great that resolutions of protest were passed in the lower houses of some colonial legislatures, and a special Congress was convened in New York which declared that the Act had "a manifest tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists." 

REFERENCE

Celebration of My Country 40; ESTC N56844; Revolutionary Hundred 4; Sabin 1606