{"id":17474,"date":"2015-12-08T16:49:46","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T21:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/?p=17474"},"modified":"2022-04-15T10:39:20","modified_gmt":"2022-04-15T14:39:20","slug":"revolutionary-crisis-american-revolution","status":"publish","type":"egp_essays","link":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/essays\/revolutionary-crisis-american-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Revolutionary Crisis (American Revolution)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Stamp Act of 1765, the first direct tax ever imposed by the British government on colonial Americans, inadvertently provoked a ten-year clash of wills between Britain and the colonies that led to the American Revolutionary War. During this Revolutionary Crisis period (1765-75), colonists resisted imperial taxes and other Parliamentary innovations with protests and with boycotts of British goods, called nonimportation agreements. Many Philadelphians initially proved more reluctant to join the protests than colonists to the north and south. However, with much of the trade of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and parts of New York flowing through the city\u2019s port, Philadelphia became a central focus for enforcing nonimportation. Ultimately, popular anger over British \u201cencroachments\u201d forced a realignment of power in the town and province and brought Philadelphia-area merchants and consumers into greater support for the resistance movement.<\/p>\n

\"Masthead<\/a>
This masthead for the October 31, 1765, Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser<\/em>, objecting to the tax about to take effect under the Stamp Act of 1765, depicts a skull-and-crossbones parody of the official stamp required by the act. The publisher, William Bradford, announces that he is suspending publication because he can’t afford the tax, calling the skull-and-crossbones icon \u201cAn emblem of the effects of the STAMP – O! the fatal Stamp,\u201d and describing the times as \u201cDreadful, Dismal, Doleful, Dolorous, and Dollar-less.\u201d (Library of Congress<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Britain\u2019s Parliament passed the Stamp Act on March 22, 1765, to offset the huge debt amassed during the recent Seven Years\u2019 War<\/a> (1754-63). The British government intended the Stamp Act to defray the cost of \u201cdefending, protecting, and securing\u201d the \u201cBritish colonies and plantations in America.\u201d The terms of the act required colonials to purchase special paper from designated commissioners for a wide variety of legal and business transactions, varying from court pleadings and wills to newspapers and gaming cards. Contracts written on other than stamped paper were null and void, and counterfeiting the stamps was deemed a capital offense.<\/p>\n

The British government seriously underestimated the anger this law would provoke. Colonial \u201cPatriots\u201d argued that cooperation with the law, which imposed taxation without American representation in Parliament, was akin to accepting economic slavery. Major riots occurred in Boston and New York City. Colonial legislatures and newspapers issued strongly worded protests. A German-language press in Germantown<\/a> encouraged readers to resist the unertr\u00e4glichen<\/em> (\u201cunbearable\u201d) Stamp Act. Everywhere, angry mobs targeted royal officials; the Constitutional Courant<\/em> (Woodbridge, New Jersey) called American-born men who would cooperate with such an act the\u00a0 \u201cvipers of human kind,\u201d and the \u201cworst of parricides.\u201d In October 1765, nine of the thirteen colonies sent representatives to a Stamp Act Congress in New York City to draft a unified protest.<\/p>\n

In comparison with other colonial cities, Philadelphia\u2019s initial response to the crisis was mild. While other colonial assemblies took a leading role in organizing the resistance, Pennsylvania\u2019s assembly, dominated by the \u201cQuaker\u201d Party of Benjamin Franklin<\/a> (1706-90) and Joseph Galloway<\/a> (1731-1803), remained caught up in a struggle to wrest the colony from the Penn family. Franklin, serving in London at the time as colonial agent, so misjudged colonial response that he recommended a trusted colleague, John Hughes (1711-72), for the post of Pennsylvania stamp act distributor.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia\u2019s Muted Protests<\/h3>\n

Franklin\u2019s popularity among the mechanics and artisans muted Philadelphia\u2019s protests, but both he and Hughes were castigated for their apparent support of the unpopular measure. On the night of September 16, 1765, a large mob gathered at the State House to target individuals associated with the act, including Franklin, Hughes, and Galloway. Franklin\u2019s wife, Deborah Read Franklin, (1708-74) reported to her husband that the crowd was dissuaded from attacking the Franklin home by an association of over 800 men formed \u201cfor the Preservation of the Peace of the City,\u201d who convinced the protesters to disperse. Once the stamps themselves arrived on October 5, another huge crowd corralled stamp distributor Hughes and made him swear not to execute the act or permit the stamps to be unloaded.<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania\u2019s rival Proprietary Party also tried to use the controversy to politically weaken Franklin, blaming him for not trying to halt the legislation. Franklin\u2019s supporters countered that no American could have successfully held off the Stamp Act, given its broad Parliamentary support. One broadside signed by \u201cA Freeman of Pennsylvania\u201d claimed: \u201cMr. Franklin<\/em>, or any other American<\/em>…might as easily have stopped the tide of Delaware<\/em>, at New Castle<\/em>, with his Finger, as prevented the Bill passing into a Law.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
In this 1781 London print, the Earl of Mansfield, shown seated, and the Earl of Sandwich keep watch over the British lion, which is asleep in a cradle surrounded by four barking dogs labeled \u201cHolland,\u201d \u201cAmerica\u201d (urinating on a paper labeled \u201cTea Act\u201d), \u201cFrance,\u201d and \u201cSpain.\u201d (Library of Congress<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Amidst the riots, congresses, petitions, and threats, the most potent form of protest was a new type of resistance action: colonial boycotts of British goods. Called \u201cnonimportation agreements\u201d (when merchants signed them) and \u201cnonconsumption agreements\u201d (when citizens signed them), these agreements were the first large-scale boycotts in history. Made possible by colonial Americans\u2019 growing importance as British consumers, they were promoted through colonial newspapers and broadsides that encouraged readers to show patriotic resistance to the unjust acts.<\/p>\n

Philadelphia\u2019s merchants pledged cooperation with nonimportation, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Philadelphia docks tried to unload all ships by November 1, 1765, the date when the Stamp Act would go into effect, accordingly preserving \u201cOctober 31\u201d on their forms as an unloading date for several weeks\u2014if a ship had begun to be unloaded by Halloween, it was \u201cgrandfathered\u201d under the pre-act terms. As late as December, ship-owners still received port authorities\u2019 go-ahead to clear ships, under the fiction that the stamps were somehow inaccessible. Even Philadelphia\u2019s vermin reportedly assisted the resistance effort, as one newspaper gleefully reported: \u201ca Quantity of the Stamp Paper, on board the Sardoine<\/em> Man of War, has been gnawed to pieces by the Rats!\u201d<\/p>\n

The Stamp Act Fails<\/h3>\n

The 1765 Stamp Act proved an abysmal failure. Mobs ultimately forced all the stamp distributors to resign. Not one of the thirteen colonies collected a shilling from the tax, and the boycott worsened England\u2019s already-depressed economy. The act was repealed within a year. When news of the repeal reached Philadelphia on May 19, 1766, large crowds drank to the health of King George III<\/a> (1738-1820).<\/p>\n

In May 1767, the British Parliament again tried to tax the American colonies, prompting a second round of protests and nonimportation agreements. Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend<\/a> (1725-67) proposed duties to exploit what he perceived to be an apparent flaw in the Patriots\u2019 argument. While the Patriots denied Parliament\u2019s right to tax, they acknowledged Parliament\u2019s right to regulate colonial trade. Accordingly, the Townshend Acts<\/a> placed import duties on five categories of imported items: paper, glass, paint, lead, and tea.<\/p>\n

While response to the Stamp Act had been immediate and spontaneous, resistance to the Townshend Duties was not. Philadelphia\u2019s merchant community remained divided, both because many of the wealthier merchants wished to try to obtain repeal of the duties quietly, through their contacts with English merchant houses, and also because merchants trading primarily in manufactured British goods (\u201cdry goods\u201d merchants) stood to be much more heavily affected by the terms of the boycott than those houses trading primarily with the West Indies, in \u201cwet goods.\u201d<\/p>\n

As segments of the Philadelphia merchants\u2019 community resisted calls for an intercolonial nonimportation agreement, political power in Philadelphia began to shift to the mechanic and artisan community, who were more heavily in favor of the ban. By the summer of 1770, Philadelphia radicals, working with the artisans and mechanics, were a new force in Philadelphia politics. Nonimportation appealed to Philadelphia mechanics from the start, as they also had economic motive to support the boycott, which reduced competition from imported British manufactured goods and hence aided domestic manufactures.<\/p>\n

\u201cLetters From a Farmer\u201d<\/h3>\n

The protest movement also found a powerful advocate in John Dickinson<\/a> (1732-1808), a Philadelphia lawyer connected to Pennsylvania\u2019s Proprietary Party. Dickinson\u2019s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania<\/em><\/a>, which ran in the Pennsylvania Chronicle<\/em> from December 1767 to February 1768, attacked the taxes on both constitutional and economic grounds. Dickinson argued that if such taxes were accepted meekly, worse would follow, endangering the very notion of private property.<\/p>\n

By May of 1768, Boston and New York had agreed upon an intercolonial nonimportation agreement. Anti-British sentiment grew with the garrisoning of troops in Boston and the dissolving of the Massachusetts legislature. A majority of Philadelphia merchants finally adopted nonimportation on March 10, 1769. However, Patriot enforcement methods (including threats of violence to persons or establishments) alienated many of the Quaker elite, and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting discouraged Quakers from supporting nonimportation, dividing the city\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n

On April 12, 1770, Parliament repealed all of the Townshend Duties save the one on tea, which was retained to make a point about Parliament\u2019s right to tax the colonies. By the fall of 1770, Philadelphia\u2019s radical leaders were trying frantically to hold nonimportation together. In late September, the Philadelphia merchants ended the boycott for all products other than tea, and by December, the intercolonial boycott was defunct.<\/p>\n

Anglo-American relations calmed somewhat in the next few years, until May 1773, when Parliament renewed the taxation controversy by passing the Tea Act. This law lowered the existing tax on tea in an effort to convince Americans to switch from smuggled foreign tea, and also granted agents of the East India Company exclusive rights to sell tea in the colonies. Patriots reacted strongly both to this perceived effort to trick Americans into paying a hidden tax and to the precedent established by granting such a monopoly to a small group of merchants. One broadside called on the \u201cindustrious and respectable Body of TRADESMEN and MECHANICS of Pennsylvania\u201d to fight to defend the \u201cdear-earned Fruits of our Labour\u201d from a \u201cSet of luxurious, abandoned and piratical Hirelings\u201d who would ruin not only colonial merchants, but also the mechanics and artisans if such monopolistic grants spread to other items of trade.<\/p>\n

Morality of Luxury Items<\/h3>\n
\"A<\/a>
In this cartoon, which depicts the old courthouse of Philadelphia during the election of October 1, 1764, people discuss the candidates in the foreground as men wait to enter the courthouse and cast their votes. (Library of Congress<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As tension over the Tea Act grew, colonial protests increasingly stressed moral arguments as well as economic ones, presenting British imported goods as dangerous luxury items that were corrupting American morals and health. One writer in Chester, Pennsylvania, noted the manifest virtue that American merchants were showing in resisting the \u201cPandora\u2019s box\u201d of danger that the tea ships represented, despite the profits that they could have made from the trade. \u201cA Sermon on Tea,\u201d printed in Lancaster, went so far as to depict tea as an evil in itself, blaming \u201cthe tea-table\u201d for encouraging female gossip and malevolent rumors, extravagance, sexual promiscuity, and physical infirmities. A mass town meeting October 16 determined that anyone helping tea ships unload their goods into Philadelphia was \u201can enemy to his country,\u201d and demanded the resignation of the tea consignees. Once the tea itself showed up in late November aboard the Polly<\/em>, the ship\u2019s captain was quickly persuaded by threats of fire, tar, and feathering to sail back to London without attempting to unload the cargo.<\/p>\n

After the colonies received word of the Coercive Acts<\/a>, passed by Parliament in response to the \u201cBoston Tea Party\u201d of December 16, 1773, nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements became truly continental. A large meeting of the \u201cfreeholders and freemen of the city and county of Philadelphia\u201d declared the Boston Port Bill unconstitutional and resolved to support Bostonians \u201cas suffering in the common cause of America.\u201d Berks County, Pennsylvania, was one of many communities across America to begin collecting relief supplies to aid the people of Boston. The first Continental Congress<\/a>, meeting in Philadelphia in September 1774 with twelve of the thirteen colonies represented, set up an association to oversee boycott of all British products. A total prohibition on imports began in December, and an export embargo was to start in September 1775 if necessary. The association called for every community to set up elected committees in order to enforce its terms, giving them sweeping authority to inspect commercial records and properties and to publicize violators. Nonimportation and nonconsumption remained major strategies for the American protest movement until the outbreak of war in April 1775 moved the quarrel to a different level.<\/p>\n

Shannon E. Duffy<\/strong> received her B.A. from Emory University, her M.A. from the University of New Orleans, and her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. She is a Senior Lecturer in Early American History at Texas State University. Her manuscript in progress, <\/em>The Twin Occupations of Revolutionary Philadelphia, explores the psychological effects of the British occupation of Philadelphia under General William Howe, as well as the American reoccupation of the city eight months later under the command of General Benedict Arnold. (Author information current at time of publication.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Stamp Act of 1765, the first direct tax ever imposed by the British government on colonial Americans, inadvertently provoked a ten-year clash of wills between Britain and the colonies that led to the\u00a0American Revolutionary War. During this Revolutionary Crisis period (1765-75), colonists resisted imperial taxes and other Parliamentary innovations with protests and with boycotts of British goods, called nonimportation agreements. Many Philadelphians initially proved more reluctant to join the protests than colonists to the north and south. However, with much of the trade of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and parts of New York flowing through the city\u2019s port, Philadelphia became a central focus for enforcing nonimportation. Ultimately, popular anger over British \u201cencroachments\u201d forced a realignment of power in the town and province and brought Philadelphia-area merchants and consumers into greater support for the resistance movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":17877,"template":"","egp_featured_subjects":[1991,2011,2013],"class_list":["post-17474","egp_essays","type-egp_essays","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","egp_featured_subjects-activism","egp_featured_subjects-government-and-politics","egp_featured_subjects-historic-places-and-symbols"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/17474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/egp_essays"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/17474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36325,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_essays\/17474\/revisions\/36325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"egp_featured_subjects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/egp_featured_subjects?post=17474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}