Prime Factors - Ranking UK Prime Ministers

7.0 - Stamp Act Special

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7.0 - Stamp Act Special

Episode Transcript

Parliament: Hip hip! Hurrah! Hip hip! Hurrah! Hip hip! Hurrah!

Stamp Act Special

Abram: Hello and welcome back to Prime Factors. I'm Abram and I'm here with my dad. We usually review all the British prime ministers from Robert Walpole to Keir Starmer, but this week we have a special episode on the Stamp Act.

Joe: This episode wasn't in our plan, but we had a fun interruption. After posting John Stuart, we were contacted by Dan Hogan, the director of news and studio operations at WCA-TV, the community access station for Watertown. He invited Abram and I to come to tour their studio and record a short episode.

Abram: And that is where we are now.

Joe: Our plan is to record and he'll ask us some questions afterwards. Since we already planned to do Grenville in Quebec, we kind of had to come up with something else to record today.

Abram: And that'll leave us more room for talking about the Prime Minister while we're in Quebec. It's also strange that we're podcasting with an audience today.

Joe: Yeah, that's a little bit of a different kind of adventure. You all good, Abram?

Abram: Yeah. Don't forget that you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and at www.primefactorspodcast.com. Also on Facebook and BlueSky. If you enjoy listening, please like, subscribe, comment, and review.

Joe: And as usual, we start each episode off with a Picture This.

Picture This

Abram: "If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?" By Samuel Adams.

Joe: Abram, close your eyes. Imagine yourself downtown Boston. We're standing outside the Chinatown station on the MBTA Orange Line. Although the once thriving Chinatown has diversified like so many other ethnic neighborhoods, and this block looks, well, not too different from any other. We're surrounded by skyscrapers and the noise of midday traffic. You know, but cannot see that we're only a few blocks southeast from Boston Common, the immense downtown park. What you can see in front of you is a Dunkin' Donuts.

Abram: Of course it is.

Joe: Because this is Boston. What else can you see? But we're going to turn the clock back 260 years to August 14th, 1765. The skyscrapers recede, replaced by modest wooden structures and muddy roads. The Common still off to your left. In fact, you can see it now that there's no big buildings in the way.

Joe: The road that you're standing on is busier than most, as it's one of the few connecting roads that link Boston at this time — practically an island city on the Shawmut Peninsula — to the mainland to the west. In the 19th century, the harbor is going to be filled in, but that's a long time from now.

Joe: In front of you, the Dunkin' Donuts has been replaced by a giant elm tree in front of a grand Boston house. And here is a picture. This is the Liberty Tree, and the picture will be up on our BlueSky. In fact, it already is visible to nearly everyone that comes at this point to Boston by land. This is a common location for protests. And once again, a tense crowd is gathered.

Abram: What happened to it?

Joe: Oh, it got chopped down by the British who saw it as a symbol of liberty.

Abram: When?

Joe: Like in the 1770s when things got a little worse.

Abram: What year was this?

Joe: This is 1765.

Abram: So like 10 years later.

Joe: 10 years later. You got to keep your eyes closed. Okay. Once again, a tense crowd is gathered. This one seems even rowdier than before as voices call out in anger against the recently passed Stamp Act.

Joe: Among those voices is a guy named Ebenezer Macintosh. He's a shoemaker and a veteran of the Seven Years' War, or what he probably called the French and Indian War. More importantly, he's one of the leaders of what they called the South End Mob, a gang that ruled southern Boston and regularly got into tussles with their counterparts in the North End Gang.

Joe: But today, both the North and the South mobs had found a common cause: hatred of the Stamp Act. He is a man that knew how to turn outrage into action, and the crowd was eating out of his hand.

Joe: As you push your way through the crowd, you can finally see what the shouting is about: an effigy, not of a foreign prime minister, but of Andrew Oliver, a colonial bureaucrat responsible for collecting the hated tax. Next to him, also hanging from the tree, is a green boot — the symbol of two other hated men that you know very well. Abram, who do you think that might be?

Abram: John Stuart and George Grenville.

Joe: John Stuart, the Earl of Bute, or the Earl of Boot.

Abram: Or the Earl of Butt.

Joe: Or the Earl of Butt. And George Grenville. So we covered John Stuart in our previous episode, and our next one's going to be on George Grenville. These are the two prime ministers of the era.

Joe: What happens next seems to come in a blur. The anger of the crowd explodes under Macintosh's skilled hand, shouting slogans but carrying the effigy of Oliver almost like a funeral procession. They marched to what one day will be called the Old State House. But it's not old yet. More marchers join along the way.

Joe: A small building sits on the side of the lot. It's old and ramshackle, but it's going to be used for the distribution of the hated stamps. Some of the marchers inexplicably have axes and crowbars with them, almost like this had been planned, and they destroy the building. Some of the protesters stamp the timbers themselves, mocking the law they hoped to destroy.

Joe: Sensing that the anger of the crowd was not yet sated, Macintosh led the crowd on a second march, this time south, returning to Dorchester Neck to Andrew Oliver's home itself. Oliver had been warned of their coming and had already fled with his family. The mob made a bonfire out of the timber they brought from the tax office, and they lit a fire on his front lawn before ransacking and looting his house. On top of this bonfire, they burned his effigy and the little green boot.

Abram: What's a little green boot?

Joe: The little green boot, the symbol of John Stuart and George Grenville.

Abram: Really?

Joe: Yes, it was a little green boot that they hung from a tree. It's a boot because of the Earl of Bute, and it's green because of George Grenville.

Abram: That's ridiculous.

Joe: Two men that attempted to save some of Oliver's things were pelted with stones and nearly died.

Joe: The following day, though, Andrew Oliver got the message. Beneath that very same Liberty Tree, he resigned his role as tax collector and denounced the Stamp Act, no doubt thinking not of the injustice that had been done by the British, but of his burned and ruined home and the near escape of his family. Was this an act of patriotism or vandalism? Well, I'll let you decide. Abram, was that fun?

Abram: Not for the person whose house was destroyed.

Joe: No, no. We talked in our last episode that John Stuart was burned in effigy. This might actually have been the same time, but at least the stories I said, they just burned a boot. We'll have to figure that out.

Abram: I think it's funny that they burned a boot.

Joe: It is funny.

Taxation With Representation

Joe: Although Abram and I are Americans, we're creating a podcast together about British history.

Abram: That's like the whole point.

Joe: That is. We started with Robert Walpole. We've been working our way forward, and we finally landed in 1763, the year when things start to seriously go wrong with the American colonies. In fact, the U.S. Library of Congress calls this the beginning of the Revolutionary Period.

Joe: So our challenge as American podcasters of British stuff is to try to cover the U.S. Revolution from the British perspective. Our next 6 or 7 prime ministers will be wrestling with what to do with the government in crisis, with the mounting debts from the Seven Years' War. And there's going to be a bunch of rowdy colonists that think that they can be independent. Whatever that means. We'll see how that works out.

Joe: The Stamp Act is going to be George Grenville's signature policy, the one thing he's going to be known to history for. And don't worry, we'll be covering his tenure in full in our next episode, hopefully from Quebec. But for this episode, we're going to start a little bit earlier in 1694. Abram, who was on the throne in 1694?

Abram: Remember, that question's incorrect.

Joe: Okay. There's two people on the throne at the beginning of 1694.

Abram: A lot of people say that Mary was like the first one, then she died, then it was William.

Joe: Yes, my notes say Abram might remark that Mary died in September 1694. So just a reminder for everyone who isn't as good at this as you, this is after James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution because he was Catholic. The Protestant William of Orange was invited to England by some revolutionary members of Parliament. He and his wife invaded England. James ran away. William III and Mary II became the joint rulers, etc.

Joe: Now William was of Orange, which is weirdly part of France, but more—

Abram: I thought it was part of the Netherlands.

Joe: So that's neat because I thought so too. I looked it up. William of Orange. Orange is in France, but he was a stadtholder in the Netherlands.

Abram: What's that mean?

Joe: That means he was a noble in the Netherlands.

Abram: And was he from France or the Netherlands?

Joe: I think he was from the Netherlands, but his title was from France. The point is that when they became king, England was dragged into something called the Nine Years' War because the Netherlands was fighting with France at the time. That war, just like the Seven Years' War, was long and expensive, and England needed to find a way to pay off its wartime debts. And how does a country pay off their debts, Abram?

Abram: Taxes.

Joe: So fortunately, William was from the Netherlands and he knew about one of the ways in which they taxed their citizens there. How it would work is like this. The stamp tax, it's mostly a tax on paper, but more importantly, it's a tax on official paper. Almost anything involving paper had to have a stamp on it to be official — contracts, legal documents, insurance papers, anything.

Joe: And either they would have to be printed on the special paper that already had the stamp, or you'd have to take it to a special office, pay the fee, and have it stamped. The exact costs vary by the type of document, but like a newspaper page might have been $1.50 in today's money. And it's not cheap when you have to do this for literally everything.

Joe: Anything not written on a piece of stamped paper was invalid. You had a contract, it wasn't stamped, contract didn't count. You had a receipt, wasn't stamped, didn't prove that you bought anything. If you took a load of cargo into a harbor in England and the cargo manifest wasn't stamped, they could assume that it was all stolen goods and they could confiscate it. So the stamp was super duper important.

Joe: And look what we got here. This is a fake stamp. Well, almost fake. This is a real stamp. It is so much easier to counterfeit 18th century tax stamps today. Thanks to my wife for her excellent efforts producing it. But we have a stamp, Abram. I want you to be able to see this.

Abram: Can I stamp you?

Joe: You cannot stamp me. However, you can stamp your script page. See, now our script is officially government sponsored.

Abram: Script sponsored by the government.

Joe: Okay. The whole point is that this process was intended to be easy, and it also was somewhat self-enforcing because everyone was inclined to make sure that their contracts would be valid and their cargo wouldn't be confiscated that very quickly, within a couple of years, England put these stamp laws on almost everything. You couldn't buy a newspaper without it being stamped, a pamphlet, any legal documents. They started stamping decks of cards. Pretty much anything written on paper over the next couple of decades would be stamped in this way.

Joe: And like any good tax, of course, once they had paid off the debts from the Nine Years' War, they didn't exactly stop it. So by the time of our story, this tax has been in place for 70 years. Few people in Britain could remember a time without it, and it was simply no big deal.

Joe: It was also a tax that was passed by the people of England on themselves. Of course, they had Parliament, their representatives, as corrupt as you know they are, right, Abram?

Abram: Walpole.

Joe: Walpole. Even though their representatives were pretty corrupt, it was still seen as a legitimate form of government. And as a result, people didn't fight the tax, or at least they didn't fight the tax as much as certain American colonists are going to. It is probably not surprising then that when George Grenville needed to come up with a way to pay the debts from the Seven Years' War, he came up with the idea of the Stamp Act.

Britain's Financial Crisis

Joe: As we discussed in the last episode, we had a battle between Prime Minister John Stuart the Earl of Bute and William Pitt over the Seven Years' War. Pitt wanted to make the war longer and John Stuart wanted to make the war shorter. In fact, Pitt was like, why do you make me give up? We are winning. They were concerned about how much the war was costing, and they were right, because as soon as the war was over, all of those interest payments, all that debt started coming due. Banks that Britain had borrowed money from wanted repaid. Even the interest on the debt was staggering.

Joe: But that wasn't the only money problem that Britain had. How many territories did they pick up last time? Do you remember? What was our final count?

Abram: We said 13.

Joe: In order to protect those 13 territories, Britain wanted 10,000 more troops to be stationed in North America from Florida all the way up to Newfoundland.

Abram: It would just make it worse.

Joe: Well, it would make it cost more money, certainly. But they were very worried about it being conquered again. So during the Seven Years' War, Newfoundland was captured by the French, or at least parts of it were pretty quickly. So they realized they needed a lot more troops in order to defend.

Joe: So the goal of the colonies was eventually to pay for themselves. In fact, Grenville and John Stuart were looking forward to the American colonies dominating trade with Spain and France, opening markets to the Native Americans and shipping manufactured goods back to Britain. But none of it was going to happen immediately, and bills needed to be paid. So what do they need to do?

Abram: Taxes.

Joe: So the question isn't taxes, but now the question is, who can we tax?

Abram: I have an idea. Let's tax the colonists.

Joe: So taxes were already up in Britain, by the way. So the Seven Years' War, they had increased taxes on everyone approximately 17%. So it wasn't just that the British people didn't want to pay any more taxes. The truth was they were already paying a lot more taxes.

Joe: Taxing the rich was always going to be hard there because that was a bit of an oligarchy and the rich people controlled Parliament, could buy seats, so they tended to not like to tax themselves. Taxing the poor didn't work out very well because the laborers needed to eat and there was a concern that if the laborers couldn't eat, then they couldn't produce wool to sell and all those other things.

Joe: The middle class is really the target of the Stamp Act. But at that point, they've already had a Stamp Act in Britain for 70 years. So there's no options there. But taxing the colonies wasn't even that popular in Britain. In fact, William Pitt said, quote, "This trade revenue is the price that America pays you for her protection," i.e., America is making stuff and selling it to different markets. That's how you make money off of America. So with little path to increase revenue domestically, taxing the American colonies might have seemed like the only answer.

Taxation Without Representation

Joe: On March 22nd, 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, bringing the British form of taxation to the roughly 23 to 28 different governments that made up America. So we think of it as the 13 colonies, but it was the 13 colonies plus the Canadian colonies, plus the Caribbean. Everyone was impacted by the Stamp Act. The tax as written wasn't going to go into effect until November. So that would give the colonies time to prepare and, well, to protest against it.

Joe: We should mention that although they were implementing a tax already known in Britain, the circumstances in the colonies were very different. First off, the new stamps had to be bought with real British money, and there was actually very little of that in the colonies.

Joe: So for many, many years, all the way going back to 1652, the colonies had been producing their own money. Boston was minting coins. They had invented paper currency. There just wasn't a lot of British pounds floating around in North America. So how could they buy the stamps?

Joe: In fact, a lot of what they were using was not only just that paper money or local money. It was very common in the colonies to trade using Spanish pieces of eight. And those pieces of eight had two different names that you might have heard before. One is peso. But do you want to guess what the other one is? Dollars.

Abram: Yay!

Joe: In fact, these Spanish dollars were a de facto currency for much of the colonial period. And when the US is eventually going to start their own currency, they're going to choose that name instead of sticking with the British pound.

Joe: So the first problem was simply that there wasn't a lot of money to pay for these stamps. But the second issue was that the price of the stamps was really, really high. So converting money from today is pretty tricky, but it gives you an idea. So that piece of paper there, that script page that we stamped, $4, please.

Abram: What?

Joe: You didn't bring any money, man. So $4 for a piece of paper or a newspaper, a calendar, a pamphlet. $12 for a pack of playing cards. $27 for a contract or a receipt or a bill of lading. And guess what? If you wanted to get a law license or something that was like a license to sell alcohol, $2,400. These stamps were expensive. They were not cheap.

Joe: And because there wasn't going to be a stamp office in every city and town, the taxes also required that a lot of the paper had to be imported on ships from Britain. So ships filled with stamped paper arrived in the US that was going to be used for all of these contracts. And guess who was upset about that? The paper mills. Although what I read actually said, because of the boycotts against the Stamp Act, they suddenly did more work. So maybe it worked out for them in the end.

Joe: And simply put, Britain had 70 years to get used to this tax. America did not. But if you think about it, Abram, we're very used to some taxes today that we don't think about. Maybe you're not because you're 11. Do you know what sales tax is, Abram?

Abram: Mm-hmm.

Joe: Every time we buy something in a store, we pay a little bit extra, and that little bit extra goes to the government. We also pay something called income tax. Every time I get a check from my job or Dori gets a check from our job, the government takes a little bit out of it. We don't think about it. It just happens. It's natural. But if somebody were to start tomorrow and say, you're paying this tax for the first time, there probably would be massive protests. So in other words, just the fact that this was being introduced so quickly caused a lot of people to really bristle.

Joe: And worse, the Americans didn't have any say in the matter. The British believed that taxation only came through representation, right? So going all the way back to King John and the Magna Carta, the British have believed that taxation required representation, but the colonies didn't have any representation in Parliament.

Joe: A couple colonies actually kind of did. In Pennsylvania, for example, Benjamin Franklin was sent as a special representative to Parliament. He could watch it, but he couldn't actually participate. But for the most part, they didn't have any representation.

Joe: Even in Britain, they believed in something called virtual representation. Which was their way of saying, well, not that many of us can vote, but everyone's still responsible. But the American colonists didn't really believe that.

Reaction to the Tax

Joe: As we saw at the beginning of the episode, reactions to the Stamp Act was fierce. The average person on the street did not want to be taxed more. They did not want Britain taxing them. They felt strongly that a government that did not understand their needs shouldn't be responsible for setting the rules.

Joe: So the political leaders sprang into action. They arranged boycotts of British goods in major ports like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They actively discouraged, sometimes with violence, anyone from buying anything subject to the tax or where the tax would have been paid.

Joe: But the citizens also sprang into action. Some formed groups like the Sons of Liberty to coordinate protests and boycotts. Others took justice in their own hands. Those riots that we saw in Boston, mock hangings in many other cities — Newport, Rhode Island, the green boot. The green boot had pretend hangings as well.

Abram: Did he escape?

Joe: Not too far. Despite it being his most famous bill, George Grenville barely survived its passing. Almost none of what we just spoke about happened during his term of prime minister, which ended in — do you know when it ended?

Abram: 1765?

Joe: It ended in July 1765. So Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquess of Rockingham, was left to figure out what to do with the tax.

Joe: October 1765, nine colonies joined together in what was called the Stamp Act Congress to create a unified message back to Britain. Not kind of dissimilar from the Continental Congress that would come later. They signed something called the Declaration of Rights and Grievances.

Joe: This declaration reinforced that they were British citizens, that they were subjects, and that they were subordinate to the king and Parliament. They were not making a declaration of independence, but a declaration that we are English. And we should be taxed like Englishmen.

Abram: It was kind of the thing. They're trying to tax them like Englishmen.

Joe: That's true. But like Englishmen, they believed that they could only be taxed if they were represented. So their argument was no taxation without representation, and no representation in Parliament meant no taxation, that only the colonial legislatures could tax them. But not Parliament.

Joe: The protests were fierce. The violence was huge. Everyone was really angry. And Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquess of Rockingham, whom we'll talk about in two episodes, he repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766, but with a caveat that they passed a different act that said that although we're canceling the Stamp Act, Parliament has the right to tax you. We're deciding not to, but it's our decision not to, but we can do it if we want. Didn't make anyone happy, and what was started at that point was difficult to stop.

Joe: We opened this episode with a story about a man who united the gangs of North Boston and South Boston to fight against the Stamp Act that everyone could agree was a common enemy. But this was now happening all over. The northern colonies, the southern colonies, the middle colonies — they were all coming together for the first time to protest the Stamp Act. It's going to be a while before we reach revolution, but now we're just starting to see the pieces pop into place. And the British Empire, well, it's never going to be the same.

Joe: And that's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed our special mini episode on the Stamp Act. Abram, did you have fun?

Abram: Yep.

Joe: With any luck, we'll be in Grenville, Quebec next time, and we'll have a proper ending for our George Grenville. With that, thanks for listening. Say goodnight, Abram.

Abram: Goodnight.

Joe: All right, goodnight.

Bibliography

Joe: I hope you enjoyed this mini episode, and I want to thank again the staff of WCA-TV for their hospitality and inviting us to their studio. We recorded the whole episode with a cameraman watching us, which, uh, let me tell you, is a very surreal thing to happen to any audio-only podcast. And they also had a brief interview with us afterwards.

Joe: We are one of several podcasters that they're interviewing for this feature, and we've been told that the interview and segment will be released in about a month. I'll include the interview as a bonus on an upcoming episode if I can, as well as post a link to the video.

Joe: This episode is an expanded version of material that was originally intended to be in Grenville's episode. If you like sidebars like this, please let us know, but we're going to be back to biographies very soon.

Joe: Our primary book source this week, and I didn't use it all that much, was *A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act* by John L. Bullion, written in 1982. That was augmented with numerous smaller sources on the Stamp Act and the Boston Stamp Act protests, including from the Bill of Rights Institute, the National Constitution Center, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and even the UK Parliament site. Not all of the stories about the August protests line up perfectly, but I think I've pulled together a pretty fun narrative.

Joe: This was a lot of fun to record. Thank you to my wife for creating the authentic Stamp Act stamp and actually sitting through a whole episode while we were recording. Podcasts are kind of her kryptonite, but she loves us anyway and puts up with it.

Joe: Thanks also to Dan Hogan for being a gracious host and a good interviewer. He did a fantastic job putting Abram at ease in a very unfamiliar situation.

Joe: And finally, thanks to our editor Sam Cunningham. You can find him as Sam C Productions on Fiverr.

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