The Stamp Act Meets the Bottom Line

On 18 March 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act for its American colonies. That was one week short of the law’s first anniversary.

Of course, the Stamp Act had already failed. How badly? Alvin Rabushka’s Taxation in Colonial America has a couple of tables that sum up the situation.

The British government shipped £102,050.8s.11d. (plus one more half-pence) worth of paper to the thirteen colonies that would form the U.S. of A. In those colonies the empire’s stamp agents collected a total of:

£45

All in Georgia.

From all of North America and the Caribbean, which included twenty-six British colonies, the Crown collected £3,292. Most of that came from Jamaica, the only colony where the law was really in force for any time at all.

The government also lost a lot of the paper it had bought and had stamped. About £61,000 worth was returned while £41,000 worth was lost or destroyed. Only South Carolina returned its consignment intact. Nearly all of New York’s paper was destroyed, as was most of New Hampshire’s and Rhode Island’s. In Massachusetts, where riots intimidated Andrew Oliver into resigning as stamp agent more than two months before the law was to take effect, about two-thirds of the paper was preserved. But the law had clearly ended up costing the government money, even without accounting for the riots.

At the same time as the repeal, Parliament approved the Declaratory Act, reaffirming its role as the sovereign authority in the British Empire. That law said the legislature “had hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.”

King George III granted official assent to the Declaratory Act immediately but didn’t approve the Stamp Act repeal for another four days. That timing didn’t really matter, but it showed his personal commitment to the idea of Parliamentary rule, even when the government no longer consisted of his favorites.

The House of Lords Considers the Declaratory Act

The Rockingham government’s strategy to extricate itself from the unenforceable Stamp Act and yet maintain Parliament’s authority was to couple the repeal of that law with the Declaratory Act.

That act stated outright that Parliament’s laws were binding in British colonies. No other legislature in the empire could be more powerful than the Parliament in London. That would become part of the constitution of the British Empire.

In an undated letter to Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden of New York, Maj. Thomas James, who went to London after an anti-Stamp mob destroyed his house on 1 Nov 1765, described the Lords’ debate on the law this way:

the House of Lords in point of Question; whether the Mother Country has a Right to lay an Internal Tax upon the Americans? and whether the Colonies are not subject to the Decrees of King Lords and Commons.

Given by 125 to 5 That the Colonies are subject to the Laws of Great Britain; and that the Acts of the House of Commons are binding throughout all the Colonies of America

The 5 in favour of America were Cambden — Paulet — Torrington — Cornwallis — Shelburn — The first made a very Good Speech upon a Wrong Cause But the Lord Chancellor [the Earl of Northington] Cut Him to pieces; and observed; He wonderd how Lord Cambden could attempt to support so bad so dangerous and so unjust an Argument, with so serene a Countenance;

The Commons have resolved that the Colonies ought to be subject to the Laws and Decrees of Great Britain; they are softening all Resolves with a firmness, that they shall be permanent. The Repeal of the [Stamp] Act will be the last Resolve. I believe it will be softened—

Of the five peers who voted against the Declaratory Act, Baron Camden succeeded his nemesis Northington as Lord Chancellor later that year. Camden continued to advocate for American rights even more than his colleagues in the short-lived Chatham administration. His speech against the Declaratory Act indirectly led to the phrase “No Taxation without Representation.”

Charles Powlett, the Duke of Bolton, committed suicide in July. Not even Horace Walpole knew why. His brother succeeded him, switching from the opposition in the House of Commons to supporting the government until 1778, when he got sick of how the American War was going.

Viscount Torrington was a young man, only twenty-four. He married a daughter of the Earl of Cork in July, and they had several children. He voted for less strict policy toward America at a couple of other important moments but doesn’t appear to have been a vocal political leader.

The Earl of Shelburne became prime minister late in the American War and completed the 1783 Treaty of Paris to end it. Under his next and higher peerage, Marquess of Lansdowne, he was the recipient of Gilbert Stuart’s famous full-length portrait of George Washington.

And finally there’s Earl Cornwallis (shown above), in 1766 a lieutenant colonel in the army as well as a peer. We know what he had to do in the Revolutionary War. Afterwards, Cornwallis went on to a more successful career building the British Empire in India.

The Earliest Appearance of “No Taxation without Representation” (so far)

In March 1766, Parliament repealed its Stamp Act for North America but passed the Declaratory Act, meant to establish that it had the power to pass laws governing those colonies—including, implicitly, new tax laws.

One of the few voices against the Declaratory Act was Charles Pratt, first Baron Camden, soon to be Lord Chancellor of England. He argued, as he’d done when the Stamp Act was proposed, that since the colonists didn’t have any representatives in Parliament, by British tradition Parliament shouldn’t have the power to tax them.

Very few Members of Parliament agreed. Camden’s political ally William Pitt actually wrote the Declaratory Act. Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, said Camden was mistaken. Only four other Lords voted against the bill.

That debate occurred just before London printers made a routine of reporting Parliament‘s proceedings in detail. But a few months later someone sent the text of Camden’s speech to printer John Almon (1737-1805), who included it in his Political Register for 1767. The text appeared in a gingerly form, perhaps as a thin guard against accusations of sedition: all the proper names were removed, so it recorded “L— C——” speaking to the “B—— p———” on the issue of taxing the “A——— c——.”

Camden had said:

My position is this—I repeat it—I will maintain it to my last hour,—taxation and representation are inseparable;—this position is founded on the laws of nature; it is more, it is itself an eternal law of nature; for whatever is a man’s own, is absolutely his own; no man hath a right to take it from him without his consent, either expressed by himself or representative; whoever attempts to do it, attempts an injury; whoever does it, commits a robbery; he throws down and destroys the distinction between liberty and slavery. Taxation and representation are coeval with and essential to this constitution. . . .

In short, my lords, from the whole of our history, from the earliest period, you will find that taxation and representation were always united; so true are the words of that consummate reasoner and politician Mr. [John] Locke.

As you can see, Camden’s argument was based on the linkage of taxation and representation. But nowhere in the speech did the baron use the phrase “taxation without representation.”

The Scots Magazine reprinted Camden’s speech in 1767. The London Magazine, or Gentlemen’s Monthly Intelligencer ran the text on two pages the following February. That magazine’s running head for the first page was “L— C——’s Speech.” The second page, as preserved by Google Books, was summed up this way:

And that page, published in February 1768, is the earliest appearance of the phrase “[No] Taxation without Representation” that I’ve found. It debuted in big letters at the top of a page of a widely circulated magazine. I suspect that pithy, rhyming summary of the argument below stuck in many readers’ minds and became the slogan for the American cause.

Thus, I posit that the person who coined the deathless phrase “taxation without representation” wasn’t James Otis, Jr., or the Rev. John Joachim Zubly or even Lord Camden. It was John Almon or an anonymous editor or printer in his shop, looking for a way to headline a couple of columns of text in a limited number of characters.