The British Parliament 119
need for general and long- range planning. Grenville proposed to keep British
regular troops permanently in America, to prohibit westward movement of settlers
until further notice, and to acquire land titles from the Indians by peaceable and
gradual negotiations. For these purposes he thought that the necessary funds
might be raised in America, and so obtained enactment of the Revenue Act of
1764, and decided also to apply in America the stamp tax already familiar in En-
gland. He hoped that it would yield about £100,000, all proceeds to be spent in the
colonies. It would amount to about one shilling per person per year of taxation,
which seemed little enough in England, but which, the reader can see, would more
than double the tax load then borne by the bucolic Americans.
Grenville spent over a year in cautious enquiries before the passage of the Stamp
Act. He consulted with the colonial agents in London, and asked them to propose
alternative means of raising revenue in America. He had, however, little faith that
the colonial assemblies would ever provide a dependable and steady revenue for
such purposes on their own initiative; he undoubtedly preferred to keep the whole
matter under parliamentary control. He was assured by Chief Justice Mansfield
that parliamentary taxation of British subjects in America was unquestionably
legal. Enough time passed in these preparations for warnings and protests to pour
across the Atlantic. Grenville decided to disregard them, considering them, not
unreasonably, to be the usual complaints made by all people against new taxation.
In fact, the American resistance to the Revenue Act of 1764 was already irking the
British. There was already in England, even before the Stamp Act, a growing feel-
ing that the colonists were an irresponsible people who must be brought under ef-
fectual government—that they must be made to realize the existence of central
authority in the empire.^12
The Stamp Act passed in March 1765. There was no opposition to it in Parlia-
ment. None of the later Whig friends of America spoke against it. It was assumed
to be an equitable measure, which the Americans would get used to in time.
The fury of the American reaction suggests that at bottom more than money or
taxation was involved. The British had entirely underestimated the strength of
American feeling. They had exaggerated the degree of Anglo- American unity felt
in America. From the beginning the real issue in the eyes of Americans was not
the tax—granted that they disliked all taxes—but the authority by which the tax
was levied. “A Parliament of Great Britain,” declared John Adams in 1765, “can
have no more right to tax the colonies than a Parliament of Paris.”^13
Since the Restoration, and since the Revolution of 1689, England and its colo-
nies, particularly those in New England, had diverged more widely than they seem
to have realized. Not that the colonists of English descent denied being English;
they took pride in their origins. But they felt no particular sympathy for the forces
that had triumphed in English life since 1660, notably the aristocratic and Angli-
12 The growth of conservatism in Britain before and during the American Revolution, and in
answer to the American demands, is one of the main themes of C. R. Ritcheson, British Politics and
the American Revolution (Norman, 1954); the belief that the American and British positions of 1775–
1776 were already taken in 1765 is one of the main themes of E. S. and H. M. Morgan, The Stamp Act
Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1953).
13 Quoted by Morgan, op. cit., 140.