Resolved, That his Majesty’s Liege people, the inhabitants of this colony, are not bound to yield obedience to any law or ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the laws and ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid. Resolved, That any person who shall, by speaking or writing, assert or maintain that any person or persons, other than the General Assembly of this colony, have any right or power to impose any taxation on the people here, shall be deemed an enemy to his Majesty’s colony.
These resolutions, which Governor Fauquier had not seen, and which were perhaps never debated in the House of Burgesses, were now circulated far and wide as part of the mature decision of the Virginia Assembly. On the 14th of September, Messrs. Randolph, Wythe, and Nicholas were appointed a committee to apprise the Assembly’s agent “of a spurious copy of the resolves of the last Assembly … being dispersed and printed in the News Papers and to send him a true copy of the votes on that occasion.” In those days of slow and difficult communication, the truth, three months late, could not easily overtake the falsehood or ever effectively replace it.
In later years, when it was thought an honor to have begun the Revolution, many men denied the decisive effect of the Virginia Resolutions in convincing the colonists that the Stamp Act might be successfully resisted. But contemporaries were agreed in according them that glory or that infamy. “Two or three months ago,” said Governor Bernard, “I thought that this people would submit to the Stamp Act. Murmurs were indeed continually heard, but they seemed to be such as would die away. The publishing the Virginia Resolutions proved an alarm-bell to the disaffected.” We read the resolutions, said Jonathan Sewell, “with wonder. They savored of independence; they flattered the human passions; the reasoning was specious; we wished it conclusive. The transition to believing it so was easy, and we, almost all America, followed their example in resolving that the Parliament had no such right.” And the good patriot John Adams, who afterwards attributed the honor to James Otis, said in 1776 that the “author of the first Virginia Resolutions against the Stamp Act … will have the glory with posterity of beginning … this great Revolution.” ¹
¹ Upon the death of George II., 1760, the collectors of the customs at Boston applied for new writs of assistance. The grant was opposed by the merchants, and the question was argued before the Superior Court. It was on this occasion that James Otis made a speech in favor of the rights of the colonists as men and Englishmen. All that is known of it is contained in some rough notes taken at the time by John Adams (Works of John Adams, ii., 125). An elaboration of these notes was printed in the Massachusetts Spy, April 29, 1773, and with corrections by Adams fifty years after the event in William Tudor’s Life of James Otis, chs. 5-7. This is the speech to which Adams, at a later date, attributed the beginning of the Revolution.
James Otis in 1765 declared the Virginia Resolutions to be treasonable. It was precisely their treasonable flavor that electrified the country, while the fact that they came from the Old Dominion made men think that a union of the colonies, so essential to successful resistance, might be achieved in spite of all. The Old Dominion, counted the most English of the colonies in respect to her institutions and her sympathies, had a character for loyalty that, in any matter of opposition to Britain, gave double weight to her action. Easy-going tobacco-planters, Church of England men all, were well known not to be great admirers of the precise Puritans of New England, whose moral fervor and conscious rectitude seemed to them a species of fanaticism savoring more of canting hypocrisy than of that natural virtue affected by men of parts. Franklin may well have had Virginia and Massachusetts in mind when he said, but a few years earlier, no one need fear that the colonies “will unite against their own nation … which ’tis well known they all love much more than they love one another.” Nor could anyone have supposed that the “Ancient and Loyal Colony of Virginia” would out-Boston Boston in asserting the rights of America. Yet this was what had come to pass, the evidence of which was the printed resolutions now circulating far and wide and being read in this month of July when it was being noised about that a Congress was proposed for the coming October. The proposal had in fact come from Massachusetts Bay in the form of a circular letter inviting all the colonies to send delegates to New York for the purpose of preparing a loyal and humble “representation of their condition,” and of imploring relief from the King and Parliament of Great Britain.
No very encouraging response was immediately forthcoming. The Assembly of New Jersey unanimously declined to send any delegates, although it declared itself “not without a just sensibility respecting the late acts of Parliament,” and wished “such other colonies as think proper to be active every success they can loyally and reasonably desire.” For two months there was no indication that any colony would think it “proper to be active”; but during August and September the assemblies of six colonies chose deputies to the congress, and when that body finally assembled in October, less formally designated representatives from three other colonies appeared upon the scene. The Assembly of New Hampshire declined to take part. Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina were also unrepresented, which was perhaps due to the fact that the governors of those provinces refused to call the assemblies together to consider the Massachusetts circular letter.
Of the 27 members of the Stamp Act Congress, few if any were inclined to rash or venturesome measures. It is reported that Lord Melbourne, as Prime Minister of England, once remarked to his Cabinet, “It doesn’t matter what we say, but we must all say the same thing.” What the Stamp Act Congress said was to be sure of some importance, but that it should say something which all could agree to was of even greater importance. “There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on the continent,” wrote Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, “but all of us Americans.” New Yorkers and New England men could not indeed be so easily transformed over night; but the Stamp Act Congress was significant as marking a kind of beginning in that slow and difficult process. After eleven days of debate, in which sharp differences of opinion were no doubt revealed, a declaration of rights and grievances was at last adopted; a declaration which was so cautiously and loyally phrased that all could subscribe to it, and which was perhaps for that very reason not quite satisfactory to anyone.
His Majesty’s subjects in the colonies, the declaration affirmed, are entitled to those “inherent rights and liberties” which are enjoyed by “his natural born subjects” in Great Britain; among which rights is that most important one of “not being taxed without their own consent”; and since the people of the colonies, “from local circumstances, cannot be represented in the House of Commons,” it follows that taxes cannot be “imposed upon them, but by their respective legislatures.” The Stamp Act, being a direct tax, was therefore declared to have a “manifest tendency to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonies.” Of the Sugar Act, which was not a direct tax, so much could not be said; but this act was at least “burthensome and grievous,” being subversive of trade if not of liberty. No one was likely to be profoundly stirred by the declaration of the Stamp Act Congress, in this month of October when the spirited Virginia Resolutions were everywhere well known.
“The frozen politicians of a more northern government,” according to the Boston Gazette, “say they [the people of Virginia] have spoken treason”; but the Boston Gazette, for its part, thought they had “spoken very sensibly.” With much reading of the resolutions and of the commendatory remarks with which they were everywhere received, the treasonable flavor of their boldest phrases no doubt grew less pronounced, and high talk took on more and more the character of good sense. During the summer of 1765 the happy phrase of Isaac Barré—“these sons of liberty”—was everywhere repeated, and was put on as a kind of protective coloring by strong patriots, who henceforth thought of themselves as Sons of Liberty and no traitors at all. Rather were they traitors who would in any way justify an act of tyranny; most of all those so-called Americans, accepting the office of Stamp Master, who cunningly aspired to make a farthing profit out of the hateful business of enslaving their own countrymen.
Who these gentry might be was not certainly known until early August, when Jared Ingersoll, himself as it turned out one of the miscreants, brought the commissions over from London, whereupon the names were all printed in the papers. It then appeared that the gentleman appointed to distribute the stamps in Massachusetts was Andrew Oliver, a man very well connected in that province and of great influence with the best people, not infrequently entrusted with high office and perquisites, and but recently elected by the unsuspecting Bostonians to represent them in the council of Massachusetts Bay Colony. It seemed inconsistent that a man so often honored by the people should meanwhile pledge himself to destroy their liberties; and so on the morning of the 14th of August, Mr. Oliver’s effigy, together with a horned devil’s head peeping out of an old boot, was to be seen hanging from the Liberty Tree at the south end of Boston, near the distillery of Thomas Chase, brewer and warm Son of Liberty. During the day people stopped to make merry over the spectacle; and in the evening, after work hours, a great crowd gathered to see what would happen. When the effigy was cut down and carried away, the crowd very naturally followed along through the streets and through the Town House, justifying themselves—many respectable people were in the crowd—for being there by calling out, “Liberty and Property forever; no Stamp.” And what with tramping and shouting in the warm August evening, the whole crowd became much heated and ever more enthusiastic, so that, the line of march by some chance lying past the new stamp office and Mr. Oliver’s house, the people were not to be restrained from destroying the former and breaking in the windows of the latter, in detestation of the hated Stamp Act and of the principle that property might be taken without consent.