To the House of Lords they pointed out that, as their ancestors had brought with them to America every right and privilege they could claim in the mother kingdom, their descendants could not justly be deprived of them. It was a fundamental principle of the British Constitution, without which freedom could nowhere exist, that the people are not subject to any taxes except by their own consent or by those who were legally appointed to represent them.
They reminded the Commons that this principle had been recognized ever since the founding of the colony. During the reign of Charles II, when the British Government sought a revenue to support the government of Virginia, they had tacitly admitted that Parliament had no right to levy the tax. Instead they drew up a bill in England and sent it over to be acted on by the Assembly.[38]
As they penned this protest the thoughts of Wythe and the others must have reverted to the part played by the control of taxation in winning self-government for the colony. They spoke of their rights as ancient, yet they must have known that the Virginia of their day was far freer than it had been under the Stuarts. And there could be no doubt as to how this great change had come about. They and their fathers and their great-grandfathers had used the control of the purse to whittle the royal prerogative until little was left. For Parliament to strike this weapon from their hands would be to nullify the gains of many decades and leave them defenseless.
When the bill to tax the Americans came before the Commons, on February 7, 1765, a lengthy debate followed. It was on this occasion that Colonel Isaac Barré retorted to Charles Townshend's assertion that the Americans had been "planted by our care, nourished by our indulgence." "Your oppressions planted them in America," he shouted. "They grew up by your neglect of them.... They protected by your arms! They have taken up arms in your defence."[39] But when the Virginia memorial was presented it was rejected by an overwhelming majority.[40] The bill passed the Commons by 205 votes to 49, and the House of Lords without a division. The measure required the colonists to use stamps, purchased from the British Government through royal agents, on newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, advertisements, and various kinds of legal documents.
It was with heavy hearts that the Assembly met in May, 1765. Edmund Pendleton, when news of the passage of the Stamp Act reached him, had exclaimed, "Poor America!" As he, George Wythe, Richard Bland, Robert Carter Nicholas, Henry Lee, Peyton Randolph, and other leading statesmen took their seats, they had no thought of resistance. They proceeded with routine business—the authorizing of a ferry over the Potomac, giving rewards for killing wolves, opening a road through the Swift Run Gap, preventing escapes from debtors' prisons, etc. Probably none of the aristocrats from the tidewater paid any attention to young Patrick Henry when he joined the House late in the session. When most of the bills had passed the third reading many of the members left, and mounting their horses rode out of town, leaving only thirty-nine to wind up business.
This was Henry's opportunity. Opening an old law book he wrote down seven resolutions. Then, rising, he introduced them in the House. In substance the first four declared that Virginians from the first settlement had possessed all the privileges of the people of Great Britain, that these privileges had been confirmed to them by two royal charters, that the taxation of the people by themselves was the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, and that the people of the colony had never forfeited the right to be governed by their own Assembly in the articles of taxation and internal policy.
When Henry came to the fifth resolution there must have been a gasp of surprise. It held that any attempt to vest the power to tax the colonies in any other body than the Assembly was illegal, unjust, and unconstitutional, and tended to destroy British as well as American liberty. Henry did not introduce the other two resolutions, probably because of the uproar which the reading of the fifth occasioned.
A violent debate ensued. George Wythe, John Robinson, Peyton Randolph, and others thought the language too extreme. But what Fauquier described as "the young, hot, and giddy members," were carried along by Henry's eloquence. "Tarquin and Caesar each had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III...." At this point he was interrupted by the Speaker who declared that he had spoken treason. Henry denied that he advocated treason. If he had said anything wrong, it should be attributed to his concern over his country's dying liberty.[41]
The first four resolutions passed by safe margins, but the fifth barely got by, by a vote of twenty to nineteen. In alarm the more conservative members sent out a hurry call for such absent Burgesses as were still in or near Williamsburg. When several had come in an attempt was made to have the resolutions struck off the journal. They succeeded with the fifth, Fauquier reported, "which was thought the most offensive," but failed with the other four.[42]
Perhaps Henry, himself, as he left Williamsburg, wearing a pair of leather breeches and leading his bony nag by the bridle, did not realize that his resolutions would be the alarm bell of revolution. The Maryland Gazette, the Newport Gazette, the Boston Gazette, and other papers published them, not only the four which passed in the House, but the other three as well. And the sixth and seventh were radical indeed. They declared that the people of the colony were not bound to obey any laws to tax them other than those passed by the Assembly, and that any person who should uphold such laws "by speaking or writing" should be deemed an enemy of the colony. It was the policy of resistance.