It was in January, 1759, that Washington took his seat in the House, and if he made it his rule "to speak seldom but on important subjects," he had several opportunities to speak before he finally left the Virginia Legislature for a more important gathering. The first very important subject was the Stamp Act, in 1765. The British Government had passed an act requiring the American colonies to place a stamp upon every newspaper or almanac that was published, upon every marriage certificate, every will, every deed, and upon other legal papers. These stamps were to be sold by officers of the crown, and the money obtained by the sale was to be used to pay British soldiers stationed in America to enforce the laws made by Parliament.
The colonies were aflame with indignation. They declared that Parliament had no right to pass such an act; that the Ministry that proposed it was about an unlawful business; and that it was adding insult to injury to send over soldiers to enforce such laws. People, when they meet on the corner of the street and discuss public matters, are usually much more outspoken than when they meet in legislatures; but the American colonists were wont to talk very plainly in their assemblies, and it was no new thing for the representatives, chosen by the people, to be at odds with the governor, who represented the British Government. So when Patrick Henry rose up in the House of Burgesses, with his resolutions declaring that the Stamp Act was illegal and that the colony of Virginia had always enjoyed the right of governing itself, as far as taxation went,—and when he made a flaming speech which threatened the King, there was great confusion; and though his resolutions were passed, there was but a bare majority.
There is no record of what Washington may have said or how he voted on that occasion, but his letters show that he thought the Stamp Act a very unwise act on the part of Great Britain, and a piece of oppression. "That Act," he says, "could be looked upon in no other light by every person who would view it in its proper colors." But he did not rush into a passion over it. Instead, he studied it coolly, and before it was repealed, wrote at some length to his wife's uncle, who was living in London, his reasons for thinking that the British Ministry would gain nothing by pressing the Stamp Act and other laws which bore hard on colonial prosperity; for he held that if they would only see it, the colonies were as necessary to England as England to the colonies.
PATRICK HENRY.
It is difficult for us to-day to put ourselves in the place of Washington and other men of his time. Washington was a Virginian, and was one of the Legislature. He was used to making laws and providing for the needs of the people of Virginia, but he was accustomed to look beyond Virginia to England. There the King was, and he was one of the subjects of the King. The King's officers came to Virginia, and when Washington saw, as he so often did, a British man-of-war lying in the river off Mount Vernon, his mind was thrilled with pleasure as he thought of the power of the empire to which he belonged. He had seen the British soldiers marching against the French, and he had himself served under a British general. He had an ardent desire to go to England, to see London, to see the King and his Court, and Parliament, and the Courts of Justice, and the great merchants who made the city famous; but as yet he had been unable to go.
He had seen but little of the other colonies. He had made a journey to Boston, and that had given him some acquaintance with men; but wherever he went, he found people looking eagerly toward England and asking what the Ministry there would do about fighting the French on the Western borders. Though he and others might never have seen England, it was the center of the world to them. He thought of the other colonies not so much as all parts of one great country on this side of the Atlantic, as each separately a part of the British Empire.
After all, however, and most of all, he was a Virginian. In Virginia he owned land. There was his home, and there his occupation. He was a farmer, a planter of tobacco and wheat, and it was his business to sell his products. As for the French, they were enemies of Great Britain, but they were also very near enemies of Virginia. They were getting possession of land in Virginia itself—land which Washington owned in part; and when he was busily engaged in driving them out, he did not have to stop and think of France, he needed only to think of Fort Duquesne, a few days' march to the westward.
When, therefore he found the British Government making laws which made him pay roundly for sending his tobacco to market, and taxing him as if there were no Virginia Legislature to say what taxes the people could and should pay, he began to be restless and dissatisfied. England was a great way off; Virginia was close at hand. He was loyal to the King and had fought under the King's officers, but if the King cared nothing for his loyalty, and only wanted his pence, his loyalty was likely to cool. His chief resentment, however, was against Parliament. Parliament was making laws and laying taxes. But what was Parliament? It was a body of law-makers in England, just as the House of Burgesses was in Virginia. To be sure, it could pass laws about navigation which concerned all parts of the British Empire; but, somehow, it made these laws very profitable to England and very disadvantageous to Virginia. Parliament, however, had no right to pass such a law as the Stamp Act. That was making a special law for the American colonies, and taking away a right which belonged to the colonial assemblies.
Washington had grown up with an intense love of law, and in this he was like other American Englishmen. In England there were very few persons who made the laws, the vast majority had nothing to do but to obey the laws. Yet it is among the makers of laws that the love of law prevails; and since in America a great many more Englishmen had to do with government in colony and in town than in England, there were more who passionately insisted upon the law being observed. An unlawful act was to them an outrage. When they said that England was oppressing them, and making them slaves, they did not mean that they wanted liberty to do what they pleased, but that they wanted to be governed by just laws, made by the men who had the right to make laws. And that right belonged to the legislatures, to which they sent representatives.