In the fall of 1765, American colonists convened a Stamp Act convention in New York and called for a boycott of British imports. The congress brought together twenty-seven delegates from nine states whose mandate was to ask the king and parliament to abolish the tax without aggravating the crisis. Congress emphasized that the colonists possessed all the “rights and privileges inherent in the English.” It adopted thirteen points, the third of which stated that “it is inseparably essential to the liberty of the people and to the undisputed right of the English that no tax should be imposed on them, but with their own consent, personally or by their representatives.” During the Seven Years` War, Britain scored a number of important victories, driving France out of North America and parts of Africa, India and the West Indies. New France, the name of the French possessions in North America, was now British, but a newly conquered population could cause problems. Few people in Britain were naïve enough to believe that these former French settlers would suddenly and wholeheartedly embrace British rule without the threat of rebellion, and Britain believed that troops were needed to maintain order. Moreover, the war had shown that the existing colonies needed defence against Britain`s enemies, and Britain believed that defence would be best provided by a fully trained regular army, not just colonial militias. To this end, the post-war British government, under the leadership of King George III, decided to permanently station units of the British Army in America. However, it would take money to keep this army. In 1651, Britain passed its first Navigation Act, updating trade laws as needed.
However, the aim was not to increase incomes, but to impose a sufficiently high tariff on foreign trade to channel trade between Britain and its colonies. [15] The tariffs proposed by Grenville would increase revenues and be strictly enforced, thereby reducing the ability of settlers to circumvent tariffs. The settlers would have accepted the stamp duty if it had been collected by their own representatives and with their consent. However, the settlers` emerging sense of independence – nurtured by the motherland and justified by their multiple interactions with other trading nations – reinforced the settlers` sense of indignation and injustice. Even if they had done so, there is little doubt that many would have been troubled by the negative impact of a tax on the free press. The American Revolution was sparked in part by a series of laws passed between 1763 and 1775 that regulated trade and taxes. This legislation created tensions between colonists and imperial officials, making it clear that the British Parliament would not respond to American complaints that the new laws were onerous. The British refusal to respond to American demands for change allowed the colonists to argue that they were part of an increasingly corrupt and autocratic empire in which their traditional freedoms were threatened. This position eventually served as the basis for the colonial declaration of independence. No one in the British government seems to have questioned whether colonial troops could have occupied America, or whether Britain should ask the colonists for financial aid instead of raising taxes over their heads.
This was partly because the British government believed it was learning a lesson from the Indian War: that the colonial government would only cooperate with Britain if it could make a profit, and that colonial soldiers were unreliable and undisciplined because they operated under different rules than the British army. In fact, these prejudices were based on British interpretations of the first part of the war, where cooperation between politically poor British commanders and colonial governments had been strained, even hostile. With the passage of the Stamp Act, the settlers` murmur eventually became an articulate response to what they saw as an attempt by the mother country to undermine their economic strength and independence. They raised the issue of taxation without representation and formed companies in the colonies to rally against the British government and nobles who wanted to exploit the colonies as a source of income and raw materials. In October of that year, nine of the 13 colonies sent representatives to the Stamp Act Congress, where the colonists drafted the “Bill of Rights and Complaints,” a document that railed against the autocratic policies of the mercantilist British Empire.