40 Fun Facts About Stamp Act

Besides newspapers and legal papers, which pastime item needed a tax stamp under the Stamp Act of 1765?

Playing cards carried a tax of a shilling a pack, and dice were charged ten times as much.

What did Stamp Act protesters say the colonies lacked in Parliament, making its tax on them unjust?

Representation was the sticking point because colonists elected nobody to Parliament; they held that only their own assemblies could tax them.

Which American agent in London answered MPs' questions on the Stamp Act in the House of Commons in February 1766?

Benjamin Franklin needed the win: he had recommended a friend as stamp distributor, and angry Pennsylvanians had threatened his Philadelphia home.

Which new member of Virginia's House of Burgesses drew cries of treason with his 1765 speech against the Stamp Act?

Patrick Henry had been sworn in only nine days earlier, and most of the burgesses had already gone home when his resolutions passed.

In which city did delegates from nine colonies gather for the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765?

New York hosted the delegates in its City Hall, where Federal Hall now stands; the same building, remodelled, later became the first capitol of the United States.

A phrase from a 1765 speech in the House of Commons gave which network of Stamp Act protesters its name?

Sons of Liberty began less as a formal organisation than as a label any opponent of the new taxes could use, which let organisers call meetings anonymously.

The Stamp Act was meant to help pay for British troops kept in America after which war ended in 1763?

French and Indian War was the American name for the Seven Years' War; when it ended, Britain kept ten thousand regulars in the colonies at about £225,000 a year.

Which tactic by colonial merchants pushed manufacturers in Britain to lobby for the Stamp Act's repeal?

A boycott of British goods hit exporters hard; two hundred merchants in a single port agreed to import nothing until the tax was gone.

Under pressure from crowds in 1765, what did almost every Stamp Act distributor in the thirteen colonies do?

Resigned the post is the short answer: with nobody left to hand out the stamped paper, the tax was never effectively collected.

How were the 'stamps' of the Stamp Act of 1765 actually applied to newspapers and legal documents?

Embossed on the paper in London, the marks meant colonists had to buy pre-stamped sheets shipped across the Atlantic rather than stick anything on.

Which Boston patriot engraved a view of the obelisk raised in 1766 to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act?

Paul Revere's print shows all four sides of the monument, each carrying four portraits of British public figures, the king among them.

Which act, passed alongside the Stamp Act's repeal in 1766, asserted Parliament's power to make laws for America?

Declaratory Act wording claimed authority over the colonies 'in all cases whatsoever', and only a handful of MPs voted against it.

Which law of 1764, a year before the Stamp Act, halved one colonial import duty but tightened its collection?

Sugar Act duties on molasses were cut so that merchants would pay rather than smuggle; the old sixpence-a-gallon rate had mostly been dodged with bribes.

Opponents of the Stamp Act in 1765 argued that the tax violated their rights as what?

Englishmen could not be taxed without their consent, the argument ran; the protesters saw themselves as loyal subjects claiming old rights, not as rebels.

Which grim symbol did the Pennsylvania Journal print on its masthead in 1765 to protest the Stamp Act?

Skull and crossbones sat beside the words 'the fatal Stamp', and the paper's printer was a leader of Philadelphia's protest movement.

Which Massachusetts patriot wrote the Braintree Instructions, his home town's 1765 rejection of the Stamp Act?

John Adams, a future president, was then a young country lawyer, and some forty other Massachusetts towns went on to adopt his wording.

Passed weeks after the Stamp Act, which law of 1765 made the colonies house and feed British soldiers?

Quartering Act rules sent troops to barracks, inns and empty buildings, but never into private homes, whatever the popular legend says.

The Boston tree where a Stamp Act official's effigy was hanged in 1765 was of which kind?

Elm it was, planted in 1646; Loyalists cut it down for firewood in August 1775, during the siege of Boston.

The war that prompted the Stamp Act had done what to Britain's national debt between 1755 and 1764?

Nearly doubled it: the debt climbed from about £72 million to almost £130 million, and raising taxes at home was judged politically impossible.

Which British prime minister, seeking money to keep an army in America, brought in the Stamp Act in 1765?

George Grenville never held office again: the king dismissed him in July 1765, months before the tax was even due to start.

Which MP, who called Americans children planted by British care in the Stamp Act debate, taxed their tea in 1767?

Charles Townshend put duties on glass, paint, paper and tea, then died of a fever within months, leaving others to face the backlash.

Which former war leader told the Commons in the 1766 repeal debate that he rejoiced America had resisted the Stamp Act?

William Pitt was already a hero in the colonies: the frontier fort named after him during the Seven Years' War grew into Pittsburgh.

The highest single charge in the Stamp Act of 1765, ten pounds, fell on the licence for which occupation?

Attorney licences bore the top rate because the steep charges on lawyers and college students were designed to limit the growth of a professional class in the colonies.

Which Massachusetts lieutenant governor saw a crowd gut his Boston mansion in August 1765 over the Stamp Act?

Thomas Hutchinson had quietly warned London against the tax; the rioters scattered the papers he had gathered on the history of Massachusetts.

How did many colonial newspapers dress their pages when the Stamp Act took effect in November 1765?

Black borders, sometimes with tombstones, declared the papers 'dead'; most were back within months, defiantly printed without the required stamp.

Riots in England over a 1763 tax on which drink made ministers wary of raising money at home before the Stamp Act?

Cider country in the west of England had erupted in riots over a levy of four shillings a hogshead, so ministers looked across the Atlantic instead.

Which Massachusetts official, named distributor under the Stamp Act, was hanged in effigy in Boston in August 1765?

Andrew Oliver privately opposed the act he was appointed to enforce, and he was the brother-in-law of the colony's lieutenant governor.

A boot hung beside a Stamp Act effigy in Boston in 1765 was a pun on which unpopular former prime minister?

Lord Bute had left office two years earlier, but colonists still blamed the king's old tutor as a hidden hand behind the tax.

Which prime minister, who took office in July 1765, steered the repeal of the Stamp Act through Parliament?

Marquess of Rockingham argued for repeal as a practical matter rather than on principle, turning the debate towards the damage done to British trade.

Which political thinker, private secretary to the prime minister, became an MP in 1765 as Stamp Act repeal loomed?

Edmund Burke helped rally London's merchants into a campaign for repeal, urging traders across the country to press their own MPs.

Ebenezer Mackintosh, who led Boston's crowds against the Stamp Act in August 1765, earned his living in which trade?

Shoemaker by trade, Mackintosh already captained the South End's street gang, so a club of Boston merchants picked him to lead the protests.

Repudiation Day, each 23 November, recalls a county court's defiance of the Stamp Act in 1765 in which US state?

Maryland's Frederick County honours twelve magistrates who told officials to carry on business without stamps; a week later a crowd held a mock funeral for the act.

The kind of tax used in the Stamp Act was devised in 1624, after a public contest, in which country?

Netherlands stamp duty came out of a public competition to find a new tax, and England borrowed the idea seventy years later, in 1694.

Stamp Act offenders could be tried in which kind of court, where a judge sat without a jury?

Admiralty judges had traditionally heard only cases from the high seas, so colonists saw a scheme to push aside their own local courts.

Which soldier-turned-MP, blinded in one eye at Quebec, defended the colonists in the 1765 debate on the Stamp Act?

Isaac Barré is remembered on the map: the city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, carries his name.

Which Pennsylvanian, later called the Penman of the Revolution, drafted the Stamp Act Congress's declaration?

John Dickinson earned the nickname two years later with his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, aimed at the next round of British duties.

The 1766 law asserting Parliament's power over America was closely copied from a 1719 act about which country?

Ireland had been made subordinate to the British Parliament by that earlier act, and the new law borrowed its wording almost line for line.

Boston's North End and South End gangs, who united against the Stamp Act in 1765, brawled each year on which holiday?

Pope Night, every 5 November, was New England's rowdy version of Guy Fawkes Night, with rival gangs fighting to capture each other's effigy of the pope.

Which Caribbean island yielded more Stamp Act revenue than any other British colony, despite loud local opposition?

Jamaica brought in about £2,000 even though many islanders dodged the stamps and ships without stamped papers were waved into port.

The Stamp Act tax had to be paid in which kind of money, which was in short supply in the colonies?

British hard coin was so scarce in America that a late amendment proposed letting colonists pay in their own scrip; Parliament judged it too little, too late.