Grenvilles Silver Hammer The Problem of PDF

Grenville’s Silver Hammer: The Problem
of Money in the Stamp Act Crisis
Andrew David Edwards
The New England merchant Nathaniel Sparhawk wrote to Charles Watson-Wentworth,

2nd Marquis of Rockingham, in 1765:
There has never happened among us anything that has thrown the people of this
province, and indeed the whole continent, into such a consternation as this Act
has occasioned. And besides its being universally disliked, it is thought by the best
judges here to be wholly impracticable, from the nature of the Act and the peculiar
circumstances of the colonies relative to it. It is much doubted whether all the circu-
lating cash among us (which is no more than is absolutely necessary for the carrying
on our trade and business, and answering the common occasions of life), supposing
the Act should be carried into execution, would be sufficient to answer its demands.
It is very plain, then, that the consequence thereof would be the ruin of the trade
and commerce of the country.1
The crisis surrounding the legislation Sparhawk laments, the 1765 Stamp Act, is the
traditional pivot point of American colonial history—when colonists first began to won-
der aloud what it might be like as citizens of an independent republic. On February 17,
1765, British Parliament passed an act “granting and applying certain stamp duties, and
other duties, in the British colonies and plantations in America,” intending to defray the
expenses of troops stationed in North America since the end of the Seven Years’ War. The
taxes were designed to be light, spread evenly throughout the colonies, requiring anyone
who participated in civil society—from graduating college students to lawyers writing a
last will and testament—to pay a small fee to the British State. Yet despite Parliament’s ef-
forts at restraint, the act outraged many colonists. Fearing mob violence, stamp distribu-
tors resigned their posts; newspapers printed death’s-heads above the fold in place of “the
Andrew David Edwards is a graduate student in history at Princeton University.

The author would like to thank Mariel Edwards, Martin Sopocy, Sean Wilentz, Jonathan Levy, Hendrik Har-
tog, David Weiman, Elizabeth Blackmar, Mae Ngai, Jeremy Adelman, Wendy Warren, Jeffrey Sklansky, David Bell,
Stanley Katz, Linda Colley, John McCusker, Claire Priest, Christopher Florio, Sean Vanatta, Yael Geller, Katlyn
Carter, Tom Toelle, Peter Conti-Brown, Clayton Childress, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Farley Grubb, Cathy Matson,
Steven Pincus, Howard Erlanger, Matt Jaremski, Ron Buel, Emma Hart, and the anonymous readers for the JAH
for their challenges, inspiration, debate and encouragement, and the History Project and Canadian Studies Program
at Princeton for its financial support.
Readers may contact Edwards at ade2@princeton.edu.
1
George Thomas Keppel, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and His Contemporaries: With Original Letters
and Documents Now First Published (2 vols., London, 1852), I, 250–52, esp. 251.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jax172
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
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338 The Journal of American History September 2017
This detail from a British satirical print from 1765 shows America as a woman attacked by
Prime Minister George Grenville, holding the hammer, while held down by Grenville’s ally
and predecessor, the Earl of Bute. Courtesy John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Prov-
idence, Rhode Island.
fatal Stamp” and colonial merchants organized nonimportation agreements meant to force
repeal of the act. Parliament repealed the act, but the revolutionary debate had begun. The
colonists had made clear they would never accept parliamentary taxation without a fight.2
Historians have generally accepted that Americans would not have had difficulty pay-
ing the stamp taxes. Edmund Morgan’s and Helen Morgan’s classic The Stamp Act Crisis
(1953), offered what remains a standard interpretation of the colonial resistance: at the
root of the crisis was a dispute over the character of representative government, not over
the economic effects of the taxes, and this dispute eventually provided the rationale for
revolution. “Although the amounts charged would not in most cases impose severe hard-
ships,” the Morgans wrote, “they would remind colonists in their business transactions of
2
Danby Pickering, ed., The Statutes at Large, from Magna Charta to the End of the Eleventh Parliament of Great
Britain, Anno 1761. Continued (46 vols., London, 1765), XXVI, 179; Stamp Act, 5 Geo. III, c. 12 (1765); Wil-
liam Bradford, “Expiring: In Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again,” Philadelphia Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly
Advertiser, Oct. 31, 1765, p. 1.

The Problem of Money in the Stamp Act Crisis 339
the authority that Parliament claimed over them.” British officials expected the tax to draw
£100,000 annually from about 2 million British colonists in North America and the Ca-
ribbean region, or about one shilling sterling per person per year. This amounted, by one
estimate, to 0.2 percent of colonial per capita income, a miniscule imposition. Moreover,
the tax came at a time when the British government was spending millions on the empire,
much of it devoted to colonial defense. The taxes, in themselves, were light enough and
fully justified. Even so, the principle of the situation mattered—whether Parliament had
the authority to lay any internal taxes, no matter how trivial, on the Americans.3
This by-now virtually uncontested interpretation, however, overlooks the crucial mat-
ter of money. Britain’s North American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century were fa-
mous as the land that had grown rich without hard money (silver and gold). The North
American colonies, Adam Smith wrote in his critique of European mercantilist policies
in The Wealth of Nations, were a place where the stock of silver and gold were “immedi-
ately sent out” with “different sorts of paper money being substituted in its place,” while
“real wealth, the exchangeable value of the annual produce of its lands and labour,” were
“increasing in a much greater proportion.” Atlantic merchants knew silver was an outside
money for American colonists; it came only from their trade in the Atlantic region and
was most useful in the Atlantic world, not inside the colonies. For Americans, the British
merchant John Wright wrote in his 1763 field guide to colonial exchange, gold and sil-
ver were just another commodity, “as much a Merchandize as any they dealt in,” shipped
to Europe as it was acquired. Lacking hard money, colonists had been obliged to “cre-
ate and issue Bills of Credit, commonly called Paper Money, to circulate in Trade among
themselves.” Paper money and credit networks facilitated by the colonial judicial system
allowed the colonists to build wealth while rarely if ever using specie.4
The Stamp Act, then, was charged in a currency most colonists did not possess. When
we estimate the weight of taxes on a per capita income basis we assume that taxes and
income are accounted in the same currency or that the cost of substituting one currency
for another is negligible. Neither was true in 1765. According to the law, the stamp taxes
were charged in the “sterling money of Great Britain” to be paid in “silver . . . to the pro-
portion and value of five shillings and six pence the ounce,” not in the local monies that
most Americans used to tally their wealth. Silver could be obtained only from sources
hundreds of miles away in the Caribbean world or in southern Europe, from trade routes
the British government often deemed illegal. Paying the tax would have required shipping
silver thousands of miles in small ships at high cost and distributing it deep into a sparsely
settled country, where land and legal claims were common but money was not. As the
1765 Stamp Act Congress declared, “the Duties imposed by several late Acts of Parlia-
ment from the peculiar Circumstances of these Colonies, will be extreamly Burthensome
& Grevious; and from the Scarcity of Specie, Payment of them absolutely impracticable.”
3
Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1995),
73. P. D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis (Oxford, 1975), 86–87; Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy
of Colonial America (New York, 1988), 199–200; “The National Debt and the Sinking Fund: Account Showing the
Cause of the Deficiency of the Grants 1764,” n.d., doc. ref. T1/434/93 (National Archives, London, Eng.).
4
On recent historiography, see Peter D. G. Thomas, “The Stamp Act Crisis and Its Repercussions, Including the
Quartering Act Controversy,” in A Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (New
York, 2008), 125. On silver as a foreign, outside money in colonial America, see Adam Smith, The Wealth of Na-
tions (1776; New York, 2003), 627. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance,
1776–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1961), 4–5; Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the
Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980), 132; Eli F. Heckscher, “Revisions in Economic History: V. Mercantilism,”
Economic History Review, 7 (Nov. 1936), 44–54, esp. 52.

Before the universal national currencies of the late nineteenth century, the difficulty of
making tax payments in a scarce currency was well understood. Thomas Paine wrote in
The Crisis IX: “There are two distinct things which make the payment of taxes difficult;
the one is the large and real value of the sum to be paid, and the other is the scarcity of
the thing in which the payment is to be made.” Americans, in their own estimation, had
the latter problem in 1765.5
Most historians since the Morgans have passed over the silver issue, noting only that
taxes were charged in silver as a neutral fact with little political significance. Until recently,
this oversight was understandable. The consensus, even among economic historians, was
that while specie might have been scarce, it was never so rare as to affect the character of
colonial crises. The important work of historians of colonial money such as Farley Grubb,
Ronald W. Michener, and Robert E. Wright has undermined this once-common view.
Economic historians now generally accept that silver and gold—indeed, money of all
kinds—was often far scarcer than previous generations of historians had imagined, sub-
ject to wide swings in availability and rarely used as a medium of exchange outside trading
ports. In short, this work implies that the colonists’ complaints about silver in the Stamp
Act crisis should not be passed over.6
Taking those complaints seriously, in turn, could help us begin to resolve a longstand-
ing interpretive predicament. Few working historians believe that ideology alone is suf-
ficient to explain the American reaction to the Stamp Act and the imperial crisis that
followed, but there is no viable alternative explanation. David Waldstreicher and Staugh-
ton Lynd have called for a new history of the American Revolution that takes colonists’
material concerns more fully into account. They note, however, that if we are to build on
our understandings of the past, exploring material interests alone is no solution. To move
forward, historians must examine the connections between ideology and material circum-
stances, not set them in opposition.
Money is perhaps uniquely suited to play a role in this reconsideration. As many his-
torians and philosophers, from Georg Simmel to Karl Polanyi, have argued, money oper-
ates at the crossroads of the material and the ideal. In colonial America the political and
the practical were densely entangled, nowhere perhaps more than in monetary practice. It
was both intensely personal and inherently political—a crucial element of statecraft and
nascent conceptions of sovereignty. Silver’s role in the Stamp Act crisis suggests that schol-
ars have underestimated the immediate stakes of monetary debates in a colonial context.
The Stamp Act forced many colonists to see themselves as a people apart, with interests
distinct from and antithetical to those of Great Britain’s citizenry. The act made money
revolutionary, striking a chord that echoed long after the immediate crisis was resolved.7
5
For the silver clause in the Stamp Act, see Statutes at Large, ed. Pickering, XXVI, 202–3. On British restrictions
of the silver trade, see Allan Christelow, “Contraband Trade between Jamaica and the Spanish Main, and the Three
Port Act of 1766,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 22 (May 1942), 309–43; Stamp Act Congress, Journal of
the First Congress of the American Colonies in Opposition to the Tyrannical Acts of the British Parliament Held at New-
York, October 7, 1765 (New York, 1845), 27–29; Craig Muldrew, “‘Hard Food for Midas’: Cash and Its Social Value
in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, 170 (Feb. 2001), 118; Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America,
1607–1775 (Princeton, 2008), 8; Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (London, 1819), 137.
6
Farley Grubb, “The Circulating Medium of Exchange in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1729–1775: New Estimates of
Monetary Composition, Performance, and Economic Growth,” Explorations in Economic History, 41 (Oct. 2004),
329–60; Ronald W. Michener and Robert E. Wright, “Farley Grubb’s Noisy Evasions on Colonial Money: A Rejoin-
der,” Econ Journal Watch, 3 (May 2006), 263–64; Robert E. Wright, The Origins of Commercial Banking in America,
1750–1800 (New York, 2001), 19–47; Ron Michener, “Money in the American Colonies,” EH.Net, http://eh.net/
encyclopedia/money-in-the-american-colonies; Wright, Origins of Commercial Banking in America, 52.

Reevaluating the colonists’ concerns regarding money as both an object and an idea
requires a thorough reappraisal of the documentary record of the Stamp Act crisis. With
few exceptions, scholars have long interpreted these documents as strategic rhetoric—a
purposeful discourse aimed at accomplishing the specific political end of repealing the
Stamp Act. Having begun with the belief that material complaints were mere pretexts,
historians have focused almost exclusively on issues of taxation and representation as dis-
putes over abstractions of British constitutional law. They also tell another story, how-
ever—of how imperial overreach presented a threat to the American colonists that was as
practical as it was profound.
To be sure, the conventional wisdom should not be dismissed entirely. The crisis can-
not be understood simply as a material or social conflict any more than it can be seen as
solely a political or constitutional conflict. Americans deployed every interpretive tool
they possessed to articulate their concerns to themselves and their imperial administra-
tors. Understanding these tools, and the deeply held political, spiritual, and constitution-
al beliefs underlying them, is necessary in grappling with the crisis and its consequences.
Even so, no sound interpretation can ignore how the documents generated by the crisis
speak to a social, economic, and political reality in the American colonies during the mid-
1760s: the scarcity of specie currency.
The Problem of Silver

The demand for silver, Massachusetts’s former agent in London William Bollan wrote in
1765, was the “most extraordinary” thing about the Stamp Act. The act “requires such
duties to be paid in sterling money at 5s. 6d. per ounce,” Bollan continued. “It might as
well have ordained, that every man in the colonies should be seven foot high, since they
are both equally impossible to be inforced, for the people have no money.” The truth is,
he concluded, “they cannot keep a piece of gold or silver among them, and that all their
money consists of paper currency.”8
“The new Tax gives the highest Disgust,” New York chief justice William Smith wrote
the absentee New York governor Robert Monckton on May 30, 1765, two weeks after the
text of the Stamp Act was published in the colony’s newspapers. “Considered in itself the
Duties are thought to be beyond all reasonable Bounds.” The stamp taxes, Smith wrote,
“will soon draw out all the little silver and gold we have or can procure, distress us to an
Extremity and frustrate the very End of the Law.” The result would be “discontent for a
while, and in the end open Opposition,” he wrote. “The Boldness of the Minister amazes
our People—This single Stroke has lost Great Britain the Affection of all her Colonies.”9
Other colonial notables sounded the same alarm. Rhode Island governor Samuel Ward
argued that paying the stamp taxes “is absolutely impracticable; money being already so
7
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York, 2001); Karl Po-
lanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, 1957); Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereign-
ty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly, 68
(Oct. 2011), 600; Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (New York, 2015);
Jeffrey Sklansky, “Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 11
(March 2014), 45; Muldrew, “‘Hard Food for Midas,’” 79; Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in Time of the French
Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2015), 8–9; [John Dickinson], The Late Regulations, Respecting the British Colonies
on the Continent of America Considered, in a Letter from a Gentleman in Philadelphia to His Friend in London (Lon-
don, 1765), 34.
8
[William Bollan], The Mutual Interest of Great Britain and the American Colonies Considered (London, 1765), 9.
9
William Smith, Historical Memoirs, ed. William H. W. Sabine (New York, 1956), 29.

scarce, that there is not, by the best estimate which I am able to procure, enough to pay
those duties two years.” The Connecticut stamp distributor Jared Ingersoll came to a simi-
lar conclusion after studying his colony’s finances. “The total Amount [paid in Connecti-
cut stamp taxes] might be rather more than Four Thousand Pounds per Annum,” Ingersoll
wrote. “It was a doubt with me, whether we had even that Sum in the Colony, in what we
call Hard Money, i.e. Gold and Silver Coin.” On September 19, 1765, New Jersey chief
justice Frederick Smyth met with prominent local lawyers who had decided to protest the
act. He asked them “whether, in their opinion, the duties could possibly be paid in gold
and silver.” Their reply was, “They could not be paid in gold and silver even for one year.”10
In Massachusetts, John Adams concurred (the words shown here in brackets and italics
were struck in Adams’s original manuscript): “We have Reason to think that the Execu-
tion of that Act for <much less space than one year> a short Space of time, considering the
present Scarcity of Money, would dreign the Country of <every shilling of> its Cash.” Like
Smith, Adams speculated that the burden imposed by Whitehall might soon bleed over
into insurrection. “And what the Consequences of so sudden a shock and such a convul-
sive Change in the whole Course of our Business, and subsistence, would be to the Peace
of the Province, we tremble to consider.”11
Southern colonists had much the same reaction. North Carolina governor William
Tryon acknowledged “the parliamentary Right of Taxation” but also “took Notice of the
Impossibility of the Stamp-Act operating in all it’s Parts in this Province, where the whole
Cash of the Country would scarcely pay a single Year of the Tax.” The tax denied basic
colonial realities, suggested one Virginia trader in a 1765 letter to a Bristol correspondent.
The trader’s letter is worth quoting at length:
I declare, upon my honor, I have not seen twenty shillings in specie since I came
to the country, which is now six months, and it is doubted whether we have more
than 100,000 in paper money current among us, this is all the medium we have for
a country whose imports from Britain, for a number of years past, has not been less
than five times that sum in sterling. Add to this the immense debts already due,
with the taxes still to be collected, to discharge the expences we were at the last war,
and the present low price of our staple commodity, and I am confident you’ll believe
that we are—DISTRESSED—The Act for charging the stamp duties closes the
scene: this tax is to be paid in silver and will amount (upon supposition that busi-
ness was to go on as usual) to about fifty thousand pounds sterling per annum—a
sum as much impossible for this colony to pay, under its present circumstances, as
if it were as many million.12
Britons elsewhere in the Atlantic world agreed that the Stamp Act was impractical at
best. Samuel Martin, a prominent Antigua sugar planter, wrote in an August 5, 1765, letter
to his son and a member of Parliament, Samuel Martin Jr., that “obliging the people to pay
10
Samuel Ward to Secretary [Henry Seymour] Conway, Nov. 6, 1765, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, ed.
John Russell Bartlett (10 vols., New York, 1968), VI, 473; Jared Ingersoll, Mr. Ingersoll’s Letters Relating to the Stamp-
Act (New Haven, 1766), 49. For the exchange between the New Jersey lawyers and Frederick Smyth, see Frederick
Ricord and Wm. Nelson, eds., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey (33 vols., New-
ark, 1885), IX, 507.
11
John Adams to Ebenezer Thayer, “I. Adams Original Draft: Instructions to the Representative of Braintree
against the Stamp Act 1765,” Sept. 14, 1765, The Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed. Sara Martin, http://rotunda
.upress.virginia.edu/founders/ADMS-06-01-02-0054-0002.
12
For William Tryon’s sentiments, see North Carolina Gazette, Nov. 27, 1765, p. 4. For the trader’s comments,
see Walter E. Minchinton, “The Stamp Act Crisis: Bristol and Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biogra-
phy, 73 (April 1965), 148.

those duties in silver which they have not” would give stamp distributors license to “fleece
the people, and redouble the opposition without offering one farth[ing] into the Revenue,
which yr Parliament cannot mean, nor I think, yr Ministry itself.” Martin worried that
poorer colonists would be ruined if they were forced to get silver. In a July 1, 1765, letter
he had warned his son that “we . . . have not silver for all and any uses of life and therefore
everything must be suspended or the people exposed to pay such an exorbitant Exchange
as the Merchants seem fit to impose, by way of coin valuation, which is putting loose the
wolves, to prey upon the sheep without any benefit to your Revenues.” He had also asked
Samuel Jr. to send him £100 worth of Spanish silver dollars as soon as possible “by good
ship and a safe hand” so that he might duck the troubles or profit from them. Inside Great
Britain, America’s allies affirmed how devastating the costs of substituting local wealth for
the silver necessary to pay the tax might be. “A Shilling is more valuable in America than in
England,” wrote the British merchant John Fothergill, arguing that the “Difference of Ex-
change” would make the stamp taxes more difficult to bear as time went on.13
Surprised by the political crisis, the British government could not argue that it had not
been warned. Minister George Grenville and his aides knew that demanding “Sterling
Money,” as one 1763 British Treasury document urged, could make paying taxes and fees
a “Matter of real Terror & Punishment” for American colonists. In the fall of 1764 John
Temple, the customs collector for the eight northern colonies, advised the Grenville aide
Thomas Whately that he doubted whether laying a stamp tax would be “Expedient or
prudent” given that colonists owed English merchants more than they could pay and were
“already very much drained of cash.” Whately subsequently wrote that “the severest Op-
pression of an American Tax” was “that of draining the Plantations of Money which they
can so ill spare.” He did promise, however, that American taxes would be spent to support
troops in America, allowing the specie to recirculate into colonial commerce.14
Even if Whately’s solution was logically sound, it did nothing to address the colonists’
immediate in ability to pay the taxes in silver. “[Grenville] said we told him we were poor,
and unable to bear such a Tax,” while “others told him we were well able,” Ingersoll re-
called of a meeting with the first minister in early 1765. Grenville told Ingersoll that he
and the other stamp distributors would “see how and where it pinches, and will certainly
let us know it, in which Case it shall be eased.” Focused on closing a £249,160 hole in
British outlays for 1764, Grenville decided to charge the stamp taxes in the currency most
convenient for his purposes. His plan was trial and error, predicated on a calculated risk.15
Grenville was willing to gamble because the rewards seemed compelling. He had good
reasons to charge the tax in silver and to keep it in America. A difficulty in administering
the colonies involved the losses caused by transferring wealth from one side of the Atlan-
tic Ocean to the other. The problem had been brought to the British ministry’s attention
13
Samuel Martin Sr. to Samuel Martin Jr., Aug. 5, 1765, July 1, 1765, call no. 21.238.176.94, “The Martin
Papers” box, British Library. Additional Manuscripts series (microfilm: reel mf. Z.5.166P), rg 21 (State Archives
of North Carolina, Raleigh). Emphasis in orginal. [John Fothergill], Considerations Relative to the North American
Colonies (London, 1765), 27. Emphasis in original.
14
For the “Sterling Money” and “Terror & Punishment” quotations, see “May it Please Your Lordships,” Sept. 16,
1763, London Customs House staff report, doc. ref. T1/430/339 (National Archives). Neil R. Stout, John Temple,
and Thomas Whately, “The Missing Temple-Whately Papers,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 104
(Jan. 1992), 132; [Thomas Whately], The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed upon
Them, Considered (London, 1765), 102; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 72. Emphasis in original.
15
Ingersoll, Mr. Ingersoll’s Letters Relating to the Stamp Act, 32; John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure:
George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765 (Columbia, Mo., 1982), 21; “National Debt and the
Sinking Fund.”

in 1763 in connection with an apparent shortfall in the payment of Virginian quitrents

because little of the rents’ real value in Virginia was making its way to the exchequer. The
cost of either shipping currency to London or buying London credit was simply too high.
Meanwhile, Grenville’s army contractors in London informed him that much of the spe-
cie assigned to pay and provision troops in America was being eaten up by transaction and
transportation costs amounting to “a great many per cents.”16
Grenville’s solution was expedient: avoid the Atlantic crossing and generate the silver
in America to pay Britain’s American silver claims. The Stamp Act was only one compo-
nent of his strategy. First, with parliamentary approval he banned legal tender colonial
paper money with the Currency Act of 1764. Colonies then could not print paper cur-
rency good at face value for paying debts and taxes. The writings of David Hume and
the American bullionist William Douglass suggested that the act would bring silver into
America and give specie already in circulation a broader reach. Second, Grenville specified
that all new imperial taxes—the revised duties of the Sugar Act and the new obligations
of the Stamp Act—could only be paid in silver bullion, ensuring steady specie revenue.
He could use this silver to help support the army in America and avoid the expense of
transatlantic exchange. The only question was whether Americans could pay the taxes,
and this risk, he told Ingersoll, he was willing to take. If Americans could pay, Grenville
was sure that they would. If not, the tax could be modified. Confident in his right and
his calculations, he dismissed the obvious political risk: taxation had prompted British
revolutions before.17
It is important to stress how dangerous many believed this bet to be. Grenville’s “Bold-
ness” shocked even people closely associated with drafting the American stamp tax. Hen-
ry McCulloh, a North Carolina land speculator and official who had consulted with the
ministry, wrote that the silver clause in the Stamp Act indicated a rush job. “Several other
Matters ought to have been taken into Consideration previous to passing the late Stamp
Duty Act,” McCulloh wrote in a 1765 memo to Thomas Townshend, Grenville’s succes-
sor as lord of the Treasury, “especially as there is not Specie in most of the said Colonies to
Enable the people Settled there to Pay in Specie the several duties required from them So
that under their present Circumstances it is impossible for many of the Colonists to pay
Obedience to the said Law.” The act, he concluded, was a “dress of Horror.”18
Grenville was less apprehensive than he might have been because British subjects in
Great Britain already paid stamp taxes. In 1763 net revenue from these duties came to
£260,647. Again, though, his judgment seems lacking. Most of the stamp taxes in Britain
were paid in long-settled, relatively urban areas that were quite different from the Ameri-
can colonies. Scotland, for instance, with just over 1 million inhabitants in the 1760s,
produced an average £7,901 in stamp revenue annually between 1758 and 1763. By con-
16
“Report on Mr. Corbine’s Memorial on the Rise of Exchange in Virginia, July 11, 1764,” doc. ref. T1/430/277
(National Archives). For the “great many per cents” quotation, see Letter from George Colbrooke, Oct. 8, 1764,
doc. ref. T1/434/188, ibid.
17
William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England, 1640–1845 (New
York, 2003), 326. Currency Act, 4 Geo. III, c.12 (1764); Sugar Act, 4 Geo. III, c. 15. William Douglass, A Discourse
Concerning the Currencies of the British Plantations in America (Boston, 1740); David Hume, Essays and Treatises on
Several Subjects (2 vols., London, 1760), II, 81–104.
18
On George Grenville’s “Boldness,” see Smith, Historical Memoirs, ed. Sabine, 29; and Philip Lawson, George
Grenville: A Political Life (New York, 1984), 195–97. Henry McCulloh was likely referring to the Caribbean colo-
nies engaged in the Spanish silver trade. See Oliver Morton Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revo-
lution (New York, 1974), 192; Jack P. Greene and Henry McCulloh, “A Dress of Horror: Henry McCulloh’s Objec-
tions to the Stamp Act,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 26 (May 1963), 253–62.

This 1765 British satirical print shows George Grenville, the “financier,” weighing pennies against
the nation’s deep postwar debts, but, in doing so, shackles America, which would—if free to
trade—be able to deliver the sack of dollars she holds in her right hand. The yoke on the enslaved
America’s neck is marked “Taxed without Representation.” Courtesy John Carter Brown Library,
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
trast, Britain’s Atlantic colonies, with a population of just over 2 million, were expected
to produce £100,000. Surely, this was unrealistic. British taxpayers in Britain enjoyed ac-
cess to institutions that eased the burden of paying of taxes in sterling: banks, a relatively
well-developed financial sector, and an imperial system designed, in part, to drive silver
and gold to the imperial center. Americans did not. The British had also spent years work-
ing out the details of collection, imposing fees gradually over decades. The colonists were
in a different situation. “They live a thousand leagues from Great-Britain; their interest
and circumstance are not similar to those of British inhabitants; nor have they been well
considered or understood by the British parliament,” the North Carolina lawyer Maurice
Moore wrote in his 1765 pamphlet on the Stamp Act. Americans had neither the institu-
tions and experience nor the specie of their counterparts across the water.19
19
State of the Revenue Arising from Stamps, 1764, doc. ref. T1/430/93 (National Archives); Lawson, George
Grenville, 193; Edward Hughes, “The English Stamp Duties, 1664–1764,” English Historical Review, 56 (April
1941), 234–64, esp. 248; Desan, Making Money, 387; Maurice Moore, The Justice and Policy of Taxing the American
Colonies in Great-Britain, Considered (Wilmington, 1765), 9.

“Tis undoubtedly true, that the circulating money in all the Colonies would not have
been sufficient to have paid the Stamp-duty for two years,” the influential Boston cleric
Charles Chauncy preached, celebrating the act’s repeal on July 24, 1766. The colony
declared a day of thanksgiving after confirming the repeal, to be celebrated in church.
Chauncy’s congregation had resisted the taxes, some violently, but they had understood
the stakes and reacted accordingly, Chauncy argued. Their actions were justified by the
laws of God and the constitutional principles of British Empire, but most immediately by
common sense: “We should have been stupid, had not a spirit been excited in us to apply,
in all reasonable ways, for the removal of so insupportable a burden.”20
Silver and the Problem of Law

Chauncy’s common sense stemmed from daily American practice. Britain’s North Amer-
ican colonists occasionally used silver and gold as money, but they did not use it every-
where or for everything. In the eighteenth-century British Atlantic gold and silver were
high-denomination currencies used either for long-distance trade between people who
did not trust each other’s credit or for transactions between strangers. If a colonist was
traveling from Boston to Philadelphia, like Benjamin Franklin did as a young man in
1723, without an introduction or letter of credit to smooth the way, the best alternative
was coin. Franklin arrived in Philadelphia dirty, tired, hungry, bedraggled, and “knew
not a soul or where to look for lodging.” With “a Dutch dollar, and about a shilling in
copper” he was able to secure bread and bed despite suspicions he was a runaway servant.
His coin was introduction enough. Colonies regulated the legal-tender value of gold and
silver, making them “hard money” in colonial usage because they could be used to settle
debit accounts, even with strangers from abroad.21
Most American colonists, though, were more settled than young Franklin and had
little use for coin. Instead they relied on interpersonal credit—sometimes called complex
or bookkeeping barter—within their communities. Rachel Stockton, for example, visited
a cooper named Joseph Olden in Princeton, New Jersey, on September 15, 1765. Olden
set three hoops on Stockton’s barrel, costing 9 pence, a figure that Olden jotted in his ac-
counting book. No currency changed hands. Since Rachel was a legal dependent, the deb-
it likely accrued to her father. In November, Rachel repaid part of it by helping Olden’s
wife, but the bulk was not settled until years later, probably after Rachel married and left
town. These credits and debits were long-term relationships between people who knew
each other well—the opposite of the coin Franklin used in Philadelphia. While often
quite small, personal accounts were important in aggregate. They were the basis of Ameri-
can financial wealth before the American Revolution, when any kind of money—paper
or hard—was uncommon, “infrequently used outside major port cities.” In Alice Han-
son Jones’s survey of colonial probate records from 1774, she found whole rural counties
where no money appears.22
20
Charles Chauncy, A Discourse on “the good News from a far Country” (Boston, 1766), 12–13.
21
On the formulation of daily American practice with gold and silver, see Akinobu Kuroda, “Reconstructing
Global Monetary Historiography to Reconsider What Money Is” (lecture, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.,
March 12, 2015). Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791; New York, 1906), 24.
22
William Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1772–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1945); Michael
Merrill and Sean Wilentz, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “a Laborer,”
1747–1814 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 12–13; Joseph Olden, “Accompt Book, 1762–1779,” C0199 no. 773,
Manuscript Collections (Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University, Princeton), 49. For the “ma-

Currency was scarce in British North American because it was rarely used. “Hard cur-
rency” was scarcer still. It was most useful abroad (indeed, Ingersoll argued that was the
only place it was useful before the stamp crisis), and almost all of it went there. What little
specie existed rarely found its way into the interior except as payments to British troops
and payoffs to Native American allies. The “monied Men” in most parts of America, one
contemporary author wrote, would never “pay any of the Money that comes into their
Hands that is Weight” to creditors in the interior, instead hoarding it to send to Britain.
In this context, the Stamp Act’s demand for silver would have seemed threatening to
many. As Chauncy noted, ignoring a demand for coin few colonists saw on a daily basis
would have been “stupid.”23
This alone, however, does not explain the violence of colonial opposition to the Stamp
Act. If the tax had only been “impracticable,”most Americans would likely have disre-
garded it. Evasion, not resistance, was their default position regarding objectionable im-
perial impositions. But the Stamp Act was almost as difficult to evade as it was to pay.
Ignoring the act meant losing many of the protections of British law—a consequence few
in the colonies could disregard.24
The Stamp Act comprised sixty-three clauses covering fees and fines related to civil law,
customs and shipborne commerce, probate, property, and the press. Many taxes were cal-
culated to work in concert. They ranged from a half penny on a half-sheet pamphlet to
£10 sterling to join the colonial bar. These nominal rates are misleading given practical
American realities, but the silver problem also makes the notion of “tax” misleading. The
Stamp Act, in the colonists’ view, barred many from basic British institutions, promising
to turn a lack of silver into a species of lawlessness.25
The fees on civil law are an example. The first tax mentioned in the Stamp Act levied
a fee of 3 pence on each plea in civil proceeding: a “declaration”—the plaintiff’s state-
ment of a claim to action; a “plea”—the defendant’s formal statement in reply to the
declaration; a “replication” or “rejoinder”—the plaintiff’s answer to the defendant’s plea;
a “demurrer”—an admission of facts by the defendant that denies the plaintiff’s legal jus-
tification for relief; or “any other pleading.” These fees would add up quickly. Without
a declaration, plea, and rejoinder no case would exist, yet those three simple actions, in
addition to the four-shilling fee on any “judgment, decree, sentence, or dismission” that
would close the case, would be beyond the means of most colonists if fees had to be paid
jor port cities” quotation, see Michener and Wright, “Farley Grubb’s Noisy Evasions on Colonial Money,” 264;
and Farley Grubb, “Theory Evidence and Belief—The Colonial Money Puzzle Revisited: Reply to Michener and
Wright,” Econ Journal Watch, 3 (Jan. 2006), 47. Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be, 132; Ronald Hoffman et al., eds.,
The Economy of Early America: The Revolutionary Period, 1763–1790 (Charlottesville, 1988), 126–65, 196–243; Jo-
seph Ernst, Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy
of Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1973), 89–106; Ferguson, Power of the Purse, 4–5; James Henretta, The Origins of Ameri-
can Capitalism: Collected Essays (Boston, 1991), 28; Alice Hanson Jones, American Colonial Wealth: Documents and
Methods (New York, 1977), 68–218. On the debates surrounding Alice Hanson Jones’s data, see Wright, Origins of
Commercial Banking in America, 21–22.
23
Ingersoll, Mr. Ingersoll’s Letters Relating to the Stamp-Act, 7. For the “monied Men” and “Weight” quotations,
see John Wright, The American Negotiator (London, 1765), lxxvi.
24
For American uses of the word impracticable, see Stamp Act Congress, Journal of the First Congress of the
American Colonies in Opposition to the Tyrannical Acts of the British Parliament Held at New-York, 27–39; Kep-
pel, Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham and His Contemporaries, 250; Ward to Conway, Records of the Colony
of Rhode Island, ed. Bartlett, VI, 473. On the Stamp Act’s effect on colonial law, see Justin du Rivage and Claire
Priest, “The Stamp Act and the Political Origins of American Legal and Economic Institutions,” Southern Cali-
fornia Law Review, 88 (2014–2015), 875–912.
25
Pickering, ed., Statutes at Large, 179–205.

in specie. Furthermore, any “appeal” of a sentence or “writ of error” alleging a mistake in

the court’s judgment carried a stamp duty of ten shillings—meaning that once a court
decided a case, only the wealthiest would have the means to contest it. And even if spe-
cie were available, the fees would leave cash-poor colonial families even deeper in debt.26
In all, the taxes would fall hardest on those least able to pay them, “the poorest Indi-
viduals in the poorest Colonies,” the Maryland lawyer Daniel Dulany observed, “from
Mortgagors, Obligors, and Defendants.” John Adams noted that the act would effectively
“strip Multitudes of the poorer People of all their Property and reduce them to absolute
Beggary” because court fees were paid by the debtor. Other colonists argued that un
payable fees would eventually even have ramifications in Britain, where merchant houses
relied on colonial courts in the “deepest recesses of the woods” to enforce their debts.
Eventually, colonists projected, civil courts would disappear, as without stamps no judg-
ment would be legally binding. Creditors would have to either put up fees themselves,
which few could afford to do, or let debtors go.27
Fees on civil pleadings were not the Stamp Act’s only interference in American com-
mercial life. Increasingly, common debt instruments were also taxed. Bonds of less than
£10 would carry a stamp duty of half a shilling (six pence) in silver—a major imposi-
tion on minor debts. Bonds of up to £20 carried a tax of a shilling, and up to a shilling
and a half on bonds up to £40. By definition this amounted to a regressive tax on basic
financial instruments. Bonds certified by a colonial judge faced an even higher rate—10
shillings.28
The stamps on land transfers and surveying rights were perhaps even more onerous.
These affected the most valuable real property that the majority of colonists possessed.
Like bonds, taxes on surveying rights cost more, proportionally, for smaller holdings than
for large ones, but surveying was less ubiquitous than land transfers, and these were taxed
too. The one and a half shilling tax on “any deed, mesne conveyance, or other instrument”
conveying a piece of land under one hundred acres would likely have been especially dif-
ficult to pay. Americans would need silver on hand just to sell property or buy more. A fee
charged in silver could not be rolled into the purchase price unless that price was paid in
silver. The task would have stood, literally, as a metallic barrier between British colonists
and the use of their possessions. This, it seems, was what the colonists meant when they
said the Stamp Act made their property “precarious.” “This is a part of English Liberty, to
make such Contracts respecting our Property, as we think proper; and when made, the
Law will inforce the Performance,” a self-proclaimed New York “Son of Liberty” wrote
in 1765. The writer, who worried that protests against the Stamp Act provided ammuni-
tion for colonists seeking to slough off rent obligations, argued that British law was “the
grand Security of every Thing valuable in social Life.” If property could not be defended
in court, there was no “Security.” With no silver to pay the fees, eventually there would be
26
Ibid.
27
[Daniel Dulany], Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Rais-
ing a Revenue, by Act of Parliament (Annapolis, 1765), 25; Adams to Thayer, “I. Adams Original Draft: Instructions
to the Representative of Braintree against the Stamp Act 1765,” Sept. 14, 1765, Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed.
Martin, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/ADMS-06-01-02-0054-0002; [William Knox], The Claim of
the Colonies to an Exemption from Internal Taxes Imposed by the Authority of Parliament; Examined: In a Letter from a
Gentleman in London, to His Friend in America (London, 1765), 26.
28
On the increasing use of debt instruments in colonial Connecticut, see Bruce H. Mann, Neighbors and Strang-
ers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Chapel Hill, 1987). Judge-certified bonds are called statute merchant
and statute staple in the Stamp Act.

no law—a point that the writer’s tenants seem to have taken to heart; property without
law is not property.29
Colonists saw the tax on wills and writs of dower—legal actions that allowed widows
to recover a part of their deceased husband’s estate—as needlessly cruel. To be sure, only
the wealthiest half of the colonial population left property in probate, but even these
residents were not necessarily likely to have held their wealth in cash. The taxes left “the
Widow and the Fatherless,” Ingersoll wrote, in a difficult position: unless the bereaved
had fortunes of their own, they would have to borrow to secure inherited estates. Many
colonists also noted that disputes over the tax would be tried in admiralty court, an inno-
vation introduced in the 1764 Sugar Act. Thus, colonists would be required to undertake
a dangerous and, for some, expensive journey of hundreds of miles to Halifax, Nova Sco-
tia, to make a plea in a trial without a jury—which itself would be taxed. Admiralty courts
were soon established farther south, but in 1765 this threat was real.30
Parliament appeared to have demanded the absurd. The Stamp Act was a law that
made the operation of law impossible. George Washington noted this irony in his let-
ters during the crisis: “Our Courts of Judicature must inevitably be shut up,” he wrote to
Francis Dandridge, “for it is impossible (or next of kin to it) under our present Circum-
stances that the Act of Parliamt can be complyd with were we ever so willing to enforce
the execution.” Colonists did not have the silver to pay the tax, but they would not be the
only ones affected by it, Washington noted: “If a stop be put to our Judicial proceedings
I fancy the Merchants of G. Britain trading to the Colonies will not be among the last to
wish for a Repeal of it.”31
Silver and the Problem of Supply and Demand

Given the unlikelihood of poorer colonists having silver, their resistance to the Stamp Act
is unsurprising. They took to the streets in protest, forced distributors to resign, destroyed
stamps where found, and prevented them from landing in the first place. Without silver,
their ability to pay the property and personal debts they built their lives around was in
real peril. More surprising is the resistance of the colonial merchant elite, who from time
to time did have specie on hand. Arguably, the Stamp Act would have consolidated their
power as the sole source of specie credit in the colonies. Farmers anxious to settle a debt
or secure their land would have had to come to them for silver—a troubling dynamic,
but one that might have worked in their favor.32
Yet the colonial mercantile elite was largely supportive of the resistance movement.
Some, surely, were persuaded by the violent feelings of their countrymen or the eloquence
of colonial writers. Others, however, including some of those most likely to have ben-
efited from the act, opposed it on practical grounds. These merchants resisted the taxes
29
[Son of Liberty], To the Public (New York, 1765), 2; Robert Gordon, “Paradoxical Property,” in Early Modern
Conceptions of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (New York, 1995), 95–107.
30
Ingersoll, Mr. Ingersoll’s Letters Relating to the Stamp-Act, 49.
31
George Washington, “To Francis Dandridge,” Sept. 20, 1765, Papers of George Washington Digital Edition,
http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN-02-07-02-0250.
32
Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 327; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Ori-
gins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 186–88; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
(London, 1787), 274; Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York,
1995). On how fiscal demand for currency shapes a market for goods, see Desan, Making Money, 44–46, 58–69.

b ecause of an acute shortage of specie in 1765. The postwar silver shortage flattened co-
lonial distinctions, it seems, because neither rich nor poor could pay.
The only sources of silver were abroad. Trade was required to get it, yet trade with Brit-
ain was not a likely source and definitely not a legal one. In 1695 Parliament banned the
exportation of English currency to the colonies. Aside from extraordinary payments the
only alternative was to trade with England’s rivals. Millions of silver pesos were minted in
Mexico City every year, 11.5 million in 1765 alone; it was not easy to obtain and was usu-
ally not legal. Most silver pesos ended up some nine thousand miles away in Manila and
Guangzhou, used to pay for Chinese tea, silks, porcelain, and other Asian luxuries. Some,
however, wound up in the hands of Caribbean traders and southern European financiers
in cities such as Cadiz and Genoa, where they might sell them to American colonists.33
In 1765 the trades Americans followed to obtain silver had become increasingly risky.
The peace meant far less sterling from Britain, a flow that the Stamp Act was intended
to reduce further. The Caribbean trade was under attack by British warships tasked to
intercept smugglers. The Caribbean fleet had orders to clamp down on the foreign trad-
ers who paid in silver at Britain’s sugar islands, cutting off the most reliable supply at its
source. Moreover, the Sugar Act had made colonists’ rum trade—the reason most went to
the Caribbean in the first place—effectively illegal. “’Tis most certain, I believe, that the
Trade of the French and Dutch West-Indies, is failing and decaying very fast,” Ingersoll
wrote to the British Ministry in 1764, “and that there is not a single Voyage of that Sort
planned with the most distant Intention to pay the Duty.” Smugglers willing to make the
run faced hostile forces and willing informers. “For the future I apprehend that their will
not be many Attempts to Smuggle,” Temple remarked in a letter to the Treasury Board
in October 1764, “while the Men of War Remain, that Trade will either Drop, or they
will honestly pay the Duty.” A declining Caribbean trade meant little new silver at home.
“Money is so very scarce it will take time to dispose your Effects for Cash,” the Boston
merchant Henry Lloyd wrote his correspondents on June 27, 1765. “Money is so scarce,
people will make any shift rather than part with it.” In this context “money,” intended to
be sent overseas, meant gold or silver.34
As supply dried up, demand from abroad for silver was growing. American mer-
chants were fielding increasingly strident orders for money from Europe. The case of
Samuel Abbot, a Boston-based merchant, was typical. In the last years of the war, when
Parliament was showering the colonies in specie, Abbot had extended credit generously
across New England and prospered in doing so. In 1764 Abbot’s British creditors be-
gan to press him for cash—a serious matter, as his business depended on their credit
and goodwill. But by 1765 his cash supply was nearly gone. He was worth £35,000 in
Old Tenor—an accounting standard that had been popular in his youth—but had only
£210, or £21 sterling, in cash. This was a dangerous position. He could neither send
silver abroad nor purchase increasingly expensive London credit at home. The only so-
33
Claire Priest, “Currency Policies and Legal Development in Colonial New England,” Yale Law Journal, 110
(June 2001), 1322; D. A. Brading, “Mexican Silver-Mining in the Eighteenth Century: The Revival of Zacatecas,”
Hispanic American Historical Review, 50 (Nov. 1970), 668; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Sil-
ver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571,” Journal of World History, 6 (Oct. 1995), 201–21.
34
Christelow, “Contraband Trade between Jamaica and the Spanish Main, and the Three Port Act of 1766,” 316;
Ingersoll, Mr. Ingersoll’s Letters Relating to the Stamp-Act, 5; John Broome, The Memorial of the Merchants of the City
of New-York, (New York, 1806), 9; John Temple, “Copy of a Letter from Mr. Robinson Collector of Rhode Island,”
n.d., doc. ref. T1/429/347 (National Archives); Henry Lloyd, “Henry Lloyd Letter book 1765–1767” (Baker Li-
brary Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston, Mass.).

lution was to press his debtors in turn, wheedling, cajoling, and threatening them to
pay up. Others were similarly pressured. “Money we have not in specie; that is all gone
to England in remittances,” Daniel Coxe, a merchant in Trenton, New Jersey, wrote
to an American friend in London on April 12, 1764. “[The British] need not send tax
gatherers, for they can gather nothing—never was money so very scarce as now.” The
result of European demands, at scale, was what Americans described as a kind of cas-
cading liquidity crisis.35
For those who dealt in precious metals on a regular basis such as the New York mer-
chant John Watts, the shortage of specie in 1765 was a pressing matter. As early as the fall
of 1763, Watts was informing his correspondents that gold and silver, which had been
relatively abundant in the last years of the war, had become “extremely scarce.” By De-
cember he reported regretfully, “the Trade has swept off all the Gold & Silver for remit-
tances.” Bills of exchange on London were in such high demand, Watts reported, that all
merchants were collecting specie to send instead, but little could be had.36
Watts was shocked by the demand for silver in the Stamp Act. For him, the oppression
it represented was a matter of professional expertise. In April 1765 he wrote a correspon-
dent that while he acknowledged “The Supreme Authority of the Legislature” in Parlia-
ment, trade was such that Americans had “No Money to carry us thro’.” Again, money
could have only meant silver. Watts grew increasingly frustrated with parliamentary de-
mands, which he labeled “so unintelligible . . . it would puzzle a Newton.” A “real Scar-
city of Money” existed, he protested, but British “wise ones who know Nothing of the
Colonies . . . and are, regardless of what they do know, not content with what the Colonys
have got, want to ruin them for what they have not got.” The Stamp Act would undo the
trading colonies, Watts warned.37
The silver situation was, if anything, more difficult on southern plantations, though,
where even wealthy colonists were unlikely to have substantial amounts of specie on
hand. George Washington, for example, ranked as one of the wealthiest men in Virginia.
As of December 1765, he had only £10, six shillings, and 10 pence (about 206.8 shillings
all told) of “English silver.” The problem was evident to Lord Adam Gordon while trav-
eling in Virginia, at the heart of the crisis. “Money is at present a scarce Commodity, all
goes to England, and I am much at a loss to find out how they will find Specie, to pay the
Duties last imposed on them by the Parliament,” he noted in his diary.38
35
Barlow Trecothick to Samuel Abbot, Dec. 23, 1763, Sept. 5, 1764, June 12, 1765, folder 13: Foreign Letters,
box 50, Samuel Abbot Business Papers, 1754–1819 (Baker Library Historical Collections); “New England Letter
Book 1764,” vol. 30, ibid.; Daniel Coxe to Joseph Reed, April 12, 1764, in The Life and Correspondence of Joseph
Reed, ed. William B. Reed (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1847), I, 31. Isabel Schnabel and Hyun Song Shin, “Liquidity and
Contagion: The Crisis of 1763,” Journal of the European Economic Association, 2 (Dec. 2004), 929–68; Jacob M.
Price, “Multilateralism and/or Bilateralism: The Settlement of British Trade Balances with ‘the North,’ ca. 1700,” in
Overseas Trade and Traders: Essays on the Commercial, Financial, and Political Challenges of British Atlantic Merchants,
1660–1775, by Jacob M. Price (Brookfield, 1996), 254–74. On the lack of liquidity in the colonies, see Wright,
Origins of Commercial Banking, 19–36.
36
John Watts, Letter Book of John Watts: Merchant and Councillor of New York, January 1, 1762–December 22,
1765, ed. Dorothy C. Barck (New York, 1928), 186; On the colonial specie shortage, see Leslie V. Brock, “The
Colonial Currency, Prices, and Exchange Rates,” Essays in History, 34 (1992), http://people.virginia.edu/~ms3uf/
brock/brock34.htm; Watts, Letter Book of John Watts, 204, 176.
37
Watts, Letter Book of John Watts, 345, 399, 403, 406.
38
“Cash Accounts, December 1765,” Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, http://rotunda.upress.virgin-
ia .edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=GEWN-print-02-07-02-0268; Newton Dennison Mereness, ed. Travels in the
American Colonies (New York, 1916), 405.

At the center of this 1765 etching, Britain offers America the Stamp Act in the form of a Pandora’s
Box, as Commerce flees and a bellicose Athena tells them not to take it. The print illustrates the
multidimensional difficulties associated with the Stamp Act—commercial, political, and existen-
tial. On the far left, Americans stand in front of a gallows, reflecting that “necessity has no Law”
and “We shall all starve.” Courtesy John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode
Island.
The problems of paying for law in silver in a society with little of it, from the colo-
nists’ perspective, were widespread and various. They tracked each clause of the lengthy
and sometimes-confusing act. Up and down the Atlantic Seaboard the stamp taxes on
customs paperwork seemed likely to freeze up the shipborne trade necessary to obtain
silver to pay the taxes. By one estimate, the new taxes would have amounted to £2 per
ship clearing port, an especially heavy burden on the coastal trade where stops were fre-
quent. The ultimate effect of the tax would have been to limit intercolonial trade and
communication to the most profitable trips. The taxes threatened to halt trade and com-
muniation completely, without new sources of silver. Merchants such as John Hancock
saw this as a real possibility. “No, Gentlemen,” Hancock wrote his British creditors,
“there is not cash enough here to support it, and pray where are we when our Cash is
gone or indeed where will you obtain your remittances”? A committee of Philadelphia
merchants concurred. The Stamp Act, the committee wrote in a letter to British mer-
chants in 1765, “must inevitably drain us, in a very short Time, of our Specie, disable
us from discharging our present Debts to England, and effectually cut off the beneficial
Intercourse.”39
Like the threat to law, the threat to trade was paradoxical. If colonists paid the tax-
es, they would have substantially less specie to send abroad; if they paid their creditors,
39
Dickerson, Navigation Acts and the American Revolution, 191; Abram English Brown, ed., John Hancock: His
Book (Boston, 1898), 90; For the “must inevitably drain us” quotation, see To the Merchants and Manufacturers of
Great-Britain; The Memorial of the Merchants and Traders of the City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1765), 1. Em-
phasis in original.

they could not pay the tax. “An annual payment of 35,000 sterling, the interest of what
we owe them, would of itself effectually drain us of specie,” one merchant wrote in the
Georgia Gazette. If interest was paid, however, “we will not detain a single farthing in our
hands after the king’s customs, the stamp duties, &c. &c. shall be paid.” American mer-
chants could either pay their creditors in Britain, avoiding legal action abroad, or invest
in stamps to collect from debtors at home. In their assessment, they could not do both for
long. Virtually everyone stood to lose.40
Great merchants such as Lloyd, Abbot, Watts, Hancock, and the Philadelphia mer-
chants were most likely of all colonists to feel, as the Morgans argued, that “in most cases”
stamp taxes would not “impose severe hardship.” In fact, the opposite was true. New York
and Pennsylvania merchants such as Watts and his colleagues were resistance leaders in
1765, in part because they understood better than most the urgency of the specie situa-
tion. They knew with professional certainty that most colonial Americans simply could
not pay.41
In a “single stroke,” not having silver became a bar to justice, trade, and property, and
promised to be a bar to information. Adding a silver fee on newspapers and advertise-
ments promised to ruin that trade as well. “Heretofore, as no Duty was paid, an American
could advertise the Loss of a Cow, a Horse, or a Hog, and sometimes things of less Value,
at a little Expence,” the British merchant John Fothergill wrote. “But all this is now at
an End.” Newspaper publishers from Quebec to Georgia printed pleas begging subscrib-
ers to settle up so the printer could afford stamped paper when it arrived, and asking
them to pay higher subscription rates in silver, up front. The Pennsylvania Gazette printer
David Hall wrote to Benjamin Franklin that he did not expect the newspaper to have
“Half Enough” subscribers “to pay the Expence of Working it” under the new fee struc-
ture. Subscribers everywhere balked, leaving many colonies without a newspaper once the
Stamp Act took effect on November 1, 1765. The only solution was to ignore the law; the
only American newspapers continuing to appear did so illegally.42
In effect, colonists warned, the Stamp Act was a bar to being British. What did “Brit-
ish Liberty” mean if it did not reside in trade or British law? For the vast majority of
Americans—rural farmers who had little or no silver—the parameters of the act seemed
outrageous. To wealthy Americans they seemed insane. “I now Tell you, & you will find
it come to pass that the people of this Country will never suffer themselves to be made
slaves of by a Submission to that D---d act,” Hancock wrote in a letter declaring his in-
tention to cease trade until the act was repealed. “It is my invariable opinion that this act
is unconstitutional, & cruel the Expence of which we are not able to Support. . . . I am
free & Determined to be so & will not willingly & quietly Subject myself to Slavery: We
are a people worth a Saveing.”43
Many Americans, meanwhile, had begun to see deeper implications in the Stamp Act.
At a gathering on August 22 in New London, Connecticut, Benjamin Church compared
the tax to the “molten calf ” of the Bible verse Exodus 32, an idol made from the gold and
40
N., “To the Printer,” Georgia Gazette, Nov. 7, 1765.
41
Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 73. See also Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the
American Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York, 1918), 591.
42
[Fothergill], Considerations Relative to the North American Colonies, 21. Emphasis in original. David Hall,
“From David Hall,” June 22, 1765, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Digital Edition, http://franklinpapers.org.
43
John Hancock to Barnard Harrison, Oct. 14, 1765, vol. JH-6, John Hancock letterbook (business), 1762–
1783, Series II: John Hancock Papers, 1749–1814, Hancock Family Papers, 1654–1854 (Baker Library Historical
Collections).

silver finery of the Israelites. Church argued that Ingersoll—the Connecticut stamp dis-
tributor who would be burned in effigy that night—had returned from London
proclaiming sacrifice, sacrifice unto me . . . bring your silver and gold (for I know
not the paper money of your colony); if you are destitute of hard money, you must
bring the extravagancy of your colony. O daughters of Connecticut, you must sac-
rifice your gold beads, jewels, ear-rings &c. until you are made bare and naked to
your shame (for the beast’s sake) for the calf or st—pm-n will make sterling of all.
For Church, liberty, property, feminine virtue, and the devil himself were implicated in
the Stamp Act because of the demand for hard money.44
Colonists such as Church and Hancock would be repeatedly forced to ask themselves
the obvious questions raised by the Stamp Act in the months and years ahead: Why
would Parliament do such a thing? What did the act mean? And how could the colonists
stop Parliament from doing it again?
Silver and the Problem of Interpretation

As colonists questioned Parliament’s motives, the money issue took on revolutionary im-
plications. “Rebellion,” Albert Camus wrote in 1951, “is born of the spectacle of irratio-
nality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.” American colonists
faced precisely this “spectacle of irrationality” in the Stamp Act crisis, making silver as
much an interpretive problem as an economic one. Why would Parliament have insisted
on taxing in silver when, one British writer put it, “to require the payment of this tax in
any coin but what the country affords, was vexatious and absurd?” Did the king of Spain,
the author asked, tax silver miners in English cloth? For many, Parliament’s demand for
silver, as Watts observed, was “unintelligible,” but for others it was an intellectual and
political challenge. Parliamentary rationale was a matter of debate, even if the irrational-
ity of its request was not.45
The pamphlet literature that circulated during the Stamp Act crisis suggests that Par-
liament’s demand for silver, and the arbitrary and apparently unthinking power it pre-
sented, was interpreted in one of two ways: as well-intended ignorance or as a new tyran-
nical malevolence. From the beginning, many Americans argued for the more charitable
interpretation, with important implications for the language and prosecution of the sub-
sequent revolutionary crisis. American colonists had been brought up, James Otis wrote
in 1764, to “yield the most chearful and ready obedience to [British] laws, particularly
to the power of that august body the parliament of Great-Britain, the supreme legislative
of the kingdom and in dominions.” That did not mean that Parliament was perfect, of
course. In fact, the legislative body might very well act on faulty information and, due to
the thousands of miles of ocean between the colonies and the metropole, might be unable
to get news quickly enough to reverse harmful decisions. In this view, the Stamp Act was
44
A Friend to the Liberty of his Country [Benjamin Church], Liberty and Property Vindicated, and the St--pm-n
burnt: A Discourse Occasionally Made, on Burning the Effigy of the St—pm-n, in New-London, in the Colony of Con-
necticut (New London, 1765), 8.
45
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York, 2012), 10; Douglass
Cecil North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York, 1981), 32–53; Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a
Cultural System,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (New York, 1964), 47–56. For the “to require the
payment of this tax . . .” quotation, see Considerations on the American Stamp Act, and on the Conduct of the Minister
Who Planned It (London, 1766), 25. For the “incomprehensible” quotation, see Watts, Letter Book of John Watts, 399.

Americans such as Benjamin Church were not the only ones to see occult implications for George
Grenville’s plans. In this 1765 British print, Grenville (on the far left) dances with the devil on the
tomb of William Duke of Cumberland. Cumberland had helped assemble the Rockingham Min-
istry that replaced Grenville and repealed the Stamp Act before dying in October 1765. Courtesy
John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
an information problem. Without knowing American circumstances, Parliament could

not tax effectively. In that case, representation, not independence, was the solution to the
colonial predicament. The silver problem, by demonstrating the extent of parliamentary
ignorance, implied the necessity of colonial representation.46
If the solution to parliamentary fumbles was representation, that could mean one of
two things. Some Americans favored electing American members to Parliament, a solu-
tion that they felt would harmonize commerce within the empire. “A thousand advan-
tages would result” from American representation in Parliament, Otis wrote. Above all, he
explained, “It would be the most effectual means of giving those of both countries a thor-
ough knowledge of each others interests.” That way, if Americans were mischaracterized
in parliamentary debate “by persons with bad minds and wicked views . . . persons of the
first reputation among their countrymen, might be on the spot, from the several colonies,
truly to represent them.” The silver problem would never have arisen, then, if Americans
who were well versed in the colonies’ situation had been on hand to explain it.47
Others, however, argued that local representation was the only solution. On hear-
ing that a stamp tax was planned in 1764, Connecticut governor Thomas Fitch argued
against it on the grounds that the “Colonies may not, they cannot” be represented in Par-
liament. The most important distinguishing characteristic of “British subjects” as a “free
People,” Fitch wrote, was their general representation in matters of taxation. Such repre-
sentation was a constitutional right, to be sure, but it was also a practical guarantee, “es-
sential for the Preservation of the Liberty, Property, and Freedom of the Subject.” Taxing
46
James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (London, 1766), 48.
47
Ibid., 54.

This 1765 print is a British artist’s impression of what it meant to appoint Americans as stamp
distributors under the Stamp Act. The men on the left tell the highwayman, “We are all
Americans,” while the king tells the Earl of Bute, “Money we must have.” The way the act
promised to turn Americans against each other—pitting imperial employees against their
fellow colonists—was another element of its perceived cruelty. Courtesy John Carter Brown
Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
the colonies without the benefit of local knowledge could be devastating, Fitch warned,
“for the Use of Improvement of Lands, Barter, and Transmutation of Property are as nec-
essary in civilized Countries as Food and Raiment are to the Body natural.” Colonies
must be “vested with legislative Authority within themselves,” he argued. A poorly de-
signed stamp tax would cut off colonists from necessary institutions—an unacceptable
and unnecessary risk.48
Fitch’s appeal had little effect in London, in part because it was read as a challenge to
Parliament’s power rather than an appeal for good governance. “The point of the Author-
ity of Parliament to impose such Tax, I found on my Arrival here was so fully and uni-
versally yielded, that there was not the least Hope of making any Impressions that Way,”
Jared Ingersoll, who carried Fitch’s protest to Parliament, wrote the governor on February
48
[Thomas Fitch], Reasons Why the British Colonies, in America, Should Not Be Charged with Internal Taxes, by
Authority of Parliament; Humbly Offered for Consideration, in Behalf of the Colony of Connecticut (New Haven, 1764),
4, 21. Emphasis in original.

11, 1765. Ingersoll did not have time to prepare another argument; Parliament passed
the Stamp Act less than a week later, and George III ushered it into a law on March 22.49
Meanwhile, Thomas Whately, Grenville’s aide, responded to Fitch’s appeal with a pam-
phlet of his own, arguing that “All British Subjects are virtually represented in Parliament”
and thus subject to parliamentary taxes. Americans refused to concede this point. Repre-
sentation was not only a constitutional right, they argued; the problem of silver made it
an institutional necessity. “The Parliament, at their great Distance from North-America,
[cannot] be properly informed, so as to enable them to lay such Taxes upon the Colonies
with Justice and Equity, their circumstances being all different one from the other,” Phila-
delphia merchants wrote to colleagues in London. These merchants argued that the ab-
surdity of the Stamp Act itself was proof enough that American representation, preferably
local, was needed, if only to prevent such legislative stumbles.50
The Maryland lawyer Daniel Dulany made one of the strongest arguments along these
lines in the summer of 1765. Without new “Gold or Silver mines,” Dulany wrote, how
would Americans pay taxes with their trade constricted and their specie due for debts in
Britain? If Americans had been members of Parliament, they would have been able to
make this argument a year earlier, he asserted, without putting the colonies’ welfare at risk.
Representatives in Parliament could have pointed out “every dangerous Tendency” in the
act, “shewing, in the plainest Language, the Injustice or Oppression of it,” Dulany wrote.
They could do so in confidence, “expos’d to no Danger in explaining their Reasons.” Af-
ter all, colonial writers protesting the Stamp Act were suggesting that many colonists were
insolvent or at least illiquid on Parliament’s terms—a delicate argument indeed. The basic
point was simple. Virtual representation may have been a legal solution (Dulany argued it
was not), but the silver problem demonstrated that virtual representation was practically
unworkable. Representation, local or perhaps in London, was the only sustainable fix.51
As November approached—when the act would go into effect—seeing Parliament
as blinkered by circumstance became more difficult. By late 1765, colonial ministers
had begun to argue forcefully that the Stamp Act represented a new, malevolent form of
parliamentary tyranny. Like Church, with his imagery of the molten calf, these preach-
ers defined the silver problem as tyranny in biblical terms. Specifically, many likened the
new taxes to Egyptian slavery. Like the biblical pharaoh, Parliament had “set task-masters
over them, to oppress and distress them,” Rev. Stephen Johnson of Lyme, Connecticut,
preached. The ministry’s goals, as these preachers perceived them, were the same as the
pharaoh’s: to “impoverish” their subjects and “prevent their growth: That they might have
neither wealth nor power to get out of that bondage.” If starkly stated, these fears were far
from paranoid. None of the colonies was “separately formidable,” Whately had written in
reply to Fitch, and the Stamp Act would help keep them that way. The Egyptian case had
clear implications. As it had been in Egypt, colonial preachers argued, so it was in 1765.52
The central metaphor of Americans’ identification with Egyptian slavery was “bricks
without straw.” In Exodus 5, the pharaoh ordered the Israelites to bake bricks without
providing the straw necessary to make them. Thus, through a subtle economic i mposition,
49
Ingersoll, Mr. Ingersoll’s Letters Relating to the Stamp-Act, 11.
50
[Whately], Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, 104–9. Empha-
sis in original. To the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great-Britain, 4. Emphasis in original.
51
[Dulany], Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, 3.
52
[Stephen Johnson], Some Important Observations, Occasioned by, and Adapted to, the Publick Fast (Newport,
1766), 13; [Whately], Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, 18–19.

Johnson preached, “They drew the chains of bondage hard upon them in every way.” In
the American context, straw was silver. “The STAMP-DUTY” charged in silver “would,
in a few years, have taken away all our money, and rendered us absolutely incapable, ei-
ther of supporting the Government here, or of carrying on any sort of commerce, un-
less by an exchange of commodities,” Chauncy, the Boston minister, argued. “It was this
grievance that occasioned the bitter complaints all over these lands, ‘we are denied straw,
and yet the full tale of bricks is required of us!’”53
As a metaphor, Egyptian slavery had revolutionary implications. It pressed the current
American generation to action: “If we tamely submit to the imposition, we bring slavery
upon ourselves, and entail it upon our posterity,” the Boston minister Joseph Emerson
preached. “Power aims at extending itself, and operating according to mere will, where-
ever it meets with no ballance, check, controul or opposition of any kind,” Jonathan
Mayhew, another Boston cleric, explained to his congregation. “For which reason it will
always be necessary, as was said before, for those who would preserve and perpetuate their
liberties, to guard them with a wakeful attention; and in all righteous, just and prudent
ways, to oppose the first encroachments on them.” Only by resistance could Americans
avoid the same type of slavery imposed on the ancient Israelites.54
The Stamp Act made the metaphor of “Egyptian slavery” inescapable, and inarguably
appropriate.
If the parliament “have a right to impose taxes of every kind upon the colonies,” they
ought in justice, as the same people, to have the same sources to raise them from:
their commerce ought to be equally free with the commerce of Britain, otherwise
it will be loading them with burthens, at the same time that they are deprived of
the strength to sustain them; it will be forcing them to make bricks without straw,
the Virginian Richard Bland wrote in reply to Whately’s pamphlet. “They were not sent
out to be slaves, but to be the equals of those that remained behind.” The metaphor urged
revolution. “If there be left to the colonies but this single, this dreadful alternative—
slavery or independency—[the colonists] will not want time to deliberate which to
choose,” Johnson proclaimed. The pharaoh would eventually have to let his people go.55
Two great revolutionary arguments, then, gained urgency in response to Parliament’s
demand for silver. Both would have lasting consequences. The notion of Parliament as
a tyrant intent on enslaving American colonists, with its attendant ironies, would only
grow more prevalent over the next decade. The demand for representation, arguably the
more reasoned solution to a crisis predicated on legislative ignorance, proved explosive in
Great Britain. Parliament’s determination to assert its sovereign right and deny American
representatives power at home and abroad motivated many of the decisions that eventu-
ally pushed Americans toward “independency.” Parliament’s reaction was understandable;
its sovereign power to define money through taxation was at stake, but so too was Ameri-
cans’ refusal to compromise.56
53
[Johnson], Some Important Observations, 13; Chauncy, Discourse on “the good News from a far Country,” 13n13.
54
Joseph Emerson, Mr. Emerson’s Thanksgiving-Sermon on the Repeal of the Stamp-Act, July 24th 1766 (Boston,
1766), 13; Jonathan Mayhew, A Thanksgiving-Discourse, Preached at the Desire of the West Church in Boston, N.E.
Friday May 23, 1766. Occasioned by the Repeal of the Stamp-Act (Boston, 1766), 34.
55
Richard Bland, Enquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies; Intended as an Answer to “The Regulations Lately
Made Concerning the Colonies, and the Taxes Imposed upon Them Considered.” In a Letter Addressed to the Author of
That Pamphlet (Williamsburg, 1769), 19–20. Emphasis in original. [Johnson], Some Important Observations, 20.
56
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 232–46. For the
“independency” quotation, see [Johnson], Some Important Observations, 20.

As the crisis progressed, Americans began to reconcile the necessity of representation

and the “slavery” presented by the Stamp Act. Like many Americans, the Pennsylvania
lawyer John Dickinson had learned from the Stamp Act crisis that representation was a
vital institutional necessity. The Stamp Act, Dickinson wrote, laid the “precious Fruits” of
Americans’ freedom—their prosperity—“low in the Dust.” The “fatal Tendency” of the
act was obvious. “Men cannot be happy, without Freedom; nor free, without Security of
Property, nor so secure, unless the Power to dispose of it be lodged in themselves; therefore
no People can be free, but where Taxes are imposed on them with their own Consent, given
personally, or by their Representatives.” Dickinson then invoked the language of Egyp-
tian bondage. “Rouse yourselves therefore, my dear Countrymen,” he wrote. “Think, oh!
Think of the endless Miseries you must entail upon yourselves, and your Country, by
touching the pestilential Cargoes that have been sent you. Destruction lurks within them.
To receive [the stamps] is Death—is worse than Death—it is SLAVERY!” Representa-
tion and freedom had been fused in the American mind. Representation was the only
way to ensure that Parliament would never again ask for “bricks without straw” and make
“slaves” out of American colonists.57
Silver and the Problem of Politics

In October 1765 nine colonies sent representatives to New York to draft a joint petition
against the Stamp Act. All nine would declare independence in 1776. Their strongest
statement comes in the “Declaration of Rights” drafted by Dickinson. The declaration
tied Americans’ right to tax themselves to the practical evidence of the Stamp Act. The
delegates wrote that due to “the peculiar circumstances of these colonies,” the stamp
duties were “extremely burthensome and grievous, and, from the scarcity of specie, the
payment of them absolutely impracticable.”58
This was probably the simplest possible way to state the silver case, but the congress’s let-
ters to the king, the House of Commons, and the House of Lords reinforced the commer-
cial context of the crisis. The “advantages” conveyed to Britain by America, “were in danger
of being for ever lost, our subordinate legislatures in effect rendered useless by the late acts
of parliament imposing duties and taxes on these colonies,” the delegates wrote in their let-
ter to the king. They continued: “and the payment of the several duties will very soon, for
want of specie, become absolutely impracticable; and that the restrictions on trade by the
said acts, will not only distress the colonies, but must be extremely detrimental to the trade
and true interest of Great Britain.” They wrote to the Commons: “That money is already
very scarce in these colonies, and is still decreasing by the necessary exportation of specie
from the continent for the discharging of our debts to British merchants.” The stamp taxes,
they argued, could only reduce the colonists’ ability to pay.59
Still, Dickinson seemed to recognize that more specificity was needed. After the Stamp
Act Congress adjourned, he went home to Philadelphia and wrote what would prove to
be the definitive account of the Stamp Act crisis. It was a precise and full representation
57
[John Dickinson], Friends and Countrymen (Philadelphia, 1765), 1–2. Colonists used the term slavery without
irony. As Bernard Bailyn has noted, American chattel slavery was not what these ministers had in mind, though the
evident violence and coercion of slavery and the slave trade throughout the Americas was inseparable from the word
slavery itself. See Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 238.
58
Stamp Act Congress, Journal of the First Congress of the American Colonies in Opposition to the Tyrannical Acts
of the British Parliament Held at New-York, 27–29, esp. 29.
59
Ibid., 33, 36, 39.

of American troubles and proved influential. Dickinson’s pamphlet was printed in Phila-
delphia and London before Parliament decided the issue, and was reprinted in 1766 in a
collection of the most important pamphlets of the crisis.60
America, Dickinson wrote, was a nation of small producers. Unfortunately, the goods
Americans produced—“provisions, naval stores, furs, iron and lumber” in addition to “to-
bacco and indigo”—were not worth enough in England to pay for the goods Americans
desired. “The only expedient left us for making our remittances, is to carry on some other
trade, where by we can obtain silver and gold, which our own country does not afford.”
When Parliament first began to restrict the trade that brought specie to the colonies, he
continued, American colonists had not seen it as a “design formed against liberty.” Rath-
er, they had developed internal institutions to keep trade going and “collect considerable
sums of money for the joint benefit of ourselves and our mother country.” The Currency
Act and the Sugar Act of 1764, made these innovations unworkable, and hindered Ameri-
cans from paying their debts in London, which Dickinson estimated at some £4 million.
The debts “sweep off our silver and gold in torrent to Great Britain,” Dickinson wrote,
while trade restrictions kept Americans from tapping new sources of specie. “And in this
exhausted condition, our languishing country is to strive to take up and totter under the
additional Burthen of the STAMP ACT.”61
“But it is unnecessary to endeavor to prove by reasoning on these things that we shall
suffer, for we already suffer,” Dickinson wrote. “Trade is decaying; and all credit is expiring.
Money is become so extremely scarce, that reputable freeholders find it impossible to pay
debts which are trifling in comparison to their estates.” Bankruptcy and ruin were com-
mon, Dickinson wrote, because of the lack of legal tender. “If these effects are produced
already, what can we expect, when the same causes shall have operated longer? What can
we expect, when the exhausted colonies shall feel the STAMP ACT drawing off, as it
were, the last drops of their blood? From whence is the silver to come, with which the du-
ties imposed by this act, or the other late acts, are to be paid?”62
Dickinson did not want rebellion. A decade later he refused to vote for the Declara-
tion of Independence. He wanted reconciliation and sound governance. American “re-
sentment is but the resentment of dutiful children, who have received unmerited blows
from a beloved parent,” he wrote. Even so, colonists could not pay the tax, could not
ignore it, could not continue with it, or abandon it without abandoning the empire.
“What then can we do?” he wrote. “Which way shall we turn ourselves? How may we
mitigate the miseries of our country? Great-Britain gives us an example to guide us. SHE
TEACHES US TO MAKE A DISTINCTION BETWEEN HER INTERESTS AND
OUR OWN. Teaches! She requires commands—insists upon it—threatens—compels—
even distresses us into it.” He was instinctively conservative but was left with little choice
but to resist.63
60
[Joshua Steele et al.] A Collection of the most Interesting Tracts, Lately Published in England and America on the
Subjects of Taxing the American Colonies, and Regulating Their Trade (2 vols., London, 1766). [John Dickinson], The
Late Regulations of the Colonies Considered, in A Collection of the Most Interesting Tracts, Lately Published in England
and America on the Subject of Taxing the American Colonies, and Regulating Their Trade, ed. John Almon (3 vols.,
London, 1766), I.
61
[Dickinson], Late Regulations, Respecting the British Colonies on the Continent of America Considered, 4, 6, 7.
Emphasis in original.
62
Ibid., 18, 19. Emphasis in original. Currency Act, 4 Geo. III, c.12 (1764); Sugar Act, 4 Geo. III, c. 15.
63
[Dickinson], Late Regulations, Respecting the British Colonies on the Continent of America Considered, 37, 26.
Emphasis in original.

Dickinson’s pamphlet is the most brilliant work of the Stamp Act crisis—a document
with undeniable force, clarity, and feeling that presages his more famous work two years
later in the Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies.
Yet his pamphlet and the declaration he authored at the Stamp Act Congress are largely
unintelligible within the traditional interpretation of the Stamp Act crisis. If the taxes
“would not in most cases cause severe hardship,” his arguments make little sense. Was he
simply mistaken or dissembling for political effect?64
Neither option is plausible. The breadth of the evidence to the contrary and the spec-
ificity of colonial complaints about silver compels a different interpretation. Lawyers,
clergy, gentleman farmers, itinerant nobility, future loyalists, future patriots, experts on
Atlantic exchange, ministry consultants, businessmen trading in silver, and even Adam
Smith spoke to the silver problem in concrete, coherent terms. No colonial pamphlet
from the crisis mentioned the Stamp Act without noting the difficulty of paying the tax.
Every analysis, constitutional or otherwise, assumed it. The 1766 repeal came on com-
mercial grounds and was hailed on those terms in the colonies: “It was therefore a pro-
fessed view of the commercial good, not only of the Nation at home, but of the Plan-
tations also abroad, that the authority of the British King and Parliament interposed to
render null and void that act,” Chauncy preached, celebrating the repeal. “From what
more noble source could a REPEAL of this act have proceeded?”65
If we take the colonists’ claims about money seriously, the story of the Stamp Act crisis
must be revised and with it the history of the American Revolution. American colonists
opposed the taxes because they appeared impossible to pay, and they could not avoid pay-
ing them without abandoning many of the protections of British law. This paradox dele-
gitimized parliamentary power and justified mass resistance, compelling a fundamental
reappraisal of the transatlantic relationship, indeed of the empire itself. The implications
of this story go well beyond the crisis. It means reevaluating longstanding interpretations
of the American Revolution, inasmuch as historians have relied on the Morgans’ view,
and revisiting our assessment of what colonists called British tyranny. Perhaps more im-
portantly, the problem of money in the Stamp Act crisis might serve as a reminder that
ideological and economic concerns exist in dynamic relationship, no more opposed than
mass and acceleration in the production of force. These perennial oppositions are even
more questionable in context. Colonial analyses moved fluidly across idiosyncratic frame-
works of interpretation to describe a tax they could not pay, and were arguably more pow-
erful for it; constitutional and commercial considerations were difficult to distinguish in
a mercantile empire such as Britain’s, where both were stretched and folded into a system
of imperial governance.
Reinterpreting the Stamp Act crisis also suggests that historians should reassess the role
of money and attempts to define it politically in American history. The scene begins to
shift when see money as an imperial weapon as much as an economic institution. Money
had always been a political issue in the American colonies, but the Stamp Act made mon-
ey revolutionary. Money, as a vector of British power, became a crucial catalyst in Ameri-
cans’ struggle to define colonial sovereignty within the British Empire. For the generation
64
Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 73; [John Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the In-
habitants of the British Colonies (Philadelphia, 1774); John Dickinson and Richard H. Lee, Empire and Nation: Let-
ters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (John Dickinson). Letters from the Federal Farmer (Richard Henry Lee), ed. Forrest
McDonald (Indianapolis, 1999).
65
Chauncy, Discourse on “the good News from a far Country,” 8.

that would lead the colonies into the Revolution the Stamp Act was a defining moment.
By working through the implications of a tax in silver, the colonists learned that the pow-
er to impose taxes and to define money through the terms of payment was an essential
sovereign power and belonged, in the final accounting, with the people. It was the power
to destroy. In the 1819 U.S. Supreme Court case McCulloch v. Maryland John Marshall
would call this fact “too obvious to be denied.” Perhaps it was not so obvious before 1765.
Americans had to be taught. The association of taxation and money with sovereign power
would remain crucial on both sides of the Atlantic in the years ahead, as taxation in silver,
an American “revenue” in British terms, however small, became central to the conflict be-
tween Britain and her colonies.66
Conflicts over who would control American money and how it would be made, de-
fined, distributed, and taxed have rarely been far from the center of U.S. politics. Those
conflicts take on new urgency if we begin to see money as an institution defined by power
relationships—inherently political and potentially revolutionary. Money, like any human
institution, is subject to change, and those changes have the potential to change every-
thing. In America, this story becomes central and visible with the Stamp Act crisis.
66
McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 427 (1819).


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Grenville’s Silver Hammer: The Problem

of Money in the Stamp Act Crisis

Andrew David Edwards

The New England merchant Nathaniel Sparhawk wrote to Charles Watson-Wentworth,

Andrew David Edwards is a graduate student in history at Princeton University.

September 2017 The Journal of American History 337

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The Problem of Silver

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in 1763 in connection with an apparent shortfall in the payment of Virginian quitrents

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Silver and the Problem of Law

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in specie. Furthermore, any “appeal” of a sentence or “writ of error” alleging a mistake in

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Silver and the Problem of Supply and Demand

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Silver and the Problem of Interpretation

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an information problem. Without knowing American circumstances, Parliament could

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As the crisis progressed, Americans began to reconcile the necessity of representation

Silver and the Problem of Politics

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