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zachary mcleod hutchins Colorado State University One enduring legacy of the Stamp Act, 250 years after its passage in 1765, is an ongoing willingness, among conservative American politicians and pundits, to equate political coercion generally, and oppressive tax policies more specifically, with slavery. As Bernard Bailyn notes, North American Whigs borrowed this conception of slavery from their eighteenth-century counterparts in England and popularized its figurative use during debates over the Stamp Act, Townshend Duties, and subsequent crises (23246).1 In 1764, while Prime Minister George Grenville was still formulating the specific provisions of the Stamp Act, the governor of Rhode Island, Stephen Hopkins, anticipatorily objected that "they who are taxed at pleasure by others, cannot possibly have any property, can have nothing to be called their own; they who have no property, can have no freedom, but are indeed reduced to the most abject slavery" (16).2 Characterizations of involuntary taxation and other forms of political oppression as bondage proliferated in the decade that followed. Colonists opposed to the Stamp Act reported a public discourse "filled with exclamations against Slavery and arbitrary Power," and declamations against the British imposition of slavery persisted long after the duty had been repealed ("New
Early American Literature – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Nov 18, 2015
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