Stamp Act imposes direct tax on printed materials

On March 22, 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring an official stamp on newspapers, legal documents, licenses, pamphlets, almanacs, and other printed paper used in the American colonies. Prime Minister George Grenville defended the measure as a fair way to help pay for British troops stationed in North America after the Seven Years' War. Colonial printers, lawyers, merchants, and legislators immediately understood that the act would reach into daily commerce, public discussion, and the courts.

The new tax provoked more than economic anger because it raised the constitutional question whether Parliament could impose an internal tax on people who had no representatives at Westminster. Patrick Henry's Virginia Resolves in May 1765, crowd action in Boston, and arguments advanced by James Otis and John Dickinson all treated the act as a direct challenge to self-taxation through local assemblies. Resistance spread so widely that royal officials could scarcely distribute the stamped paper without military protection.

The Stamp Act crisis produced the Stamp Act Congress, the rise of the Sons of Liberty, and the nonimportation campaign that pressured British merchants to seek repeal. It also fixed the phrase 'no taxation without representation' at the center of the imperial crisis and prepared the constitutional language Americans would later carry into the Revolution.