The Stamp Act and the American Revolution

A pivotal step toward American independence gets its due in historian Shumate’s immersive follow-up to The Sugar Act and the American Revolution. In the early 1760s, Great Britain wanted to raise revenue so it could keep a standing army in America. After colonial resistance derailed the 1764 Sugar Act, the British retrenched in 1765 with the Stamp Act, which required all colonial documents to be printed on embossed paper from Britain. The result, Shumate writes, was “a political great awakening.” He draws deeply on archival sources—including government records, pamphlets, and handbills—to put together a collage of that awakening’s development, with his own writing serving mostly to move the story from one primary source to the next. Surprising facts emerge along the way; e.g., it was New York, not Massachusetts, that first explicitly refuted Parliament’s legal right to levy taxes on the colonies, and they did so in a petition “conceived in terms so inflammatory” that nobody dared read it aloud in the General Assembly. Elsewhere, the contributions of minor figures are spotlighted, like Daniel Dulany of Maryland, whose pamphlet against British taxation contains the fiery line “I acknowledge dependence on Great Britain, but I can perceive [only] a degree of it without slavery, and I disown all other.” It makes for a captivating blow-by-blow account of the buildup of revolutionary fervor. (Jan.)