Chapter 5

I. The Imperial Reform Movement, 1763–1765

A. The Legacy of War

1. The Great War for Empire fundamentally changed the relationship between Britain and its American colonies; there were major conflicts over funding, military appointments, and policy objectives.

2. The Great War exposed the weak position of British royal governors and officials, prompting immediate administrative reforms.

3. To assert their authority, the British began a strict enforcement of the Navigation Acts, and in 1762 Parliament passed a Revenue Act that curbed corruption in the customs service.

4. In 1763 the British ministry stationed a peacetime army in North America, indicating its willingness to use force in order to preserve its authority over the colonies.

5. As Britain’s national debt soared, higher import duties were imposed at home on tobacco and sugar, and excise levies (a kind of sales tax) were increased; the increases were passed on to British consumers.

6. Free Americans paid only about one-fifth the amount of annual imperial taxes, as did the British taxpayers.

7. To collect the taxes the government doubled the size of the British bureaucracy and granted

it the power to arrest smugglers.

8. To reverse the development of debt and of a more powerful government, reformers demanded

Parliament be made more representative of the property-owning classes.

B. The Sugar Act and Colonial Rights

1. As the war ended, British officials undertook a systematic reform of the imperial system aimed at centralizing control of the colonies in Britain and extracting larger revenues from the colonists.

2. George Grenville won approval of a Currency Act (1764) that banned the use of paper money as legal tender, thereby protecting the British merchants from colonial currency that

was not worth its face value.

3. Grenville proposed the Sugar Act of 1764 to replace the widely evaded Molasses Act of 1733.

4. Americans argued that the Sugar Act was contrary to their constitution, since it established a tax and

“all taxes ought to originate with the people.”

5. The Sugar Act closed a Navigation Act loophole by extending the jurisdiction of viceadmiralty

courts to all customs offenses, many of which had previously been tried before local and sympathetic juries.

6. After living under a policy of salutary neglect, Americans felt that the new British policies

challenged the existing constitutional structure of the empire.

7. British officials insisted on the supremacy of Parliamentary laws and denied that colonists were entitled to even the traditional legal rights of Englishmen.

C. An Open Challenge: The Stamp Act

1. The Stamp Act required small, embossed markings on all court documents, land titles, and various other documents and served as revenue to keep British troops in America.

2. Prime Minister Grenville vowed to impose a stamp tax in 1765 unless the colonists would tax themselves.

3. Benjamin Franklin proposed American representation in Parliament, but British officials rejected the idea, arguing that Americans were already “virtually” represented in Parliament.

4. George Grenville’s goal with the Stamp Act was not only to raise revenue but also to assert the right of Parliament to lay an internal tax upon the colonies.

5. Parliament also passed a Quartering Act directing colonial governments to provide barracks and food for the British troops stationed in the colonies.

6. For the colonists, a constitutional confrontation with the British arose over taxation, jury trials, quartering of the military, and representative self-government.