Act," reviving an old law for enforcement in the American colonies.
The act was meant to "protect" West Indian sugar-planters, and it
laid a heavy duty upon all sugar and molasses imported into North
America from the French West Indies.

The outbreak of indignation, especially in New England, against this
imposition was a prelude to the more general and determined
resistance to the Stamp Act, which was Grenville's second obnoxious
measure. The history of "Grenville's Stamp Act" is adequately set
forth by Grahame and Bancroft, whose respective accounts present its
most important features and its fate in the hands of American
patriots.

JAMES GRAHAME

The calamities of the French and Indian War (1755) had scarcely ended
when the germ of another war was planted which soon grew up and produced
deadly fruit. At that time sundry resolutions passed the British
Parliament relative to the imposition of a stamp duty in America, which
gave a general alarm. By them the right, the equity, the policy, and
even the necessity of taxing the colonies were formally avowed. These
resolutions, being considered as the preface of a system of American
revenue, were deemed an introduction to evils of much greater magnitude.
They opened a prospect of oppression, boundless in extent and endless in
duration. They were, nevertheless, not immediately followed by any
legislative act. Time and an invitation were given to the Americans to
suggest any other mode of taxation that might be equivalent in its
produce to the Stamp Act; but they objected not only to the mode, but
the principle; and several of their assemblies, though in vain,
petitioned against it.

An American revenue was, in England, a very popular measure. The cry in
favor of it was so strong as to silence the voice of petitions to the
contrary. The equity of compelling the Americans to contribute to the
common expenses of the empire satisfied many who, without inquiring into
the policy or justice of taxing their unrepresented fellow-subjects,
readily assented to the measures adopted by the Parliament for this
purpose. The prospect of easing their own burdens at the expense of the
colonists dazzled the eyes of gentlemen of landed interest, so as to
keep out of their view the probable consequences of the innovation. The
omnipotence of Parliament was so familiar a phrase on both sides of the
Atlantic that few in America, and still fewer in Great