l objections. The various proclamations or orders were issued
without opposition, and the bills passed Parliament almost unnoticed.
The British governing class was but slightly concerned with colonial
reform: the Board of Trade, the colonial officials, and the responsible
Ministers were the only people interested.

To the astonishment of the Cabinet and of the English public, the new
measures, especially the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, raised a storm of
opposition in the colonies unlike anything in their history. The
reasons are obvious. If the new Sugar Act was to be enforced, it meant
the end of the flourishing French West India intercourse and the death
of the "triangular" trade. Every distiller, shipowner, and exporter of
fish, timber, or grain, felt himself threatened with ruin. If the
Stamp Act were enforced, it meant the collection of a tax from
communities already in debt from the French wars, which were in future
to be denied the facile escape from heavy taxes hitherto afforded by
bills of credit. But the economic burdens threatened were almost lost
sight of in the political {32} dangers. If England meant to impose
taxes by parliamentary vote for military purposes, instead of calling
upon the colonists to furnish money and men, it meant a deadly blow to
the importance of the assemblies. They could no longer exercise
complete control over their property and their finances. They would
sink to the status of mere municipal bodies. So far as the Americans
of 1765 were concerned, the feeling was universal that such a change
was intolerable, that if they ceased to have the full power to give or
withhold taxes at their discretion they were practically slaves.

In every colony there sprang to the front leaders who voiced these
sentiments in impassioned speeches and pamphlets; for the most part
young men, many of them lawyers accustomed to look for popular approval
in resisting royal governors. Such men as James Otis and Samuel Adams
in Massachusetts, William Livingston in New York, Patrick Henry in
Virginia, Christopher Gadsden in South Carolina denounced the Stamp Act
as tyrannous, unconstitutional, and an infringement of the liberties of
the colonists. Popular anger rose steadily until, in the autumn, when
the stamps arrived, the people of the thirteen colonies had nerved
themselves to the pitch of refusing to obey the Act. Under pressure
from crowds of angry men, {33} every distributor was compelled to