proposed Stamp Act.

Yet these resounding phrases doubtless meant something less to Americans
of 1764 than one is apt to suppose. The rights of freemen had so often,
in the proceedings of colonial assemblies as well as in the newspaper
communications of many a Brutus and Cato, been made to depend upon
withholding a governor's salary or defining precisely how he should
expend a hundred pounds or so, that moderate terms could hardly be
trusted to cope with the serious business of parliamentary taxation.
"Reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state
of tributary slaves" was in fact hardly more than a conventional and
dignified way of expressing a firm but entirely respectful protest.

The truth is, therefore, that while everyone protested in such spirited
terms as might occur to him, few men in these early days supposed the
new laws would not take effect, and fewer still counseled the right
or believed in the practicability of forcible resistance. "We yield
obedience to the act granting duties," declared the Massachusetts
Assembly. "Let Parliament lay what duties they please on us," said James
Otis; "it is our duty to submit and patiently bear them till they be
pleased to relieve us." Franklin assured his friends that the passage
of the Stamp Act could not have been prevented any more easily than the
sun's setting, recommended that they endure the one mischance with the
same equanimity with which they faced the other necessity, and even saw
certain advantages in the way of self-discipline which might come of
it through the practice of a greater frugality. Not yet perceiving the
dishonor attaching to the function of distributing stamps, he did
his two friends, Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut and John Hughes of
Pennsylvania, the service of procuring for them the appointment to the
new office; and Richard Henry Lee, as good a patriot as any man and
therefore of necessity at some pains later to explain his motives in the
matter, applied for the position in Virginia.

Richard Henry Lee was no friend of tyrants, but an American freeman,
less distinguished as yet than his name, which was a famous one and not
without offense to be omitted from any list of the Old Dominion's "best
families." The best families of the Old Dominion, tide-water tobacco
planters of considerable estates, admirers and imitators of the minor
aristocracy of England, took it as a matter of course that the political
fortunes of the prov