The Stamp Act of 1765
The act placed a tax on virtually every paper transaction. Marriage certificates, ships’ papers, legal documents, newspapers, even playing cards and dice. Worse, the act raised the terrifying threat that if paper documents were subject to government taxation and control, how long before Puritan, Baptist, Quaker, and Methodist religious tracts or even Bibles came under oversight by the state? To assume as much was not unrealistic, and certainly Sam Adams argued that this was the logical end-point. “The Stamp-Act itself was contrived with a design only to inure the people to the habit of contemplating themselves as slaves of men, and the transition from thence to a subjection to Satan, is mighty easy.”
Hostility to the new act ran far deeper that its narrow impact on newspapers, however. An often overlooked component of the policies involved the potential for EVER-EXPANDING HORDES OF ADMINISTRATORS AND DUTY COLLECTORS in the colonies. Had the pecuniary burdens been completely inconsequential, the colonists still would have protested the INSIDIOUS, INVASIVE PRESENCE OF AN ARMY OF ROYAL BUREAUCRATS AND CUSTOMS OFFICIALS. Several organizations were formed for the specific purpose of harassing stamp agents, many under the name of Sons of Liberty. They engaged in violence and intimidation of English officials, destroying the stamps and burning the Boston house of the lieutenant governor, Thomas Hutchinson. SYMPATHETIC COLONIAL JURIES THEN REFUSED TO CONVICT MEMBERS OF THE SONS OF LIBERTY, demonstrating that the colonists saw the economic effects as nil, but the political ramifications as substantial.
The above was just a bit of what you can find in this book:
A Patriot’s History of the United States - Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen
(CAPS are mine.)
Yep, LS was the first source I thought to check too.
Ok, my limited brain capacity regarding history brings me to the same conclusion regarding our current crisis--as I see it--in America today. Are we approaching another pivot point in history that will see an uprising with the patriots of today? I see parallels that make me consider we are in for another revolt in the not so distant future.