Taxation to Revolution kmconlin Tue, 11/30/2010 - 20:46
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Impress, Acton, Conservative and Unionist Central Office, 1968, Higher unemploym
Question

What taxes were the colonists required to pay by the British around the years 1760-1776?

Answer

After British victory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Parliament attempted to better organize the British Empire. Among other things, Parliament, led by the ministry of George Grenville, enacted the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, and so for the first time taxed the British North American colonies. The Sugar Act amended the Molasses Act of 1733 by lowering the duty on French West Indian molasses from 6d per gallon to 3d. Reducing the duty made purchase affordable and so encouraged what the higher duty had discouraged.

The colonists denounced the Sugar Act. They reasoned that British subjects had a sacrosanct right to have their property protected. The power to tax threatened property unless the taxing body was chosen by the tax payers and also had to pay the same taxes it required others to pay. The British House of Commons met neither requirement when it taxed the colonies, and so the colonists concluded that taxation without representation violated property rights.

The colonists made the Stamp Act unenforceable

The colonists made the same argument in response to the Stamp Act. But the Sugar Act was enforced primarily on the oceans and by the navy, meaning that the colonists could not physically prevent the tax from being assessed. The stamp tax required that to be legal most paper products—newspapers, court documents, marriage licenses, wills, even playing cards and dice—carry an official stamp. To work the tax depended on colonists within colonial communities selling the stamps, making suspected stamp distributors vulnerable to the pressure of their neighbors. The Grenville ministry announced the stamp tax in February 1765 to go into effect in November. In the intervening months the colonists protested, rioted, and intimidated anyone suspected of taking the office of stamp distributor. Led by the Sons of Liberty, the colonists made the Stamp Act unenforceable before it even began. In 1766 the new Rockingham ministry repealed the Stamp Act but only amended the Sugar Act lowering the duty to 1d per gallon. The experience showed that the colonists opposed all parliamentary taxation but that they could much more easily prevent internal taxes than external ones.

The Chatham ministry came to power in 1767 and enacted new taxes, the Townshend Acts, that year. These external taxes taxed lead, glass, paint, and especially tea. The Townshend Acts provoked the same ideological criticism and led colonists to have grave concerns that British liberty was not safe within the empire. Because the taxes were external they were much harder to prevent but by 1769 the colonists had organized a boycott movement. Growing tensions caused troops stationed on the western frontier to be reassigned to Boston, which led to the famous Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. The new first minister, Lord North, had already decided to repeal most of the Townshend Acts, which were threatening to tear apart the empire.

It was reasoned that no colonists could fear an act that made them drink cheaper tea

In 1770 North repealed all of the acts except for the tax on tea, the most lucrative of the taxes. The remaining tax kept relations tense and suspicious. Finally in 1773 North sought to resolve the impasse. He replaced the last Townshend Act with the Tea Act of 1773. The act was meant to bail out the East India Company, make clear Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies, and make the price of tea cheaper for colonists than it had been before. North reasoned that no colonists could fear an act that made them drink cheaper tea. He was wrong and the Boston Sons of Liberty threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. The Boston Tea Party destroyed tea worth £11,000 or about $1.5 million today. That was the last tax Parliament ever imposed in the colonies. The Tea Party caused the passage of the Coercive Acts of 1774, which were punitive laws meant to punish Massachusetts, but were not taxes. The Coercive Acts led to the first and second Continental Congresses and, ultimately, to the declaration of independence. So taxes did not cause the American Revolution, but taxation without representation did create a climate of suspicion and fear that provoked the events which did.

For more information

Carp, Benjamin. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, first edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Jensen, Merill. The Founding of a Nation, A History of the American Revolution 1763-1776 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Picturing the American Revolution

Bibliography

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Morgan, Helen and Edmund S. Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Thomas, P.D.G. (Peter). Townshend Duties Crisis: The Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767-1773 Claredon Press, Oxford University Press, 1987.

An Ear for the Past: The National Jukebox

Date Published
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Poster, New Victor records of popular patriotic selections, 1917, LoC
Article Body

You don't have to look far to see how important music is to modern American life. Young people (as well as adults) talk about music, listen to music, download music, remix music, share music, and define themselves by music. In classrooms across the country, MP3 players and pop-tune ringtones give students' musical tastes away (and get them in trouble). But has music always been this personal, portable, and repeatable?

Ask your students to think back. Do they remember a time when music wasn't something you could own? When they, someone in their family, or someone they knew didn't have an MP3 player—or a CD, tape, or record player?

Before the birth of the recording industry, you could buy sheet music and learn how to perform musical pieces for yourself—but that was it. An individual performance was ephemeral, literally once in a lifetime.

When the recording industry took off, music became an object. Now you could buy and trade moments in musical time, preserved forever. You could listen to artists who lived far away from you, whom you might never see live. You could listen to your favorite performances again and again. You could even sell music, without having to worry about arranging performances. One song sung once by one artist could earn money for months or years to come. Sound become solid, something that could be passed from hand to hand—and preserved.

Exploring the Jukebox
Sound become solid, something that could be passed from hand to hand—and preserved.

On May 10, 2011, the Library of Congress launched its National Jukebox, an online archive of more than 10,000 recordings from 1901–1925. According to the website, Library of Congress staff worked throughout 2010 to digitize this massive collection of Victor Talking Machine Company recordings (Victor, now RCA, is one of the oldest record companies in existence, according to the Library of Congress's blog entry announcing the launch of the Jukebox).

You can browse the recordings by vocal artist, composer, lyricist, language, place or date of recording, target audience, label, category, or genre. And if you find some music you'd like to remember? Add it to your playlist in the site's pop-up player. Now you can listen to it while you browse other sites, email it to yourself to listen to later, or share it with others on social media sites or by embedding it in a blog or website.

Students and the Jukebox

While exploring the Jukebox is entertaining in its own right—I just spent two minutes listening to humorous singer Burt Shepard trying to lure a lost cat home—it also makes invaluable primary sources easily accessible.

Teaching about the rise of ragtime and jazz? Make a playlist of famous (and less famous) songs and artists and share it with your students.

How about the invention of the airplane? The Haydn Quartet's "Up in My Aeroplane" can give students an idea of the romance and novelty of flight six years after the Wright Brothers' first successful test run.

World War I? "Hooray, the war is over!" sings Harry Lauder in 1918; months earlier, baritone Reinald Werrenrath remembered the U.S.'s debt to Lafayette and to embattled France.

Pick a time period, a genre, an artist, a word—and go looking! There's something in this storehouse to accompany almost any topic from 1901–1925, if you look hard enough. Use the recordings to grab your students' attention—or ask them to analyze or compare music and lyrics. What do the words (if you choose a vocal piece) say? What emotions does the piece seem to seek to evoke? When was it recorded? Where? Who audience did the composer, artist, or publisher have in mind?

Finding music by topic can be difficult, as none of the pieces have transcriptions, but a little creative searching should leave you with at least a handful of catchy new sources to play with. Watch for more to come—the Library of Congress adds new content monthly, and it hopes to provide content from other Sony labels, such as Columbia and Okeh, in the future.

For more information

Looking for guidelines for music analysis? Professors Ronald J. Walters and John Spitzer introduce you to using popular song as a source in Using Primary Sources, and scholar Lawrence Levine demonstrates historical analysis of two blues songs.

Professor of social studies/history education Anthony Pellegrino's blog entries have ideas for exploring music in the classroom, too.

Panic of 1873

Question

What was the economic and social impact of the Panic of 1873?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks differ in their treatment of the Panic in significant ways. Most tie the depression to the national political controversies surrounding Reconstruction. Too often, textbooks combine the Panic with the political scandals which rocked the Grant administration. While certainly a source of the political crisis facing Republicans in the 1870s, the roots of the Panic run far deeper than merely Grant’s poor political skills.

Source Excerpt

Limited by the amount of gold held in the U.S. Treasury, access to currency and credit contracted sharply, interest rates skyrocketed, and investors were forced to pay off their high stakes gambles (made with cheap paper dollars) with hard-earned gold. Sources bring to light the integral nature of bimetallist theory and its effect on the economy rather than the political climate and scandal that surrounded the Federal Government.

Historian Excerpt

The Panic of 1873 stands as the first global depression brought about by industrial capitalism. It began a regular pattern of boom and bust cycles that distinguish our current economic system and which continue to this day. While the first of many such market “corrections,” the effects of the downturn were severe and, in 1873, unexpected. In 1873 modern economic adjustments were unknown and the ability of national authorities to control the money supply was immature. As a result, the Panic of 1873 led to the longest recorded economic downturn in modern history.

Abstract

Most Americans are familiar with the Great Depression, beginning in 1929, and the economic safety nets established in response to the crisis, such as Social Security and the right to collective bargaining, from 1933 to 1938. Some know of the equally dire economic conditions, starting in 1893, and how this spurred federal progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson to strengthen public oversight of corporate trusts, child labor, banking, monetary policy, and tariffs. Yet almost no one knows of the profound economic collapse that struck the United States following the Civil War or its equally substantial effect upon the social and political trajectory of the nation. The Panic of 1873 began in Europe, but quickly spread to the United States producing 65 months of depressed economic conditions.

The Art of Beauty

Description

From Colonial Williamsburg: Past and Present Podcasts

"Attaining ideal beauty in the 18th century might require hog's lard, mousehide, toxic lead, and daily application of gin. Historical Interpreter Meg Brown shares her favorite discoveries."

Interested in making your own colonial cosmetic products? Click here for authentic 18th century recipes to cure dry-skin, freshen rooms, and create body fragrances.

On This Day

Description

Colonial Wiliamsburg Librarian Juleigh Clark describes her research into the events described in Revolutionary-War-era newspapers, both in articles and advertisements.

Note: this podcast is no longer available. To view a transcript of the original podcast, click here.

Swordmaking in the 18th Century

Description

War creates an industry of its own in every century, calling artisans and inventors to bring forth the best of their craft in the fastest way possible. In the Revolutionary War, this burden lay heavily on metalworkers, whose sword blades and gun barrels were in constant demand. Suzie Dye, a journeyman brass founder, discusses the technology of war in the 18th century, particularly the art of swordmaking.

Click here to discover more about colonial gunsmiths and iron workers.

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