Read Online Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham - Free Book Online

their Indian allies on the one hand and the British and the Americans on the other led to a cold war over money and power between the Old and New Worlds.
    Empires are expensive, and the one London controlled at the end of the Seven Years’ War was of remarkable scope. Simply put, London needed revenue and believed the American colonies should bear more of the cost of maintaining the British dominions. About ten thousand British troops were to remain in North America; the redcoats represented a pervasive sense of threat. Armies that could liberate and protect could also conquer and subjugate.
    The imperial authorities were now reaching ever more deeply into the lives and fortunes of Americans—Americans who watched such assertions of power warily, fearful that despotism was at hand. Before the French and Indian War, London had not exercised strict control over grants of the western lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. After the war, and after an uprising of Ohio Valley Indian tribes against British posts, London sought to give the king the power to decide the fate of the western lands, a move that particularly alienated Virginians accustomed to speculating freely there. Before the war, London had not been especially rigorous in its enforcement of Navigation Acts to regulate trade. After the war, London opened a campaign to use “writs of assistance” to board and search colonial vessels, enraging Boston in particular.
    The South and West were angry about the lands and the Indians; the Northeast was uneasy about the writs of assistance. And the whole of the colonies was infuriated by what was known as the Sugar Act of 1764, which included mechanisms for strict enforcement. Though the bill actually lowered the tax on molasses, it imposed duties on other items (including Madeira wine, a favorite of the young Jefferson). The Sugar Act was also an attempt to establish a principle and a precedent in these post–Seven Years’ War days: that, in the words of the legislation, it was “just and necessary that a revenue be raised in your Majesty’s said dominions in America.”
    I n the House of Commons on Friday, March 9, 1764, Prime Minister George Grenville, a Whig politician who served as head of government from 1763 to 1765, had risen to announce the Sugar Act and the prospect of a colonial stamp tax (a tax on documents and things made of paper, including newspapers and playing cards). Grenville told the House that he “hoped that the power and sovereignty of Parliament, over every part of the British dominions, for the purpose of raising or collecting any tax, would never be disputed.”
    Yet disputed it was, and would be. Americans were avidly reading the Massachusetts lawyer James Otis’s Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, a kind of forerunner to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that made a compelling case for the American cause.
    Otis’s views were abroad in the colonies in the autumn of 1764, when, in Williamsburg, George Wythe drafted a petition to the House of Commons protesting taxation. His language, however, was considered too strong by some burgesses, even treasonable, which suggests that Wythe—the man closest to Jefferson, and whom Jefferson idolized—held decided opinions on the questions that led to revolution.
    The essence of the anti-British position was summed up in a 1764 resolution that Virginia sent to the king and to Parliament: “that the People are not [to be] subject to any taxes but such as are laid on them by their own consent, or by those who are legally appointed to represent them.” Virginia’s resolutions had no effect on the outcome in London. Parliament did not even consider them, and the Stamp Act passed on Friday, March 22, 1765.
    The subsequent drama offered Jefferson his first intimate glimpse of politics. The Virginia debates over how to respond to the Stamp Act had a bit of everything: