Illustration: Portrait.]
James Otis, Jr.

[1764]

In 1760-61 England tried to enforce the navigation laws more strictly.
Writs of assistance issued, empowering officers to enter any house at
any time, to search for smuggled goods. This measure aroused a storm of
indignation. The popular feeling was voiced, and at the same time
intensified, by the action of James Otis, Jr., a young Boston lawyer,
who threw up his position as advocate-general rather than defend the
hated writs, which he denounced as "instruments of slavery." "Then and
there," said John Adams, "the trumpet of the Revolution was sounded."

In May, 1764, a report reached Boston that a stamp act for the colonies
had been proposed in Parliament, to raise revenue by forcing the use in
America of stamped forms for all sorts of public papers, such as deeds,
warrants, and the like. A feeling of mingled rage and alarm seized the
colonists. It seemed that a deliberate blow was about to be struck at
their liberties. From the day of their founding the colonies had never
been taxed directly except by their own legislatures. Massachusetts, New
York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Virginia at once sent
humble but earnest protests to Parliament against the proposed
innovation.

The act was nevertheless passed in March of the next year, with almost
no opposition. By its provisions, business documents were illegal and
void unless written on the stamped paper. The cheapest stamp cost a
shilling, the price ranging upward from that according to the importance
of the document. The prepared paper had to be paid for in specie, a
hardship indeed in a community where lawsuits were very common, and
whose entire solid coin would not have sufficed to pay the revenue for a
single year. Even bitterest Tories' declared this requirement
indefensible. Another flagrant feature of the act was the provision that
violators of it should be tried without a jury, before a judge whose
only pay came from his own condemnations.

[Illustration: Crowd of well-dressed men standing around a fire.]
Burning the Stamps in New York.

[1765]

The effect upon the colonies was like that of a bomb in a
powder-magazine. The people rose up en masse. In every province the
stamp-distributor was compelled to resign. In Portsmouth, N. H., the
newspaper came out in mourning, and an effigy of the Goddess of Liberty
was carried to the grave. The Connecticut legislature ordered a day of
fast