Colonial Virginia Press And The Stamp Act Essay

Different viewpoints and interpretations of historic occurrences affect the opinions that are created in the future. However, those interpretations could be modified by the personal beliefs or background that an individual has. Therefore, it is important to view a moment in history from different texts and viewpoints, to compare them and analyze their similarities to get a good idea of what really happened and what was added/forged throughout the years. When analyzing a historic event such as the Stamp Act, it is ideal to get opposing works to analyze the ideas of the different sides. In his work, “The Colonial Virginia Press and the Stamp Act”, Roger P. Mellen entails British accounts for why they thought the tax would work and the motivation

“In the summer of 1764, new Prime Minister George Grenville warned colonial governors that his government was considering a stamp tax in the colonies”(Mellen 75). This tax was “imposed to help pay the debt incurred of the Seven Years’ War” and would help keep “British soldiers on the frontier to protect colonists” (Mellen 75). Grenville’s introduction of this tax was based off a tax that “had been in effect since 1712” in Britain (Mellen 75). The tax required all “legal and business documents to be printed or issued only on a paper with a royal stamp” which meant that colonists would have to pay more to print and to buy paper products such as newspapers (Mellen 75). Grenville’s assumption was that this tax was beneficial to both parties, since it would grant America security with the presence of British troops, meanwhile also paying off the debt from the Seven Years’

Michael Warner, a social theorist, “theorized in 1990 that it was an ‘attempt by authority [British government] to curtail civil liberty’ by restricting press freedom” (Mellen 76). Warner argued that by having troops present in America and restricting communications through the use of a printing press, Britain was trying to gain power in America. However, “evidence from historians, British records, and Greenville’s papers do not support this claim” (Mellen 76). Historians such as Stephen Botein argued that it was a mislead assumption by colonists that Britain was trying to take them over and that “overstated the role of the press in the radicalization of American politics” (Mellen 76). America began to divide based on whether they opposed the tax or not. As colonists began to take “divergent positions over the Stamp Act dispute, printers had difficult editorial decisions to make”: choose to support the British and publish their paper, which would anger the colonists who opposed anything that had a British tax on it, or publish without the tax and take the risk of punishment from Britain (Mellen 79). Although evidence argues that press had little to no effect on the mindset of Americans, Grenville’s taxes, which the colonists saw as unfair from their perspective, caused an upsurge in colonial