Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III STAMP ACT TIMES In the year 1765 Great Britain was feeling strong and proud. In every quarter of the globe her arms had triumphed. France and Spain had been humbled, immense territory had been conquered, she was undisputed mistress of the seas, the Indian outbreak had been put down, Pontiac had smoked his great pipe of peace and gone to his hut in the woods, never to lead war band again. Now was the time to have certain issues settled with the colonies. They had not pleased the mother country, had not come up with quotas of money assessed against them, had not shown the most dutiful spirit, had, in fact, given offense to many insolent English officials, from whose point of view a colonial was an inferior who had few rights they were bound to respect. In this spirit was conceived the Stamp Act?a measure which had no precedent, and which was in plain violation of what the colonies understood to be the law. As will be shown hereafter, it was an open breach of a written compact which had long been in existence between Virginia and the mother country.But so universal was the feeling in America that the Stamp Act was tyrannical, that the movement against it was almost simultaneous, as well as voluntary and spontaneous. According to the historian Wheeler, North Carolina, eleven days before the adoption of the famous resolution in the Virginia burgesses, grew so boisterous in opposition to the Stamp Act that Governor Tryon had to dissolve the Legislature. Speaker John Ashe put the king’s lieutenant on notice that any attempt to enforce the odious law would be
resisted to blood and death. It was not long before the British sloop-of-war, the Diligence, arrived in Cape Fear River, bringing a lot of the stamped paper to be sold in the colony. The people flew to arms…