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Stamp Act Dbq

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During the 7 Years War, the British were spending a lot of money to support their military, and they looked to fix this by adding more taxes for the colonists to pay. The colonists were already angry about their taxation situation, already dealing with the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Quartering Act of 1765. Then, Prime Minister George Grenville proposed the Stamp Tax in 1765 in order to raise revenue to support the military in their battle against the French. The Stamp Act mandated the use of stamped paper or the affixing of stamps certifying payment of tax. The majority of Americans became extremely agitated with this act as well as many others before and after the Stamp Act because they felt that their individual rights were being infringed …show more content…

This principle of making sure the country is still united is shown throughout the Articles of Confederation where it is written that the separate states were “binded to assist each other against all force offered to, or attacks made on them on account of religion, sovereignty, or any pretense,” (Articles of Confederation III). This sense of unity came from all of the colonists fighting together for the same goal: Independence from Britain and a new society structured in the colonist’s favor. An example of this is when colonists united in opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765 (Maier). Colonists rose up in unity to fight the Revolution in the first place, which is shown through support of what happened during the Boston Massacre or the unity that occurred at Lexington and Concord. In Lexington and Concord, the small battle between the colonial “minute men” and the British redcoats unified Americans as all of the very different countries became united in an effort for independence. After achieving this independence, the colonists saw what they had achieved and what they had gone through together and wanted to maintain this sense of unity, even if it was not extremely strong (Kennedy, Cohen, and Piehl 91). During the formation of the group that would …show more content…

Limiting the power of the federal government in order to stop corruption by giving states almost total control came from American oppression from the highly centralize form of government practiced in Britain. The principle of protecting individual freedoms came from American unrest of the infringement of their individual rights while being a part of Britain. The idea of every state having actual representation and an equal vote in Congress occurred because of American disgust with not having actual representation in Parliament and no say in what occurred in the entire British Empire. Congress was not able to create a federal tax, and this came from the struggle that the colonists had dealing with the Stamp Act and the Townshend Tea Act. One of the ideas that Americans kept from Britain was the idea of keeping their country unified, which spurred from the common history and goal of all of the colonies during the Revolutionary War. The mindset and ideas that all of the Revolutionary colonists had was to create a country better than Britain ever was, and they believed that to do so the country must be almost completely different from what Britain ever was. Eventually, the Articles of Confederation were seen to give too much power to the people because of the radical sense of change from Britain. Certain instances such as

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