The Different Taxes And Acts Of The Revolutionary War

The Different Taxes and Acts of the Revolutionary War. Prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution, numerous taxes and acts were imposed upon the colonists, by their mother country of Great Britain. The most well known of these are; The Stamp Act, which required all colonists who had purchased documents to provide a stamp on them, The Sugar Act, which placed a tax on all shipments of molasses and sugar that came through the colonies, and the Townshend acts, that would place a tax on shipments of British manufactured goods that would be coming through the colonies at all times.

The Stamp Act, which was implemented on the 22nd of March 1765, Levied a direct tax upon all commercial documents. Items such as playing cards, legal deeds and documents, and newspapers all required a tax in order to be sold in the British colonies. Furthermore, the tax could only be paid with the harder to obtain British currency pound sterling, rather than the colonist currency. Any citizen of the colonies who were found to be in direct violation of the stamp act could be prosecuted by the British courts which were held in the mother country and contained no jury of the defendant's peers.
John Dickinson was a farmer from Pennsylvania, who would voice his displeasure with the acts in a series of letters that would be posted in “The Pennsylvania Gazette” on December 10, 1767. In Letter 2, Dickinson states that these were “unconstitutional” and “destructive to the liberties of these colonies”. The colonists were displeased with the townshend acts and in March 1770, most of the townshend acts were repealed by Lord