Tax Protests
In 1764 Britain imposed a tax on sugar, the first of many ultimately unsuccessful attempts to make her North American subjects bear a portion of the cost of the recent French and Indian war. The first stirrings of revolution in Maryland came in the Fall of 1765, when the speaker of the Lower House of the Maryland General Assembly received a number of letters from Massachusetts, one proposing a meeting of delegates from all the colonies, others objecting to British taxation without consent and proposing that Marylanders should be "free of any impositions, but such as they consent to by themselves or their representatives".
Meanwhile an Annapolis merchant by the name of Zachariah Hood, charged by the British with the task of collecting the new stamp duty, was injured at the dock on his return to Maryland by an angry crowd in what has been called the "first successful, forcible resistance in America to King George's authority". Shunned by his friends and fearful of his life, Hood fled Maryland for New York, and Governor Sharpe reported in September 1865 that he was "very apprehensive that if the stamp paper was to arrive here and be landed at this time it would not be in my power to preserve it from being burnt".
Read more about this topic: Maryland In The American Revolution
Famous quotes containing the word tax:
“I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)