No Taxation Without Representation - American Revolution

American Revolution

The phrase had been used for more than a generation in Ireland. By 1765 the term was in use in Boston, and local politician James Otis was most famously associated with the phrase, "taxation without representation is tyranny."

The British Parliament had controlled colonial trade and taxed imports and exports since 1660. By the 1760s the Americans were being deprived of a historic right. The English Bill of Rights 1689 had forbidden the imposition of taxes without the consent of Parliament. Since the colonists had no representation in Parliament the taxes violated the guaranteed Rights of Englishmen. Parliament contended that the colonists had virtual representation.

However, Pitt the Elder, amongst other prominent Britons and North Americans such as Joseph Galloway, debated and circulated plans for the creation of a federally representative British Parliament or imperial structure with powers of taxation that was to consist of American, West Indian, Irish and British Members of Parliament. Despite the fact that these ideas were debated and discussed seriously on both sides of the Atlantic, it appears no Congressional demand for this constitutional development was sent to Westminster. William Knox, an Irish Under-Secretary of State for the American Colonies and pamphleteer, received an appointment in 1756 to the American provinces, and after his return to London in 1761 recommended the creation of a colonial aristocracy and colonial representation in the British Parliament. He was soon afterwards appointed agent for Georgia and East Florida, a post which he forfeited by writing in favour of the Stamp Act. In his 1769 pamphlet The Controversy between Great Britain and her Colonies Reviewed Knox wrote that the colonial delegates to the Stamp Act Congress had been offered seats in the British Parliament, the offers of which they had refused. Knox submitted that "whilst exclaim against Parliament for taxing them when they are not represented, they candidly declare they will not have representatives lest they should be taxed...The truth...is that they are determined to get rid of the jurisdiction of Parliament...and they therefore refuse to send members to that assembly lest they should preclude themselves of plea legislative acts...are done without their consent; which, it must be confessed, holds equally good against all laws, as against taxes...The colony advocates...tell us, that by refusing to accept our offer of representatives they...mean to avoid giving Parliament a pretence for taxing them.". This offer of actual imperial representation was likewise re-stated to the delegates of the colonies in 1774, according to Connecticut-born Reverend Thomas Bradbury Chandler, in his publication A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans. Parliament's Carlisle Peace Commission of 1778 nevertheless proposed to the Congress the rights of provincial representation, Congressional representation, pardons for the Congressional delegates, and above all, actual Parliamentary representation of Americans in London.

The Americans rejected the Stamp Act of 1765 brought in by British Prime Minister George Grenville, and violently rejected the remaining tax on tea imports, under the Tea Act passed in May 1773, at the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773. The Parliament considered this an illegal act because they believed it undermined the authority of the Crown-in-Parliament. When the British then used the military to enforce laws the colonists believed Parliament had passed illegally, the colonists responded by forming militias and seized political control of each colony, ousting the royal governors.

The complaint was never officially over the amount of taxation (the taxes were quite low, though ubiquitous), but always on the political decision-making process by which taxes were decided in London, i.e. without representation for the colonists in British Parliament. In February 1775, Britain passed the Conciliatory Resolution which ended taxation for any colony which satisfactorily provided for the imperial defense and the upkeep of imperial officers.

Patrick Henry's resolution in the Virginia legislature implied that Americans possessed all the rights of Englishmen, that the principle of no taxation without representation was an essential part of the British Constitution, and that Virginia alone had the right to tax Virginians.