Another new tax, the Stamp Act of 1765, sparked the first great imperial crisis. The new levy was to cover part of the cost of keeping British troops in America — which turned out to be £385,000 a year (about $150 million today), 70 percent more than the initial estimate. Grenville hoped the Stamp Act would raise £60,000 per year. The act would require a tax stamp on all printed items, from college diplomas, court documents, land titles, and contracts to newspapers, almanacs, and playing cards. It was ingeniously designed. Like its counterpart in England, it bore more heavily on the rich, since it charged only a penny a sheet for newspapers and other common items but up to £10 for a lawyer’s license. It also required no new bureaucracy; stamped paper would be delivered to colonial ports and sold to printers in lieu of unstamped stock.

Benjamin Franklin, agent of the Pennsylvania assembly, proposed a different solution: American representation in Parliament. “If you chuse to tax us,” he wrote, “give us Members in your Legislature, and let us be one People.” With the exception of William Pitt, British politicians rejected Franklin’s idea as too radical. They argued that the colonists already had virtual representation in Parliament because some of its members were transatlantic merchants and West Indian sugar planters. Colonial leaders were equally skeptical of Franklin’s plan. Americans were “situate at a great Distance from their Mother Country,” the Connecticut assembly declared, and therefore “cannot participate in the general Legislature of the Nation.”

Asserting “the Right of Parliament to lay an internal Tax upon the Colonies,” the House of Commons ignored American opposition and passed the act by an overwhelming majority of 205 to 49. At the request of General Thomas Gage, the British military commander in America, Parliament also passed the Quartering Act of 1765, which required colonial governments to provide barracks and food for British troops. Finally, Parliament approved Grenville’s proposal that violations of the Stamp Act be tried in vice-admiralty courts.

Using the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, Grenville had begun to fashion a centralized imperial system in America much like that already in place in Ireland: British officials would govern the colonies with little regard for the local assemblies. Consequently, the prime minister’s plan provoked a constitutional confrontation on the specific issues of taxation, jury trials, and military quartering as well as on the general question of representative self-government.