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NOTE 13. Reaction in the South

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Volume 3, Chapter 13, Reaction in the South

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Virginia was also inspired by the Massachusetts Circular Letter of June 1764, and the House

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of Burgesses appointed a committee of notables of the province to draft a protest to England.

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The committee was headed by Peyton Randolph and included Richard Henry Lee, Landon Carter,

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George Wythe, Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, and Archibald Carey.

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The Virginia protest, sent in mid-December, asserted freedom from parliamentary taxation

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as a right, although the application of this freedom to external, as against internal taxes,

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was not clearly defined. The protest also moved to reject one solution that was already

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Implicit in James Otis's position, Colonial Representation in Parliament. This was an alternative

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to continuing colonial home rule most emphatically rejected by most Americans, and the Virginia

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Resolves were the first to make this clear. In a private letter, young Richard Henry Lee

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expressed sentiments portentous for the future. He asserted the unquestionable right of Americans

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to the free possession of property and to laws and taxes made by their own representatives.

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He sensed a design by the mother country to oppress North America with the iron hand of

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power, unrestrained by any sentiment, drawn from reason, the liberty of mankind, or the

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Finally, he warned that possibly this step of the mother country, though intended to oppress and keep us low, in order to secure our dependence, may be subversive of this end.

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Poverty and oppression, among those whose minds are filled with ideas of British liberty,

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The North Carolina House during its October session protested the imposition of taxes without colonial consent and against what we esteem an inherent right and exclusive privilege of imposing our own taxes.

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The protest was drawn up by a committee headed by Thomas Maguire. No distinction was made between internal and external taxes, but the boldness of the stand was greatly vitiated by the fact that the protest was only addressed to the governor, and that none was sent to England, even privately to the colony's London agent.

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The first Southern Assembly to protest the American Revenue Act was the South Carolina House,

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which in August 1764 ordered its Committee of Correspondence to instruct its London agent

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to oppose any parliamentary tax as violating the inherent right of every British subject

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Subject, not to be taxed but by his own consent or that of his representative.

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No official protests, apparently, emanated from New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware and

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of Georgia.