Volume 3, Chapter 13, Reaction in the South
Virginia was also inspired by the Massachusetts Circular Letter of June 1764, and the House
of Burgesses appointed a committee of notables of the province to draft a protest to England.
The committee was headed by Peyton Randolph and included Richard Henry Lee, Landon Carter,
George Wythe, Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, Richard Bland, and Archibald Carey.
The Virginia protest, sent in mid-December, asserted freedom from parliamentary taxation
as a right, although the application of this freedom to external, as against internal taxes,
was not clearly defined. The protest also moved to reject one solution that was already
Implicit in James Otis's position, Colonial Representation in Parliament. This was an alternative
to continuing colonial home rule most emphatically rejected by most Americans, and the Virginia
Resolves were the first to make this clear. In a private letter, young Richard Henry Lee
expressed sentiments portentous for the future. He asserted the unquestionable right of Americans
to the free possession of property and to laws and taxes made by their own representatives.
He sensed a design by the mother country to oppress North America with the iron hand of
power, unrestrained by any sentiment, drawn from reason, the liberty of mankind, or the
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.
Poverty and oppression, among those whose minds are filled with ideas of British liberty,
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.
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.
The first Southern Assembly to protest the American Revenue Act was the South Carolina House,
which in August 1764 ordered its Committee of Correspondence to instruct its London agent
to oppose any parliamentary tax as violating the inherent right of every British subject
Subject, not to be taxed but by his own consent or that of his representative.
No official protests, apparently, emanated from New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware and
of Georgia.