Benjamin Franklin Explains the Stamp Act Protests to Parliament, 1766

Benjamin Franklin Explains the Stamp Act Protests to Parliament, 1766 brings together a unique collection of primary source documents, organized and arranged as a dialogue, to examine the issues surrounding the Stamp Act. The selections--at the center of which is Benjamin Franklin's examination in Parliament on February 13, 1766--are meant to be read as a continuous dialogue among leading colonists in America and politicians in England. While the individual documents were separated in time and space, here they are reconstituted as part of a consistent whole--a trans-Atlantic conversation about the nature of the empire, the rights of the colonists, and the powers of Parliament at a critical moment in American and British history. Some liberty has been taken in their editing in order to emphasize this conversational quality. A chronology preceding the documents indicates the sequence of their production, and a bibliographical essay at the end of the documents directs students to useful secondary sources.

Peter Charles Hoffer is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of several books, including For Ourselves and Our Posterity: The Preamble to the Federal Constitution in American History (OUP, 2012) and Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (OUP, 2011).