US History Essay

Submitted By kafor3
Words: 443
Pages: 2

1. What was the relationship between the early writings of John Adams: A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law and The True Sentiments of America and the Stamp Act of 1765?
- In A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law Adams explained that the opposition of the colonies to the Stamps Act was because the act deprived the American colonists of two basic rights guaranteed to all Englishmen, and which all free men deserved: rights to be taxed only by consent and to be tried only by a jury of one’s peers. Adams believed strongly in natural rights, that is, those rights that are inalienable or unchangeable. The passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 provoked a response from Adams and In August of that year he anonymously contributed four articles to the Boston Gazette (republished in The London Chronicle in 1768 as True Sentiments of America, also known as A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law).

2. Why did the Stamp Act cause such uproar of opposition in the American colonies?
- The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British government. The act, which imposed a tax on all paper documents in the colonies, came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and looking to its North American colonies as a revenue source. Arguing that their own representative assemblies could tax them, the colonists insisted that the act was unconstitutional, and they resorted to mob violence to intimidate stamp collectors into resigning.

Thomas Jefferson and the Meaning of Liberty Chap. 8
1. How did the story of Jefferson and Sally Hemings first