Celebrate America 250: Samuel Adams Sparks a Fire

May 24, 1764. Samuel Adams drafted "Instructions to Boston's Representatives" in the Massachusetts General Assembly, declaring that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies.

After a victorious but expensive Seven Years' War (French and Indian War), Britain needed to finance its new standing army in North America and to pay off its huge war debt. The preexisting legislation, the Molasses Act of 1733, imposed high duties on the cheap sugar that colonial rum distillers imported from non-British colonies, but it was easily evaded by colonial merchants and so raised little money. On April 5, 1764, Parliament voted to replace it with the Sugar Act, which cut the duty in half but made it nearly impossible to evade. Moreover, the Sugar Act removed the trials for smuggling sugar from sympathetic local juries to the admiralty courts under control of the Crown. The Sugar Act would have ruined many Boston merchants.

The Boston Town Meeting instructed Samuel Adams to draft instructions to its delegates in the General Assembly on how to respond, which he did on May 24, 1764. Although Adams emphasized "the unshaken loyalty of this province and this town — its unrival’d exertion in supporting his Majesty’s government and rights in this part of his dominions," he declared that Parliament had no right to tax the colonies because they had no representatives there.

The key language was the following:

If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?

This was the first public document to declare that Parliament lacked legitimate authority over the colonies. With these instructions, Samuel Adams and the Boston Town Meeting lit the spark that would become a conflagration and result in the birth of a new nation in 1776.