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CHAPTER TEN THE DOCTRINE OF CONSENT TO TAXATION Unlike the plea of charter and the argument of contract, the doctrine that taxation was unconstitutional without consent was central to the revolutionary controversy. Thomas Hutchinson noted early in the period that the whig slogan was "No representation, no taxation." After the Revolution had begun, the clause in the Declaration of Independence charging George III with "imposing taxes on us without our consent" was referred to by a London reviewer as "the grand foundation of the contest," and the pamphleteer who answered the Declaration for the ministry referrred to the doctrine of consent as "originally the apparent object of [the] contest."l The ministerial hack was correct. Before the Stamp Act was even passed by Parliament, Rhode Island's Governor Stephen Hopkins noted that all American pamphlets agreed "That it is the incontestable right of a subject of Great-Britain not to be taxed out of parliament, and that in parliament every subject dwelling within the kingdom of Britain, is represented ." He might have made his statement much stronger had he noted that the declarations of official American governmental bodies also agreed..As early as January 1764, a committee of the Massachusetts House of Representatives protested the new vigor London was putting into enforcement of the Sugar Act of 1733, saying it could not concede "to the 105 106 THE DOCTRINE OF CONSENT TO TAXATION Parliaments having a Right to Tax our trade which we can't by any means think of admitting, as it wou'd be contrary to a fundamentall Principall of our Constitution vizt. That all Taxes ought to originate with the people ." In May, the Boston town meeting made what has been called the first public denial of Parliament's authority to tax without consent. The next month the Massachusetts House of Representatives reacted to news that Parliament was considering the Stamp Act by warning other colonies that stamp taxes imposed by the imperial legislature would deprive Americans "of some of their most essential Rights as British Subjects and as Men particularly the Right of assessing their own Taxes and being free from any Impositions but such as they consent to by themselves or [by] Representatives." And before the year had ended the burgesses of Virginia had informed separately each of the three branches of Parliament that for them to impose taxes on North America would violate colonial rights. They petitioned the king "to protect your People of this Colony in the Enjoyment of their ancient and inestimable Right of being governed by such Laws respecting their internal Polity and Taxation as are derived from their own Consent, with the Approbation of their Sovereign ." They remonstrated to the Commons that it was "essential to British Liberty that Laws imposing Taxes on the People ought not to be made without the Consent of Representatives chosen by themselves." And they memorialized the House of Lords that it was "a fundamental Principle of the British Constitution, without which Freedom can no Where exist, that the People are not subject to any Taxes but such as are laid on them by their own Consent, or by those who are legally appointed to represent them."2 A CONSTITUTIONAL DOGMA It cannot be said flatly that Americans were not represented in Parliament . Colonial whigs said it, of course, because by their definition of representation they were not represented. The British definition of representation , though, differed from the American and most participants for the imperialist side of the taxation debate believed the colonists were legally and constitutionally represented in the House of Commons. What everyone acknowledged was that no member of Parliament was elected by the people of a colony, and most persons in Great Britain would have agreed with the Massachusetts House of Representatives that Parliament's taxing of the colonies would mean taxes levied "without the Voice or Consent of one American in Parliament." In order to understand the Ameri- THE DOCTRINE OF CONSENT TO TAXATION can argument against parliamentary taxation, the British definition of representation should be set aside for the moment. The American argument is more familiar, for it is closer to twentieth-century concepts of representation in both the United States and the United Kingdom. It was the criterion employed by the Pennsylvania Assembly when it resolved "[t]hat the only legal representatives of the inhabitants of this province, are the persons they annually elect to serve as members of assembly."3 The American definition was not complicated, nor was...

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