When Words Fail: William Pitt, Benjamin Franklin and the Imperial Crisis of 1766

Passage of an American stamp tax in 1765 produced a sharp political backlash before the year was out. That new tax was part of a larger programme of imperial reform championed by the Grenville ministry. Now out of power, Grenville and his supporters resisted the growing desire in both houses of parliament to end the imperial crisis by repealing the new tax. During debates that began in early 1766 there were those few, most notably William Pitt, who wanted to discuss constitutional ultimates as part of the move toward repeal. Pitt contended that parliament did not have the authority to tax the colonies directly. Grenville disagreed and warned that if parliament accepted any limit to its supremacy the colonists would eventually claim legislative autonomy. When debating the distinction – if indeed any such distinction existed – between taxation and legislation, and between internal and external taxes, Pitt, Grenville and their parliamentary contemporaries raised questions about authority and power that they could not answer. There were no words to describe perfectly the imperial relationship, a relationship that, as Benjamin Franklin hinted in his testimony to the Commons, was always subject to change anyway. Avoiding constitutional questions had not seemed to work; trying to answer them did not work any better, at least in the contentious atmosphere of that moment.