Stamp Act Crisis — Colonial 'Slavery' Rhetoric Exposes Hypocrisy

Colonial protestors against the Stamp Act of 1765 repeatedly invoked the language of slavery to describe British taxation — calling themselves 'enslaved' to Parliament. Contemporaries like the Boston Gazette noted the irony that those loudest about British 'tyranny' were themselves slaveholders. Samuel Johnson later asked: 'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?' The rhetorical gap between colonial freedom claims and the reality of chattel slavery beca