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