Why was the Stamp Act especially hated by many American colonists? How did they protest against the act? Was their protest successful?
The Stamp Act (1765) was the single most unpopular measure passed by the British government in the 1760s and 1770s, and it generated angry protests in America. The Stamp Act required that every legal document, such as contracts, wills, even college diplomas, must bear an official stamp in order to be valid. (If you have ever seen a notarized document, in which an official seal is pressed into the paper, you will have a sense of what these stamps looked like.) Colonists had to purchase these stamps from a British official. Colonists greatly resented the Stamp Act, because they viewed it as a tax that had no purpose other than to raise money for Britain, and because they believed that they could not be taxed without their consent. Because they had no representatives in Parliament, colonists complained bitterly about "taxation without representation." Clearly, the law was not a legitimate effort to regulate trade within the British Empire: even a married couple signing a contract to sell their land to their neighbor or writing a will to leave it to their children was required to purchase a stamp.
Colonists lashed out against the Stamp Act in several ways, engaging in violence, political action, and economic protests. The response to the Stamp Act marked the worst tension in British-American relations prior to the outbreak of the American Revolution a decade later. Especially in Boston, angry mobs attacked the offices and homes of tax collectors and other British officials. The Stamp Act Congress, which included delegates from nine colonies, met to write an official protest against the act. Finally, many American merchants announced that they would boycott (refuse to import or purchase) British goods. Because American colonists purchased forty percent of British exports, this boycott took a significant toll on the British economy.
In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. But, even though it had retreated in the face of American protests, Parliament also passed the Declaratory Act, which denied colonists' insistence that the British government had no authority to tax the colonists, because the colonies had no representation in Parliament. Instead, according to the Declaratory Act, Parliament possessed the right to pass laws governing the American colonies "in all cases whatsoever."