The Declaratory Act

By the beginning of 1766 the Stamp Act was a dead letter in America and a political disaster in Britain. Colonial crowds had driven the stamp distributors out of office before a single sheet could be sold, non-importation had cut British exports sharply, and merchants in London, Bristol, and Glasgow were petitioning for relief. The Rockingham ministry wanted repeal. But repealing a tax because colonists had rioted against it looked like surrender, and the ministry needed cover from the many members who held Parliament's supremacy to be beyond negotiation.

The solution was to pass two bills on the same day. One repealed the Stamp Act outright. The other, modeled closely on the Irish Declaratory Act of 1719, asserted that the colonies were subordinate to the crown and Parliament of Great Britain and that Parliament held full power and authority to make laws binding the colonies in all cases whatsoever. It named no tax and imposed no duty. It simply erased, in the broadest language available, the distinction colonists had been drawing between external trade regulation and internal taxation.

America celebrated the repeal and largely shrugged at the declaration. Bells rang in Boston, merchants toasted William Pitt, and the New York assembly voted funds for a statue of George III. A few readers noticed the second bill. The phrase in all cases whatsoever turned up in colonial pamphlets within months as proof that nothing at all had been conceded, and Massachusetts writers warned that a right formally claimed would eventually be exercised. Most colonists preferred the fireworks to the fine print.

The warning proved sound inside a year. The Townshend duties of 1767 rested on precisely the authority the Declaratory Act had asserted, and every later measure invoked the same principle, from the tea monopoly to the rewriting of the Massachusetts charter. The act framed the constitutional question the two sides could never settle. There was no version of the empire in which Parliament held unlimited power over the colonies and the colonial assemblies held any meaningful power at all.