A College Exercise, Delivered December 16, 1765
- Anonymous Pamphleteer 1769 (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This is an anonymous pamphlet (attributed to John Morton) published just months after Parliament passed the Stamp Act — and amid fierce colonial protest against it — the piece takes the form of a formal academic exercise (likely a disputation or declamation), bringing the constitutional controversy over British taxation of the American colonies into a university setting.
Written at the height of the Stamp Act crisis, the author sorts the members of the coming assembly into four types — the good, the bad, those in power (“the ins”), and those out of power (“the outs”) — and argues that how each behaves on the colonial question will determine their place in history.
Dismissing ancient Greek and Roman precedents as irrelevant to a society built on universal liberty, Morton draws his analogy instead from Ireland and Scotland, arguing that the American colonists — roughly two million souls, “our own flesh and blood” — deserve to be treated as fellow Britons rather than subordinate subjects.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.