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Description of  Seized with the Temper of the Times: Identity and Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary America

159416410X epub Our personal rights, comprehending those of life, liberty, and estate is every subjects birthright, whether born in Great Britain or in the colonies wrote Rhode Island lawyer and politician Martin Howard in a pamphlet defending the Stamp Act. Howards opponents drew on a similar fusion of Anglo-American common law and political tradition to voice their own arguments against Parliamentary taxation. Still, such commonalities were not enough to save Howard during Newports Stamp Act riots when a mob destroyed his home and forced him to flee to London. Martin was later appointed North Carolinas Chief Justice, where he played an important role in another crisis, the Regulator Rebellion. The complexities and seeming contradictions that informed the writings of Martin Howard and his colonial counterparts during both the Stamp Act crisis and the Regulator Rebellion bring these understudied movements to vivid life, while also telling a broader story about the evolution of American political thought in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. In Read more