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Zenger’s success against the Crown foreshadowed the explosive colonial reaction after Parliament passed a stamp tax in 1765.The Stamp Act required all legal documents,licenses,commercial contracts,newspapers,pamphlets,dice,and playing cards to carry a tax stamp.The Stamp Tax raised revenue from thousands of daily transactions in all of the colonies.In addition,those accused of violating the act would be tried in Vice-Admiralty Courts—royal tribunals without juries that formerly heard only cases involving maritime law.The colonies did not have elected representative in Parliament,so the cry was a defiant“No taxation without representation.”The colonial assemblies petitioned the British,insisting that only they could tax Americans.The assemblies also sent delegates to a Stamp Act Congress,which adopted a moderate petition of protest and sent it to England.Other Americans took more forceful measures.Before the Act went into effect,in every large colonial town,mobs of artisans and laborers,sometimes including blacks and women,attacked men who accepted appointments as Stamp Act commissioners,usually forcing them to resign.American merchants also organized non-importation agreements,which put pressure on English merchants,who in turn pressured the British government.
The campaign,however,was less ideological than economic.It was led by colonial printers,who stood to lose from the new tax,which was levied on printed materials.Historian Arthur Schlesinger has called it the newspaper was on Britain.The newspaper won.The tax was withdrawn.
Despite its meagre beginnings and troubling restrictions,the colonial press rose to a position of respect and even influence by the middle of the 18th century,helped along by the political turmoil that was to culminate in the American Revolution.Indeed,this turmoil and the press fed off each other.Just as newspapers benefited from the turmoil,colonial activists such as John Dickinson,Samuel Adams,Isaiah Thomas,and Thomas Paine used the press to advance their goals.Over some 80 years,the press had come a long way indeed—from an organ of the government to what Emery and Emery have called“the most powerful weapon of the American revolutionaries”．
Thereafter,responded to the resistance of colonies,British Parliament passed a series of acts,as Townshend Acts of 1767,Tea Act of 1773,Intolerable Acts of 1774 and Quebec Act which expressed a clear signs that Britain would use whatever military force it needed to subdue the Americans．
In September 1774 every colony but Georgia sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania.The Congress refused to recognize the authority of Parliament and instead sent a petition to the king.The petition stated the principle that Parliament could not legislate for the colonies without their consent and extended this principle beyond taxation to any legislation．
While the British army occupied Boston,Massachusetts established a provincial congress that met in Concord.Through 1775 and into 1776,the Americans fought without agreeing on what the fight was about:Many wanted independence,while others wanted to reconcile with the king but not with Parliament.The pamphlet Common Sense by Anglo-American philosopher Thomas Paine presented powerful arguments opposing kings and supporting a pure republic.It changed the minds of many colonists.Thomas Jefferson,a congressman from Virginia,took on the job of writing the first draft.Congress voted for independence on July 2,1776,and signed the formal declaration two days later.In the Treaty of Paris of 1783,the British recognized the independence of the United States and relinquished its territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi．