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An alternative to conflict that serious men gave thought to, and proposed, was colonial union followed by some form of federation with Britain, and with colonial representation in an imperial parliament. In 1754, a Plan of Union to meet the French and Indian threat had been proposed by Benjamin Franklin, with advice from Thomas Hutchinson, at the Albany Congress and found no takers. During the Stamp Act crisis the idea was revived by persons who held governing responsibility in the colonies and were worried by the growing alienation from the mother country. Franklin himself, Thomas Pownall, a former Governor of Massachusetts, now an M.P., Thomas Crowley, a Quaker merchant familiar with America, and Francis Bernard, the current Governor of Massachusetts, all proposed various plans for rationalization of the colonial government and definitive settlement through debate of reciprocal rights and obligations leading to federation. Pownall complained at a later crisis in 1775 that as no one in government paid any attention to his views, he would offer them no more. Francis Bernard, who formulated a detailed plan of 97 propositions which he sent to Lord Halifax and others, was told by Halifax that the plan was “the best thing of the kind by much that he had ever read,” and that was the last he heard.

Benjamin Franklin urged his British correspondents to recognize the inevitability of American growth and development and to make no laws intended to cramp its trade and manufacture, for natural expansion would sweep them aside, but rather to work toward an Atlantic world peopled by Americans and English possessing equal rights in which the colonists would enrich the mother country and extend its “empire round the whole globe and awe the world!” It was a splendid vision which had enthralled him since the Albany Plan of Union. “I am still of the opinion,” he wrote years later in his autobiography, “that the Plan of Union would have been happy for both Sides of the Water if it had been adopted. The Colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves; there would have been no need of Troops from England; of course the subsequent Pretence for Taxing America, and the bloody Contest it occasioned would have been avoided.” Franklin ends with a sigh: “But such Mistakes are not new; History is full of the Errors of States and Princes.”

Repeal became an issue in England almost as soon as the Stamp Act became law. As Non-Importation emptied the ports, and shippers and handlers and factory workers lost employment and merchants lost money, Britain awoke to American sentiment. For the next six months the Stamp Act was a leading topic in the press. With the 18th century’s passion for political principle, all the issues—the rights of Parliament, the iniquity of taxation without representation, “virual representation,” external versus internal taxation—were debated in comments, columns and angry letters.

Great impact was made by a pamphlet published by Soame Jenyns, a Commissioner of the Board of Trade, who insisted that both the right to tax and the expediency of exerting it were “propositions so indisputably clear” that they needed no defense, were it not for arguments challenging them “with insolence equal to their absurdity.” The phrase “liberty of an Englishman,” snorted Mr. Jenyns, had lately been used “as a synonymous term for blasphemy, bawdry, treason, libels, strong beer and cyder,” and the American argument that people cannot be taxed without their consent was “the reverse of truth, for no man I know is taxed by his own consent.”

Lord Chesterfield, observing affairs, like Horace Walpole, from the sidelines, had a way of picking out the essence in contrast to the stilted etiquette he preached to his nephew. The “absurdity” of the Stamp Act, he wrote to Newcastle, equaled “the mischief of it by asserting a right you know you cannot exert.” Even if effective, he wrote, the tax should bring in no more than £80,000 a year (the government calculated