ABSTRACT
By the summer of 1765 America had received news of the Stamp Act. Enraged over this measure that levied the first tax of any kind other than customs duties, the Colonies resisted with a unity of spirit they had never before displayed. Adams took time to ponder the meaning of the Stamp Act that had thrust him into political life and brought every colony to a resounding angry rejection of Parliament's right to tax Americans. One day during that troubled December of 1765, he meditated upon the point to which history had taken him and his fellows. Adams, on the other hand, saw pernicious handwriting in the resolves, the first of which maintained that King, Lords and Commons had an undoubted right to make laws for the Colonies in all cases. The public good, the salus populi, in the case of the British constitution was none other than liberty.
