ABSTRACT
The battle of the resolutions underscores how political disputes only deepened differences in constitutional perspective. Superficially, the inevitable battles that pitted governors against legislators revolved around the control of finances—the governor’s salary, other uses of public monies, the executive prerogative—but beyond such matters lay differences over ultimate sovereignty. The Massachusetts General Court had begun as the governing body for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Charles I granted the founding company its charter in 1629. With the Dominion’s fall, Massachusetts received a new charter and the colony would be governed under it for over eighty years, until London all but set the charter aside in one of the bitterly resented Coercive Acts of 1774. As the resolutions demonstrate, many Massachusetts legislators linked the quartering of troops to the issue of parliamentary taxation, which showed that repeal of the Stamp Act had not resolved much at all.
