Museum accessions.(stamp act)

The Stamp Act passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765, was the first direct tax levied on the American colonists by Great Britain. It applied to all printed materials, from licenses and documents to pamphlets and playing cards, and provoked a violent outcry because the colonists felt that since they were not represented in Parliament, they should not be taxed without their consent. So unified were they in their opposition that the act was repealed within a year--on March 17, 1766--but the damage had been done, and growing American nationalism ultimately led to the Revolution. In England, an enterprising potter produced the creamware teapot illustrated here, one of at least three known (one at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and the other at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts) made to mark the repeal of the Stamp Act and which thus demonstrate the importance of the American consumer to British industry.

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Acquired from the collection of the late William Guthman, the teapot is an important addition to the strong holdings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English earthenwares decorated for the American market at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D. C.

Native to the southeastern United States, the loblolly pine is a most appropriate decorative device on the silver belt plate illustrated below, since it was made for a member of the South Carolina Royalists. The regiment was actually formed in East Florida in May 1778 and consisted primarily of displaced South Carolina loyalists. They fought in several of the Revolutionary War battles in the South and afterwards were sent to New York, where they were disbanded in 1783. Members are known to have worn red coats with yellow facings, and any one of the sixty officers could ...