The Royal Navy and the Enforcement of the Stamp Act, 1764–65: The Account of Captain Archibald Kennedy RN

While investigating a tranche of captains in the mid-eighteenth century in The National Archives, a unique cache of documents was found in the letters to the Admiralty in Captain Archibald Kennedy's file. The importance of these documents is that they reveal the events in New York and the eastern seaboard of North America during the Stamp Act crisis which occupied the last three months of 1765, as they impinged on a naval captain – not a politician, colonial official or merchant. This perspective is different from that usually described in histories and is worthy of a wider audience. Captain Kennedy was senior naval officer at New York from 1763, and most of his correspondence with the Admiralty had to do with the difficulties of impressing men from the merchant vessels trading in and out of New York. Trade was booming in the years after what was known in America as the French and Indian War and in Britain as the Seven Years’ War. Merchant vessel owners could afford to pay their crews more than the navy offered, which made manning his vessels difficult. Kennedy reported to his Commander-in-Chief Lord Colvill, stationed in Halifax, and copied his letters to the Admiralty when it seemed likely that ships would reach England more quickly than ice-bound Halifax. He deployed the three sloops he had at his disposal as best he could to meet the many conflicting demands of the local colonial officials. In 1764 everything changed. The Grenville administration had long planned to recoup from the colonists themselves some of the costs of protecting the American colonies from the French. Leading lawyers from the colonies, such as John Tabor Kempe, the young Attorney General in New York, had discussed this in London. Politicians in Britain anticipated no difficulty in levying taxes in America. If they had realised that the cost of collecting customs dues charged on American trade was three times the amount that officials raised in money they might have thought again. It is easy with hindsight to see that politicians in London should have paid more attention to the warnings of colonial administrators in America who were unable to persuade the colonial assemblies to vote them any income. Trading with the enemy was not confined to the American colonies: the Irish supplied beef to the French army despite being much more closely governed than the colonies were.

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