"HOW IS THIS MODE MORE TOLERABLE THAN THE STAMP ACT?": FIRST PRINTING OF THE 1774 QUARTERING ACT, ONE OF THE CATALYSTS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION CITED IN THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

(AMERICAN REVOLUTION) (QUARTERING ACT). An Act for the better providing suitable Quarters for Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty's Service in North America. London: Charles Eyre and William Strahan, 1774. Folio, disbound; complete as issued in two leaves (pp. 1249-1252). $5000.

Uncommon first printing of the 1774 Quartering Act, expanding on the 1765 Quartering Act, one of the most important catalysts of the American Revolution, "the quartering of large bodies of armed troops among us" being specifically cited as a grievance in the Declaration of Independence.

In the decade before the American Revolution, a series of Quartering Acts were passed by Parliament to provide for the housing and provisioning of British troops in the American colonies. The first, enacted in 1765, required each colonial assembly to provide for the basic needs of British soldiers stationed within its borders, including housing, food and drink, and numerous other staples. Colonial authorities were compelled to lodge British troops in any "uninhabited Houses, Outhouses, Barns, or other Buildings, as shall be necessary," and supply the soldiers with "Diet, and Small Beer, Cyder, or Rum mixed with Water… and allow each non-commission Officers or Soldiers the use of fire, and the necessary Utensils for dressing and eating their Meat." Like that to the Stamp Act, resistance to this 1774 follow-up—which expanded the authority of British officers to house soldiers on private property—was far-reaching and consequential. Colonial leaders such as Philadelphia's John Dickinson expressed "the contradictory spirit of the period: loyalty to King and Empire, but growing American unity." Dickinson, in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, wrote, "If the British Parliament has a legal authority to issue an order that we shall furnish a single article for the troops here, and to compel obedience to that order, they have the same right to issue an order for us to supply those troops with arms, cloths, and every necessary; and to compel obedience to that order also; in short, to lay any burthens they please upon us. What is this but taxing us at a certain sum, and leaving to us only the manner of raising it? How is this mode more tolerable than the Stamp Act?" Additionally, the New York Assembly would argue its state was unduly burdened because British commanders were headquartered there, and in a 1766 vote resisted fulfilling every parliamentary requirement. When the Assembly refused "to incur an additional 'ruinous and insupportable' expense, Parliament… declared all acts of the NY Assembly to be null and void until it fully complied with the Quartering Act" (Morison, Sources, xvi, 35-36).

This second Quartering Act was enacted on June 2, 1774 by the British Parliament as one of a series of four acts in response to the Boston Tea Party that became identified as the Coercive (or Intolerable) Acts. Of these, three dealt specifically with Massachusetts but this fourth, the extension of the already contentious 1765 Quartering Act, applied to all 13 colonies and along with its explosive predecessor played a central role in prompting "the first inter-colonial Continental Congress since the Stamp Act Congress [to convene] in Philadelphia in September 1776 to consider a coordinated response" (Schama, History of Britain, II: 470). The quartering of troops in America was specifically cited as a grievance in both the 1774 Resolves of the First Continental Congress and the 1776 Declaration of Independence. Printed in Gothic type (also known as blackletter, indicative of first edition), with a separate title page bearing the royal coat of arms. This first printing, from the Sessional Volumes of Parliament, is the earliest and most accurate contemporary source of the text and precedes all the American printings. ESTC N57479. See Evans 13410.

Fine condition.