Exploring Pre-Revolution Taxation Cartoons | BRIdge to the Past: Art Across U.S. History

Staff members Mary Patterson and Joshua Schmid examine two 18th-century political cartoons,
“Stamp Master in Effigy” (1765) and Philip Dawe’s “The Bostonians paying the excise-man, or
tarring & feathering” (1774). Both works depict the colonial dissatisfaction and violence that
ran rampant during the American revolutionary period as the British Parliament imposed harsh
taxes on stamps, tea, and other imports. What do these two cartoons tell us about colonial
America in the lead-up to war?