BRAINTREE RESOLUTIONS, instruc tions given by the town of Braintree, Mass., on 24 Sept. 1765, to its representative in the Massachusetts General Court, Ebenezer Thayer, relative to his action in the matter of the Stamp Act. They were drawn by John Adams, one of a committee appointed by the Braintree town meeting for that purpose, accepted unanimously and published in the Boston Gazette. Some 40 Massachusetts towns subsequently adopted them verbatim as their instructions to their own representatives; and John Adams says that Samuel Adams copied several paragraphs into his own draft for the Boston town meeting. The resolutions declared the tax, even if legal, an unbearable burden and a vexatious inter ference with the business of a poor and sparsely settled province; that, moreover, it was con trary to British common law, and the "founda tion principles of the British constitution, that we should be subject to any tax imposed by the British Parliament, because we are not repre sented in that assembly in any sense, unless it be by a fiction of that to put the cases in the decision of one judge without a jury was "an alarming extension of the power of courts of admiralty," and repugnant to the Great Charter itself, especially as the judges held office only during the pleasure of the Crown, and moreover had a commission on the goods condemned. They enjoin the Braintree
representative to "comply with no measures or proposals" for executing the law, but "by all lawful means" to obstruct it; to favor entering on the public records "the most clear and ex plicit assertion of our rights and liberties"; and—most significant of all —"to agree to no steps for the protection of the stamped paper or the stamp officers, because any addition to the laws for preserving the peace would only exasperate the people and endanger public tranquillity.)