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AbstractIn March 1764 George Grenville announced plans to raise revenues in America for colonial defence with stamp duties. Opinions differ about why Grenville then postponed the Stamp Act until a year hence. Writing in 1950, Edmund S. Morgan found the decision puzzling. Peter D.G. Thomas and John L. Bullion subsequently offered procedural explanations. Grenville envisaged the Stamp Act as a firm precedent for parliament's authority to impose direct taxation ('inland duties') in the colonies – a prospect that terrified Americans schooled in the common law, alert to dangerous precedents, and already prone to slippery‐slope reasoning. With the mundane details of the Stamp Act unavailable until after its passage, however, the postponement also raised imperial debate to a level of abstraction from which it never retreated. Grenville's postponement of the Stamp Act foreclosed prospects for compromise and set British imperial policy on a course that ultimately fomented the American Revolution.