The British Parliament had decided to blockade Boston Harbor as punishment for a protest against taxes on tea.

[2] During the 1760s after the French and Indian War, Great Britain began imposing taxes on its North American colonies.

[6] A popular pamphlet written by Maryland lawyer Daniel Dulany in 1765 was called Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies.

Although this pamphlet complained mostly against the Stamp Act, it also noted that the restriction on the colonial export of tobacco to countries other than Great Britain was costing farmers money.

[10] In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts which added different types of taxes which were used to fund colonial governors and judges.

Men dressed as Native Americans boarded a British East India Company ship in the harbor at night and destroyed its entire shipment of tea by throwing it into the water.

[3] The December 16 incident became known as the Boston Tea Party, and it led to defiance in other colonies and similar protests.

[3] Over the next few weeks, tea from the British East India Company was rejected at ports in Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia.

[14] British Parliament reacted to the Boston Tea Party by passing a group of punitive laws aimed at Massachusetts called the Coercive Acts.

[15] British leadership hoped their punishment for Massachusetts would cause other colonies to tone down their resistance to authority.

[18] John Thomas Scharf, a 19th-century historian and author of a history of Maryland, wrote that "...no county was more decided in its action than Talbot.

[24] The earliest record of the Talbot Resolves is at the bottom of page 3 in the September 2, 1774, edition of the Maryland Gazette.

[25] On the same newspaper page is another article that lists a statement made by the citizens of Chester Town, and it makes liberal use of the term "resolved".

[20][Note 3] A summary paragraph of the Chester Town proclamation, in a paragraph above the Talbot Court House statement and below the Chester Town statement, says "The above resolves were entered into upon a discovery of a late importation of the dutiable tea...."[20] No record is known to exist of the men at the meeting that produced the Talbot Resolves.

Matthew Tilghman of Rich Neck Manor, a future member of the First Continental Congress, is the person said to have called the meeting on the courthouse lawn.

[16][Note 5] The Talbot Resolves Alarmed at the present situation of America and impressed with the most tender feelings for the distresses of their brethren and fellow subjects in Boston, a number of gentlemen having met at this place, took into their serious consideration the part they ought to act as friends of liberty and the general interests of mankind.

But when those rights are invaded—when the mode prescribed by the laws for the punishment of offences and obtaining justice is disregarded and spurned—when without being heard in their defence, force is employed in the severest penalties inflicted; the people, they clearly perceive, have a right not only to complain, but like–wise to exert their utmost endeavors to prevent the effect of such measures as may be adopted by a weak and corrupt ministry to destroy their liberties, to deprive them of their property and rob them of the dearest birthright as Britons.

Impressed with the warmest zeal for and loyalty to their most gracious sovereign, and with the most sincere affection for their fellow subjects in Great Britain, they have determined calmly and steadily to unite with their fellow subjects in pursuing every legal and constitutional measure to avert the evils threatened by the late act of Parliament for shutting up the port of Boston; to support the common rights of America and to promote the union and harmony between the mother country and the colonies on which the preservation of both must finally depend.