There were also serious tensions between the colonists and the British over land, especially after the Crown effectively confirmed Indian land rights in 1763. Washington himself was appalled by this decision to protect native property rights, writing to his future partner William Crawford in 1767 that he:  could never look upon that Proclamation in any other light ... than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians. It must fall, of course, in a few years, especially when those Indians consent to our occupying their lands. In 1764 Britain imposed a tax on sugar, the first of many ultimately unsuccessful attempts to make her North American subjects bear a portion of the cost of the recent French and Indian war. The first stirrings of revolution in Maryland came in the Fall of 1765, when the speaker of the Lower House of the Maryland General Assembly received a number of letters from Massachusetts, one proposing a meeting of delegates from all the colonies, others objecting to British taxation without consent and proposing that Marylanders should be "free of any impositions, but such as they consent to by themselves or their representatives". Meanwhile, an Annapolis merchant by the name of Zachariah Hood, charged by the British with the task of collecting the new stamp duty, was injured at the dock on his return to Maryland by an angry crowd in what has been called the "first successful, forcible resistance in America to King George's authority". Shunned by his friends and fearful of his life, Hood fled Maryland for New York, and Governor Sharpe reported in September 1765 that he was "very apprehensive that if the stamp paper was to arrive here and be landed at this time it would not be in my power to preserve it from being burnt". One of the early voices for independence in Maryland was the wealthy Roman Catholic planter Charles Carroll of Carrollton. In 1772 he engaged in a debate conducted through anonymous newspaper letters and maintained the right of the colonies to control their own taxation. As a Roman Catholic, he was barred from entering politics, from practicing law, and from voting. In the early 1770s, Carroll appears to have begun to embrace the idea that only violence could break the impasse with Great Britain. According to legend, Carroll and Samuel Chase (who would also later sign the Declaration of Independence on Maryland's behalf) had the following exchange:  Writing in the "Maryland Gazette" under the pseudonym "First Citizen," Carroll became a prominent spokesman against the governor's proclamation increasing legal fees to state officers and Protestant clergy. Carroll also served on various Committees of Correspondence, promoting independence.