Conceived in Liberty (165 page)

The town of Providence was inspired by the rebellious actions of Newport, and on August 29—30 a crowd hung and burned an effigy of Augustus Johnston. However, with the British officials and Tory Junto both in Newport, Providence was on the fringes of the struggle, and could by such action only demonstrate its solidarity with its sister city.

The people of Massachusetts and Rhode Island had now set the example. The other colonies were not slow to follow. Neither was the lesson lost on the appointed stamp distributors in the remaining colonies. As early as August 26, New York’s stamp master, James McEvers, threatened with the same fate as Oliver, hastily resigned his post before mob action surfaced. On September 2, the frightened William Coxe, stamp distributor for New Jersey, hastily resigned his post even though he had received no threats from the populace. In Maryland, stamp master Zachariah Hood refused to resign even after a mob razed his house on September 2, an act that followed the whipping, pillorying, hanging, and burning of his effigy. The people of Maryland saw that more drastic measures were necessary; they set upon Hood and forced him to flee for his life to New York City. There he was driven from an inn by New York radicals, but found congenial refuge at Fort George, run by Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden. Hood had not yet resigned but he was no longer a present danger to Marylanders.

New York might be free of its stamp distributor, but the potential menace of the stamped paper remained. The paper arrived from England toward the end of October, but it found the people of New York ready to meet it, headed by the Sons of Liberty of New York, formed a few days before. The Sons organized a crowd of some two thousand New Yorkers to prevent the landing of the stamped paper. But the implacable Tory Cadwallader Colden arranged for a British warship to stand watch while the paper was unloaded at night at his fortress on Fort George. That night, October 26, the following warnings were posted throughout New York City:

Pro Patria

The first Man that either distributes or makes use of

Stampt Paper

Let him take Care of his House, Person and Effects.

Vox Populi

We Dare.

The evening before the Stamp Act was to take effect, a public meeting warned that the Stamp Act would be disobeyed. A crowd paraded through the city shouting “Liberty!” and threatening to bury alive Major Thomas James. James, commander of the troops at Fort George, had boasted that he “would cram the stamps down the [New Yorkers’] throats with the end of his sword.”

The following night, November 1, a mob of about two thousand New Yorkers, many of them former soldiers and privateersmen as well as seamen, carpenters, and rural folk, marched to the house of the hated Colden, carrying and then hanging and burning effigies of Colden and of the devil. The crowd, defying efforts of the mayor and Council to disperse it, broke into Colden’s coach house and paraded around the coach, later hanging the two effigies on a public gibbet and then burning them along with the coach and other Colden carriages. The mob then broke into Major James’ home, smashed the interior, and leveled the house.

The people had not yet attacked Fort George to seize the stamps. At this point conservative opponents of the stamp tax bitterly tried to dissuade the people from such a bold course. Led by Robert R. Livingston and James Duane, the conservatives gained the concession from Colden that he would not issue the stamps. But the radical-liberal leaders were not to be put off by this tactical retreat: the stamped papers themselves must be destroyed! Armed New Yorkers passed into the city to support an attack on the fort, and posters signed by such Sons of Liberty names as “Sons of Neptune”—an organization of seamen—and “Free Sons of New York” threatened an all-out assault on the fort on the night of November 5 unless the stamped papers were surrendered. Under this threat, Governor Colden, on the advice of the British general Thomas Gage and the New York Council, finally capitulated and turned the paper over to the municipal authorities. In mid-November, a second shipment of stamps was again turned over to the municipal corporation.

The Sons of Liberty, the indomitable leaders of the radical resistance in New York City, were unsurprisingly led by wealthy merchants and lawyers, and rested on a mass base of artisans, small businessmen, and laborers. Its original leaders had been the liberal lawyers William Livingston and John Morin Scott, but they were soon replaced by better and more radical organizers, who were also wealthy merchants: Isaac Sears, a privateer; John Lamb, a manufacturer of mathematical instruments; and Joseph Allicocke.

In some of the colonies, the stamp distributors had not yet arrived at the time of their appointment. Here the task of the colonists was to await their arrival with vigilance. Thus, George Meserve, appointed stamp master for New Hampshire, faced as he sailed into Boston Harbor a hornets’ nest of trouble. He found there a letter from the leading citizens of Portsmouth warning him of grave danger should he attempt to set foot in New Hampshire before resigning his commission. More immediately, he found a Boston mob that prevented his ship from landing for two days until they were convinced no stamped paper was aboard.

It did not take Meserve long to size up the situation. He publicly announced his resignation before going ashore, and was feted and cheered by the Bostonians in return. But in New Hampshire, Meserve found less willingness to forgive and forget. He lived in fear of popular retaliation until he agreed to hand over his royal commission to be burned publicly by his neighbors.

George Mercer, a leading Virginia planter and former aide of George Washington, happily received his colony’s stamp appointment in England without realizing the temper of the province. Mercer arrived in Virginia on October 30, shortly before the deadline, to find Virginia in an uproar. In the Northern Neck, Mercer had been burned in effigy; upcountry threats abounded of marching in to destroy the stamped paper; and two country justices had already resigned in protest against the Stamp Act. Mercer’s old friend George Washington, though opposed to the stamp tax as unworkable, was cool to the resistance, calling it “ill-judged,” but this had no effect in stemming the tide.

When Mercer arrived at Williamsburg, a crowd, which included almost all the leading merchants and “gentlemen of property” in the colony, met him on the street and demanded his immediate resignation. When Mercer, asking for time to think until November 1, was greeted warmly by Governor Fauquier, Speaker Robinson, and the Virginia Council, the crowd rumbled and demanded an immediate decision: “Friday is too late... the law goes into effect then.... Let us rush in!” Under this severe pressure, Mercer reluctantly agreed to give his decision by the next day, October 31.

Despite the urging of Governor Fauquier to stand his ground, George Mercer reevaluated his position, and by the next morning he assured the large throng that he had not approved the Stamp Act and that he would never directly or indirectly help to enforce it. The gladdened mob feted Mercer, and bore him in triumph around the streets of Williamsburg.

Jared Ingersoll, a high Tory of Connecticut, proved not as easy to convince as his fellow stamp masters. Ingersoll, as Connecticut’s agent in London, had learned to move amiably in high Tory circles there. He had become a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Jackson, John Temple, surveyor general of the New England customs, and Thomas Whately, secretary to George Grenville and the author of the final draft of the Stamp Act.

News of Ingersoll’s appointment as stamp distributor did not at first arouse much wrath, but by the time he arrived at New Haven in early August the popular temper was beginning to rise. The attacks began with an article in the
Connecticut Gazette
of August 9, by Naphtali Daggett, professor of divinity at Yale, who denounced Ingersoll as a traitor, and trenchantly ridiculed the idea that “since ’tis decreed [the country] must fall, who can blame me for taking a part in the plunder?” Throughout the colony in Lebanon, Norwich, Windham, and New London, Ingersoll was hung in effigy during the latter part of August; and the last three counties launched a movement to force Ingersoll’s resignation. Armed companies in Windham, Norwich, and New London in eastern Connecticut, threatened to march on New Haven against him. A troop of five hundred easterners armed with staves, and including militia officers, formed themselves into the Sons of Liberty and marched westward to meet Ingersoll at Wethersfield on September 19. Ingersoll argued and ranted, but severe threats of lynching finally changed his mind, and he was forced to confirm his resignation in front of the Connecticut Assembly.

As a rationalist Old Light Presbyterian in a colony of growing adherence to a now diluted evangelical New Light cause, Ingersoll dealt his religious group
a severe blow by becoming a stamp master. The blow was compounded by the conservatism of most of the Connecticut Old Lights on resistance to the hated Stamp Act. With the notable exception of the Reverend Ebenezer Devotion, Old Light minister in Windham, most of the resisters and Sons of Liberty in Connecticut were New Lights. Furthermore, Governor Thomas Fitch, an Old Lighter, though elected by the people of Connecticut, announced his intention to enforce the stamp tax, and thus put paid to the Old Light cause in the colony. Only four members of the Connecticut Council supported Fitch in this most unpopular stand.

John Hughes, Franklin’s lieutenant in Pennsylvania, also resisted resignation from the post of stamp distributor in Pennsylvania and Delaware. In early September, the people of Pennsylvania began to insist on Hughes’ resignation. Hughes lamented to Franklin that “the spirit or flame of rebellion” is now at “a high pitch” in America, a spirit that he termed “a sort of frenzy or madness.” Hughes’ determination not to resign was stiffened by Franklin’s admonition from his privileged sanctuary in England to carry out his office “whatever may be the madness of the populace [or] their blind leaders.” The favor of the colonial people must always be sacrificed in any clash with the authority of Great Britain.

The pressure against Hughes had not yet reached a peak, since the stamped papers had not arrived in the colonies. In the meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Assembly, dominated by conservative Quakers and their Tory allies from the increasingly overrepresented eastern counties, decided by only one vote on September 10 to send delegates to the intercolonial Stamp Act Congress called by the Massachusetts Assembly. Hughes, of course, led the fight against the move.

The pressure of the people continued to mount, however, and on September 16 the radical-liberals, led by Samuel Smith and aided by the New York Son of Liberty John Lamb, determined to reduce Hughes’ house to ashes. But in Philadelphia the principal Tory leaders, Hughes and Joseph Galloway, were able to organize a gang of seven to eight hundred to guard the house. The gang consisted largely of Galloway’s mass base in the city, the clubs of Philadelphian tradesmen known as the White Oaks and the Hearts of Oak. The governor and the municipal officials, like the proprietary, sympathetic to
the resistance and more particularly hostile to the pro-royal Franklin party, remained neutral in the struggle and prudently left town. Confronted with Galloway’s gang, the popular mob contented itself with burning John Hughes in effigy.

For the next three weeks, Hughes was ill and
hors de combat,
but the conflict came to a climax on October 5 with the arrival of the stamped paper and of Hughes’ official commission. The people could wait no longer. The radical leaders met at the coffeehouse of the printer William Bradford, and summoned the people by tolling all the church bells and beating muffled drums throughout the city. A great crowd collected at the State House, particularly including Presbyterians. William Allen, Jr., son of the chief justice of the colony, headed the crowd. The governor and mayor took care to be absent from the scene. Only the Quaker alderman Benjamin Shoemaker attempted, vainly, to order the crowd to disperse. The crowd deputed seven of the prominent citizens of Philadelphia to demand Hughes’ resignation, with a threat of the extreme penalty should he refuse. The seven included Bradford, attorney James Tilghman, and merchants Robert Morris, Charles Thomson, Archibald McCall, John Cox, and William Richards. The stubborn Hughes resisted the demand even when learning of the threats of Virginia and Maryland mobs to kill him should he ever set foot there. Finally, the rather timid delegation agreed to a face-saving modification for Hughes. Hughes agreed only to defer executing the Stamp Act in Pennsylvania or Delaware until it was executed in the neighboring colonies. Still full of ginger, Hughes continued to harangue his enemies about their supposedly grievous crimes. He persisted in attacking the governor for not enforcing the tax, and the Presbyterians of the colony (recently united under New Light control) as rebels “as averse to Kings, as they were in the days of Cromwell, and some begin to cry out,
no King but King Jesus.”

In North Carolina and Georgia, no stamp distributors had been appointed by November 1. In Georgia, radicals had to content themselves with demonstrating with nameless effigies. The appointment of George Angus was announced to the Georgians on November 7, but Angus, alone of all the colonial distributors, was a native Englishman, and had not yet set sail for America. The people of Georgia could only keep vigil to mete out similar treatment as in the other colonies; meanwhile, the Stamp Act was not being enforced there.

In North Carolina, Henry McCulloh had naturally been the original appointee, but he prudently declined. The appointment then went to Dr. William Houston, who only heard the news by mid-November. When Houston arrived at Wilmington on November 16 to claim his commission, he was confronted with a determined crowd headed by the mayor and forced to resign immediately.