Conceived in Liberty (166 page)

South Carolina provided a notable example of radical resistance to the Stamp Act. Its leader was the great statesman Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, a leader in the House and one of the wealthiest merchants in the colony. For his mass base, Gadsden, as in the case of Massachusetts and New York, relied on the small businessmen, the artisan-manufacturers of Charleston, the bulwark of the Sons of Liberty.

South Carolina’s appointed stamp distributor, Caleb Lloyd, arrived at Charleston on October 18, along with the stamped paper. Immediately, lamented Governor William Bull, “The minds of men... were... universally poisoned with the principles which were imbibed and propagated from Boston and Rhode Island....” The next day, the people erected a high gallows
at the center of Charleston; hanging there was an effigy of Lloyd, with a devil effigy at one side and the symbol of a boot at the other. Written on the display were various mottoes and warnings, including “Liberty and no Stamp Act” and “Whoever shall dare attempt to pull down these effigies, had better been born with a stone about his neck, and cast into the sea.”

That evening the crowd took down the effigies, and two thousand people paraded them around town in a mock funeral procession. They arrived at the house of George Saxby, appointed inspector of stamps for the Carolinas and the Bermudas, and still on the high seas. The crowd searched the house but could find no telltale stamped papers, which had been placed at Fort Jackson. Over a hundred Sons of Liberty, however, stormed Fort Jackson and destroyed the papers. After burning the effigies and burying a coffin dubbed “American Liberty,” the crowd proceeded to search the houses of Tories and British officers for more stamped paper.

Caleb Lloyd fled for his life to Fort Johnson, and there he was joined by Saxby a week later. In Charleston, threats to the British officers and posters asserting the natural rights of the colonists filled the town. Finally, on October 29, under threat of death, Saxby and Lloyd agreed to suspend execution of their offices until Britain decided whether to enforce or repeal the stamp tax as a result of colonial protests.

By November 1, then, the popular liberals of the colonies had done their work well: not one stamp master remained ready, willing, or able to enforce the Stamp Act. Virtually all had either resigned or publicly pledged not to support the act. Only two ambiguities in status remained, and these were cleared up quickly. At his refuge in Flushing, New York, Zachariah Hood, the Maryland stamp distributor, was visited on November 28 by an angry crowd of three hundred Sons of Liberty from New York City carrying banners inscribed with the slogan “Liberty, Property and No Stamps.” Hood was persuaded to resign forthwith. The New York Liberty Boys were thanked for their effective work by the Sons of Liberty of Baltimore, who assured them that Hood had escaped “the just resentment of his injured countrymen.”

George Angus finally arrived to assume his post in Georgia on January 4. Spirited to the home of Governor James Wright, Angus distributed some paper to the customs officers. But within two weeks, angry crowds persuaded Angus to flee the country. Plans for a march of some six hundred men on Savannah induced the governor to send the stamped paper back to England on a British warship.

Thus, the ambiguities of stamp distribution in Maryland and Georgia were quickly resolved. The New York Sons of Liberty also exercised due vigilance in pursuing current and potential stamp masters. In late November, the Sons of Liberty of New York forced the retirement of Peter DeLancey from his post as inspector and distributor of stamps in Canada and Nova Scotia. A few days later, James McEvers was forced to repeat his public resignation as stamp
distributor for New York. In early January, the Albany Liberty Boys warned prospective stamp distributors, and some four hundred of them pulled down the house of one such candidate, Henry Van Schaack. Van Schaack, seeing the handwriting on the wall, hurried to a Sons meeting the following day to promise never to accept the post of stamp master. He was duly cheered by the throng. And in Rhode Island, Augustus Johnston was again forced to resign as stamp distributor, at the end of December. When a little later the stamped papers arrived, the Sons of Liberty of Newport ceremonially burned the papers.

By November 1765 the stamp distributors and the stamped paper had been put out of action by the direct revolutionary mass action of the people, who increasingly formed themselves into Sons of Liberty in the separate colonies. Even if the various colonial assemblies had not been so timorous and conservative, there was little that they could have done. To nullify the Stamp Act, the first essential step was to put the stamp masters out of commission. This was a revolutionary act that the assemblies could hardly have done openly—especially since they were in most cases subject to the veto of a royal governor.

But one function the assemblies
could
perform: send off official protests to Britain asking for repeal of the noxious Stamp Act. Not much importance should be laid to these official resolves, which could only play a minor supplementary role in the great American struggle against the stamp tax.

The exception to the minor importance of official resolutions was, of course, Patrick Henry’s Virginia Resolves, which, helped by the shrewd publication of the final resolutions, ignited the spark of the whole resistance struggle. The first colony to imitate Virginia’s example of official protest was, not surprisingly, Rhode Island, where the Assembly adopted the call to disobedience that everyone
believed
the Virginia Assembly had passed. The resolution also denied Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies at all, although it modified the disobedience clause to include only an internal tax such as the stamp tax. Moreover, the Rhode Island Assembly went further—directing all officers of the colony to proceed as if the stamp tax did not exist, the Assembly promising to idemnify them for any penalties incurred in following such a course. Rhode Island’s courageous resolutions, passed in September, were touched off in mid-August by similar resolves of the Providence Town Meeting, followed
by several other towns, including Newport. The Rhode Island Resolves were largely drawn up by Henry Ward, secretary of the colony, and Moses Brown, a leading merchant of Providence. They represented a living embodiment of the unity on this question of the Ward and Hopkins factions in Rhode Island.

None of the other colonial assemblies, however, had the courage to go as far as little self-governing Rhode Island. None dared either to call for disobedience or to order officials to disregard the Stamp Act. Almost all the assemblies, however, issued resolves during the last third of 1765, denying the authority of Parliament to levy taxes (internal or external) upon the colonies, and most of them denied the authority of Parliament to extend the domain of the hated admiralty courts. Colonies such as Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, which had not in the previous year strongly challenged the parliamentary authority to tax, now took steps to correct their former hesitation. The only colonial assemblies that did not issue such resolves were Georgia, Delaware, New Hampshire, and North Carolina, and the last was not allowed to meet by edict of the royal governor.

The major effort of official protest was the Stamp Act Congress, called in June by the Massachusetts House at the behest of James Otis and the Boston Town Meeting. The congress, which met in New York City on October 7, consisted of delegates from each of the colonial assemblies—with the exception of those of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, whose governors prevented the assemblies from meeting, and of New Hampshire, which declined to attend. Delaware and New Jersey met the same obstruction from their governors, but their assemblymen defied the governor by meeting informally and selecting delegates anyway. All in all, twenty-seven delegates from nine colonies attended this early example of united intercolonial resistance.
*

Massachusetts could have been expected to give the leadership to the congress, but its delegation consisted of trimmers and renegades to the colonial cause. Otis was in one of his conservative phases, having recently called for British troops to put down rebellion. Ruggles’ and Partridge’s election had been craftily engineered by Governor Bernard, and this manipulation paid off when Ruggles was chosen as chairman of the Stamp Act Congress. Ruggles had secretly agreed with Bernard to try to bend the congress to ask England for repeal solely on pragmatic economic grounds, and to recommend, in the meanwhile, passive submission to the Stamp Act.

Fortunately for colonial liberty, Ruggles was not able to prevent and cripple the movement for colonial resistance. The first struggle in the congress was waged over a declaration of principles, which occupied the delegates for twelve days. Over the bulk of the principles there was general agreement: the right to be taxed only by one’s own representatives; the impracticality of any American representation in Parliament; the inherent right of trial by jury; and the evils and invasions of rights committed by the Stamp Act. The big struggle was waged over the definition of the scope of Parliament’s authority over the colonies. All the delegates privately admitted that Parliament had the authority to regulate colonial trade, but the radical-liberals—led by Christopher Gadsden and Thomas Lynch of South Carolina—strongly objected to any explicit admission of parliamentary authority. Such admission might leave a loophole for implied consent to such external parliamentary taxation as the Sugar Act.

The first draft of the congress’s declaration, composed by Dickinson, pledged colonial obligation to “all acts of Parliament not inconsistent with the rights and liberties of the colonists.” But Gadsden insisted throughout on taking a stand on “the broad and common ground of those natural and inherent rights” that all Americans possessed, not only as Englishmen but as
men.
A second Dickinson draft then changed “rights and liberties of the colonists” to “the principles of freedom” in an attempt to appease the radicals. But here too the radicals saw that such phrasing would commit the colonists to obey all parliamentary legislation that did not violate principles that remained highly vague. The final wording, then, only committed the Americans to “all due subordination” to Parliament, which of course conceded nothing to England since the word “due” remained undefined.

This solution was bitterly opposed by the ultraconservatives in the delegation, especially by Ruggles, Robert Ogden, speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, and Robert R. Livingston of New York. Ruggles and Ogden, indeed, went to the length of refusing to sign any of the proceedings of the Stamp Act Congress.

The next step for the congress was to draw up petitions of protest to England, based on its declaration. Gadsden and the radicals urged that no petition be sent to Parliament, as this would imply an admission of parliamentary authority. But the others would not go that far, and Gadsden could be happy in knowing that the main radical point—no explicit admission of parliamentary authority—had been carried. The petitions were drawn up and approved in only four days. By late October, the Stamp Act Congress had been concluded. Every one of the colonial assemblies, even those that had been absent, hastened to approve the actions of the congress, and Ruggles and Ogden were censured by their respective assemblies for not going along. Ogden, furthermore, was burned in effigy in almost every town in New Jersey, and was forced to resign his seat in the Assembly. Only the Virginia House of Burgesses,
prevented from meeting by the governor, could not meet to approve the congress’s resolves; but it had made its position clear months before.

It must be noted, however, that the radicals were not able to generate a call for open resistance by the congress. Rhode Island remained alone in this courageous stand. Nor was Gadsden able to carry, in the congress’s petition, a position grounded on natural human rights, rather than one confined to the mere rights of Britons. Of the colonial resolves, only the assemblies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts expanded their groundwork to include these libertarian natural rights. Pennsylvania referred to “the Natural Rights of Mankind,” which later helped form the groundwork of Pennsylvania’s constitution.

By far the most eloquent statement of the natural-rights position was the Massachusetts Resolves of October 29. These logical and incisively libertarian resolutions were drawn up by Sam Adams, who had replaced Thacher in the Massachusetts Assembly. Squarely in the tradition of John Locke’s
Essay on Civil Government,
Adams began by explicitly grounding British rights on “the law of God and Nature, and on the common rights of mankind.” Therefore, Adams continued, the people of Massachusetts “are
unalienably
entitled to those essential rights in common with all men: and that no law of society can consistent with the law of God and Nature divest them of those rights.” Crucial to these natural and inalienable rights was the right of property:
“Resolved,
that no man can justly take the property of another without his consent.” And from this Adams presumed to derive the right of representation in levying taxes.

*
The delegates to the Stamp Act Congress were as follows:
Massachusetts:
James Otis, Jr., Timothy Ruggles, and Oliver Partridge;
Rhode Island:
Henry Ward and Metcalf Bowler;
Connecticut:
Eliphalet Dyer, William Samuel Johnson, and David Rowland;
New York:
Robert R. Livingston, Philip Livingston, William Bayard, John Cruger, and Leonard Lispenard;
New Jersey:
Robert Ogden, Joseph Gordon, and Hendrick Fisher;
Pennsylvania:
John Dickinson, George Bryan, and John Morton;
Delaware:
Thomas McKean and Caesar Rodney;
Maryland:
Edward Tilghman, Thomas Ringgold, and William Murdock;
South Carolina:
Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Lynch, and John Rutledge.