“Stamp Act Memes” Online Talk on 9 Sept.

On Thursday, 9 September, I’ll deliver the latest version of my online talk “How Americans Fought the Stamp Act with Memes” via the American Revolution Round Table of New Jersey.

For details about that event and how to cadge an invitation, see this description.

This event feels bittersweet because I had the pleasure of speaking to this group in Morristown once and had planned to be there again. I was even building a longer trip around the event with archive and family visits. But “community spread” of the Covid-19 virus has risen again, and we decided that it’s safer to avoid large gatherings.

Speaking of large gatherings, my talk will explore how crowds, with the help of newspaper printers, defined the details of an anti-Stamp Act protest in August 1765, and then repeated that action with variations for months until they made the law a dead letter.

We can see that effect in this 6 September letter from the Philadelphia printer David Hall to his mentor and business partner in London, Benjamin Franklin:

We are all in a Ferment here, as well, as in the other Governments, about the Stamp Law taking, or not taking place.

You, very probably before this can reach, may have heard of Mr. [Andrew] Oliver, the Stamp officier being hanged in Effigy in Boston; a House pulled down, which was supposed to have been erected for the Business of the Stamp Office, and other Damage done him; upon which he resigned and, it is said, wrote home to the Commissioners of the Stamp-Office, letting them know that he could not put the Law in Execution; and that he believed it impracticable for any One else to do it.

Soon after this Mr. [Augustus] Johnston, appointed for Rhode Island; Mr. [James] McEvers for New York, and Mr. [William] Coxe for New Jersey, all gave up their Commissions.

At New-London the Stamp Officer has likewise been hanged in Effigy. And at New-Haven the House of the Officer there, has been beset by a Number of People, who desired to know whether he intended to act in that office, or resign? His Answer, it is said, was, that having accepted the Office in Person he did not think he had Power to resign. They then demanded whether he would deliver the Stamp Materials, as soon as they arrived, to them, in Order to make a Bonfire, or to have his House pulled down? Upon which he promised, that when they Arrived, he would either reship them to be sent back, or that when they were in his House, his Doors should be open, and they might then act as they thought proper, on which they despersed.

Mr. [Jared] Ingersoll has likewise been hanged in Effigy [actually, all those preceding Connecticut events were aimed at Ingersoll], as has Mr. [Zachariah] Hood, the officer for Maryland.

Mr. [George] Mercer, the Officer for Virginia, is not yet Arrived, but the People of that Colony, are much enraged.

Mr. [John] Hughes [of Pennsylvania] has not yet resigned; whether he will, or not, I cannot say, but I understand his Friends are all endeavouring to get him to resign.

In short, there seems to be a general Discontent all over the Continent, with that Law, and many thinking their Liberties and Privileges, as English Men lost, or at least in great Danger, seem Desperate. What the Consequences may be, God only knows; but, from the Temper of the People, at Present, there is the greatest Reason to fear, that the Passing of that Law will be the Occasion of a great Deal of Mischief.

The most awkward part of the news for Franklin was that he had used his influence as a lobbyist to get Coxe, Hughes, and Hood appointed as stamp agents in their respective colonies. The patronage job was supposed to be a pleasant surprise. Instead, those men came under threat, and Hood actually had to decamp for New York.

Annapolis Commemorates the Stamp Act Protests, 19-25 Oct.

On 26 Aug 1765, the same day that Bostonians tore apart Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s home in the North End, Annapolis saw its first public protest against the Stamp Act.

Following the model of the widely reported demonstration in Boston on 14 August, Marylanders built an effigy of their colony’s stamp agent, Zachariah Hood, and then ritually destroyed it. This is the account from the Maryland Gazette, published by Boston native Jonas Green:

Monday morning last, a considerable number of people, assertors of British American privileges, met here to show their detestation of, and abhorrence to, some late tremendous attacks on liberty, and their dislike to a certain late-arrived officer, a native of this Province. They curiously dressed np the figure of a man, which they placed on a one horse cart, malefactor-like, with some sheets of his paper in his hands before his face.

In this manner they proceeded through the streets of town till noon, the bells at the same time tolling a solemn knell, when they proceeded to the hill; and after giving it the Mosaic law [i.e., thirty-nine lashes] at the whipping-post, placed it in the pillory, from whence they took it and hung it to a gibbet erected for that purpose, and then set fire to a tar-barrel underneath, till it fell into the barrel. By the many significant nods of the head while in the cart, it may be said to have gone off very penitently.

Among the people who led that event was twenty-four-year-old lawyer Samuel Chase. The next year, members of the local political establishment called him “a foul-mouthed and inflaming son of discord and faction.” Chase went on to be a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Chief Justice of Maryland, and an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, surviving impeachment in 1805.

Zachariah Hood himself wasn’t in Annapolis to see his effigy. He arrived from London a few days later, met by an angry crowd. In September another mob burned one of his warehouses. Meanwhile, other Maryland towns—Baltimore, Elk Ridge, Fredericktown—burned him in effigy. Hood fled to New York City, then Flushing. Tracked down by local activists in a show of continental solidarity, he finally resigned as Maryland’s stamp agent on 28 November.

Historic Annapolis will commemorate those events with Sons of Liberty Week on 19-25 October. The schedule includes:

• Lecture and panel discussion on “Freedom of the Press Then and Now,” with historian Glenn Campbell and several present-day journalists.
• Revolutionary Annapolis Walking Tour.
• Reenactment march up Main Street on Sons of Liberty Day, 25 October.
• Revolutionary Festival at the William Paca House and Garden.
• Exhibit of the Maryland Gazette at the Historic Annapolis Museum.
• Hand-printed broadsides from the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts.

In addition, the organizers promise “Public Outbursts” throughout the week: “costumed re-enactors will appear at random throughout the Annapolis historic district in October to exhort townspeople and visitors to join the rebellion.”