volume 3 chapter 31 ignoring the stamp tax immobilizing the distribution of stamps
supplemented by official protest to britain could only be the first step in the people's
nullification of the stamp act for once the act went into effect in november 1765 the colonist
The first, devoid of stamped paper, faced a critical choice, either to carry on normal
transactions as if the Stamp Act did not exist, or to stop all business so as not to violate
the law.
The latter, the conservative path, avoided any breaking of the law, but would have meant
and a suicidal stoppage of trade and of the courts that would have quickly brought the
colonists to their knees. Many of the royal governors, gravely underestimating the fighting
qualities of the resistance movement, confidently expected the latter result. They could not
dream that the colonists would make open defiance of the Stamp Act a continuing way of life.
Thus, as the enforcement date drew near, Governor Bernard smugly expected that famine would
soon bring Massachusetts to a standstill.
Jared Ingersoll calmly predicted that the distresses which the want of the stamped papers
will occasion will put the people to desire to introduce and distribute them.
But having disposed of the stamp masters, the colonists were in no mood to submit meekly
to Economic Suicide, rather than defy the hated stamp tax.
For the work of nullifying the Stamp Act, ordinary business transactions within the
colonies presented no problem.
Contracts and exchanges could be made with the simple refusal of bothering about the
Stamp Act's existence.
The major problem in domestic business was faced by the newspapers, who were in an exposed
position.
As November approached, the press reluctantly prepared to close up in obedience to the Stamp
Law, but their courage was buoyed by threats, especially in New York and Boston, to the
person and the property of the printers should they dare thus surrender to the law.
The pattern of press courage was set on November 1 with the bold appearance of the New London
The Great Radical Organs of Liberty, The Boston Gazette and The New York Gazette, or Weekly Post Boy, swiftly followed suit.
John Holt, editor of the New York paper, emblazoned on his newspaper the motto,
Auto, Liberty, Property and No Stamps, which was soon picked up by other leading papers.
Other northern newspapers continued to publish, first hedging with such partial disguises
as changing their titles or leaving out the printer's names, but soon they resumed publication
full blast.
Only in the South did the bulk of the press display cowardice by suspending operations rather
than publishing unstamped.
In some cases, courage returned and printing resumed.
For example, the Annapolis-Maryland Gazette and the Williamsburg-Virginia Gazette.
However, the publisher of the latter paper was not trusted by the liberals, who induced
The New Unstamped Newspaper
In Wilmington, North Carolina, the radicals turned to violent methods of persuasion.
A mob forced the publisher of the North Carolina Gazette to resume publication unstamped, at
the hazard of life, being maimed or have his printing office destroyed.
The publisher, however, found himself whipsawed between two masters, the governor and counsel,
finally removing him as public printer for inflammatory expressions.
The only southern paper that defied the Stamp Act from the start was the Georgia Gazette,
which however was closed by pressure from the royal governor in late November. Internal
transactions and even the press thus successfully defied the Stamp law. The real problem for
the colonist was transactions necessarily involving government agencies, which could
The most vital question was foreign trade, on which many economic activities, especially
in the port towns, depended absolutely.
For merchants needed clearances from the royal customs officials to ship out of port.
Without such clearance, they were liable to seizure on the high seas by the British Navy,
which did not have to worry about colonial opposition or rebellious activity on the Atlantic.
Domestic transactions requiring government stamps presented a much lighter problem. Marriages,
wills and diplomas could be and were informally recorded, and criminal court procedures did
not require stamped paper. Furthermore, a positive advantage accrued to the colonists.
The closing of the hated Admiralty Courts, which were not supposed to function without
stamps.
Only the civil courts posed a problem for the colonies.
On the crucial question of foreign trade, which could make or break the resistance movement,
the colonists could either greatly increase their smuggling operations or put pressure
on the royal customs officials to grant the merchants clearance papers.
The Great Trading Center of Boston particularly had to face the port problem. The Assembly had first thought to make unstamped trade legal on the ground that no stamps existed, and guaranteeing to indemnify officers who might be penalized by Britain for such action.
But the assembly shrewdly decided that such a stand would compromise the cause, for it
would concede the legality of the Stamp Act if there were a stamp master in the colony.
Instead, the Massachusetts assembly, unwilling to go so far as to encourage open resistance,
left the whole matter to the Sons of Liberty, who were quite willing to assume the responsibility.
The first step was to gain time, and this the Boston merchants, as well as the merchants
of all the colonies, did by putting every possible ship out to sea before the November
1 deadline.
In the meanwhile, the royal officials, the governor, controller, collector of customs,
advocate general of the admiralty court, attorney general, and surveyor general of the Customs
Customs of New England engaged in a complex, farce comedy of passing the buck in deciding
on clearance policy for the port. Cutting through this confusion were the Sons of Liberty,
which put intense pressure on the Customs collectors and threatened to storm the Customs
House with a mob by December 17. Then the radicals showed their power by again forcing
A Public Resignation from Stamp Master Andrew Oliver
A mob of 2000, such as pressured Oliver, could not be ignored, and the customs officials
promptly capitulated, agreeing to provide ship clearances without stamps.
On the night of December 17, the Sons of Liberty celebrated their highly significant victory,
And it was particularly fitting that the brilliant organizer of the radicals, Sam Adams, was
feted as the guest of honor.
The earliest and easiest resolution of the problem came in Virginia, which had the good
fortune of having a liberal and understanding surveyor general in Peter Randolph of the
eminent Virginia family.
As early as November 2, Randolph advised all the customs collectors to clear all vessels
Customs Without Stamped Paper Governor Fokker of Virginia was also intelligent
about the issue and quickly seconded Randolph's stand.
The customs officials in Rhode Island promptly followed.
The merchants of Philadelphia used an ingenious device of adding clearances to partially loaded
cargo ships before November to extend their time of grace through that month.
Collector John Penn induced the collector to go along with the scheme.
By early December, however, the Philadelphia harbor was filled with vessels, and the customs
officials faced squarely the problem of clearances.
Riding to England, the Philadelphia collectors admitted their fear of the populace should
they enforce the Stamp Act, and they soon began to issue ship clearances.
In a few days, the Philadelphia breakthrough was enormously widened by Charles Stewart,
Surveyor General of Customs for the Eastern Middle District, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
and Delaware.
Stewart authorized all the customs officials to issue ship clearances without stamps, and
again gave the threat of popular force as his justification.
New York Custom Officials were especially relieved. They had suffered the growing pressure
of the populace, particularly of the seaman, unemployed by the stoppage of trade. New England's
ports were in effect blasted open by the surrender of the Boston Customs officials in mid-December.
Duncan Stewart, collector at New London, Connecticut, was forced to give way a few days before Boston.
New Haven, Connecticut and Portsmouth, New Hampshire followed a few days after. There
was a little resistance by customs officials at Portsmouth, but this was arrested by a
mob demonstration on December 26, and there was no clearance trouble after that. Except
for Virginia, the main customs difficulties were experienced in the South. Maryland did
did not finally issue clearances without stamps at the main port of Annapolis until the end
of January. The courageous Peter Randolph tried his best to open up the Carolinas as
he had Virginia, but he was foiled for a long time by the zeal of the governors and local
customs officials. In South Carolina, Randolph joined with the assembly, the merchants, the
and the rest of the people to battle the stubborn Governor William Bull.
Finally, the resigned stamp master Caleb Lloyd reaffirmed his resignation and began to issue certificates of unavailability of stamps to attach to clearance papers.
By mid-February, ships were sailing legally from South Carolina without stamps.
Meanwhile, North Carolina's reactionary governor, William Tryon, tried a particularly shrewd
maneuver in attempting to induce submission to the Stamp Act.
While blocking any meeting of the assembly, Tryon convened a private meeting of fifty
leading planters and other gentlemen of the colony and tried to sell them on abandoning
Resistance. Assuring them that he personally strongly opposed the Stamp Act, Tryon urged
them to submit to the tax and enjoy untrammeled trade, while he personally would appeal to
Britain for special favors for North Carolina. As a further inducement, he promised to pay
personally for the cost of the stamps required on papers issued by him. The leading citizens,
offer, spurned this shrewd appeal to ease and short-run cupidity, and firmly refused
the offer.
North Carolina suffered from closed ports until February, when the customs officials
finally gave in.
The one exception was the port of Cape Fear, in extreme southern North Carolina.
There are particularly reactionary set of royal officials cracked down rigorously to
enforce the Stamp Act.
Captain Jacob Blob of the Royal Navy had had the gall in early January to seize several
vessels coming into Cape Fear because their clearance papers officially issued in other
American ports were unstamped.
When William Dry, collector at Brunswick, North Carolina, proposed to present the confiscated
vessels at the Halifax Vice Admiralty Court, a group of citizens from Brunswick, New Hanover
and Bladen counties gathered at Wilmington on February 18 to form an association to prevent
operation of the Stamp Act.
The Association quickly amassed a thousand men and marched on Brunswick, capturing control
of the town and the port.
Seizing the recalcitrant William Dry, the Association searched for the ship's papers,
and won from Dry and Captain Lobb the release of the three vessels and a promise to open
the port from then on.
In February 21, the citizens rounded up all the court and customs officials and forced
them to swear an oath not to execute the Stamp Act.
North Carolina, at last, was free of Stamp Act tyranny, and the happy citizens sailed
back to Wilmington on the liberated ships.
Georgia, the southernmost of the rebellious colonies, also had its troubles.
George allowed ships to clear without stamps until the end of November, when Governor James
Wright and the customs officials closed the ports. Governor Wright persisted in his dictatorial
course despite the pleas of merchants and shippers. When George Angus distributed stamped
paper during his brief term of office in January, the Savannah merchants earned the hatred and
and contempt of all other merchants and colonists for selling out to the stamp tax by applying
for stamped paper.
The rural people throughout Georgia, similarly outraged, gathered in arms six hundred strong
on January 27, ready for an angry march on Savannah.
For Governor Wright, too, discretion proved to be the better part of valor.
On hearing news of the threatened march, Wright hurriedly shipped the papers onto a British
vessel where they were effectively out of circulation. Very shortly, Savannah was operating
without stamps. Thus, by the end of February, even the most recalcitrant officials in the
South were all permitting open ports, while the northern ports had all been opened by
by the end of 1765.
If the customs officials could be successfully intimidated, what about the British naval officers
beyond the reach of colonial harassment, at least while at sea?
Generally, the colonists found that the British Navy did not much bother to enforce the Stamp
Act.
Astute entrepreneurs in Philadelphia began to issue insurance policies to shippers against
British seizure at the low rate of two and one-half percent, thus indicating the lax
state of enforcement. Moreover, American shippers soon began to find that they could land unmolested
without stamped papers at English-run ports that themselves were obeying the stamp rules
including ports in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Florida, the West Indies and even England itself. During
In the period of the temporary closing of American ports, illegal smuggling increased
greatly, thereby generating further contempt for English authority.
Indeed, the customs officials began to issue clearances partly out of fear that they would
soon be ignored completely by the colonists.
The Philadelphia officials wrote perceptively that we must now submit to necessity and do
Do without them, the stamped papers, or else in a little time people will learn to do without
either them or us.
Once in a while a rigorous naval officer persisted in plaguing the colonist.
Captain Archibald Kennedy, for one, insisted on stopping all vessels leaving New York even
after the port was officially opened and blocking the path of any whose clearance papers were
unstamped.
As Kennedy allowed all entering ships to proceed, New York City soon accumulated a large population
of discontented, unemployed seamen ready to rebel against the laws of trade. One reason
for the lax naval enforcement, ironically enough, was the forced closing of the admiralty
courts for lack of stamps. Only the Halifax court was now open. With these courts closed,
The naval officers were reluctant to detain ships for any length of time. The civil courts
were not opened so quickly, but then the need was not nearly as pressing as in the case
of the ports. We have seen the positive advantage of the closed admiralty courts as well as
the informal substitutes for domestic legal transactions. Moreover, as long as the civil
While courts remained closed, English merchants could not collect on the substantial sum of
debts owed them by Americans.
This blockage could only lead British merchants to put pressure on Parliament to repeal the
Stamp Act.
George Washington, Richard Henry Lee and other Virginia tobacco planters, generally in heavy
to English merchants saw the importance of this method of creating pressure.
As a result, the pressure to reopen the courts was far less than that to reopen the ports.
Pressure for reopening the courts came mainly from the Sons of Liberty and other radicals
who wanted the opening to symbolize judicial repudiation of the Stamp Act.
Thus, as soon as the ports were opened in Massachusetts,
The Massachusetts Council was openly warned, open your courts and let justice prevail,
open your offices and let not trade fail, for if these men in power will not act, we'll
get some that will, in actual fact. This popular pressure was succeeded by arguments by leading
When Parliament heirs declared Adams boldly, it need not be obeyed, and it had no right
to impose taxes on the colonies.
James Otis Jr. this time backed the Adams' view.
The Council wordly passed the buck to the judges of the colony attempting to wash its
hands of the entire problem.
The Massachusetts Superior Court was not scheduled to convene until March, but two lower courts
in Suffolk County, containing Boston, were supposed to meet in January.
The probate court of Suffolk County was being held up by Thomas Hutchinson, judge of the
Hutchinson was soon told that his only viable alternatives were to do business without stamps,
to quit the country, to resign the office, or keeping the stamp-less court closed.
It was made clear was not a healthy path for Hutchinson to choose.
Faced with this threat, Hutchinson consented to have his more pliable brother Foster replace
The House passed a resolution to open all the courts of the justice by the overwhelming
vote of 81 to 5.
But again, the Mestafelian Thomas Hutchinson blocked its passage in the Council.
The radical Boston Gazette, spearheaded by Otis, denounced Hutchinson bitterly, but the
Council, not wanting to take any positive stand, also blocked the proposal of Governor
Bernard to arrest Otis for his seditious essay.
Finally, the Council again passed the buck to the judges of the colony, who in turn passed
it over to the lawyers to decide.
Faced with such responsibility, the lawyers, including Otis, began to stall.
After a token hearing of one case in the crucial Superior Court during March, the Court adjourned
without taking action, to await passively the now rumored imminent repeal of the Stamp Act.
Virginia displayed the same vacillation and hesitancy in opening its courts.
Edmund Pendleton, a judge in Caroline County and one of Virginia's most respected lawyers,
urged keeping the courts open on the same hard-hitting grounds as the Boston Libertarians.
Justice Littleton Eyre of the Northampton County Court took the same stand, but the other judges were far less courageous and they dithered along without taking the decisive step.
The Virginia lawyers, tough in talk and in theory, also balked at taking the public step of reopening the courts.
As a result, the courts of Virginia, as in Massachusetts, largely remained closed, with
the exception of Akamak County.
In Akamak, on the eastern shore, the courts defiantly reopened, but few other lower courts
joined in.
The story in most of the other colonies was much the same.
In colony after colony, the lawyers approved the high libertarian principle of keeping
Open in Disregard of an Invalid Stamp Tax but, timorously, continued to delay putting
their high ideals into practice. The judges, likewise, continued to stall until the thrilling
news of repeal of the Stamp Act reached the colonies in early April and took them all
off the spot. This was conspicuously the case, for example, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and
New York. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, however, a few lower courts managed to remain
open. In New York, an attempt by judges of the Court of Common Pleas to reopen was harshly
crushed by a threat of Governor Henry Moore to fire any judges who dared to open without
stamps. The courts of South Carolina also dithered throughout the period, but by March
Justices of the Charleston Court of Common Pleas attempted to reopen.
They were responding to pressures by merchants, traders and their associated Sons of Liberty
in Charleston and backed by the South Carolina Assembly.
However, the judges were blocked in this effort by the court clerk Dougal Campbell and by
Governor Bull.
Among the colonies then, only four, New Hampshire, Maryland, Delaware and Rhode Island, opened
all of their courts before the repeal came through.
Meeting in early February, the New Hampshire Superior Court overruled the obstructionism
of its clerk and the victory was promptly hailed by the Portsmouth Sons of Liberty.
Some of Maryland's lower courts opened as early as November, but the superior court did
not open until forced to do so in early April by repeated demands at a mass meeting at Annapolis
of the Sons of Liberty from all over the colony.
The courts of Delaware were opened in February under severe pressure from its grand jury,
which refused to perform its task of making criminal indictments, which were not subject
to the Stamp Tax, until the civil courts agreed to reopen.
Little Rhode Island was unique among the colonies.
There all the courts remained open without interruption.
In this colony, the backbones of the judges were fortified by the assembly's pledge to
indemnify all officials who ignored the Stamp Act, and all the courts continued happily
to function.
In one case before the Superior Court, the hated ex-stamp master Augustus Johnston refused
to prosecute in his capacity as King's attorney.
The Court expressed its contempt for British rule by replacing Johnston as Attorney General
with Silas Downer, Secretary of the Providence, Sons of Liberty.
While most of the colonial civil courts, especially the Superior Courts, remained closed during
and the Stamp Act era. It is clear that legal and judicial shilly-shalling could not have
continued forever, mounting popular pressure undoubtedly, which soon forced a general reopening
of the courts had not repeal intervened. However, it is likely, from their attitude, that the
judges would have proceeded timorously on the practical ground that stamps were unavailable
rather than have taken a stand on constitutional principle.