On Wednesday morning, August 14, 1765, Andrew Oliver awoke to find himself hanging in effigy from a Boston Liberty Tree. Like all those who accepted the position of stamp distributor, Oliver’s effigy swayed “the whole day without the least opposition,” the Boston Evening Post reported. In the evening, “a number of reputable people assembled,” took down the effigy, and paraded it “in a regular and solemn manner” through the streets. Stopping at the dock on Kilby Street, the crowd leveled a building reputed to house the dreaded stamps. Taking “the wooden remains,” the crowd marched in a mock funeral procession to Fort Hill, where they kindled “a noble fire” and committed the effigy to the flames “for those sins of the people which had caused such heavy judgments as the Stamp Act, etc., to be laid upon them.”

Naturally harrowed by the incident, Oliver resigned his position the next day. “The newspapers will sufficiently inform you of the abuse I have been met with,” he wrote to Jared Ingersoll, a fellow stamp distributor in Connecticut. “After having stood the attack for 36 hours—a single man against a whole people—[and] the government not being able to afford me any help during the whole time, I was persuaded to yield in order to prevent what was coming.”

The Stamp Act birthed a crisis in America that had no parallel. “I took every step in my power to prevent the passage of the Stamp Act,” Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania’s agent in London, wrote. “But the tide was too strong against us.” Passed overwhelmingly by Parliament in March 1765 despite a flood of petitions against it, the legislation went beyond the regulations of trade in previous times and levied fifty-five different duties directly on the colonists. No piece of paper escaped the new taxation, which included duties on attorney licenses, playing cards, land grants, college diplomas, and newspapers. “For every skin or piece of vellum or parchment, or sheet of paper, on which shall be engrossed, written, or printed,” the colonists read over and over again for twenty-five pages, “a stamp duty.” “Poor America,” Edmund Pendleton wrote. “Every kind of business transacted on paper is taxed.” 

Americans took particular umbrage at the taxation of their newspapers, which by 1765 had become a cherished medium of free expression. The act, the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote, “was a millstone round the colonial printer’s neck, for it hampered him not only as a newspaper publisher but also in all other phases of his business.” Nearly every aspect of the printing business became the object of new taxes, which covered sheet sizes, pamphlets, almanacs, and advertisements. Failure to comply, of course, would result in heavy fines. “I must Die, or submit to that which is worse than Death,” the defiant New Hampshire Gazette declared, “be Stamped, and lose my Freedom.” 

Most American printers were determined not to comply. “Be not intimidated,” John Adams wrote anonymously in the Boston Gazette, “your paper deserves the patronage of every friend to his country.” “The liberty of free inquiry is one of the first and most fundamental of a free people,” declared a writer in the unstamped New London Gazette. “The press,” the editor of the Connecticut Gazette wrote, “is the test of truth, the bulwark of public safety, the guardian of freedom, and the people ought not to sacrifice it.” On Saturday, September 21, the radical printer William Goddard published the Constitutional Courant, a single-issue, single-page newspaper in New Jersey “Containing Matters interesting to Liberty, and no wise repugnant to Loyalty.” Vowing not to give in to “the vile minions of tyranny and arbitrary power,” the Courant declared, “Let it be our honor, let it be our boast, to be odious to these foes to humankind.” 

And odious they would be. Riots demanding the resignation of stamp distributors took place throughout the colonies. In Connecticut, a party of hundreds surrounded Ingersoll and forced him to resign. After acquiescing, the mob instructed him to throw his hat in the air and shout, “Liberty and property!” three times. 

From Portsmouth to Savannah, effigies of stamp distributors, along with those resembling royal governors and the King’s ministry, lit the night sky, and on October 3, the elderly John Hughes, the only remaining stamp distributor north of the Potomac, resigned.

In Virginia, Patrick Henry declared that the colonial assembly alone had the “right and power to lay taxes and impositions…and that every attempt to vest such power in any person or persons, whatsoever other than the General Assembly…has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom.” “The countenance of so respectable a colony as Virginia confirmed the wavering, and emboldened the timid,” David Ramsay wrote. “Opposition to the Stamp Act, from that period, assumed a bolder face.”

By the end of the year, the colonists had effectively defeated the Stamp Act. “If Great Britain can or will suffer such conduct to pass unpunished,” Hughes wrote, “a man need not be a prophet to see clearly that their empire in North America is at an end.” Eleven years later, the colonies declared independence.

Standing inside the Old North Church in Boston on April 18, 1975, President Gerald Ford said, “It is well to recall this evening that America was born of both promise and protest—the promise of religious and civil liberties, and protest for representation and against repression.” 

Years earlier, in 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and [is] as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

Democracy may be noisy on occasion—even silly—but it’s better than the alternative: as Jefferson wrote, “I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude.”

Dakoda Pettigrew is a summa cum laude graduate of Liberty University with a Bachelor’s of science in political science and history. Pettigrew’s father went to school in Cassville, and he lives in Tennessee. He can be reached at [email protected].