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Illustrated Episode · Volume III, chapter 31 · 19 February 1766

The collector's desk is forced

In a plain timber room, armed men in coats and felt hats hold a stout man in a grey wig by the arms while another forces open a writing desk and pulls out papers, three vessels' masts in the window behind.
Brunswick, North Carolina, February 1766. A thousand armed men of the Cape Fear association have marched on the port, and they seize customs collector William Dry and break open his desk for the papers of the ships held for lack of stamps. Dry and Captain Jacob Lobb give up the three vessels. Rothbard says North Carolina was at last free of Stamp Act tyranny. Chapter 31 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

By January 1766 the ports of North America were opening, one customs official after another giving way to crowds. Cape Fear was the holdout. Captain Jacob Lobb of the Royal Navy had seized several vessels coming in with clearance papers from other ports, because those papers carried no stamps, and William Dry, the collector at Brunswick, meant to send them to the Vice Admiralty Court at Halifax. On February 18 a group of citizens from Brunswick, New Hanover and Bladen counties met at Wilmington and formed an association to stop the Stamp Act. It gathered a thousand men and marched on Brunswick. They took Dry, broke open his desk on February 19 and searched for the ships' papers, and Governor Tryon wrote that night of armed men watching every approach to his house. The next day they got Lobb to give up the vessels and promise to let the port open. On February 21 they rounded up every court and customs official and made each swear not to carry out the Stamp Act. Rothbard counts it the liberation of North Carolina: a thousand armed citizens put the act out of force at Cape Fear in three days, and the happy citizens sailed back to Wilmington on the liberated ships.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. III, ch. 31, 'Ignoring the Stamp Tax', pp. 894-902 (Cape Fear, pp. 897-898). CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, vol. 7 (Raleigh, 1890), editor's preface pp. viii-ix, summarising Governor Tryon's letters of February 1766 (the desk broken open on 19 February, about 150 armed men at the Governor's house, the committee aboard the Viper on the 20th). Read on docsouth.unc.edu through a fetch tool that returned the preface's sentences on request. Secondary source
  3. NCpedia, 'Dry, William, III' (born 1720; collector of the port of Brunswick from 1761; died 3 June 1781), read as a search-engine summary. Secondary source
  4. North Carolina Historic Sites, 'Early Revolutionaries', Brunswick Town and Fort Anderson (the Dobbs and Patience held for unstamped clearances; several hundred armed colonists at Russellborough; Dry and the stamp master Pennington made to resign), read through a fetch tool that summarises pages. Secondary source
  5. data/cil/registry/eras/southern-colonies-1710-1770.yaml, dress and arms entries (planters and officials, frontier settlers). Secondary source