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Illustrated Episode · Volume III, chapter 28 · 19 October 1765

A funeral for the stamp master

At dusk in a torchlit street, six men carry a stuffed figure in a gentleman's coat on a bier, a horned devil and a huge boot on poles above the crowd, a tall empty gallows behind them.
Charleston, October 1765. Two thousand people take down the effigy of stamp master Caleb Lloyd from a high gallows and carry it off in a mock funeral, a devil and a boot borne beside it. On October 29, under threat of death, Lloyd agrees to suspend his office. Rothbard calls Charleston a notable example of radical resistance to the Stamp Act. Chapter 28 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

Caleb Lloyd, South Carolina's stamp distributor, stepped off the ship at Charleston on October 18, 1765, with the stamped paper, and Governor William Bull soon lamented that men's minds had been "universally poisoned" with principles from Boston and Rhode Island. The next day the town built a high gallows at its center and hung an effigy of Lloyd from it, with a devil at one side and a boot at the other, under mottoes such as "Liberty and no Stamp Act." That evening two thousand people took the effigies down and paraded them in a mock funeral. They searched the house of George Saxby, the stamp inspector still at sea, found no paper, and over a hundred Sons of Liberty stormed Fort Jackson and destroyed the stamped sheets. The crowd burned the effigies, buried a coffin dubbed "American Liberty," and searched the homes of Tories and British officers. Lloyd fled to Fort Johnson, and on October 29, under threat of death, he and Saxby agreed to do nothing until Britain decided whether to enforce the act. Rothbard credits Christopher Gadsden, who led the movement through Charleston's artisans. By November 1, he says, not one stamp master in the colonies remained ready, willing, or able to enforce it.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. III, ch. 28, 'Response in the Carolinas and Georgia', pp. 886-888. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. Hicks, 'Colonial Charles Town endures a violent response to the Stamp Act', The Post and Courier (Charleston), 2020; its account (a gallows at Broad and Church streets on 19 October 1765, an effigy under a sign, a procession, burning) was read only as a search-engine summary because the page itself returned HTTP 429. Secondary source
  3. data/cil/registry/eras/southern-colonies-1710-1770.yaml, dress and architecture entries (Charleston's timber and brick houses; enslaved and free laborers' dress). Secondary source
  4. data/cil/registry/eras/urban-colonial-1760-1775.yaml, dress entries for artisans, laborers, seamen and women. Secondary source