Read aloud under the Liberty Tree

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 42 for his account.

Charleston was the South’s biggest trading town, and in the spring of 1769 its merchants would not join the boycott of British goods that had swept Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The planters and the town’s mechanics would, and Rothbard says it was Christopher Gadsden, merchant and planter both, who welded them into one alliance, with Peter Timothy’s South Carolina Gazette as their voice. On July 3 and 4, two hundred and thirty mechanics signed a pledge under the Liberty Tree, the live oak on the edge of town where they met. The merchants railed and signed a weaker one of their own. Then a joint committee of merchants, planters and artisans wrote a single agreement, and on July 22 Gadsden read it to a great audience under the same tree. Over four hundred signed and named a General Committee of thirty-nine, thirteen from each group. Signers would import nothing from Britain until every Townshend duty was repealed, and any South Carolinian who would not sign was to be boycotted. Rothbard admires what the merchants missed: nobody was forced by the state, and a boycott is a pledge of free people.