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Illustrated Episode · Volume III, chapter 24 · 1 November 1765

Burn the governor's coach

At night a closed coach burns on a green, flames lighting a ring of packed faces and two effigies hanging from a wooden gibbet, with the dark ramparts and gun muzzles of a stone fort looming behind and sparks rising.
New York, November 1765. Two thousand New Yorkers, sailors and carpenters and old soldiers among them, burn Lieutenant Governor Colden's coach beneath a gibbet hung with effigies of Colden and the devil, under the muzzles of the guns of Fort George. Rothbard says the crowd defied the mayor and Council to do it. Chapter 24 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

The stamped paper reached New York at the end of October 1765, and it found the city waiting. The Sons of Liberty, organized only days before, had posted warnings that whoever used the paper should take care of his house, person and effects. Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden had the stamps landed by night at Fort George, and the commander there, Major Thomas James, boasted he would cram them down New Yorkers' throats with the end of his sword. On the night of 1 November about two thousand of them, many of them old soldiers and privateersmen, along with seamen, carpenters and country people, marched to the fort with effigies of Colden and the devil. The mayor and Council tried to send them home and failed. The crowd took Colden's coach from its coach house, paraded it, hung the effigies on a gibbet, and burned all of it on the green under the fort's guns. Then they leveled Major James's house. Four nights later a threat to storm the fort made Colden, on Gage's advice, hand the stamps to the city. Rothbard credits a mass base of artisans, small businessmen and laborers, led by merchants such as Isaac Sears, for forcing the surrender of a tax collected behind cannon.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. III, ch. 24, 'Response in New York', pp. 878-879, at p. 879. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. New-York Mercury, 4 November 1765 ('under the Muzzles of the Fort Guns, where a Bon-Fire was immediately made, and the Drummer, Devil, Coach, &c. were consumed amidst the Acclamations of some Thousand Spectators'), as quoted in a search summary of the New-York Historical Society blog, 'No Stamped Paper to be Had: The Stamp Act 250 Years Later'; the page itself blocked retrieval. Secondary source
  3. 'It's Been 250 Years Since the Event that Kicked Off the American Revolution: The Stamp Act Crisis', History News Network (procession, the portable gallows with effigies of the governor, Grenville and the devil, Colden's carriage from a carriage house outside the fort, the fort's cannon turned on Bowling Green, the bonfire). Secondary source
  4. Joel Tyler Headley, The Great Riots of New York, 1712 to 1873 (1873), on the 1765 riot (the gibbet, Colden hanged in effigy and beside him a figure holding a boot, taken to be the devil or Lord Bute; the coach dragged round the streets by torchlight), as quoted in a web summary. Secondary source
  5. NYC Revolutionary Trail, 'Bowling Green' (the 1765 protestors burned an effigy of the acting governor and his coach there; the statue of George III came after the repeal). Secondary source