When the candles went out

What happened

By 1734 New Hampshire's loggers had been fighting the Crown's claim to the white pines for a generation. The Naval Stores Act and the White Pine Acts reserved the great trees for the Royal Navy's masts, and the woodsmen, who lived by cutting them, told the surveyors that the king had no wood. David Dunbar, the Surveyor General and lieutenant governor, set out to enforce the law. When he came to the Copyhold saw-mill, the lumbermen greeted him with gunfire and he left. Then he hired ten men in Portsmouth and sent them up the Squamscott River to seize the boards. They put up at Gilman's tavern in Exeter and spent the evening drinking. At about nine o'clock on 23 April some thirty men dressed, not very convincingly, as Indians, burst into the taproom, put out the candles and beat the hired men, dragging some out of the house and throwing them down the bank. Rothbard calls it a pitched battle and says the New Hampshire Council refused Dunbar military support (CiL, p. 708). Governor Belcher had the Council issue a proclamation against the riot and sent the tale to London. In Rothbard's verdict the decrees could not stop the destruction of the royal woods and left the woodsmen permanently enraged.