The Liberty Archive FREECAPITALISTS.ORG

Illustrated Episode · Volume III, chapter 26 · 19 September 1765

Made to cheer for liberty

In a sunlit village street a man in a wig and long coat stands on a wooden chair, one arm flung up as his cocked hat sails into the air, ringed by a crowd of men raising pale staves and hats, with horses and clapboard houses behind.
Wethersfield, Connecticut, September 1765. Five hundred farmers with white staves have held the colony's stamp master for three hours, and Jared Ingersoll gives in. He climbs a chair in the street, resigns, and throws his hat in the air for "Liberty and Property." Rothbard credits the people themselves: the governor meant to enforce the tax, and Connecticut's farmers made sure nobody could. Chapter 26 of Conceived in Liberty.

Download the painting, full size (JPEG)CC BY 4.0

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: credit freecapitalists.org. How to credit.

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

What happened

On 19 September 1765 about five hundred riders from eastern Connecticut, each with a freshly peeled white staff, met the colony's new stamp master, Jared Ingersoll, on the road to Hartford and turned him into Wethersfield. Their commandant, Major John Durkee of Norwich, held him at a tavern on Broad Street for about three hours while Ingersoll argued, stalled and hailed passing assemblymen for help. Durkee finally warned him that he could no longer keep the people off, and Ingersoll decided the cause was not worth dying for. He signed the resignation the committee had written for him, stood on a chair in the street, read it out, and threw his hat in the air for "Liberty and Property" with three cheers. Then the riders, near a thousand by now, escorted him to Hartford to read it again within hearing of the Assembly. Rothbard says "severe threats of lynching finally changed his mind" (CiL, p. 882); no blow was struck, and the force was numbers and resolve. His point is who did it. Governor Thomas Fitch meant to enforce the Stamp Act, and the farmers of Windham and New London counties made it unenforceable. A tax dies when no one will collect it, and in Connecticut the people saw to that without firing a shot.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. III, ch. 26, 'Response in Connecticut', pp. 882-883. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. Jared Ingersoll, narrative of the affair of 19 September 1765, dated New Haven, 23 September 1765, Connecticut Gazette, 27 September 1765; repr. in Franklin B. Dexter, ed., 'A Selection from the Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Jared Ingersoll', Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 9 (1918), pp. 341-349. Primary source
  3. Jared Ingersoll to Thomas Whately, New Haven, 2 November 1765, in Dexter ed., Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 9 (1918), p. 351. Primary source
  4. Connecticut Courant, 23 September 1765, as quoted in Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, vol. I (1904), p. 417. Primary source
  5. Franklin B. Dexter, editorial introduction and notes, Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 9 (1918): portrait note and C. H. Hart's 1879 description, pp. 201-202 (plate facing p. 201); Wethersfield route note, pp. 344-345. Secondary source
  6. Lawrence Henry Gipson, Jared Ingersoll: A Study of American Loyalism in Relation to British Colonial Government (Yale University Press, 1920), pp. 35, 41-42, 178-187, 193-194. Secondary source
  7. Henry R. Stiles, The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut, vol. I (New York, 1904), pp. 415-417 (section by Sherman W. Adams). Secondary source
  8. 'J. Ingersol, stamp agent for Conn.', etching after the 1771 portrait, inscribed 'Nat 1722 - Ob 1781', attributed to Max Rosenthal; New York Public Library, Emmet Collection EM233. Secondary source
  9. Ned Lazaro and Barbara Mathews, 'Picturing Slavery: Clothing, Appearance, and New England Advertisements for Run-Away Enslaved Men During the 18th Century', Historic Deerfield, 14 August 2020. Secondary source
  10. Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum, 'Joseph Webb House' (built 1752, Wethersfield). Secondary source
  11. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute, Tricorne, 1750-75 (108649); the Met object page (metmuseum.org, object 108649) blocks automated link checks, so the Wayback snapshot of 2026-03-13 is cited. Secondary source
  12. Wikipedia, 'John Durkee' (birth 11 December 1728, Windham; death 29 May 1782), consulted 2026-09-29; the article is flagged as single-source. Secondary source