Stand for our privileges

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 56 for his account.

In the spring of 1687 Sir Edmund Andros’s council, sitting with no elected assembly, ordered every town in the Dominion to elect a commissioner to help assess a new tax. On the night of 22 August the selectmen and leading men of Ipswich, with the minister John Wise, met at the town clerk John Appleton’s house and agreed that “it was not the town’s duty any way to assist that ill way of raising money without a General Assembly.” The next day the town met in legal town meeting. Wise spoke vigorously against a tax laid without a vote of the people’s own representatives, and told his neighbors they had a good God and a good king and should do well to “stand for our privileges.” The whole assembly voted, twice, that it was “not willing to choose a Commissioner,” and forbade the selectmen to lay any rate until a General Assembly agreed (Waters, Ipswich, pp. 238-239). Other Essex towns followed Ipswich. Then the government struck. Wise, Appleton and four more Ipswich men were arrested, tried before Dudley, Stoughton, Usher and Randolph, jailed for nearly a month and fined, Wise and Appleton fifty pounds each on a thousand-pound bond, and the resistance to the tax collapsed. Rothbard says the order “abridged their liberty as Englishmen” (CiL, p. 406). When Wise pleaded the rights of Englishmen, Dudley told him that he had no more privileges left “than not to be sold for slaves” (p. 406).