A cutlass at the governor's door

What happened

On the morning of 17 November 1747 the Royal Navy's press gangs had taken almost fifty Boston laborers and dragged them to Commodore Knowles's ships, and the town answered at once. Several hundred seamen and laborers with cutlasses and clubs seized naval officers as hostages and beat the sheriff. They carried their captives to the house of Governor William Shirley, who had been a lawyer before he was a governor and was used to being obeyed. Shirley wrote afterward that part of the crowd came through his courtyard to his door, and that one of them, armed with a cutlass, answered him in an insolent manner. His son-in-law struck the man's hat off his head and asked if he knew who he was talking to, and the noise stopped. Shirley took the officers inside. Rothbard says he cowed the crowd into giving up a few, but the mob took courage again, beat a deputy sheriff and put him in the stocks, broke the Town House windows that evening, and burned a barge on the Common. By nightfall Shirley had fled to Castle William. Knowles threatened to shell the town, and Shirley talked him out of it. The impressed men were freed (CiL, p. 719). Boston had won its point, and Shirley called it an insurrection.