A hundred men with clubs

What happened

East Jersey's towns had refused Governor Jeremiah Basse's sharp new taxes in 1699, and by the summer of 1700 they were shutting the proprietors' courts, jostling their judges and freeing their prisoners. Rothbard tells how Sheriff John Stewart's jailings in Monmouth County ended on 17 July, when the prisoners' friends beat him and drove him off, and how Lewis Morris, once the rebels' own leader, now turned on them and warned Governor Andrew Hamilton. Hamilton raised a posse of forty or fifty men, marched them the ten miles from Shrewsbury to Middletown, and demanded the surrender of two rebel leaders, Richard Salter and John Bray. About a hundred Middletown men with clubs walked out and stood across the road to meet him. Rothbard's arithmetic is the whole story: "the free men of Monmouth County by now numbered six-to-one against Hamilton and Morris" (CiL, p. 479). Nobody struck a blow. A compromise averted a clash, the prisoners posted bail, and the posse went home; Andrew Bowne, reporting to Basse on 30 July, wrote that the governor's men had withdrawn before a much larger force. A Monmouth grand jury later indicted sixteen men, and the rebels, Rothbard says, remained undaunted. Whole towns would no longer obey proprietary law, and soon the proprietors gave up the government of the Jerseys to the Crown.