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Illustrated Episode · Volume III, chapter 23 · 27 August 1765

The Tory Junto swings in effigy

Before a long brick courthouse, three cloth effigies with ropes round their necks hang from a wooden gallows in afternoon sun, while three hunched men in heavy coats and flapped hats hold clubs in front of it and a crowd looks up.
Newport, Rhode Island, August 1765. Three effigies with halters round their necks hang from a gallows before the courthouse: Augustus Johnston, Martin Howard and Dr. Thomas Moffat, the Tory Junto. Three leading merchants stand guard with clubs. Rothbard says Rhode Island, always libertarian, leaped to follow Boston, and within days the stamp distributor had resigned. Chapter 23 of Conceived in Liberty.

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

What happened

On 27 August 1765, Newport answered Boston. A procession carried three effigies through the main street, each with a halter round its neck and a label pinned to its breast, and hanged them side by side from a gallows before the town courthouse. They were the Newport Junto: Augustus Johnston, the new stamp distributor, and two men who had argued for Parliament's right to tax, the lawyer Martin Howard and the physician Dr. Thomas Moffat. A song pinned up with them promised that whoever betrays his country for a post makes a rope for himself. Rothbard stresses who stood guard: the three leading merchants of Newport, William Ellery, Robert Crook and Samuel Vernon. Moffat complained afterward that they walked under and before the gallows in muffled big coats, flapped hats and bludgeons. The men they had hanged took the hint. Moffat left town, Howard and Johnston took refuge on the warship Cygnet, and the crowd cut down the effigies and burned them that night. By 29 August Johnston had resigned, and Howard and Moffat sailed for England. In two days the people of Newport had cleared out the colony's strongest friends of the Stamp Act, and Massachusetts was no longer alone.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. III, ch. 23, 'Rhode Island Responds', pp. 874-877, at pp. 874-876. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. Newport Mercury, 2 September 1765 (Thomas Moffat's complaint: the merchants 'walked under and before [the gallows] in muffled big coats, flapped hats and bludgeons'), as quoted in the essay below; the original issue was not read. Secondary source
  3. 'The Newport Junto: a Bumbling Bunch of Tories who Inflamed Colonial Newport's Stamp Act Riots', Rhodes Gallery blog, 20 October 2018 (guards Ellery, Vernon and Crook with bludgeons; the effigies on the south side of the Colony House; dates the gallows 26 August). Secondary source
  4. New England Historical Society, 'Newport Stamp Act Riot Sends Loyalists Packing' (quotes the Newport Mercury: 'Various Labels were affixed to their Breasts, Arms, &c'; effigies carted through the streets, hanged on the gallows, cut down and burned). Secondary source
  5. Newport Historical Society, 'The Colony House' (built 1739-1741, designed by Richard Munday; brick, two storeys, eighty by forty feet; the Stamp Act riot of 1765 took place in front of it; clock added 1783). Secondary source