24. Response in New York

The people of Massachusetts and Rhode Island had now set the example. The other colonies were not slow to follow. Neither was the lesson lost on the appointed stamp distributors in the remaining colonies. As early as August 26, New York’s stamp master, James McEvers, threatened with the same fate as Oliver, hastily resigned his post before mob action surfaced. On September 2, the frightened William Coxe, stamp distributor for New Jersey, hastily resigned his post even though he had received no threats from the populace. In Maryland, stamp master Zachariah Hood refused to resign even after a mob razed his house on September 2, an act that followed the whipping, pillorying, hanging, and burning of his effigy. The people of Maryland saw that more drastic measures were necessary; they set upon Hood and forced him to flee for his life to New York City. There he was driven from an inn by New York radicals, but found congenial refuge at Fort George, run by Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden. Hood had not yet resigned but he was no longer a present danger to Marylanders.

New York might be free of its stamp distributor, but the potential menace of the stamped paper remained. The paper arrived from England toward the end of October, but it found the people of New York ready to meet it, headed by the Sons of Liberty of New York, formed a few days before. The Sons organized a crowd of some two thousand New Yorkers to prevent the landing of the stamped paper. But the implacable Tory Cadwallader Colden arranged for a British warship to stand watch while the paper was unloaded at night at his fortress on Fort George. That night, October 26, the following warnings were posted throughout New York City:

Pro Patria

The first Man that either distributes or makes use of

Stampt Paper

Let him take Care of his House, Person and Effects.

Vox Populi

We Dare.

The evening before the Stamp Act was to take effect, a public meeting warned that the Stamp Act would be disobeyed. A crowd paraded through the city shouting “Liberty!” and threatening to bury alive Major Thomas James. James, commander of the troops at Fort George, had boasted that he “would cram the stamps down the [New Yorkers’] throats with the end of his sword.”

The following night, November 1, a mob of about two thousand New Yorkers, many of them former soldiers and privateersmen as well as seamen, carpenters, and rural folk, marched to the house of the hated Colden, carrying and then hanging and burning effigies of Colden and of the devil. The crowd, defying efforts of the mayor and Council to disperse it, broke into Colden’s coach house and paraded around the coach, later hanging the two effigies on a public gibbet and then burning them along with the coach and other Colden carriages. The mob then broke into Major James’ home, smashed the interior, and leveled the house.

The people had not yet attacked Fort George to seize the stamps. At this point conservative opponents of the stamp tax bitterly tried to dissuade the people from such a bold course. Led by Robert R. Livingston and James Duane, the conservatives gained the concession from Colden that he would not issue the stamps. But the radical-liberal leaders were not to be put off by this tactical retreat: the stamped papers themselves must be destroyed! Armed New Yorkers passed into the city to support an attack on the fort, and posters signed by such Sons of Liberty names as “Sons of Neptune”—an organization of seamen—and “Free Sons of New York” threatened an all-out assault on the fort on the night of November 5 unless the stamped papers were surrendered. Under this threat, Governor Colden, on the advice of the British general Thomas Gage and the New York Council, finally capitulated and turned the paper over to the municipal authorities. In mid-November, a second shipment of stamps was again turned over to the municipal corporation.

The Sons of Liberty, the indomitable leaders of the radical resistance in New York City, were unsurprisingly led by wealthy merchants and lawyers, and rested on a mass base of artisans, small businessmen, and laborers. Its original leaders had been the liberal lawyers William Livingston and John Morin Scott, but they were soon replaced by better and more radical organizers, who were also wealthy merchants: Isaac Sears, a privateer; John Lamb, a manufacturer of mathematical instruments; and Joseph Allicocke.