THE FATAL STAMP Effigies, Raging Fires, Houses Wrecked and Defraying “The Expences of Defending, Protecting, Looted, Rampant Propaganda, Swelling Outrage
Number 108 / Spring 2015 MHS Miscellany THE FATAL STAMP Effigies, raging fires, houses wrecked and Defraying “the Expences of defending, protecting, looted, rampant propaganda, swelling outrage. and securing” the colonies meant, in short, paying Welcome to Boston, 1765. the salaries of British troops who were stationed In March 1765, Parliament passed, and George in North America with nothing much to do since III assented to, the Stamp Act. The resulting un- the close of the French and Indian War. Tensions rest arguably marks the start of the American between American colonists and British forces, Revolution. Two hundred and fifty years later, the not at all helped by the Stamp Act, would continue MHS commemorates the passage (and popular to mount, coming to a dramatic head in the Boston rejection) of the Stamp Act with the exhibition, Massacre four years later. now on display, God Save the People! From the The response in Boston was vehement. Stamp Stamp Act to Bunker Hill. To tell the story masters, agents commissioned to admin- of the coming of the American Revo- ister the tax, faced the very real threat lution in Boston, this exhibition fol- of gang and mob violence. One such lows the evolution of colonial thought figure, Andrew Oliver, was hanged and political action through the let- in effigy from what would later be ters and diaries of men and women called the Liberty Tree, and a mob caught up in the conflict, together ransacked his home—after they had with political cartoons, newspapers, leveled the stamp office—in the first maps, and portraits.
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