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Slavery, Violence, and the Stamp Act of 1765

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Slavery, Violence, and the Stamp Act of 1765 W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2014 "The Fatal Year": Slavery, Violence, and the Stamp Act of 1765 Joshua Fogarty Beatty College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Beatty, Joshua Fogarty, ""The Fatal Year": Slavery, Violence, and the Stamp Act of 1765" (2014). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623642. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-96gh-3y07 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “The Fatal Year”: Slavery, Violence, and the Stamp Act of 1765 Joshua Fogarty Beatty Plattsburgh, NY Master of Library and Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 2010 Master of Arts, College of William and Mary, 2002 Bachelor of Arts, University of Rhode Island, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Lyon G. Tyler Department of History The College of William and Mary May 2014 © Copyright by Joshua Fogarty Beatty 2013 APPROVAL PAGE This Dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Ap ■' - ~ 4 i \ / i no v^vnoyo ui vviniaiii emu mcny Associate Professor Chandos Brown, History and American Studies The College of William and Mary Associate Professor Ronald Schechter, History The College of William and Mary ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that the American colonists came to resist the Stamp Act of 1765 through equating it with slavery, a state still understood as resulting from surrender in war. This metaphor both dominated print discourse and served to justify violence against supporters of the Act. Slavery rhetoric implied that resistance through violent struggle was essential for the colonists both to win their freedom and to demonstrate to the wider world that they deserved such freedom. Understanding resistance in these terms reveals the close connections between the rhetoric deployed against the Stamp Act and the actions taken against stamp officers and other supporters of the Act. A close examination of the chronology of rhetoric and resistance shows that it was the colonists’ commitment to violent struggle—the actions of urban crowds and of a vigilant network of Sons of Liberty—that prevented enactment of the Stamp Act. And it was knowledge of that resistance that caused Parliament to vote against sending troops to enforce the Stamp Act, well before merchants and manufacturers testified to their economic straits. The four chapters proceed chronologically through the period May 1765 - May 1766. The first chapter examines the colonists’ decision to resist the Stamp Act and ends in July 1765. Chapter 2 is a study of the crowd actions against crown officers in August through October. The third chapter contrasts the ineffectual Stamp Act Congress with the actions of the Sons of Liberty in the winter of 1766, while the final chapter focuses on the repeal celebrations of May 1766. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Dedications iii List of Figures iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Virginia Resolves and the Origins of Violent Resistance 11 Chapter 2. Crowd Violence and the Fear of Slavery 66 Chapter 3. The Stamp Act Congress and the Sons of Liberty 128 Chapter 4. Repeal and “Rejoicings” 176 Conclusion 229 Bibliography 232 Vita 244 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My advisor, James P. Whittenburg, has been tireless in his support for me as a researcher, teacher, and librarian for my entire tenure at William and Mary. The members of my dissertation committee, Chandos Brown, Holly Mayer, and Ron Schechter, read the manuscript closely and gave me valuable (and unexpected) insights during my defense. Many institutions have directly funded the research and writing of this dissertation. These include the Lyon G. Tyler Department of History at the College of William and Mary, the General Society for Colonial Wars, the Charles Center at William and Mary, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Foundation. At the Virginia Forum in 2011 I was encouraged to keep writing at a time that support was most needed. Much thanks to my co-panelists there, Kevin Hardwick and Jon Kukla, and to Brian Daugherity for a very long pep talk. My colleagues at SUNY Plattsburgh have been tremendously supportive in my attempt to juggle a full-time job with research and writing. Rhys Isaac's Transformation of Virginia was the first history I read cover-to-cover. Working with Rhys was an honor; my one regret is that I dallied too long for him to see the final product. Ellen Adams deserves a purple ribbon for living the 1760s with me for the past eleven years. Thanks, Ellen. For Rhys iii LIST OF FIGURES 1. “A View of the Obelisk,” 1766 203 iv INTRODUCTION This dissertation represents the first book-length study of the Stamp Act in the American colonies since Edmund and Helen Morgan’s The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution from 1953. As such, it incorporates nearly sixty years of historiographical and methodological evolution to reinterpret the resistance to the Stamp Act as a specifically colonial moment, rather than simply one step on an inevitable and logical path to the American Revolution. The four chapters proceed chronologically through the period May 1765 - May 1766. The first chapter examines the colonists’ decision to resist the Stamp Act and ends in July 1765. Chapter 2 is a study of the crowd actions against crown officers in August through October. The third chapter covers the long winter of nullification, while the final chapter focuses on the repeal celebrations of May 1766. Throughout, this dissertation looks specifically at the colonists’ point of view and uses sources penned in the heat of the moment to reconstruct their states of mind as they reacted to events. It focuses on slavery as the dominant metaphor colonists used for the Stamp Act and shows how the metaphor both dominated print discourse and served to justify violence against supporters of the Act. Parliament passed the Stamp Act in early 1765. Intended to raise revenues to offset the costs of the Seven Years’ War, the Act taxed nearly all printed papers used in the colonies: newspapers, customs forms, and legal writs were among those. The colonists received word of the Stamp Act in May 1765. It was set to be enacted on 1 November. 1 Paper, pre-stamped, would be shipped to the major port or capital of each colony, where a single designated stamp officer would take charge of the paper and, perhaps through sub­ distributors, sell it to the colonists. The colonists were initially disposed to submit to the Stamp Act, as they had the Sugar Act. Some planned a congress of representatives from each colony to petition King and Parliament for relief. However, over the summer of 1765 a spirit of resistance grew. Resistance hardened into a movement that through threats and violence nullified the Stamp Act by forcing the stamp officers to resign. By 1 November none in the colonies between New Hampshire and Georgia were willing to enforce the Act. During the long winter groups of Sons of Liberty in many towns took on the tasks of keeping the colonies free from stamped papers in their particular regions and of forming communities of mutual aid with the Sons in other towns. At the same time, Parliament, alarmed by the riots in the colonies and pressured by merchants and manufacturers who feared loss of trade, steadily moved towards a repeal of the Stamp Act. The King signed the repeal in March 1766; the colonists celebrated with great “rejoicings” in May of that year intended to demonstrate their renewed loyalty to the mother country. The broadest historiographical trend with which this dissertation converses is that of the history of the coming of the American Revolution. O f those works, the muse for and nemesis of this project has been Edmund and Helen Morgan’s classic The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. The Morgans argued for the importance of principled, constitutional opposition to the Stamp Act, culminating in the rational declarations of a congress made up of a representative cross-section of colonists. For the Morgans, the riots against stamp 2 officers were at best a sideshow. This dissertation bows to the Morgans’ breadth of sources and subtle narrative; it nevertheless takes issue with them on several substantive points.' The other two agreed classic works that have been of great influence are from opposing viewpoints: Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins o f the American Revolution and Gary Nash’s Urban Crucible. Bailyn, rightly, identified a current of fear and uncertainty running through the writings of the time. What he saw in his very limited set of sources—he only consulted political pamphlets of the era—is magnified in the news reports and essays of the other major print source of the time, weekly papers. Bailyn’s, though, is about a revolution of the mind. Nash brings that revolution crashing to earth, identifying how the lower classes of the urban seaports had similar sensibilities but had very different particular grievances. In this dissertation I try to show how this current of fear both shapes and is shaped by the specific events of 1765 and 1766.2 Within the larger historiography of the onset of the Revolution, some specific trends can be seen.
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