Free American Fun by John Beckman Page A

before. He accepted their challenge to bury neighborhood hatchets and lead them as one against the Stamp Act.
    Early on the morning of August 14, on fashionable Newbury Street, Andrew Oliver’s effigy swung from what thereafter would be theLiberty Tree. It was adorned with a couplet of Thomas Morton–gradesatire: “A goodlier sight who e’er did see? / A Stamp-Man hanging on a tree!” Next to Oliver was adevil puppet, crawling out of an oversize boot (a pun on the Stamp Act’s Earl of Bute). “Many Gentlemen,”Governor Bernard wrote to Lord Halifax, “especially some of the Council, treated it as a boyish sport,” but Bernard suspected worse. Young toughs defended the dummies all day, even threatening the sheriff’s deputies who tried to take them down. One-third of the city’s schoolboys were given recess to witness this vision of civil disobedience. Meanwhile, as the crowds spilled over onto the Common, mock stamp stations blocked the city gates to hold up traffic in and out of Boston. By late afternoon, folks from Boston and far-flung counties—with estimates numbering up to eight thousand—had gloried in the shame of the Massachusetts colony’s third-ranking official. The
Boston Newsletter
reported, “So much were they affected with a Sense of Liberty, that scarce any could attend to the Task of Day-Labour; but all seemed on the Wing of Freedom.” Who could work in the midst of such fun?
    Late in the day theeffigies were cut down, and McIntosh paraded them, with his bumptious thousands, past the highest halls of government. They projected their message through council chamber windows, giving “three huzzas by way of defiance,” then pressed on to the Kilby Street docks, gleefully dismantling Oliver’s half-constructed stamp officeand disporting themselves by “stamping” its bricks. This body of the people gained diversity as it went, taking on ever more respectable sorts who never would have joined aPope’s Day parade, or even raised their voices in public. Tradesmen and merchants suddenly had reason to take to the streets and cheer and wave banners and act like ruffians; even some gentlemen, disguising themselves as laborers, betrayed their class and joined the fun. Arriving after nightfall on nearby Fort Hill, the leaders built a bonfire and cremated the effigies—as “a Burnt-Offering … for those Sins of the People which had caused such heavy Judgements as the STAMP ACT etc. to be laid upon them.” Apart from the pointed demolition of Andrew Oliver’s home (and another building he had under construction), no further property was damaged, and other than the chief justice and sheriff—who received “some bruises”—not a soul was injured.
    The complex prank was a roaring success. It caused Andrew Oliver’s resignation, which, asSamuel Adams wrote, “gave universal Satisfaction throughout the Country.” He acknowledged that the event followed a ragged discipline, but said it was “justifyd” all the same—as “legal steps” had failed.
    While Samuel Adams flitted from one sphere to another, inquiring into his countrymen’s “fears and jealousies,” listening to all levels of his highly striated Boston,John Adams stayed committed to theGreat Chain of Being. “There is,” he wrote, “from the highest Species of animals upon this Globe which is generally thought to be Man, a regular and uniform Subordination of one Tribe to another down to the apparently insignificant animalcules in pepper Water.” In this stratified worldview the working classes, it often seems, weren’t far above the animalcules. It stands to reason that, asRichard Allen Ryerson argues, John Adams’s most comfortable political position may have been, in his own fanciful terms, “republican monarchist.”
    Samuel didn’t join his friends, theLoyal Nine, in stirring mobs against the Stamp Act. (He supported a British boycott, which would have been legal in any case.) John Adams, who disapproved of illegal