houses, in one of which Mr. Oliver was, but happily they were diverted from this pursuit by a gentleman telling them, that Mr. Oliver was gone with the Governor to the Castle. Otherwise he would certainly have been murdered.
When Governor Bernard tried to call out drummers to alert the local militia, he was told that most of the drummers were probably in the mob. The governor then fled to the safety of Castle William in Boston Harbor. Later that night, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson took matters in hand. Bernard described his fate:
After 11 O’Clock, the mob seeming to grow quiet, Lt. Governor Hutchinson and the Sheriff ventured to go to Mr. Oliver’s house to endeavor to persuade them to disperse. As soon as they began to speak, a ringleader cried out, “The Governor and the Sheriff! To your arms, my boys!” Presently after a volley of stones followed, the two gentlemen narrowly escaped through favor of the night, not without some bruises.
The day after this riot, Andrew Oliver promised to resign his commission as Stamp Distributor.
On August 26, 12 days after the first riot, Boston witnessed another one. At dusk a huge crowd gathered around a bonfire on King Street. Shouting “Liberty and Property!” the mob split into two groups. One group made its way to the home of William Story, an official of the vice-admiralty court (which tried smugglers and other violators of trade laws). This group wrecked Story’s house, plundered its contents, and burned official papers. The other group inflicted a similar fate on the home of Benjamin Hallowell, comptroller of customs.
The night was still young, so the two mobs combined forces and marched to the beautiful house of Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts. Hutchinson described what happened:
The hellish crew fell upon my house with the rage of devils and in a moment with axes split down the doors and entered. My son, being in the great entry, heard them cry, “Damn him, he is upstairs; we’ll have him.”
When the rioters discovered that Hutchinson had left, they set to work on his house and possessions. The destruction, as Hutchinson noted, was systematic and thorough:
One of the best finished houses in the Province had nothing remaining but the bare walls and floors. Not contented with tearing off all the wainscot and hangings and splitting the doors to pieces, they beat down the partition wall; and although that alone cost them near two hours they cut down the cupola and they began to take the slate and boards from the roof and were prevented only by the approaching daylight from a total demolition of the building. The garden fence was laid flat, and all my trees broke down to the ground. Such ruins were never seen in America. Besides my plate and family pictures, household furniture of every kind, my own, my children and servant’s apparel, they carried off about 900 sterling in money and emptied the house of everything whatsoever except a part of the kitchen furniture, not leaving a single book or paper in it, and have scattered or destroyed all the manuscripts and other papers I had been collecting for 30 years together besides a great number of public papers in my custody.
The leader of the Boston riots was Ebenezer McIntosh, a shoemaker and commander of Boston’s south-end gang. When McIntosh was arrested, some leading merchants informed the sheriff that should additional violence occur, no one would try to stop it. McIntosh was released.
Some other rioters were arrested, but a crowd entered the home of the jailer and compelled him to surrender the key. No one was ever punished for participating in the Boston riots.
News of the Boston riots spread quickly throughout the colonies. The Boston Sons of Liberty provided a strategic model that other colonies adopted to prevent the Stamp Act from being implemented. New organizations sprang up everywhere, and these Sons of Liberty used violence and threats of violence to pressure stamp distributors to resign.
The New York distributor, James McEvers, wished to avoid the fate of Boston’s Andrew Oliver. McEvers explained that he could not risk losing his property:
I have a large store of goods and seldom less than twenty-thousand pounds currency value in it with which the populace would make sad havoc. With respect to my own person I am not much concerned about it, but I must confess I am uneasy about my store, as a great part of what I have been laboring hard for is centered there.
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