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The Sons of Liberty rallied support for colonial resistance through the use of petitions, assemblies, and propaganda, and they sometimes resorted to violence against British officials. Instrumental in preventing the enforcement of the Stamp Act, they remained an active pre-Revolutionary force against the crown .
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Overview
- Prominent Leaders Included Samuel Adams, John Hancock
- The Boston Tea Party
- HISTORY Vault: The American Revolution
Most famous for their role in the Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty used grassroots activism to push back against British rule.
The Sons of Liberty were a grassroots group of instigators and provocateurs in colonial America who used an extreme form of civil disobedience—threats, and in some cases actual violence—to intimidate loyalists and outrage the British government. The goal of the radicals was to push moderate colonial leaders into a confrontation with the British Crown.
The Sons marked one of their early victories in December 1765. The Stamp Act—the first tax imposed directly on American colonists by the British government—had only been in effect for a month, when a group of Boston merchants and craftsmen sent a letter to Andrew Oliver, the newly-appointed official collector of stamps. The group informed Oliver that he was to show up the next day at noon at the Liberty Tree in the city’s South End to publicly resign.
Stamp Act
“Provided that you comply with the above, you shall be treated with the greatest Politeness and Humanity,” the letter explained. The message left to Oliver’s imagination what terrible fate might befall him if he didn’t comply.
Oliver didn’t need much persuading. He appeared as demanded, walking through the streets of Boston in a driving rainstorm and quit his job, to the cheers of a crowd of 2,000 people.
The Sons’ most prominent leader was Samuel Adams, the son of a wealthy brewer who was more interested in radical rabble-rousing than commerce. Adams wrote his masters thesis at Harvard on the lawfulness of resisting British rule. While George Washington eventually led the war effort against the British, “the truth is that there might not have been a fight to begin with had it not been for the work of Sam Adams,” writes historian Les Standiford.
Another key member was John Hancock, who later was immortalized by his flamboyant signature on the Declaration of Independence. James Otis, Paul Revere, Benedict Arnold, and Dr. Benjamin Rush, among others, were also involved in the group.
Adams and Hancock in particular were so loathed and feared by the British that when General Thomas Gage offered amnesty to Bostonians who stopped their resistance in 1775, he made a point of excluding the two men, “whose offences are of too flagitious a nature” not to be punished severely.
It’s not hard to understand why Gage took a hard line against them. After forming in the summer of 1765, the Boston Sons chapter marched through the streets and burned stamp officer Oliver’s effigy, and then broke into and looted his house. When Massachusetts Lt. Gov. and Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson, a loyalist, declined to renounce the Stamp Act, they similarly looted and destroyed his house as well.
The Sons didn’t stop there. After Parliament passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, which imposed import duties on goods such as china and glass, Adams organized a boycott to keep British goods out of Massachusetts altogether. According to Adams biographer Dennis Fradin, the Sons enforced the boycott by sending boys to smash the windows and smear excrement on the walls of local shops that didn’t comply. If that didn’t work, the proprietor faced the risk of being kidnapped and tarred and feathered, a painful, humiliating torture that could leave lasting scars.
“Violence was not necessarily accepted as a regular feature of politics, but there was an understanding that it might be part of politics as a last resort,” explains Benjamin L. Carp a historian at Brooklyn College and author of the 2010 book Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America.
Parliament’s passage in December 1773 of the Tea Act, which propped up the financially struggling British East India Company by giving it a virtual monopoly on selling tea to the colonies, pushed the Sons to become even more brazen. The law threatened the livelihood of the American merchants who had been importing tea from Dutch traders. The Sons couldn’t let that stand.
“I don’t think the Bostonians set out to destroy property. I think they felt it was a last resort,” Carp says. “Their first preference would have been to send the tea back. But when the merchants (consignees) were unwilling, the ship captains were unwilling—it would have ruined them—and the governor was unwilling to bend the rules for them, they felt they had no choice.”
“If they’d allowed the tea to land, they knew that customers wouldn’t be able to resist it—so they would have paid the tax on it AND let a monopoly company, the East India Company, muscle into the local market,” Carp says.
The Bostonians also knew that if they let the tea be unloaded, they’d lose standing in the eyes of other Sons of Liberty groups in New York, Philadelphia and other places, he notes.
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The Sons of Liberty were also responsible for the Burning of the Gaspee in 1772 – a lesser-known act of Patriot resistance, in which a British customs ship was set alight off the coast of Rhode Island. Learn about the Sons of Liberty, and what they did to help the cause of the American Revolution.
The Sons of Liberty was a loosely organized, clandestine, sometimes violent, political organization active in the Thirteen American Colonies founded to advance the rights of the colonists and to fight taxation by the British government.
I expected Sons of Liberty to be something similar to that: a documentary with re-enactments of the events leading up to the revolutionary war. Instead, it was more along the lines of...
Nov 24, 2014 · The Sons of Liberty was a group of political dissidents that formed in the North American British colonies during the early days of the American Revolution in Boston, Mass. The following are some facts about the Sons of Liberty: The Sons of Liberty formed to protest the passage of the…
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The Sons of Liberty (this term will be used in the generic sense to refer to all radical groups in the American colonies objecting to the Stamp Act, even though this embraces possibly quite diverse groups, some of which would only adopt the name later, if at all) have been, and continue to be, the subject of many papers and books by historians.
