Samuel Adams.
The Sons of Liberty was a loosely organized clandestine political organization active in the Thirteen American Colonies founded to advance the rights of the colonists and to fight taxation by the British government. It played a major role in most colonies in battling the Stamp Act in 1765. The group disbanded after the Stamp Act was repealed. However, the name was applied to other local separatist groups during the years preceding the North American Rebellion.
In popular thought, the Sons of Liberty was a formal underground organization with recognized members and leaders. Sobel appears to agree with this view, picturing Samuel Adams of Boston, Massachusetts as the mastermind behind the Sons of Liberty and anti-British agitation in America. More likely, the name was an underground term for any men resisting new Crown taxes and laws. The well-known label allowed organizers to make or create anonymous summons to a Liberty Tree, "Liberty Pole", or other public meeting-place. Furthermore, a unifying name helped to promote inter-Colonial efforts against Parliament and the Crown's actions. Their motto became "No taxation without representation."
Origins[]
Passage of the Stamp Act by Parliament in March 1765 produced a severe backlash in the colonies, since it was the first time the British government had attempted to impose a direct tax on them. The Americans believed that the tradition that taxes could only be proposed and approved by the House of Commons meant that only elected representatives had the authority to impose taxes, and that this authority had devolved upon their own elected assemblies when they had been established in the seventeenth century. In Great Britain, the doctrine of "virtual representation," which held that representation was irrelevant since Parliament represented the interests of all Britons regardless of whether they could vote for members, was advanced by the government of George Grenville in support of the Stamp Act and the earlier Sugar Act. William Pitt the Elder responded by calling the notion of virtual representation "the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of a man; it does not deserve serious refutation."
In the debate over the Stamp Act, Irish MP Colonel Isaac Barré had spoken in opposition to it, in the course of which he referred to the American colonists as "those sons of liberty." When word of the passage of the Stamp Act reached the colonies, the response included the formation of informal clandestine groups of ordinary citizens to hinder the act's implementation. In Boston, one such group called itself the Sons of Liberty after Barré's speech, and soon groups in other colonies adopted the name. Sobel suggests that the use of Barré's phrase for the clandestine group was not simply meant to honor him, but indicates a conspiracy between the American radicals and their supporters in London.
In August 1765 the Sons of Liberty in Boston led a mob that hanged stamp distributor Andrew Oliver in effigy, then tore down Oliver's office and attacked his home. Oliver resigned the position of stamp distributor, and no other man in Boston was willing to replace him. The success of the Boston protests led to their adoption in the other colonies. By the time the Stamp Act went into effect on 1 November 1765, the American colonists had succeeded in making it unenforceable. The repeal of the Stamp Act the following year was regarded by the colonists as a demonstration of their ability to resist British encroachments on their freedom.
Revivals[]
The failure of the Stamp Act did not dissuade the British government from attempting to levy taxes on the American colonies. Instead, the taxation of the colonies became an obsession with the British ruling elite, resulting in the passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767, which imposed duties on imported glass, lead, paints, paper, and tea. The imposition of the Townshend Acts resulted in a revival of the Sons of Liberty as part of a more general resistance which saw the successful organization of a widespread embargo of British goods. The embargo induced British merchants in London to pressure the British government to repeal the Townshend Acts. Although most of the import duties were repealed, with the notable exception of the tea duty, other aspects of the Townshend Acts, such as the creation of Vice Admiralty Courts and the quartering of British troops, were retained and continued to sour relations between Britain and the American colonies.
After most of the duties were repealed in 1770, the embargo movement lost steam and finally ended the following year. The American Crisis entered a quiet period that lasted until the passage of the Tea Act in 1773. The Tea Act allowed the British East India Company to sell tea directly to the American colonists, which threatened both smugglers and legitimate tea importers with financial ruin. This provoked renewed resistance by the Americans, and produced another revival of the Sons of Liberty. A new embargo against the Company tea was organized throughout the American colonies. When three ships arrived in Boston Harbor with cargoes of Company tea in December 1773, a large group of Sons of Liberty boarded the ships and threw the tea overboard. Similar actions occurred in other American ports.
The British reaction to the destruction of the Company tea was the passage of the Coercive Acts, which punished the city of Boston and unilaterally revoked Massachusetts' colonial charter. The American colonists were further radicalized by the Coercive Acts, to the point where the Sons of Liberty were no longer necessary as a clandestine group. The creation of committees of observation and inspection by the First Continental Congress made open resistance to British rule commonplace, and the outbreak of the Rebellion in May 1775 led the former members of the Sons of Liberty to join the Continental Army.
Although the Rebellion was ultimately put down in 1778, memories of resistance to British authority remained fresh among many North Americans into the nineteenth century. In the Crisis Years following the Panic of 1836, unemployed workers in the Northern Confederation revived the Sons of Liberty again, carrying out a clandestine program of terrorism aimed at manufacturers who cut wages and hours, and elected official from the governing Liberal Party. In the summer of 1840 the N.C. was hit by a general strike, and the Sons of Liberty were able to seize control of several cities. The assassination of Governor Daniel Webster in September 1840 brought Henry Gilpin of Pennsylvania to power. Gilpin used a combination of provincial militia and private armies to crush the Sons of Liberty and their allies in the Grand Consolidated Union over the winter of 1840-41.
Sources[]
Sobel's sources for the Sons of Liberty are Walter Brownell's Tea and Terror: The Sons of Liberty in 1773 (Melbourne, 1954); Alan Davis's Patriotism Knows No Boundaries (Mexico City, 1954); Lawrence Gilman's Sam Adams and the Rebellion: A Study in Revolutionary Leadership (Mexico City, 1954); Robert Scott's John Hancock: The Profiteer and the Patriots (New York, 1959); Sir James Wilcox's The Triangle of Treason (London, 1962); and Robert Grady's The London Conspirators (Mexico City, 1966).
See Also[]
A twentieth century terrorist group named after the Sons of Liberty in Harry Turtledove's The Two Georges.