The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (24 page)

and hats and carrying bludgeons, guarded these images until late afternoon when a crowd fortified by "strong Drink in plenty with Cheshire cheese," sent by the merchants, gathered and burned the effigies after sunset.
¹⁹
The honorees -- Johnston, Howard, Moffat -- had long since fled the town after receiving warnings that they might be murdered.

The next three days provided evidence that the threats had substance. On Wednesday, the day following the effigy burning, Howard, Moffat, and Johnston made their way back into town, but so did the news of the great riot in Boston against Thomas Hutchinson. That night in Newport, the mob struck Howard's house three times (at eight, eleven, and two o'clock in the morning) and Moffat's twice. The two houses went the way of Hutchinson's, and when the mob finished its work they were little more than shells. Johnston's escaped -- he still commanded some popularity in Newport, and his friends interceded with the mob by promising that Johnston would resign the next day.

The next morning, Thursday, August 29, Johnston returned and resigned in public, but the mob had not yet exhausted itself. Indeed, one of its working leaders, an English sailor named John Webber, boasted in the streets of his leadership and in a thinly veiled attempt at extortion insulted his merchant-patrons. These merchants set the sheriff on Webber; in custody, Webber was delivered to HMS
Cygnet
for safekeeping. Webber's followers thereupon threatened to tear the town apart, especially the houses and warehouses of the merchants, and the merchants sent an abject sheriff to fetch Webber from the
Cygnet.
Back on the streets of Newport, Webber proved unsubdued, threatening once more to pull down houses. The merchants in something of a panic bribed him to quiet down; and the sheriff, now' thoroughly humiliated, offered to lie down while Webber trod on his neck. The day ended with all parties retiring uneasily to their beds.

Webber arose with the sun and once more promised to destroy his onetime sponsors. By this time, Augustus Johnston, now a former stamp distributor but still the attorney general, was back in town. Johnston was a brave man and doubtless more than a little angry. Running into the swaggering Webber on the streets and hearing his renewed threats, Augustus Johnston solved Newport's problem by clapping him into jail.
²⁰

In Connecticut, as in Rhode Island, political factions seized upon the Stamp Act as an opportunity to wound hated rivals.
But whereas

____________________

in Rhode Island the Ward-Hopkins groups joined in battering the Tory Junto, which they perceived as a threat to the charter government, in Connecticut the two factions sought to use the crisis over the Act to destroy one another. The two factions are sometimes referred to as the New Lights and the Old Lights; the New were the supporters of the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the Old the opponents. Religion had given these two factional groups their beginnings, but originally the New and Old Lights had no political cast at all. They gradually acquired one in the fifteen years following the climax of the revival in 1741-42, thanks to attempts to cool its enthusiasm and to several issues having nothing to do with it.
²¹

The Awakening had naturally frightened some solid citizens, just as it had inspired others. It was a frightening, even shattering event, with thousands of men, women, and children convinced that the spirit possessed them, with revivalists denouncing the established ministry as unconverted, with churches splitting, and with excess in personal behavior everywhere in evidence. The solid citizens who controlled the legislature-indeed, most reputable institutions -- tried to deflate what they considered to be a spirit of madness. In the legislature in 1742, they pushed through statutes prohibiting itinerants from preaching and barring the unordained from pulpits. The next year they repealed a longstanding statute providing religious toleration.
²²

Such action gave the New Lights pause and virtually forced them to begin to think politically. A major dispute at Yale College in the next decade, pitting the New Light rector against the First Church of New Haven, encouraged this disposition to think about politics and kept Old Light rage smoldering. The issue at Yale revolved around the plan of Thomas Clap, the rector or head of Yale, to appoint a professor of divinity who would then preach the true faith to faculty and students. Yale College would in this way become a church, a most desirable circumstance in Clap's view, because the Reverend Joseph Noyes of the First Congregational church in New Haven preached in such a cold and insipid style. Yale College was an important institution, and the struggle, which continued until 1756 when Clap got his way, further divided the colony.
²³

____________________

Money and land also contributed to division. The Connecticut charter which was issued in 1662 provided that the colony's western boundary should be the Pacific Ocean. To insist in the 1750s on the validity of this limit, in part the result of seventeenth-century ignorance of American geography, was not altogether reasonable, as some in Connecticut recognized. Nevertheless, in 1754, the Susquehannah Company, an organization of land speculators with expansionist visions, was formed and immediately began planning the settlement of the upper Wyoming Valley. One of the company's problems was that the Wyoming Valley lay within Pennsylvania. Another was that the legislature took a dim view of the company and its claims.
²⁴

In the 1750s the legislature and the governor were Old Light. There were Old Lights in every part of the colony, but most were in the western half and concentrated especially heavily in Fairfield County. The New Lights had also spread themselves, but they too were concentrated, mostly in two eastern counties, Windham and New London. Most of the stockholders in the Susquehannah Company also lived in these eastern counties and most were New Light.
²⁵

Jared Ingersoll, the stamp distributor for Connecticut, was an Old Light, a graduate of Yale College, a lawyer, a onetime king's attorney for New Haven County, a man well acquainted with England and fond of it. He had opposed Thomas Clap's scheme to turn Yale College into a New Light church, and he had opposed the Susquehannah Company's claims to the Wyoming Valley and its attempt to get itself incorporated by the Crown. Not surprisingly, Jared Ingersoll enjoyed a certain reputation in the colony; indeed, the New Lights detested him.
²⁶

The Stamp Act was one more thing Ingersoll had opposed, but though he had predicted heavy weather for the tax in America, he accepted appointment as distributor while still in England. He may have found reassurance in the first reactions from America to his appointment, which became public knowledge late in May 1765. For the postal service soon groaned under the weight of letters to Ingersoll from office-seekers who wrote from towns all over Connecticut asking for appointments as his local representatives. Some of these letters have an obsequious flavor common to such communications: "I should Esteem myself honoured to be thought Worthy your Service; and would Recive the Favour with

____________________

Gratitude . . . and I hope I shall be able to Convince you -- as much as the Difference of station will admit -- how much I am your sincere Friend and Obedient Servent."
²⁷

Ingersoll discovered shortly after his return from England on July 28 that these sincere friends had rather brittle desires to assist him. Local animosities to the new tax were just beginning to be revealed publicly, inspired at least in part by the Virginia Resolves. There were other reasons of course -- no one relishes the obligation to pay taxes, and the people of Connecticut, already overburdened and in default many thousands of pounds, shrank before still another demand. Hence the attacks on the Act and its local representative, Ingersoll, who became an object of vituperation.

Old enemies took advantage of Ingersoll's precarious situation to settle old feuds. Naphtali Daggett, professor of divinity at Yale and a New Light, struck him hard in the pages of the
Connecticut Gazette
. Daggett doubtless hated the Stamp Act as an encroachment upon American rights, but Ingersoll was also a welcome target because of his part in the fight in the 1750s over the professorship of divinity. Daggett described Ingersoll as a man of guile who in justifying his acceptance of the stamp distributorship asked, "But had you not rather these duties should be collected by your brethren than by foreigners?" Daggett marked Jared Ingersoll as a betrayer, and when another attacker pointed out that his initials, J. I., were also those of Judas Iscariot, his "treachery" was made to seem even more reprehensible.
²⁸

Ingersoll and a few hardy friends answered as best they could, but they were up against a growing passion. The first violence seems not to have been used on Ingersoll but on one of his assistants, the venerable Nathaniel Wales of Windham. Sometime after August 15, a crowd surrounded Wales's house and warned him not to travel to New Haven to receive his commission from Ingersoll. Wales broke immediately and wrote to Ingersoll that he had decided not to take the post after all. Other representatives of the stamp distributor did not escape so easily, especially. if they proved stubborn about resigning. In New Providence a crowd threatened to bury the distributor alive when he insisted on remaining in office. The crowd put this stout-hearted soul inside a coffin, nailed the lid shut, and lowered him into a grave. They then began shoveling dirt on the coffin. The official listened to the awful sound of

____________________

dirt striking wood and called for release and thereupon submitted his resignation.
²⁹

The chief object of crowd action, led by men calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, was of course the chief villain in Connecticut, Jared Ingersoll. On August 21 the Sons hanged his effigy in Norwich and the next day in New London. Windham and Lebanon followed suit on August 26, Lyme on August 29, and West Haven burned "a horrible Monster, or Male Giant, twelve Feet High, whose terrible Head was internally illuminated."
³⁰
New Haven, where Ingersoll lived, burned no effigies, but on a September evening a crowd surrounded Ingersoll's house threatening to pull it down should he not resign. Ingersoll appeared before this crowd and explained that he could not resign until the government of Connecticut took a stand; in the meantime, he would not execute his office and would even allow the people to destroy any stamps sent to him.