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THE SONS OF LIBERTY
THE SONS OF LIBERTY
With the passage in 1765 of the Stamp Act and Navigation Acts, which taxed manufactured goods entering the American colonies, the popularity of Whig ideology (the ideas of the sanctity of private property and government by representatives of the people) in the colonies led to impassioned written attacks on the taxes.
Letters began to circulate from committees of correspondence urging boycotts of British goods and other forms of resistance, and from the ranks of the committees, wealthy merchants John Hancock and Samuel Adams formed the sons of liberty in Boston in 1765. Adams managed to win the allegiance of two Boston gangs who carried out violent terrorism for the organization.
The name came from a speech on the Stamp Act by Member of Parliament Isaac Barré, in which he referred to the colonists as "sons of liberty." The sons of liberty engaged in direct action against British rule, more or less covertly. Membership was native-born American white men of the gentry and "middling sort," most of them in the Northern colonies.
The sons of liberty are surrounded to the present day by enormous quantities of folklore and antiquarian fiction. Nevertheless, despite the claims of genealogists and moviemakers, it is clear that the sons were a secret organization meeting at night, likely in the Green Dragon Tavern or some other safe place rather than, as legend has it, beneath the "liberty tree." They were violent and destructive: the New York chapter, led by Alexander McDougall and John Lamb, destroyed the carriage of acting governor Cadwallader Colden in 1765 and later on January 9, 1766, stole and burned 10 boxes of parchment and stamped paper to protest the Stamp Act. That most of this terrorism went to benefit not the gang members who acted but the merchants and landowners who avoided taxes is an irony lost in most accounts of the sons.
The sons of liberty formally disbanded in 1766 after the Stamp Act was repealed. They then reorganized in 1768 to battle the hated Townshend Acts, duties on such manufactured goods as paper, glass, and paint. Lord Frederick North, who became prime minister of Great Britain in 1770, agreed to repeal the Townshend Acts but kept a reduced tax on tea. This led to a series of actions against tea drinking in America.
In 1773, the sons of liberty organized the Boston Tea Party, in which they blackened their faces and seized a British ship, dumping its load of 342 chests of green tea into the Boston harbor. Samples of the tea, recovered from the beaches, remain to this day in museum collections. Although Americans did not cease drinking tea, this vandalism remains the best-known action of the sons of liberty. Throughout the revolutionary period, the sons of liberty continued to fight, eventually disbanding in 1783 with the end of the war. In later years, the original sons and their descendents became national heroes. During the bicentennial of the American Revolution in the 1970s, discussion and reenactment of the actions of the sons brought them back into the public eye. They have also figured in endless historical fiction, such as Esther Forbes' prizewinning Johnny Tremain and even in such science fiction as Larry Niven's A Gift from Earth, where they are the "Sons of Earth."
At present, the sons of liberty are seen as patriots and liberators rather than as the terrorists and stooges for the merchant elite of Boston that they may have seemed at the time. A right-wing group calling itself by the same name is today active in the anti-government, pro-gun, and privacy rights movements.
MLA Citation
Comer, Jim. "sons of liberty movement." American History. ABC-CLIO, 2015. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.
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