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When South Carolina Learned to Resist

On Oct. 19, 1765, a crowd gathered at the corner of Broad and Church streets in Charleston, South Carolina, and built a gallows.

An effigy representing South Carolina’s stamp distributor was soon hanging from it beneath a sign that read, “Liberty and no Stamp Act.”

The Stamp Act had been passed by Parliament only months earlier. Now Charleston was showing Britain what resistance looked like. The crowd eventually took the effigy down, carried it through the streets in a procession, and burned it.

And that was only the beginning.

Over the next several days, riled up bands of Charlestonians searched buildings and homes suspected of concealing stamped paper.

Around midnight in late October, about 80 masked and blackened-faced men descended on Henry Laurens’ house on East Bay Street, chanting, “Liberty, Liberty & Stamped Paper,” and forced their way inside.

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Laurens, himself an opponent of the Stamp Act, pleaded with them to leave because his wife, Eleanor, was sick and pregnant. They assured him that they “loved and respected” him—but they had come to search the house anyway.

Meanwhile, the pressure on South Carolina’s actual stamp officials was working. George Saxby and Caleb Lloyd, the colony’s stamp inspector and distributor, were pressured at Motte’s Wharf on Oct. 28 to publicly affirm that they would not execute the Stamp Act.

They renounced their commissions, and under a flag bearing the word “Liberty,” a crowd escorted them with bells, drums, music, cannon fire, and cheers to Dillon’s Tavern.

Parliament had passed a law; Charlestonians had decided it would not be enforced.

South Carolina had won its first great confrontation with Parliament without firing a shot at a British soldier.

And at the center of the resistance was a 41-year-old Charleston merchant........

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