The Loyal Nine (also spelled Loyall Nine) were nine American patriots from Boston who met in secret to plan protests against the Stamp Act of 1765. Mostly middle-class businessmen, the Loyal Nine enlisted Ebenezer Mackintosh to rally large crowds of commoners to their cause and provided the protesters with food, drink, and supplies. A precursor to the Sons of Liberty, the group is credited with establishing the Liberty Tree as a central gathering place for Boston patriots.
Sometime after the Stamp Act was passed in March 1765, the Loyal Nine began meeting at the office of the Boston Gazette with the goal of preventing the act from taking effect that November. [1] In August, they found a mob captain among the common people to do their bidding: a shoemaker by the name of Ebenezer Mackintosh. [2]
Mackintosh already had experience leading unruly mobs. Once a year on November 5, Boston's lower classes celebrated Pope Night, an anti-Catholic holiday in which rival gangs from the North and South Ends battled for the honor of burning an effigy of the pope. As the leader of the South End gang, Mackintosh could easily gather two or three thousand men on short notice. [3] The Loyal Nine arranged for the gangs to unite in protest against the Stamp Act, with Mackintosh as their leader. The officers of the group were wined, dined, and outfitted by John Hancock and other local merchants. [4]
Under the direction of the Loyal Nine, Mackintosh led two mob actions that August, two more in November, and another in December. The first of these protests took place under a large elm tree in Hanover Square near the Chase and Speakman distillery. [5] The tree became known as the Liberty Tree, and was a central gathering place for speeches, processions, and the hanging of effigies. [1] The businessmen took care to keep their own identities secret and let Mackintosh take responsibility for the actions of the mob. Henry Bass, one of the Loyal Nine, admitted as much in a December 1765 letter:
We do everything in order to keep this and the first Affair Private: and are not a little pleas'd to hear that McIntosh has the Credit of the whole Affair. [6]
Members of the Loyal Nine may have participated in the Stamp Act protests along with Mackintosh and his mob. Witnesses reported seeing "gentlemen" dressed as workmen in the crowd, and one witness saw a rioter's trouser leg slide up, revealing silk stockings. [7]
The businessmen later distanced themselves from Mackintosh. Some felt he had allowed the protests to become too violent, particularly the August 26 raid that destroyed the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. [8] Fearing Mackintosh was another "Masaniello" (an Italian fisherman who had led a proletarian rebellion in the 17th century), they replaced him with Thomas Young and William Molineaux, members of their own social circle. [9]
The Loyal Nine all became active members of the Sons of Liberty. By some accounts, they were the leaders of the organization in its earliest days. [1] [10] [11]
Loyal Nine members Henry Bass, Thomas Chase, and Benjamin Edes became members of the North End Caucus, [10] a political group reputedly involved in the planning of the Boston Tea Party. John Avery, Thomas Chase, Steven Cleverly, and Thomas Crafts attended the planning meeting. It was held in a small counting room above Chase and Speakman's distillery. At the actual event, Bass, Chase, Crafts, and Edes actively participated in the destruction of British East India Company tea. [1]
According to the Boston Tea Party Museum, the nine members were: [1]
Samuel Adams, who is often credited with founding the Sons of Liberty, was not a member of the Loyal Nine, but often met with them. [1] Several other men are thought to have been involved with the group at one time or another:
Paul Revere was an American silversmith, military officer and industrialist who played a major role during the opening months of the American Revolutionary War in Massachusetts, engaging in a midnight ride in 1775 to alert nearby minutemen of the approach of British troops prior to the battles of Lexington and Concord.
The Stamp Act 1765, also known as the Duties in American Colonies Act 1765, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which imposed a direct tax on the British colonies in America and required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper from London which included an embossed revenue stamp. Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not in colonial paper money.
Thomas Hutchinson was an American merchant, politician, historian, and colonial administrator who repeatedly served as governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He has been described as "the most important figure on the loyalist side in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts". Hutchinson was a successful merchant and politician who was active at high levels of the Massachusetts colonial government for many years, serving as lieutenant governor and then governor from 1758 to 1774. He was a politically polarizing figure who came to be identified by John Adams and Samuel Adams as a supporter of unpopular British taxes, despite his initial opposition to Parliamentary tax laws directed at the colonies. Hutchinson was blamed by British Prime Minister Lord North for being a significant contributor to the tensions that led to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War.
The Province of New York was a British proprietary colony and later a royal colony on the northeast coast of North America from 1664 to 1783. It extended from Long Island on the Atlantic, up the Hudson River and Mohawk River valleys to the Great Lakes and North to the colonies of New France and claimed lands further west.
The Sons of Liberty was 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 and throughout the entire period of the American Revolution. Historian David C. Rapoport called the activities of the Sons of Liberty "mob terror."
The Townshend Acts or Townshend Duties were a series of British acts of Parliament passed during 1767 and 1768 introducing a series of taxes and regulations to enable administration of the British colonies in America. They are named after the Chancellor of the Exchequer who proposed the program. Historians vary slightly as to which acts they include under the heading "Townshend Acts", but five are often listed:
The Tea Act 1773 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive. A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.
Andrew Oliver was an American-born merchant and colonial administrator in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Born into a wealthy and politically powerful merchant family, he is best known as the official responsible for implementing the provisions of the Stamp Act, for which he was hanged in effigy. He never actually carried out those duties and was later commissioned as the province's lieutenant governor.
The Gaspee affair was a significant event in the lead-up to the American Revolution. HMS Gaspee was a Royal Navy revenue schooner that enforced the Navigation Acts around Newport, Rhode Island, in 1772. It ran aground in shallow water while chasing the packet boat Hannah on June 9 off of Warwick, Rhode Island. A group of men led by Abraham Whipple and John Brown I attacked, boarded, and burned the Gaspee to the waterline.
The Liberty Tree (1646–1775) was a famous elm tree that stood in Boston, Massachusetts near Boston Common in the years before the American Revolution. In 1765, Patriots in Boston staged the first act of defiance against the British government at the tree. The tree became a rallying point for the growing resistance to the rule of Britain over the American colonies, and the ground surrounding it became known as Liberty Hall. The Liberty Tree was felled in August 1775 by Loyalists led by Nathaniel Coffin Jr. or by Job Williams.
Isaac Sears was an American merchant, sailor, Freemason, and political figure who played an important role in the American Revolution.
The Boston Tea Party was an American political and mercantile protest on December 16, 1773, by the Sons of Liberty in Boston in colonial Massachusetts. The target was the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the East India Company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts. The Sons of Liberty strongly opposed the taxes in the Townshend Act as a violation of their rights. In response, the Sons of Liberty, some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company.
John Rowe (1715–1787) was a property developer and merchant in 18th century Boston, Massachusetts. As a merchant, John Rowe's most famous cargo was the tea that played a starring role in the Boston Tea Party. As a developer, his name is remembered to this day in the name of Rowes Wharf, a modern development in downtown Boston on the site of his original wharf.
Samuel Adams was an American statesman, political philosopher, and a Founding Father of the United States. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States. He was a second cousin to his fellow Founding Father, President John Adams.
The Philadelphia Tea Party was an incident in late December 1773, shortly after the more famous Boston Tea Party, in which a British tea ship was intercepted by American colonists and forced to return its cargo to Great Britain.
Benjamin Edes was an early American printer, publisher, newspaper journalist and a revolutionary advocate before and during the American Revolution. He is best known, along with John Gill, as the publisher of the Boston Gazette, a colonial newspaper which sparked and financed the Boston Tea Party and was influential during the American Revolutionary War.
Then Province of Maryland had been a British / English colony since 1632, when Sir George Calvert, first Baron of Baltimore and Lord Baltimore (1579-1632), received a charter and grant from King Charles I of England and first created a haven for English Roman Catholics in the New World, with his son, Cecilius Calvert (1605-1675), the second Lord Baltimore equipping and sending over the first colonists to the Chesapeake Bay region in March 1634. The first signs of rebellion against the mother country occurred in 1765, when the tax collector Zachariah Hood was injured while landing at the second provincial capital of Annapolis docks, arguably the first violent resistance to British taxation in the colonies. After a decade of bitter argument and internal discord, Maryland declared itself a sovereign state in 1776. The province was one of the Thirteen Colonies of British America to declare independence from Great Britain and joined the others in signing a collective Declaration of Independence that summer in the Second Continental Congress in nearby Philadelphia. Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed on Maryland's behalf.
Pope Night was an anti-Catholic holiday celebrated annually on November 5 in the colonial United States. It evolved from the British Guy Fawkes Night, which commemorates the failure of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Pope Night was most popular in the seaport towns of New England, especially in Boston, where it was an occasion for drinking, rioting, and anti-elite protest by the working class.
Ebenezer Makintosh was a shoemaker who lived in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is known for his role as a leader in Boston riots protesting the Stamp Act.