Effects of the Stamp Act on Colonial Pennsylvania Politics

Abstract

It I the fatal Stamp, the tombstone edition of the Pennsylvania 15} Journal, October 31, I765, lamented. One and one-half months before, an ugly mob of Philadelphians had planned to attack the houses of John Hughes (the stamp distributor), Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Galloway, and Samuel Wharton. When the stamped paper arrived in Philadelphia, on October 5, another mob had turned out intent on making a bonfire of this symbol of parliamentary oppression and on forcing Hughes to resign his commission.' Mob violence in Philadelphia followed a pattern, established in Boston and repeated elsewhere, of stamp burnings and house wreckings. Because rioting was so widespread, and because the stamped paper was rejected in twelve American colonies, historians have concluded that the feelings of Americans ran so deeply against the Stamp Act that the colonies would have revolted against any sustained attempt to enforce it.2 This conclusion rests on the assumption that the riotous elements, the Sons of Liberty, could have captured control of the political machinery, armed the colonists, and raised the general populace to a fighting pitch. Did feeling in fact run so hotly against the Act and against