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Patrick Henry, who at age twenty-nine had just been elected to the legislature. In the dignified setting of the House of Burgesses, Henry dared to repeat his challenge to crown authority that he had earlier made in the Parson’s Cause. Just as Julius Caesar had had his Brutus and King Charles I his Oliver Cromwell, so he did not doubt that some American would now stand up for his country against this new tyranny. Henry was stopped by the Speaker of the House for suggesting treason; and some of his resolves (including one proclaiming the right of Virginians to disobey any law that had not been enacted by the Virginia assembly) were too inflammatory to be accepted by the legislature. Nevertheless, colonial newspapers printed the resolves as though the Virginia assembly had endorsed them all. Many Americans became convinced that Virginians had virtually asserted their legislative independence from Great Britain.
    Henry’s boldness was contagious. The Rhode Island assembly declared the Stamp Act “unconstitutional” and authorized the colony’s officials to ignore it. In October 1765 thirty-seven delegates from nine colonies met in New York in the Stamp Act Congress and drew up a set of formal declarations and petitions denying Parliament’s right to tax them. But as remarkable as this unprecedented display of colonial unity was, the Stamp Act Congress, with its opening acknowledgment of “all due Subordination to that August Body the Parliament of Great Britain,” could not fully express American hostility.
    Ultimately it was mob violence that destroyed the Stamp Act in America. On August 14, 1765, a crowd tore apart the office and attacked the home of Andrew Oliver, the stamp distributor for Massachusetts. The next day Oliver promised not to enforce the Stamp Act. As news of the rioting spread to other colonies, similar violence and threats of violence spread with it. From Newport, Rhode Island, to Charleston, South Carolina, local groups organized for resistance. In many places fire and artillery companies, artisan associations, and other fraternal bodies formed the basis for these emerging local organizations, which commonly called themselves Sons of Liberty. Led mostly by members of the middle ranks—shopkeepers, printers, master mechanics, small merchants—these Sons of Liberty burned effigies of royal officials, forced stamp agents to resign, compelled businessmen and judges to carry on without stamps, developed an intercolonial network of correspondence, generally enforced nonimportation of British goods, and managed antistamp activities throughout the colonies.
    BRITISH REACTION
    In England the Rockingham Whigs (who had been critical of the policies of George III and Grenville) were now in charge of the ministry, and the government was prepared to retreat. Not only were these Whigs eager to disavow Grenville’s policies, but they had close connections with British merchants who had been hurt by American economic boycotts. In February 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act.
    Despite the British government’s attempt to offset its repeal of the Stamp Act by a declaration that Parliament had the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” after 1765 the imperial relationship and American respect for British authority—indeed, for all authority—would never be the same. The crisis over the Stamp Act aroused and unified Americans as no previous political event ever had. It stimulated bold political and constitutional writings throughout the colonies, deepened the colonists’ political consciousness and participation, and produced new forms of organized popular resistance. In their mobs the people learned that they could compel both the resignation of royal officials and obedience to other popular measures. Through “their riotous meetings,” Governor Horatio Sharpe of Maryland observed in 1765, the people “begin to think they can by the same way of proceeding accomplish anything their