Episode Details

In the summer of 1765, the argument over the Stamp Act came down out of the pamphlets and into the streets. This is the story of the Sons of Liberty: the Boston effigy that hung from the Liberty Tree, the shoemaker Ebenezer Mackintosh and his united mob, and the two August nights that showed the colonies what popular resistance could do, and what it could cost.

One night forced a royal officer to quit. The other tore apart the home of Thomas Hutchinson, a man who had himself opposed the tax, and left the lieutenant governor borrowing a coat amid the ruins of his life’s work. Through it all, a young John Adams argued with himself in his diary about whether this was liberty or simply a mob. By November 1st, the most unavoidable tax ever designed was a dead letter from New Hampshire to South Carolina. The colonists had discovered they could make themselves ungovernable. The harder question was whether they could control what they had unleashed.