The Sons of Liberty

These began in boston, in a early summer of 1765, when a group of shopkeepers and artisans, who called the selves the loyal 9, began preparing for agitation against the stamp act. As these group grew, it came to be known as the Sons of Liberty. These where not the leading man of boston, but where workers and trades man.amongst the members were two men who could generate much public sentiment about the Act. Benjamin Edes, a printer, and John Gill of the Boston Gazette produced a steady stream of news and opinion. The first widely known acts of the Sons took place on August 14, 1765, when an effigy of Andrew Oliver was found hanging in a tree on Newbury street, along with a large boot with a devil climbing out of it. By the end of that year the Sons of Liberty existed in every colony. Their most popular objective was to force Stamp Distributors throughout the colonies to resign.Wherever these groups existed they were either directed in secret by leading men in the community or actually lead by them. However, there were opportunists everywhere, too, who would use the name Sons of Liberty to carry out acts of revenge and other violence not related to the cause. For example, in South Carolina a group of sailors, calling themselves The Sons of Liberty, formed a mob to coerce money from people on the streets. The success of these movements in undermining the Stamp Act cannot be attributed to violence alone. Their most effective work was performed in newsprint. A great part of the Sons were printers and publishers themselves and even those who were not, were sympathetic to the cause. It was they who would pay the most in duties, after all. Nearly every newspaper in the colonies carried daily reports of the activities of the Sons of Liberty. When the Stamp Act became effective on the 1st of November, 1765, nearly all of these papers went right on publishing without the required Stamp. So it was that the first efforts to unite the colonies were not undertaken by their respective legislatures, but by these independent radical groups. The various Sons throughout the colonies began to correspond and develop a larger organization.