In August 1765, a Boston mob led by shoemaker Ebenezer McIntosh tore apart the mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, causing over 2,000 pounds in damage. The trigger was a British tax on paper. This episode unpacks the debt, propaganda and mob violence behind the Stamp Act and how it taught thirteen separate colonies to organize and resist together.

After the Seven Years’ War nearly doubled Britain’s national debt, the government kept 10,000 troops in America and Prime Minister George Grenville sought revenue directly from the colonies. The Stamp Act targeted lawyers, printers and students, required payment in scarce hard currency, and provoked fierce debates over virtual representation. Printers, the Sons of Liberty, the Stamp Act Congress and merchant boycotts forced repeal in 1766, but Parliament paired it with the Declaratory Act.

• Why Britain kept a peacetime army in America and how patronage politics played a role
• The design of the Stamp Act and why it hit the most influential colonists hardest
• Thomas Whately’s virtual representation argument and Daniel Dulany’s rebuttal
• Newspapers printed with mourning borders and skulls, and the hanging of Andrew Oliver in effigy
• Benjamin Franklin’s testimony, the repeal and the Declaratory Act’s claim of authority in all cases whatsoever