“people like to tell themselves that the origins of american independence were non-violent. but it’s not true”

On a warm August evening in 1765, Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor of the British colony of Massachusetts, sat down to supper in his mansion, one of the finest homes in the colonial city of Boston.

As he prepared to eat, word reached Hutchinson that an angry mob was advancing. He swiftly “directed my children to fly to a secure place” and withdrew to a nearby house, “where I had been but a few minutes before the hellish crew fell upon my house with the rage of devils and in a moment with axes split down the door and entered”.

The horde tore apart Hutchinson’s mansion, from room panelling to roof tiles, drinking his wine and stealing silverware and money. By the following day, he wrote, “nothing remained but bare walls and floor”.

The rampage that wrecked Hutchinson’s home on 26 August 1765 was the culmination of months of unrest among colonists protesting the wildly unpopular Stamp Act, passed by the British parliament in March 1765. This act, which would take effect the following November, imposed a tax on legal and official papers and publications circulating in Britain’s 13 North American colonies. Heated opposition had flared in cities including New York, Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, with strident objections published in pamphlets and newspapers. And just 12 days before the attack on Hutchinson’s mansion, an effigy of Boston’s stamp tax agent had been hanged, stamped on, decapitated and burned.

Hutchinson himself believed that the Stamp Act should be repealed; rather than condemning colonists’ protests outright, he had merely advocated moderation. But, with his record of enforcing government levies, Hutchinson was branded a supporter of the tax, and became a focus of colonists’ ire. So on that August night, a mob incited by a clandestine organisation called the Sons of Liberty surged into action. Having marched on the homes of court officials and c