26. Response in Connecticut

Jared Ingersoll, a high Tory of Connecticut, proved not as easy to convince as his fellow stamp masters. Ingersoll, as Connecticut’s agent in London, had learned to move amiably in high Tory circles there. He had become a close friend of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Jackson, John Temple, surveyor general of the New England customs, and Thomas Whately, secretary to George Grenville and the author of the final draft of the Stamp Act.

News of Ingersoll’s appointment as stamp distributor did not at first arouse much wrath, but by the time he arrived at New Haven in early August the popular temper was beginning to rise. The attacks began with an article in the Connecticut Gazette of August 9, by Naphtali Daggett, professor of divinity at Yale, who denounced Ingersoll as a traitor, and trenchantly ridiculed the idea that “since ’tis decreed [the country] must fall, who can blame me for taking a part in the plunder?” Throughout the colony in Lebanon, Norwich, Windham, and New London, Ingersoll was hung in effigy during the latter part of August; and the last three counties launched a movement to force Ingersoll’s resignation. Armed companies in Windham, Norwich, and New London in eastern Connecticut, threatened to march on New Haven against him. A troop of five hundred easterners armed with staves, and including militia officers, formed themselves into the Sons of Liberty and marched westward to meet Ingersoll at Wethersfield on September 19. Ingersoll argued and ranted, but severe threats of lynching finally changed his mind, and he was forced to confirm his resignation in front of the Connecticut Assembly.

As a rationalist Old Light Presbyterian in a colony of growing adherence to a now diluted evangelical New Light cause, Ingersoll dealt his religious group a severe blow by becoming a stamp master. The blow was compounded by the conservatism of most of the Connecticut Old Lights on resistance to the hated Stamp Act. With the notable exception of the Reverend Ebenezer Devotion, Old Light minister in Windham, most of the resisters and Sons of Liberty in Connecticut were New Lights. Furthermore, Governor Thomas Fitch, an Old Lighter, though elected by the people of Connecticut, announced his intention to enforce the stamp tax, and thus put paid to the Old Light cause in the colony. Only four members of the Connecticut Council supported Fitch in this most unpopular stand.