Loyal Nine

In the summer and fall of 1765, a group of men from the middle ranks of Boston society called themselves the Loyal Nine and organized the initial street resistance to the Stamp Act (1765). The group may have been a social club before the Stamp Act crisis. By the beginning of 1766, the Loyal Nine began to use the name adopted by similar groups in other communities—the Sons of Liberty. The Loyal Nine strove to keep their activities a secret. They printed handbills calling for crowd action against stamp agent Andrew Oliver and built the effigies used by the mob. They developed a close relationship with mob captain Ebenezer McIntosh, who had previously been known for his role in Pope Day celebrations. They also organized other demonstrations and elicited a second public resignation of Oliver as stamp distributor in December 1765.

Because John Adams visited one of their meetings in January 1766, we have a list of the probable members. His diary included the following names: John Avery, a distiller or merchant; John Smith, a brazier; John Smith, a printer; Joseph Field, a ship captain; Benjamin Edes, a printer; Stephen Cleverly, a brazier; Henry Bass, a merchant; George Trott, a jeweler; and Thomas Crafts, a painter. Some scholars believe that Field, like Adams, was just visiting the meeting, and that Henry Wells was the ninth member. There is also strong evidence indicating that Samuel Adams was closely connected to the Loyal Nine. Whatever the exact membership of this organization, it played the central role in the Stamp Act resistance in Boston.

See also resistance movement.

Further reading: Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972); Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to a Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

Lyon, Matthew (1750-1822) politician Matthew Lyon rose from humble beginnings to become a leading Democratic-Republican politician. He was born in Ireland and immigrated to the North American colonies at age 15. After acquiring enough money to purchase land, Lyon settled in Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1772. Marrying Mary Hosford (niece of Ethan Allen) one year later, he moved again in 1774, after purchasing land in the Hampshire Grants (Vermont) from the Allen brothers.

Lyon quickly became involved in the local militia (the Green Mountain Boys), where he was promoted to colonel and was prominently known in the border country of Lake Champlain. He participated in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. After the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) Lyon joined the Continental army as a second lieutenant near the Canadian border. He was dishonorably discharged from the army after his troops got into some disciplinary trouble, but he was soon reinstated, serving with distinction during General Arthur St. Clair’s retreat before General John Burgoyne’s invasion in the summer of 1777. Lyon resigned from the army after Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga (October 17, 1777), heading back to the Green Mountains region, where he became involved in politics and business.

Although Vermont was still technically a part of New York (the United States did not admit Vermont as a state until 1791), settlers in the Green Mountains wrote their own state constitution in 1777 (see also constitutions, state). In this breakaway state government, Lyon acted as deputy secretary to the governor and represented Arlington in the legislature. After his first wife died in 1782, he married Beulah (Chittenden) Galusha and one year later moved to Fairhaven, where he became a leading businessman. There, Lyon owned 400 acres of land rich in iron, timber, and waterpower. Lyon established his own printing press and newspaper (the Farmer's Library ) in 1793, with which he openly advocated direct representation, sympathized with the French Revolution (1789-99), and opposed the views of Alexander Hamilton. With cloth paper not meeting his publishing needs, he invented a new process of making paper out of basswood.

Lyon was known for boasting of the role his press played in the formation of the Democratic-Republican

Party. He ran for federal office, winning a seat in Congress in 1796. Because of his background and party affiliation, many of the other congressmen viewed him with contempt and made him the butt of cruel jokes. The Federalist Party press attacked him relentlessly and ridiculed his Irish birth and his former status as an indentured servant. This abuse led to an infamous confrontation in 1798, when, after Roger Griswold insulted Lyon’s military record, Lyon spat in Griswold’s face. Griswold then assaulted Lyon with a cane, wherein Lyon grabbed a pair of fire tongs. A fencing match ensued on the floor of the House of Representatives. The Federalist Party then attempted to censure Lyon’s behavior in Congress but failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote.

The Federalist Party, however, used the Sedition Act (see also Alien and Sedition Acts) to prosecute Lyon because he had mocked President John Adams for his preparations for war with France and called it “a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, or selfish avarice.” Lyon also made fun of the president in several speeches. Convicted of sedition, Lyon was fined $1,000 and sentenced to four months in jail. Lyon continually published throughout his imprisonment and was reelected to Congress before his release date. While members of the Federalist Party tried to bar him from his seat, Democratic-Republicans defended his innocence.

In 1801 Lyon resettled to Kentucky, where he founded the city of Eddyville. There his life mirrored that of the successful businessman he had been in Vermont. He remained politically active as well, representing Kentucky in Congress from 1803 to 1811. He was defeated for reelection in 1811 mostly because of his opposition to the policies leading to the War of 1812 (1812-15). Lyon’s business suffered during the war, but his friendship with President James Monroe brought him a political appointment in 1820. Lyon moved to Spadra Bluff, Arkansas, where he managed the trading activities of the Cherokee Nation until his death two years later.

See also journalism.

Further reading: Aleine Austin, Matthew Lyon, “New Man” of the Democratic Revolution, 1749-1822 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1981).

Macintosh, Ebenezer (1737-1816) activist Ebenezer Macintosh was a shoemaker who achieved brief fame and notoriety for the role he played in Boston’s Riots against the Stamp Act in 1765. Macintosh was born to an impoverished family and apprenticed as a shoemaker. He had few career prospects. Shoemakers in Boston were generally poor and in the years prior to the Revolutionary War (1775-83) their fortunes were declining.

In the 1760s, Macintosh emerged as a popular leader among the poor in Boston’s South End. He was a leading participant in the town’s celebrations of Pope Day (November 5)—effigy parades celebrating the Protestant succession in Great Britain. During the early 1760s Boston’s Pope Day celebrations had become increasingly violent. On November 5, 1764, prior to the procession, a young boy fell under the carriage carrying the South End pope effigy and was killed. In response, the sheriff and militia were called out to destroy the North and South End effigy popes and to cancel the celebration. The officials destroyed the North End pope but a South End crowd, under the leadership of Macintosh, defended their effigy. The North Enders rebuilt their pope and a raucous, violent celebration ensued. For his part, as “captain” of the South End procession, Macintosh was arrested but was acquitted in a trial in February 1765.

Soon after Macintosh’s acquittal, Parliament adopted the Stamp Act. in Boston, opposition to the Stamp Act was coordinated by a group of artisans and lesser merchants known as the Loyal Nine. in August 1765 the Loyal Nine mediated the unification of the North and South End mobs prior to the disturbances that led to the resignation of Andrew Oliver, a Boston merchant suspected as the likely Stamp Act collector in Massachusetts. Macintosh led a crowd of more than 3,000 in demonstrations on August 14, which included destroying an effigy of Oliver as well as ransacking the merchant’s office and home. The next day Oliver resigned as stamp distributor (a post to which he had not yet been appointed). Bostonians had rendered the

Stamp Act a dead letter. The solution proved infectious and soon similar demonstrations followed by resignations were held throughout the colonies. Macintosh also helped to lead the mob that attacked and gutted Thomas Hutchinson’s house on August 26.

Although Ebenezer Macintosh was a popular leader in 1765, many of the men who tried to guide the resistance movement (1764-75) may have been uncomfortable with him because of his social standing. He reappeared in the streets on Pope Day in 1765, wearing a blue and gold uniform trimmed with lace, bearing a rattan cane and a speaking trumpet, in mockery of men like Andrew Oliver whom he had humbled. Macintosh, however, soon returned to obscurity. There is no record of his participating in the angry crowds protesting imperial regulations in the late 1760s and 1770s. in fact, he ran upon economic hard times and languished for awhile in debtor’s jail. Many years later he claimed to have led the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773), but no evidence exists to back this assertion. in 1774 Macintosh left Boston to settle in Haverhill, New Hampshire. He spent most of the rest of his days there in poverty, dying in 1816 in the local poor farm.

Further reading: George P Anderson, “Ebenezer Mackintosh: Stamp Act Rioter and Patriot,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 26 (1924-26): 15-64; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).

—Francis D. Cogliano

Macon, Nathaniel (1758-1837) Speaker of the House, anti-Federalist

A veteran of the Revolutionary War (1775-83) and 37 years as a member of Congress, Nathaniel Macon was born near Warrenton, North Carolina in 1758. He emerged from the war as one of the leading figures in his home state and became a vigorous supporter of STATES’ RIGHTS and a committed ANTI-FEDERALIST. Macon fought against RATIFICATION OF the Constitution because he believed it concentrated too much power in the hands of the central government. However, he became an influential political figure in the new republic upon his election to the House of Representatives in 1791.

Macon served as Speaker of the House between 1801 and 1807 and remained a committed Democratic-Republican despite his brief association with a political faction known as the “Quids,” who supported James Monroe over James Madison as the man they wanted to succeed Thomas Jefferson as president. He won a seat in the Senate following the War of 1812 (1812-15) and served as a senator from 1815 to 1828. During his last two years in office he also served as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, thus retiring as the fourth most powerful elected official in the United States.

In both houses of Congress Macon vigorously opposed Federalist Party policies, from the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) to protective tariffs, and strongly attacked the chartering of the Second Bank of the United States. He was a champion of personal liberty and limited government throughout his life, and he ironically opposed a bill that bears his name and represents his most enduring legacy in the popular mind: Macon’s Bill No. 2, which Congress passed in 1810, reopened TRADE with Great Britain and France, and the embargo of 1807 had banned three years earlier. Like its predecessors, however, the bill failed to stop the drift toward war between the United States and Great Britain in 1812. Macon died in 1837.

Further reading: William E. Dodd, The Life of Nathaniel Macon (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1903).

—Lance Janda