First Victory over Tyranny: How Did They Do It?

How a brilliant 18th-century American uprising overturned British despotism

May 04, 2025

The Story of the American Revolution

History must guide the reform of our magnificent democracy

The Americans won the contest. On March 18, 1766, Parliament repealed the despised Stamp Act, restoring liberty and renewed hope for harmony between Britain and the colonies.

But how did they do it? How did they bend the will of the greatest empire on earth without firing a shot, without marching an army, or waging war?

The victory over the Stamp Act did not emerge from any single strain of resistance. Rather, the colonists wove together a tapestry of united strategic action: peaceful protests, violent protests, a nine-colony congress, petitions, pamphlets, economic boycott, lobbying in the halls of London, and—crucially—mass civil disobedience.

Let’s review the three chief sources of the thirteen colonies’ success:

Protests & Petitions
Mass Organizing and Civil Disobedience
Economic Boycott

Protests & Petitions

The Stamp Act wasn’t just another tax. It was a power play, an assertion of imperial supremacy over the colonists’ most sacred right: the right to self-taxation based on representation in government.

There were indeed acts of flagrant property damage, but what mattered far more in reversing Parliament’s tide of tyranny was unity leading to mass civic uprising.

Town meetings rallied ordinary citizens to pledge resistance and organize collective defiance. Colonial assemblies passed resolutions asserting inalienable rights and dispatched constitutional pleas to London.

Newspapers, from Boston to Charleston, published searing editorials, anonymous essays, and impassioned letters condemning the Stamp Act as a violation of British liberty. The papers reprinted rousing speeches from town meetings, resolutions from colonial assemblies, and dramatic reports of protests and resignations of stamp officers.

Patriots flooded the public square with protests and petitions, with the press emerging as the nervous system of the resistance—connecting distant colonies, shaping public sentiment, and turning defiance into doctrine.

Massachusetts called a congress for unified deliberation. John Dickinson wrote an intellectual tour de force. Benjamin Franklin stood before the House of Commons and calmly stated that Americans would “Never” consent to the debasement of their rights to the status of second-class citizens. “Never,” said Franklin repeatedly.

By the fall of 1765, the colonists’ united actions had fanned the flames of liberty, turning protest into a movement.

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Mass Organizing and Civil Disobedience

A key factor in the American colonists’ success in securing the repeal of the Stamp Act was their capacity for mass organizing. In the wake of Parliament’s announcement, resistance coalesced through well-coordinated networks of communication not only for the purpose of protest and petition-writing but also to spread and enforce civil disobedience.

The Sons of Liberty—semi-clandestine, cross-colonial, and disciplined in their pursuit of liberty—were a driving force. By late 1765, they operated in nearly every major port city, orchestrating mass demonstrations, intimidating stamp distributors, publicly refusing to use stamped paper, shutting down colonial courts, and pressuring merchants who complied with the Act.

Colonists suffered for their liberty. Shopkeepers lost income, lawyers lost clients, printers risked arrest, ship captains forfeited cargoes, and ordinary citizens halted business deals, delayed legal claims, and went without imported goods.

Though many of the colonists’ actions were “illegal” by the standard of parliamentary prerogative, the sheer scale of collective defiance overwhelmed imperial capacity. There were simply too many noncompliant citizens to jail. They defied the law faster than it could be enforced.

These sacrifices—economic, legal, and personal—formed the moral backbone of a widespread resistance.

It was civil disobedience at its finest.

The victory over the Stamp Act did not emerge from any single strain of resistance. Rather, the colonists wove together a tapestry of united action: protests, a nine-colony congress, petitions, economic boycott, lobbying in the halls of London, and, critically, mass civil disobedience.

Economic Boycott

Civil disobedience against the use of stamps and stamped paper in the thirteen colonies constituted one form of resistance. Another was a colony-wide economic boycott of British goods—a non-importation agreement.

Colonists knew that if they successfully hit the pocketbooks of the empire’s powerful merchant class, those self-interested traders would take up the cause of American liberty themselves—bombarding Parliament with petitions, demanding repeal, and threatening to withdraw political support from unsympathetic leaders.

In this spirit, Americans boycotted. Ships sat unloaded in harbors. British textiles, paper, and luxury items went unsold. Colonists not only refused to buy these goods—they also shamed and harassed those who did.

The two dominant strategies were civil disobedience against the use of stamps and stamped paper and a colony-wide economic boycott of British goods

Timeline of the Revolution

Repeal

As the organizers predicted, mass civil disobedience and boycott triggered a crisis in Britain’s commercial heart. Merchants watched their profits plummet and their warehouses overflow.

All this led merchants in London to descend on Westminster, pressing lawmakers to reverse course. It was this pressure—economic loss coupled with merchant lobbying—that turned the tide in London. The loudest voices in Parliament soon belonged not to Stamp Act hardliners but to manufacturers, shippers, and bankers pleading for relief.

A new law was adopted that, referring to the Stamp Act, declared “the above-mentioned act, and the several matters and things therein contained, shall be, and is and are hereby repealed and made void to all intents and purposes whatsoever.”

In the end, the unconstitutional Act was repealed not primarily by the force of logic or justice. It was repealed by the all-powerful hand of capitalism combined with the impossibility of containing massive coordinated American civil defiance.

Celebration

Across America, the victors heralded the restoration of liberty.

In the cradle of resistance, Boston, citizens erupted in elation at the dismantling of the "Impolitic, Unrighteous, and Unconstitutional Stamp Act."

As printed beneath the headline “Glorious News” in a widely-distributed broadside, published on May 16, 1766:

It is impossible to express the Joy the Town is now in, on receiving the above, great, glorious, and important NEWS—The Bells in all the Churches were immediately set a Ringing . . . Joy smil'd in every Countenance, Benevolence, Gratitude and Content seemed the Companions of all.

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Eli Merritt is a political historian at Vanderbilt University and the author Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution