The public feeling was variously expressed.  At Boston, on the day the act was to take effect, the shops were closed, the bells of the churches tolled, and the flags of the ships hung at half-mast.  At Portsmouth, in New Hampshire, the bells were tolled, and the friends of liberty were summoned to hold themselves in readiness for her funeral.  At New York, the obnoxious Act, headed “Folly of England and Ruin of America,” was contemptuously hawked about the streets.  Bodies of patriots were organized everywhere under the name of “Sons of Liberty.”  The merchants, inspired then by liberty, resolved to import no more goods from England until the repeal of the Act.  The orators also spoke.  James Otis with fiery tongue appealed to Magna Charta.

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Sir, regarding the Stamp Act candidly and cautiously, free from animosities of the time, it is impossible not to see that, though gravely unconstitutional, it was at most an infringement of civil liberty only, not of personal liberty.  There was an unjust tax of a few pence, with the chance of amercement by a single judge without a jury; but by no provision of this act was the personal liberty of any man assailed.  No freeman could be seized under it as a slave.  Such an act, though justly obnoxious to every lover of constitutional Liberty, cannot be viewed with the feelings of repugnance enkindled by a statute which assails the personal liberty of every man, and under which any freeman may be seized as a slave.  Sir, in placing the Stamp Act by the side of the Slave Act, I do injustice to that emanation of British tyranny.  Both infringe important rights:  one, of property; the other, the vital right of all, which is to other rights as soul to body,—­the right of a man to himself.  Both are condemned; but their relative condemnation must be measured by their relative characters.  As Freedom is more than property, as Man is above the dollar that he owns, as heaven, to which we all aspire, is higher than earth, where every accumulation of wealth must ever remain, so are the rights assailed by an American Congress higher than those once assailed by the British Parliament.  And just in this degree must history condemn the Slave Act more than the Stamp Act.

Sir, I might here stop.  It is enough, in this place, and on this occasion, to show the unconstitutionality of this enactment.  Your duty commences at once.  All legislation hostile to the fundamental law of the land should be repealed without delay.  But the argument is not yet exhausted.  Even if this Act could claim any validity or apology under the Constitution, which it cannot, it lacks that essential support in the Public Conscience of the States, where it is to be enforced, which is the life of all law, and with-out which any law must become a dead letter.

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