The key term that Maier used was “extra-legal resistance.” What did it mean? In the colonies as in Britain, communities believed that certain acts of government could be resisted when they threatened the essential rights and interests of the king’s subjects. Various kinds of uprisings, riotous events, and militant protests did occur during the colonial era of our history. From the perspective of imperial officials representing the British crown, these protests were illegal acts to be repressed or punished. Ship captains in the Royal Navy believed they were acting legally when they forcefully impressed sailors for their warships. Merchant seamen, shipyard workers, or ordinary individuals innocently strolling the streets thought otherwise. When anti-impressment riots occurred, they enjoyed the community’s full support.
This tradition was well established before the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 disrupted imperial politics. Some of the earliest protests against the Stamp Act were indeed too violent. It was one thing to intimidate individuals who thought they had received lucrative appointments as stamp collectors into resigning their commissions. That was the easiest way to halt the enforcement of the Stamp Act. It was another matter entirely to ransack the residences of royal officials, notably including the Boston mansion of Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts. This wanton destruction of private property was blatantly illegal. Nor could such acts ever be justified while the colonists were insisting that they were defending their rights, not defying their royal sovereign.
It was precisely because the initial resistance to the Stamp Act had this violent edge that Maier’s “radicals” acted as they did. Their concept of extra-legal resistance meant they had to pursue the least offensive means first—petition first, then petition again, and escalate tactics only after the government remained impervious to their requests. But escalation, too, had to be a gradual process. When it spun out of control, further steps had to be taken to minimize the damage. That is why John Adams took on the risky assignment of defending the British redcoats who committed the Boston Massacre.
In the past few weeks, Minneapolis has become our Boston, and its citizens have become modern Sons of Liberty. Far more important, they and their counterparts in other communities have unknowingly revived the strategy of resistance that American communities deployed between the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 and the crisis of independence. Blowing whistles, tailing ICE and Border Patrol vehicles, blaring airhorns outside the hotels where their agents are hopefully spending sleepless nights—these are modern versions of the extra-legal resistance that Maier described. It is altogether fitting and proper that she hailed from St. Paul, the twin city of Minneapolis.
