Interview with Benjamin Edes and Ebenezer Mackintosh — At the Liberty Tree Site, Corner of Washington Street and Essex Street, Boston, Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts — The Corner of Washington Street and Essex Street
Most people walk right past this corner without a second glance. Traffic moves. Pedestrians scroll their phones. The plaque on the building is easy to miss, and the stone marker across the street at Liberty Tree Plaza barely interrupts the flow of a modern Boston day.
But stop for a moment. Look up. Look across the street. Somewhere beneath the asphalt and the sidewalk, the roots of a revolution are still buried here.
This is where the Liberty Tree stood — a massive elm, already over a hundred years old by the time the fires of colonial outrage began to flicker in the 1760s. From its branches, the men of the Loyal Nine chose to hang an effigy that would force a tax collector to resign his post, inspire imitators across all thirteen colonies, and give the resistance its first true symbol.
On this visit, I did something a little different. The Loyal Nine were famous for staying in the shadows, for letting the crowds take the visible risks while they planned from behind the scenes. So I went looking for two of them — a printer who helped shape public opinion, and a cobbler who knew how to move a crowd.
Benjamin Edes was the printer and co-publisher of the Boston Gazette, the most influential colonial newspaper of its time. Ebenezer Mackintosh was a shoemaker from South Boston who could organize a crowd like no one else in the city. Together they were among the most important members of the Loyal Nine — and two of the most deliberately forgotten.
Note: The following interview is fictionalized but inspired by documented history.
The Interview
Dan: Hello, everyone! Today I am standing at the corner of Washington Street and Essex Street in downtown Boston, right here at the Liberty Tree plaque. And across the street, there is the Liberty Tree Plaza marker. I am honored to sit down with two members of the Loyal Nine — men who helped ignite a revolution but rarely wanted the credit for it. Welcome, Benjamin Edes and Ebenezer Mackintosh.
Benjamin Edes: I appreciate the invitation, Dan. Though I must say — “honored” feels like strong language for men who were largely doing what any right-thinking citizen ought to have done.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: Aye. We were tradesmen. Plain men with a grievance. I cobbled shoes, Ben ran a press. We were not the sort of men who expected statues.
Dan: And yet here we are, standing at one of the most important revolutionary sites in American history — a site connected directly to your work. Let’s start at the beginning. It was 1765. The British had just imposed the Stamp Act. What was the mood in Boston?
Benjamin Edes: Furious. There is no softer word for it. The colonists had no representation in Parliament. We had no voice. And yet Parliament had decided we were obligated to pay for a war we did not start and had little say in finishing. The Stamp Act was not merely a tax. It was a statement — that we were subjects to be managed, not citizens to be heard.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: And the people in the streets felt it. I knew those people. I was one of those people. My neighbors. My customers. Ordinary men who worked their hands raw every day and watched what little they earned get nibbled away by policies made an ocean away.
Dan: So how did the Loyal Nine decide what to do about it?
Benjamin Edes: Carefully. And quietly. We were — as you probably know, Dan — not in the habit of announcing our involvement. We were nine men: a distiller, a printer, a jeweler, merchants, tradesman. Not a governor among us. Not a general. We met privately, and we discussed what tools were available to people without political power.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: We had the streets. We had numbers. And we had that tree.
Dan: Tell me about the tree. How did you decide to use it?
Benjamin Edes: It had been standing on this corner for well over a century. Everyone knew it. You could not miss it — a great spreading elm, wide enough to gather a crowd beneath. We needed a stage, Dan. We had no hall, no pulpit, no Parliament floor. But we had this tree. And we had the idea that if people could see something — if they could point to something, gather around something — it would carry more weight than any pamphlet I could print.
Dan: And August fourteenth, 1765 — the day of the effigy — was that your idea?
Benjamin Edes: The planning was collective. I would not claim sole credit.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: He is being modest. Ben understood the message. I understood the crowd. We each brought what we had.
Dan: Walk me through what happened that day.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: Before dawn, an effigy of Andrew Oliver — the man appointed to collect the stamp tax — was hung from the tree’s branches. A boot alongside it, to represent Lord Bute, the former Prime Minister. By morning, half of Boston was talking about it. By midday, crowds were gathering. People who had never spoken a word of protest in public were standing here, looking up, feeling something shift inside them.
Dan: You said “feeling something shift.” What do you mean by that?
Ebenezer Mackintosh: There’s a particular fear that keeps ordinary people quiet, Dan. The fear of being the only one. The fear of being the first to stand up and say, this is wrong. When you see that someone else has already stood up — when you see an effigy swaying from a tree in the middle of your city and nobody has been arrested for it — you realize you are not alone. That is what the tree did. It told people they were not alone.
Dan: And it worked. Andrew Oliver resigned his post as stamp distributor.
Benjamin Edes: He did. And word spread. Within weeks, other colonies had their own liberty trees, their own public protests. The stamp distributors across the colonies began to resign one after another. England could pass a tax all it liked — but if no one was willing to collect it, the tax was paper.
Dan: That is remarkable. One public act at one tree in one city changed things across an entire continent.
Benjamin Edes: That is the power of a symbol, Dan. A well-placed symbol does not whisper. It shouts.
Dan: The tree also became a regular meeting place. You called it Liberty Hall?
Ebenezer Mackintosh: Yes — and the name served us well in more ways than one. The Sons of Liberty, the citizens, the organizers — they would gather beneath the canopy. The British authorities were always asking, where is Liberty Hall? And we could honestly say we did not know of any building by that name. It was a tree. It was the open sky. You cannot raid a tree.
Benjamin Edes: Ha. That is true. No doors to lock. No windows to shutter. Liberty Hall existed everywhere and nowhere. It was wherever the people chose to gather.
Dan: Eventually the British tried to destroy the tree. In 1775, a loyalist named Job Williams and British soldiers cut it down. What was your reaction?
Benjamin Edes: I was not surprised. They had seen what the tree meant to us. They believed, as powerful men often do, that if they could destroy the symbol they could destroy the spirit behind it. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how symbols work.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: And a branch killed one of their soldiers during the cutting. The colonists called it divine retribution. I will not say whether I agreed. But I will say — it did not quiet anyone. The stump became a shrine. People came to it as though it were a holy place. You cut down the tree, and it became something more.
Dan: You cannot kill an idea.
Benjamin Edes: No. You cannot. You can destroy every copy of a newspaper. You can burn a building. You can cut down an elm tree that has stood for a hundred and thirty years. But the thought behind it — the belief that ordinary people have the right to say no to unjust power — that thought does not live in the wood. It lives in the people.
Dan: I want to ask you both about leadership, because that is something I think about a lot. You were not governors. You were not generals. You were a printer and a shoemaker. Do you think of what you did as leadership?
Ebenezer Mackintosh: That is a word I would use carefully. I moved crowds. I knew how to organize men and give them a moment to rally around. Is that leadership? Perhaps. But I was never trying to lead. I was trying to be useful.
Benjamin Edes: I think — and I say this with some reluctance because I have always preferred the press to the spotlight — I think leadership in those years was less about position and more about action. We did not wait for someone with a title to tell us that the Stamp Act was wrong. We knew it was wrong. We acted on that knowledge. And we invited others to act alongside us.
Dan: What would you say to leaders today? What lessons does this corner carry?
Benjamin Edes: First: never underestimate the power of a well-chosen symbol. A symbol gives people something to gather around, something to point to, something to feel. Ideas are powerful — but ideas made visible are more powerful still. Second: print the truth. Put it where people can see it. I believed then and believe now that an informed public is the strongest defense a free society has.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: And from me: ordinary people have more power than they are told they have. I was a cobbler. I had no money, no title, no education beyond what life gave me. But I knew how to bring people together around a common grievance and turn that grievance into action. That is not a gift given only to generals and governors. That is a skill available to anyone willing to use it.
Dan: That is a remarkable thing to hear from two men who spent most of their lives trying not to be noticed.
Benjamin Edes: Ha. Well. Perhaps this is a safe distance from which to admit it.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: Two and a half centuries is far enough away, I suppose.
Dan: Thank you both. Truly. This corner of Boston feels different now.
Benjamin Edes: That is what history does, Dan. It changes the ground beneath your feet — if you are willing to stop and feel it.
Ebenezer Mackintosh: May you always find the tree worth gathering under.
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