Jared Ingersoll had a plan as he mounted his horse in New Haven, Connecticut, on Wednesday, September 18, 1765, and headed north along the Boston Post Road toward Hartford, where the colonial legislature was about to meet.1 Months earlier the British government had named him as one of two dozen officials responsible for implementing the Stamp Act of 1765 in the colonies of North America and the Caribbean. Ingersoll was the most prominent, influential, and well-informed of the Americans who accepted commissions as stamp officers.2
Born in 1722 into one of the founding families of Puritan New England, Jared Ingersoll had studied at Yale College when the religious revivals of the Great Awakening aroused rancorous disagreements there and throughout the colonies. He had rejected the evangelical revivals, joined a traditional Congregational church, and married a local girl, Hannah Whiting. After taking up the practice of law in 1743,...
