Isaiah Thomas's Stamp Acts at the Halifax Gazette: Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America

In histories of the American Revolution, printers have generally been characterized as important, yet subsidiary, agents of independence. However, in the years leading up to independence, colonial printers used a variety of inventive operations to register their discontent with British rule: adopting unexpected formats, slicing and rotating sheets of paper, and experimenting with different print techniques. A particularly rich example of this tacit protest was enacted by the printer Isaiah Thomas at the Nova Scotian newspaper the Halifax Gazette in the months surrounding the Stamp Act of 1765. By demonstrating how Thomas’s changes in technique—and consequently, material form—undermined the structural role of print in promoting imperial rule, this chapter extends the study of popular protest by arguing for the need to consider resistance by form, as much as content.