Boston, which had had experience of the utter futility of petitions to the King and to Parliament, flamed at once into violence. The Assembly there voted thanks to General Conway and Colonel Barré for their opposition in the House of Commons to the Stamp Act, and ordered their portraits to be placed in the Town Hall. On August 26 a mob destroyed the Stamp Office, the Admiralty records, and the houses of public officials who had given offence by accepting the objectionable Act. Hutchinson, the Lieutenant-Governor and Chief-Justice of Massachusetts, was maltreated; while Oliver, the Secretary of the province, who had accepted the post of Stamp-Distributor, was hung in effigy on a tree in the main street of the town, his house destroyed and himself compelled by the threatening crowd to resign his new appointment, and to swear--beneath the tree where his effigy swung in the breeze--that under no circumstances would he ever resume it. The rioters were supported by the overt sympathy of their countrymen. Mayhew, a popular preacher, chose for the text of a sermon, "I would that they were even cut off which trouble you"; the Governor, who had arrested a prominent merchant, one of the ring-leaders of the disturbances, was compelled to release him, under threat from the civic guard that otherwise they would disband themselves; while some other imprisoned citizens were set free by the mob, which forced the gaolers to surrender the keys. November 1, when the Stamp Act came into operation, was kept as a day of mourning. The bells were muffled and tolled and mock funerals passed through the streets; copies of the Act were hawked through the towns with the title of "England's Folly and the Ruin of America"; while the newspapers appeared with a death's-head in place of the stamp which by the new measure they had to bear. Boston was content to hoist half-mast the colours of the shipping in its harbour, but Philadelphia spiked the government guns in the town and in the barracks, and other towns displayed their resentment in similar practical ways.[17] [17] Almon: _Collection of Papers_.