Monuments of Colonial New York: George III and Liberty Poles

For the last installment in our six-part series on monuments in / about colonial Gotham, Wendy Bellion and Shira Lurie discuss NYC’s rebellion against British rule during the volatile decade before the War for Independence. Bellion begins with a story of destruction — the tearing down of the statue of George III in Bowling Green. Lurie tells of construction — the raising of five liberty poles on the Common (present day City Hall Park). But both go on to explore the afterlives of these events, and how they were remembered through public reenactments and visual representations in the decades that followed the revolutionary conflict. Whereas most civic commemorations and monuments associated with American independence and the founding era are linked with ideas of liberty, toleration, and equality, Bellion and Lurie show that such acts of remembrance also cultivated divisive as well as unifying sentiments and demonstrated defiance against continuing political oppression, racial discrimination, and social injustice.

Destruction: George III

By Wendy Bellion

As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to inspire a collective reckoning with public symbols, the power of images to shape understandings of New York history has never been more important.

Credit: New-York Historical Society

Consider Johannes Oertel’s "Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City" (1852-53). Oertel’s painting depicts a primal scene of American iconoclasm: on July 9, 1776, a crowd destroyed an equestrian statue of George III in Bowling Green. Yet the painting’s creation – and its recreation in later images and civic reenactments – illuminates a broader struggle over monuments, race, and ethnicity.

The king’s statue towered over Bowling Green for just six years, but its afterlife should relieve concerns that removing monuments erases history. Famously, Connecticut revolutionaries melted parts of the lead statue to mold bullets. Loyalists buried fragments underground, and the horse’s tail figures among New York’s most valued historical objects. For decades, the city debated what to put in place of George III: a statue of George Washington, a replica of the original, or a monument showing the colonists tearing it down (a proposal worthy of Banksy, who imagined a tribute to protestors upending the Bristol statue of slave trader Edward Colston). 

It took 75 years for an artist to paint the statue’s destruction, and notably, it was an immigrant who ventured to do so. In 1848, Oertel fled Bavaria for New York together with tens of thousands of “Forty-Eighters” displaced by European revolutions. He encountered an immigrant community still preoccupied with rebellion: German tradesmen mobilized labor movements, and newspapers covered unrest overseas. In this world, Oertel’s picture reflected on German independence as well as American nationhood.

Revolutions abroad, however, mattered little to Oertel’s imitators, who were eager to recast Bowling Green with Anglo-American patriots. “We will be free! Down with the statue!” chant figures in one popular engraving. Significantly, this print omitted the Native American family – a reference to the indigenous Lenni Lenape – that Oertel had prominently featured. Later pictures excised the single person of color from Oertel’s scene, together with most of the women. Through such displacements, artists reinvented Bowling Green, an iconic site of colonial protest, as a space of white male historical memory.

It’s no coincidence these transformations occurred in the decades following the Civil War, which produced many of the Confederate monuments to white supremacy that communities are now removing. Similarly, patriotic societies in New York reacted to mass immigration by reimagining a halcyon Anglo-American past – and even cosplaying iconoclasm. In civic pageants and parades, colonial revivalists rebuilt the George III statue in papier-mâché and threatened to bash it to pieces. 

Today, Oertel’s painting encourages more inclusive accounts of the nation’s founding. An interactive version of the picture at the New-York Historical Society animated the Native American boy, and in an immersive video at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, women and people of color form part of the Bowling Green crowd. Such images restore figures lost for far too long from visual representations of nationhood. In so doing, they also demonstrate how a New York story of iconoclasm has become an ever-evolving narrative about American origins.

Wendy Bellion teaches American art history and material culture studies at the University of Delaware. Her latest book, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019), explores a history of material violence in New York City from the 1760s to the 1930s, tracing acts of political iconoclasm and the return of destroyed things in visual representations and civic performances.

Creation: The New York City Liberty Poles

By Shira Lurie

On the west side of City Hall Park, the observant visitor will notice an unusual flag pole – one topped with a gilded vane that reads “LIBERTY.” Below, a plaque states that the flagstaff is, in fact, a monument. It memorializes five liberty poles — tall masts with decorations bearing political messages — raised during the American Revolution.

That New Yorkers raised multiple liberty poles, and that later generations chose to commemorate them is, at first, a bit perplexing. After all, they were, it would seem, just wooden poles. But the story of this monument is about the power of public space and the power of symbols to transform them.

New York City residents erected the first liberty pole on May 21, 1766, in celebration of Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act. Crowds of colonists flooded onto the common (today’s City Hall Park) to raise a tall pine mast, affixed with a sign that read “George 3rd, Pitt – and Liberty.” A few weeks later, on the King’s birthday, they added a flag with St. George’s cross to their pole. The pole signified the colonists’ victory in defeating the Stamp Act, but also their thankfulness to the King and Parliament for reversing course.[1]

Although initially a display of gratitude and loyalty to the empire, the liberty pole became an emblem of resistance as tensions mounted in New York City between colonials and quartered British soldiers, who viewed the pole as an affront to imperial rule. One night in August, a group of redcoats snuck out of their nearby barracks and tore down the pole, thus transforming it from a symbol of a free people living in an “empire of liberty" to one that stood for an oppressed people struggling for freedom in the face of unjust authority. The New York Gazette explained, the Sons of Liberty initially viewed their pole as a “Trifle” and would not have worried if “it had fallen by natural Decay.” But after “being destroyed by Way of Insult, we could not but consider it as a Declaration of War against our Freedom and Property, and resent it accordingly.”[2]

The colonists erected a replacement pole where the first had stood, but again redcoats tore it down, this time injuring two civilians. “It is now as common here to assemble on all occasions of public concern at the Liberty Pole and Coffee House as for the ancient Romans to repair to the Forum. And orators harangue on all sides,” complained General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in North America. The back and forth of erecting and destroying liberty poles lasted years and culminated in the Battle of Golden Hill (1770), in which colonists armed with sleigh rungs clashed with bayonet-wielding soldiers. This outbreak of violence marked a significant escalation of tensions between colonists and soldiers, preceding the Boston Massacre by six weeks.[3]

The struggle in New York confirmed colonial suspicions of a standing army and solidified the liberty pole as an emblem of American defiance. As the imperial relationship crumbled during the mid-1770s, over 50 liberty poles sprung up across the American colonies as symbols of the Patriot cause. After the War of Independence, as Americans transitioned from subjects to citizens, they returned to the liberty pole as their chosen method for protesting the federal government when it overreached and raised over 120 liberty poles between 1794 and 1800. As one witness to a pole-raising in 1794 explained, “It was said by the whole of the people that liberty poles were raised last war and they ought to be raised now.”[4]

The New York City liberty poles remind us that marking public space is a powerful mode of political expression and that conflicts over monuments reach back to the nation’s founding.[5]

Shira Lurie is a political historian of the American founding era. Her current book project on this subject is tentatively entitled Protest and Power: Liberty Poles and the Struggle for American Democracy.

[1] New York Gazette, and Weekly Mercury, February 12, 1770 (New-York Historical Society); The New-York Gazette, May 26, 1766 (David Library of the American Revolution); James Gabriel Montresor and John Montresor, The Montresor Journals, ed. G.D. Scull (New York: Printed for the New-York Historical Society, 1882), 367-368, 370 (David Library of the American Revolution).

[2] New York Gazette, or Weekly Post Boy, August 14, 1766 (New-York Historical Society).

[3] Gage to Lt. Col; William Dalrymple, January 8, 1770, Gage Papers, (Clement Library); New York Gazette, or Weekly Post Boy, February 5, 1770; For more on the New York City liberty poles and the Battle of Golden Hill, see Wendy Bellion, “Mast Trees, Liberty Poles, and the Politics of Scale in Late Colonial New York,” in Scale, ed. Jennifer L. Roberts (Chicago: 2016), 218-249; Lee R. Boyer, “Lobster Backs, Liberty Boys, and Laborers in the Streets: New York’s Golden Hill and Nassau Street Riots,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 57, (Oct. 1973), 281-308; David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6, 38-47; Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Liberty Tree: A Genealogy” The New England Quarterly, 25 (Dec. 1952), 435-458.

[4] Deposition of Henry Lebo, January 7, 1795, Rawle Family Papers (Historical Society of Pennsylvania); Shira Lurie, “Politics at the Poles: Liberty Poles and the Popular Struggle for the New Republic,” PhD, University of Virginia, 2019.

[5] Partisans continued to erect liberty poles throughout the nineteenth century. Most recently, marijuana legalization and D.C. statehood activists raised a liberty pole on the National Mall in April 2015. Perry Stein, “Marijuana and statehood activists are chaining themselves to ‘liberty pole’ on the Mall,” The Washington Post, April 15, 2015.