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As many of you know, the ancient Romans had some pretty interesting ways of celebrating. However, it wasn't all just orgies and depraved bacchanalia.
For instance, when a Roman slave was freed, he was presented with a nifty hat. Not to get too technical, but it was a particular type of headwear, known as a Phrygian cap. Given their application regarding the freed slaves, they came to be known as "liberty caps."
A tradition later emerged where, during a battle, a Roman general would raise a Phrygian cap atop a pole and call on the slaves to stand with him. Those who did would be granted their freedom. And so, these poles became known as, "liberty poles."
Following the assassination of Julius Caesar, in 44 BC, some of his (former) senators raised a Phrygian cap upon a tall pole to signify their newfound freedom from the ambitious emperor's rule.
While you might never have heard of liberty poles before (I hadn't until pretty recently, i.e., last year), they've actually been a big deal for quite a while. In fact, there was one featured on the original seal of the US Department of War, which was handed down to the Army Department, complete with the Phrygian cap.
Earlier, the poles were an important feature in Revolutionary America. So important, in fact, that they led to both silliness and violence.
Thanks, in large part, to pressure from former Prime Minister William Pitt, the British Parliament repealed the controversial Stamp Act on March 18, 1766. When the news reached New York Harbor, on May 20, the city immediately erupted in celebration and revelry. Church bells rang into the night, fireworks exploded and muskets were fired.
The next day, the Sons of Liberty —including Hercules Mulligan, Isaac Sears, and Alexander McDougall—led a crowd to the East River wharves where they retrieved a massive white pine mast from an unused ship. They then carried it to the Commons (now City Hall Park), adorned the pole with a Phrygian cap, and attached a large board that read, "George 3d, Pitt —and Liberty."
The men then hoisted the mast upright, supporting it with 25 cords of wood around its base. The celebration at the Commons continued into the night, featuring two bonfires and a twenty-one-gun salute.
But, let’s just say the atmosphere of goodwill between New Yorkers and the forces of the Crown would prove to be short-lived.
On August 10, after New York's Common Council refused to fully comply with the Quartering Act, British soldiers from the 28th Regiment, quartered in the Upper Barracks on the Commons, marched to the Liberty Pole and cut it down.
Later that day, Isaac Sears called a meeting of the Sons of Liberty, also known as the Liberty Boys, in order to strategize their next step.
Side note: If you've read any of my essays about the American Revolution, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of Hercules Mulligan. He was a total badass. However, he wasn't the baddest ass in the Sons of Liberty. That title would have to go to Isaac Sears, who was known as "King Sears" by the patriots. One British officer referred to him as the "most active leader and agitator of the rebellion." Another called him, a "spawn of liberty and inquisition."
The next morning, as the Sons attempted to erect another pole, they were set upon by British troops, armed with bayonets and swords, "cutting and slashing everyone that fell in their way." The conflict got out of hand, with Sears sustaining a wound, and soon, British commanders ordered their men to stand down.
However, later that evening, a group of soldiers returned to the Commons and razed the pole once again.
On September 23, the Sons replaced the pole and, this time, the Royal Governor, Sir Henry Moore, hoping to maintain the relative calm in the city, instructed the soldiers to allow it to remain.
Six months later, on March 18, 1767, a large crowd gathered at the Commons once again, to celebrate the first anniversary of the Stamp Act's repeal. Unfortunately, the festivities seem to have rubbed the British troops the wrong way and so they cut down Liberty Pole number three.
What do you think I'm going to tell you next? Yeah, exactly. The following day, the Liberty Boys erected a fourth pole, securing this one with iron bands that they cemented into the turf.
Over the next several days British soldiers made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to destroy it, even using gunpowder to assist them in their failed efforts. Of course, it also didn't help that each time the British tried to eliminate the damn thing, they were violently accosted by the Sons.
On the night of Sunday the 22nd, the Sons set up a strong contingent of guards to protect the pole. When a company of soldiers showed up with "bludgeons and bayonets," they were deterred by the presence of the Liberty Boys. The rank-and-file British troops were becoming seriously frustrated.
They really, really didn't like those doggone poles!
The following evening, a group of soldiers marched toward the pole, passing Montayne's Tavern, on the south side of the Commons. The watering hole was, at the time, the unofficial headquarters of the Liberty Boys, so a few of the troops decided it would be cool to fire their muskets toward the building.
At this point, the British commanders began to realize that this sophomoric behavior could easily get out of hand and determined to put an end to all of the silliness. The next evening, as a group of soldiers were heading toward the pole with a ladder, they were ordered by their officers and the governor to turn back and to refrain from any future attempts at destroying the pole.
So, calm was restored, at least for a time.
In September 1769, Governor Moore —the guy who had managed to keep the adversaries at bay— passed away and was succeeded by the universally loathed Cadwallader Colden. The new governor quickly made a few backroom deals with some influential city politicians, in an attempt to compel New Yorkers to fully comply with the Quartering Act, forcing colonists to provide lodging and “necessities” to British soldiers stationed in the city.
And, if that weren't bad enough, another thing that was angering a lot of New Yorkers was that local merchants were hiring off-duty British soldiers to moonlight at their shops. The troops were willing to work for less than the going rate, leaving many colonists unemployed.
To vent his displeasure about those and other troubling issues, a founding member of the Sons of Liberty, Alexander McDougall, published an anonymous pamphlet that was distributed on the streets and printed in the New York Gazette on December 16, 1769. Addressed to The Betrayed Inhabitants of the City and Colony of New York, the fiery screed excoriated the "corrupt hearts" of the "minions of despotism," and insisted that British troops were not in New York “to protect” the people but rather to “enslave” them. The author called Governor Colden and members of the Assembly traitors to America.
It was signed with the pseudonym, "Brutus," an alias that would be frequently employed by the Sons of Liberty.
Now, as you might expect, the letter infuriated the British, and local politicians had every printer in the city questioned, not realizing that the pamphlet had been printed in New Jersey.
However, the authorities eventually suspected McDougall to be the author and arrested him in early February 1770. As soldiers attempted to bring him into the courthouse for his bail hearing, they had to struggle through a massive crowd of patriotic supporters. Once inside, when the judge announced his bail amount, McDougall replied, "I’d rather go back to jail for the cause of liberty and freedom!”
He got his wish. Although there was no evidence against him, he was incarcerated until the following January. He was about to miss out on the first bloodshed of the Revolution, which would precede the Boston Massacre by six weeks.
Thus bad begins…
On Saturday, January 13, about 40 irate soldiers opted to act on their own authority and do away with the Liberty Pole that remained standing in the Commons. They drilled a hole into it and packed it with gunpowder. However, they were spotted by a group of citizens who ran to Montayne's Tavern, on the south of the Commons, to alert the Sons of Liberty.
When the soldiers spotted the citizens running to Montayne’s, they abandoned their efforts at the pole, instead following the snooping colonists, and attacked the tavern. They entered with drawn swords and bayonets, beat up a waiter, and broke several windows.
A group of soldiers made another attempt at the pole the next day but were once again prevented by vigilant patriots.
The Sons had distributed a "Hand Bill" instructing the "inhabitants to meet at the Liberty Pole" at noon on the 17th to "take their sentiments" about the recent conflicts and controversies.
On the eve of the meeting, citizens stood watch at the pole until about 10 pm, when they expected the soldiers would have retired for the night. However, just past midnight, a group of soldiers returned and successfully rid themselves of the source of their irritation by successfully destroying the hated Liberty Pole. And, just to rub it in, they then deposited the shattered remains of their quarry in front of Montayne's.
At noon the next day, about 3,000 citizens (in a city of roughly 20,000) gathered at the spot where the Liberty Pole had recently stood. Hercules Mulligan began his address to the crowd by pointing out that the people of New York had been providing "humane and benevolent treatment" for their British guests but had been repaid with behavior that was "ungrateful and insulting," referring to the demolition of the Liberty Pole, which had been "erected as a Memorial to Freedom."
At that point, Mulligan was done being polite and proffered two resolutions that were adopted by acclamation from the crowd. The first prohibited the employment of any soldier, in any capacity, by the city's merchants. The second stated that any soldiers found outside of their barracks after dark "shall be treated as enemies to the peace of this City.”
In my parish, those are fighting words.
Meanwhile, soldiers of the 16th Regiment had authored a rebuttal to Brutus' offensive pamphlet, entitled God and a Soldier, which began:
In times of war and not before
God and the soldier we adore
But in times of peace and all things righted
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted.
Following the lilting doggerel of self-pity, the authors proceeded to denigrate the Liberty Boys, referring to them as the “pretended Sons of Liberty” and mocking them over the notion that “their freedom depended on a piece of wood.” They went so far as to call the Sons the “real enemies” of New York, who had incited this “uncommon and riotous disturbance”
It was Signed by the 16th Regiment of Foot.
According to what the New-York Gazette would later report, the soldiers "published the paper and went through the streets, putting them up in the most public places in the City, and threw some of them in the Mayor's Entry."
(From this point on, most of the quoted portions are from the account of the incident that ran in the February 5, 1770 edition of the New-York Gazette.)
At about 9 o'clock, on the morning of Friday, January 19, Liberty Boys Isaac Sears and Walter Quackenbos left Hercules Mulligan's shop on Queen Street and proceeded around the corner to the bustling Fly Market on Maiden Lane. As they turned the corner, they spotted six British soldiers enthusiastically posting the Soldier Slighted broadsides.
Without hesitating, Sears aggressively grabbed the soldier who was in the process of affixing a copy to a wall in the market and Quackenbos grabbed the one holding the remaining copies. A third soldier then drew his bayonet, but Sears hit the dude in the head with a ram's horn, rendering him unconscious. (Yeah, he just happened to be carrying a ram's horn, you know, just 'cuz.)
The rest of the soldiers then ran off to alert the troops back at the Lower Barracks, located at Fort George, in the Battery. Sears and Quackenbos, meanwhile, dragged the two soldiers to the mayor's nearby residence to explain the situation, accusing the soldiers of libel. Mayor Whitehead Hicks was, at the time, at least moderately on the side of the patriot cause. (He'd later cave in and become a loyalist.)
As Hicks was consulting with his staff and indecisively mulling over his options in the matter, a large crowd began to gather outside of his home. Soon, about twenty soldiers armed with cutlasses and bayonets were dispatched from the Lower Barracks. As they passed the home of Peter Remsen, he tried to talk them out of going any further, warning them that they'd probably "get into a scrape." Believing Remsen to be drunk, the soldiers ignored his advice.
As they arrived at the mayor's, the soldiers were allowed through the crowd without resistance. However, a militia officer by the name of Captain Richardson figured out that the Redcoats intended to wrest the soldiers out of the place by force. He shared his suspicion with the crowd, many of whom then "ran to some sleighs that were near and pulled out some of the rungs" to use as cudgels. They also retrieved stakes and clubs from nearby carts. Richardson and several other citizens then blocked the entrance to the mayor's house.
When a group of soldiers tried to force their way in, Richardson's group prevented them from entering, telling them to sheath their weapons and go kick rocks. Interestingly, the two captive soldiers also encouraged their comrades to leave. The mayor then emerged and ordered the troops back to their barracks, but while they did leave the scene, they decided to go instead to the Fly Market.
To get there, they’d have to traverse Golden Hill.
The citizens were beginning to get antsy because the soldiers were marching around with fixed bayonets and drawn swords, so they followed the troops as they made their way up Golden Hill, "lest they might offer violence to some innocent citizens."
As the crowd arrived at the summit, they were met by a contingent of soldiers from the Upper Barracks. The troops were led by an officer wearing "silk stockings and neat buckskin breeches," who many in the crowd suspected was an enlisted man in disguise.
Anyway, now that the troops from both barracks had consolidated, they decided to take another shot at freeing the two soldiers from the mayor's place. However, their egress through the narrow passage from Golden Hill back down to the Fly Market was blocked by the crowd. That's when the dude in the silk stockings hollered, "Soldiers, draw your bayonets and cut your way through them."
The colonists at the front of the crowd defended themselves with the make-shift weapons they'd secured near the mayor's house, but most of the rest were unarmed. As the soldiers violently made their way through the crowd, some of them mockingly shouted, "Where are you Sons of Liberty now?"
Still, for a time, the townsmen held the line against the soldiers who were "cutting and slashing.” One man swung a wooden spoke at a soldier but dropped it, forcing him to flee down the street, and a few soldiers pursued him.
As they did, they wounded an innocent bystander, "Mr. Francis Field, a Quaker, who was standing in an inoffensive posture in the doorway…cut a tea-water man driving his cart…in short they madly attacked every person that they could reach…cutting a sailor's head and finger…stabbed another with a bayonet…Two of them followed a boy going in for sugar…one of them cut him on the head with a cutlass, and the other made a lunge with a bayonet at the woman at the entry…Capt. Richardson was violently attacked by two of the soldiers."
Richardson was in the center of the melee, wielding nothing but a stick until he was handed a halberd (a large axe with a spike on its tip). However, he was so gravely wounded in the confrontation that some accounts state that he later died of his wounds.
As the brawl spilled out into the streets, British reinforcements from the Lower Barracks arrived at the scene, hollering to their surrounded colleagues to fight their way down the hill and they'd meet them halfway.
Meanwhile, back at the Fly Market, a group of soldiers approached the residence of a guy named Mr. Norwood, where a group of citizens had gathered. At first, the friction amounted to nothing more than a shouting match, but then the soldiers drew their bayonets, prompting the crowd to pick up cobblestones or anything else with which they could defend themselves.
One of the soldiers tried to stab a Mr. John White, who fled. The soldier pursued him but tripped over a gutter pipe and White escaped safely.
As word of the unrest spread, city leaders and British officers attempted to quell the hostilities. However, the soldiers' rampage continued into the evening when they inexplicably cut one lamplighter on the head and knocked the ladder out from under another.
The next day, a British soldier randomly thrust his bayonet at a woman returning from the market, slashing her dress, though not injuring her. Then, at about noon, a large group of civilian seamen confronted a band of soldiers on Chapel Street, a short distance from the south end of the Commons.
The sailors initially gained the upper hand, prompting one of the soldiers to run for reinforcements who arrived at the scene in short order. The two sides engaged in a severe scuffle which resulted in one of the sailors being "run through" with a bayonet.
Mayor Hicks and a contingent of aldermen happened to be on the Commons that day to inspect the newly constructed jail. When they received word of the renewed violence, they raced toward Chapel Street, hoping to restore order.
By that time, word had quickly spread that "the soldiers had rushed out of the Barracks and were slaughtering the inhabitants in the [Commons]."
The citizens responded without delay. At the same time, several magistrates arrived in an attempt to quell the violence but were unsuccessful. The mayor requested assistance from the Upper Barracks, but the messenger was accosted along the way and was prevented from delivering the communique.
At that point, Hercules Mulligan and the Sons of Liberty led a large body of angry patriots up Broadway, toward the Commons. They were armed with clubs and blades, ultimately cowing the British and convincing them to return to their barracks.
By this time the patriots on Broadway had also been bolstered by a sizable number of citizens who joined their ranks, all of whom gathered outside the jail.
A detachment of about twenty British soldiers was dispatched from the Lower Barracks and passed easily through the crowd on the Commons. However, as they got closer to the jail, one of the troops grabbed a club from a member of the crowd, leading to a renewed confrontation, with "cutting and slashing on both sides when, the soldiers finding themselves roughly handled, made the best of their way to the barracks. Some of the inhabitants pursued them to the gates… In this scuffle, one of the citizens was wounded in the face and had two of his teeth broke by a stroke of a bayonet. A Soldier received a bad cut on the shoulder….”
Following the unrest, in an effort to avoid any further conflict, General Thomas Gage ordered his enlisted soldiers to be confined to their barracks. However, the animosity continued, and the Sons of Liberty happily contributed to it. On January 30, the Sons petitioned the city’s Common Council to “erect another LIBERTY POLE, as a memorial of the Repeal of the Stamp Act.” As you might expect, the council refused to allow another pole to be placed on the Commons, so Isaac Sears purchased a small plot of land directly in front of the British barracks and, on it, the Sons raised yet another Liberty Pole.
As it was on private property, the soldiers were ordered to let it stand.
While it might seem like the confrontation in New York in January 1770 sort of ended in a whimper, it sent a message throughout the colonies. Word of the violence reached Massachusetts on February 20, and three days later, Boston’s Sons of Liberty staged their own solidarity protest. A crowd of men and schoolboys surrounded the home of loyalist shopkeeper Theophilus Lillie. Startled by the rage of the crowd, fellow loyalist and friend of Lillie, Ebenezer Richardson, fired into the crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Seider.
The young man’s death proved to be a flashpoint for Boston radicals, such as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, who quickly incited popular violence against British soldiers and loyalists in their city.
Just two weeks later, the Boston Massacre took place.
In October 1919, the New York Historical Society and the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York resolved to erect a Liberty Pole on the very site of the original one. It was dedicated on June 14, 1921, with a plaque at its base that reads, “HERE IN THE ANCIENT COMMONS OF OUR CITY WHERE, BEFORE THE TIME OF OUR NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE, FIVE LIBERTY POLES WERE SUCCESSIVELY SET UP, THIS FLAGPOLE OF 1921 IS PLACED IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF ALL LOVERS OF OUR COUNTRY WHO HAVE DIED THAT THE LIBERTY WON ON THESE SHORES MIGHT BE THE HERITAGE OF THE WORLD.”
Brian O'Leary is a retired Marine Corps colonel, who served for 30 years, including combat deployments to Somalia and Iraq, and command of an infantry battalion in Afghanistan. Additionally, he has spent 25 years in the financial services industry. Brian earned his BA in English from Penn State University and his MA in National Security Studies from the US Army War College.
IG - @brian_oleary34 X - @brianoleary34
Great post, motivator! Let’s re-up and go kick some ass for liberty! (Have to admit I’ve been feeling a little oppressed, lately)