On this 250th birthday of America, appreciate New York’s part in the Revolution
The Declaration of Independence may have been written, edited, discussed, and signed in Philadelphia 250 years ago, but when it came to turning words into action, it was made in New York.
New York City’s America 250 story might have begun on July 4, 1776, but while John Hancock and his smaller-print cohorts endorsed the Declaration that day and 12 of the 13 colonies voted “yes,” New York abstained. Something about waiting for instructions from home.
Five days later, with or without our seal of approval, one of the quickly printed copies of the Declaration made its way to Manhattan. And on July 9, General George Washington himself ordered that it be read aloud to the assembled troops massed to hold this island for the newborn country.
The reading of the Declaration at what is now City Hall Park caused a sensation. We don’t know for certain whether it was its promise of freedom — all (white) men created equal — or its infuriating litany of crimes against the colonies by the English King.
Whatever inflamed them, these New Yorkers stampeded downtown toward the Battery, arousing fellow New Yorkers along the way. By the time they reached Bowling Green, the city’s oldest park, they had come up with a plan: to rid the green of every vestige of British rule. And they would start with the 4,000-pound, monumental equestrian statue of King George III that had loomed over the neighborhood for six years.
The statue was made of gold — or so it long seemed as it glinted in the sunshine. In truth, it was molded of lead, painted over with a coat of gilding, as if concealing the rot. (Sound familiar?) There was no stopping the revolutionaries. They swarmed through the park gates, lassoed the metal horse and rider with ropes, and sent the statue crashing down.
Not yet content, the crowd turned a symbolic gesture into a practical one. Perhaps this crumpled lead could now be melted down to make bullets to fight the very oppressors who had erected it. So it was out with the axes and hammers, smashing what was left of the effigy to bits. In those days, the main posts of the iron fencing around Bowling Green Park featured their own royal adornments: little gold crowns to signal that a king pranced within. In a final gesture of defiance, the patriots sawed off those ornaments, too.
The other morning, I headed down there myself from City Hall Park to film a segment with NY1 News. Here, I unexpectedly encountered Robert Tierney, former chair of the New York Landmarks Commission, enjoying the now-peaceful site between downtown appointments. Just north, tourists were clamoring for selfies with the banal bronze Wall Street bull crouching on nearby Wall Street, oblivious to the real deal a few blocks away.
“Bob,” is this fence really the original, I asked?
“I believe it is,” said the landmarks expert. “Repaired here and there, but still standing.”
“So, this is the actual landmark of the first act of defiance of the American Revolution.”
“That’s right,” Tierney agreed. Then we looked around, squinting at the skyscrapers that now block the sun, and tried imagining the 1776 crowd, the fury, the courage, the small scale of the young city. Most of all the statue that wasn’t there. And the thrilling opening act of the American Revolution here.
With many scenes to follow.
The British were not about to abandon the greatest natural harbor in the New World. Before long, ships laden with British soldiers sailed into Manhattan and took back the streets. George Washington tried putting up a fight in Brooklyn but fell back toward the East River. Only the cover of fog and darkness enabled his troops to escape back to Manhattan by boat. For a while, they held another line of defense far uptown, but that effort collapsed as well. Washington and what remained of the Continental Army fled to New Jersey to fight another day.
New York remained an occupied city for the rest of the war. It was a friendly occupation for the pro-British Tories who stayed behind and thrived, delighted that their treasonous neighbors had departed. But higher powers intervened. Rampant disease went largely untreated. A huge fire in September leveled as many as 1,000 buildings. And British ships anchored on the Brooklyn side began taking on patriot prisoners, confining them in such brutal conditions below decks that some 15,000 died of illness or malnutrition before the war ended—more than perished on the battlefields of the Revolution.
Not until November 21, 1783 — seven years after one George came tumbling down at Bowling Gree n— did the British finally abandon New York, allowing the other George to return in triumph. For generations, the event was celebrated as a municipal holiday — Evacuation Day — suspended only when it was subsumed by Thanksgiving.
If we look hard, we can still glimpse vestiges of New York’s defiant patriotism: Alexander Hamilton’s grave at Trinity Church; nearby St. Paul’s, where Washington worshipped; the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem, which he briefly used as a headquarters; and the “African Burial Ground” on Duane and Elk Streets — then outside the city limits — where enslaved and free Black New Yorkers were once carted off for internment.
Of course, Bowling Green Park still stands near the shoreline. Benches still invite leisurely contemplation. The mammoth statue that no longer looms over visitors casts its own kind of imagined shadow.
Uptown, at the recently and brilliantly expanded New York Historical, the new Tang Galleries feature a sound-and-light show that reimagines the big 1776 takedown. In perhaps the earliest example of New York attitude, the topplers preserved the horse’s tail — and here it rests in the museum, a final in-your-face to Mad King George.
Paintings and engravings of the statue-toppling survive, too, but they are unreliable. Some show men and women hauling it down together, implying a social equality that did not exist. One depicts an American Indian looking on, perhaps only to symbolize the mixed emotions of the original inhabitants watching yet another set of white colonizers claiming their onetime land. Yet another image suggests that the actual work of hauling down the statue had fallen to enslaved Africans, the bitterest irony of all, since people of color would be denied the guarantees of the Declaration for another four score and seven years.
We haven’t lost our taste for iconoclasm. In recent years, statues of Confederates (Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson) and so-called colonizers (Christopher Columbus) have come tumbling down, too. A few years back, the City Council voted to banish the statue of the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, that had long graced City Hall. Adopted by the New York Historical, it now anchors the installation in Tang Hall.
Now, President Trump is threatening to build a new National Garden of American Heroes cluttered with effigies of celebrities of his choosing (most already honored elsewhere). It makes far more sense this Independence Day to remember precisely what it means to create — and erase — heroic statuary. The removal of George III from Bowling Green once sparked a titanic fight for liberty. Contemplating its absence can still inspire New Yorkers — far more than new statues can — to fight for freedom deferred, delayed and denied.
