In the Museum of the New York Historical Society there is a large
flat stone with an inscription cut into one side of it, and in
the other, three deep holes for three legs of a horse. Lying on a
table near it are several large pieces of heavy metal with the
old gilding almost worn off. One piece looks like the tail of a
horse and another like a part of his saddle. These fragments of
metal and the stone slab are nearly all that is left of a statue
of King George the Third on horseback that stood on Bowling
Green, at the lower end of Broadway in New York City, before the
Revolutionary War.
One evening early in the war a mob gathered on Bowling Green. Led
by the Sons of Liberty and helped by some of the soldiers, the
crowd tore down the king's statue and broke it into bits.
Bonfires were blazing in the streets and by the light of these
ropes were thrown over the king and his charger and both were
pulled down and dragged through the streets. An entry in
Washington's Orderly Book at this time, forbidding his soldiers
to take part in anything like a riot, shows that he did not fully
approve of this proceeding. But the people were very much
excited. It was the night of the 9th of July, 1776, and news of
the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress in
Philadelphia had just reached New York that afternoon. At evening
rollcall the Declaration was read at the head of each brigade of
the army and "was received with loud huzzas."
Independence was declared in Philadelphia on the 4th of July, and
that day has been kept ever since as the birthday of the United
States, but news traveled so slowly before the telegraph was
invented that it was not known in New York until Monday, the 9th.
Then bells rang, and as night drew on people lighted bonfires to
show their joy, and not content with this, they hurried away to
Bowling Green and pulled down the statue of the king and cut off
his head. They acted at once on the statement of the famous
Declaration which they had just heard read to them, that "A
prince whose character is marked by every act that may define a
tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
Once off his pedestal, however, the king suddenly became valuable
and precious to them, for he, as well as his horse, was made
mostly of lead and he could be melted down and run into bullets.
Lead was dear and scarce, and bullets were needed in the army.
The king's troops now "will probably have _melted majesty_
fired at them," some one wrote in a letter to General Gates. So
the pieces of the statue were carefully saved and most of it was
sent away secretly by ox-cart, so it is said, up into the
Connecticut hills to the home of General Wolcott in Litchfield,
for safe keeping. The general was returning there himself about
this time from Philadelphia, and perhaps he took charge of its
transportation. We shall hear of it again in Litchfield, for this
story, which begins in New York, ends in Connecticut.
The story should really begin in London, for the statue was made
there. The colonists sent an order for it after the repeal of the
Stamp Act in 1766. This act had excited great resentment in the
colonies because it was an attempt to tax the people without
their consent. When it was at last repealed, they were overjoyed,
and New York determined to express its renewed loyalty to the
king by erecting a statue of him. The laws of the colony state
that it was set up "as a monument of the deep sense with which
the inhabitants of this colony are impressed of the blessing they
enjoy under his [King George's] illustrious reign, as well as
their great affection for his royal person."
The statue was of lead, dark, heavy, and dull like the character
of the king it represented, but it was richly gilded outside and
looked, at first, like pure gold. Some of the pieces in the
museum still show the gilding. It must have been a brilliant
ornament in the little city when, on August 1, 1770, it was
placed on Bowling Green, facing the Fort Gate. But it did not
stand there very long in peace, for the stormy days of the
Revolution were approaching. England continued to impose taxes
and the colonies to resist them, until the discontent of the
people broke out in many ways. More than one attempt was made to
injure King George's statue before it was finally torn down on
the night of July 9, 1776.
[Illustration: KING GEORGE THE THIRD
Courtesy of Mr. Charles M. Lefferts and the New York Historical
Society
A drawing by Mr Lefferts from descriptions and measurements of
fragments of the statue]
If we want to know what the British thought of this last insult
to their king, we shall find out by reading the journal of
Captain John Montresor, an officer in the British army.
"Hearing," he writes, "that the Rebels [that is, the Americans]
had cut the king's head off the equestrian statue in the centre
of the Ellipps [near the Fort] at New York, which represented
George the 3rd in the figure of Marcus Aurelius, and that they
had cut the nose off, clipt the laurels that were wreathed round
his head and drove a musket bullet part of the way thro' his head
and otherwise disfigured it, and that it was carried to Moore's
tavern adjoining Fort Washington, on New York Island, in order to
be fixt on a spike on the Truck of that Flag-staff as soon as it
could be got ready, I immediately sent to Cox, who kept the
tavern at King's Bridge, to steal it from thence and to bury it,
which was effected, and was dug up on our arrival and I rewarded
the men, and sent the Head by the Lady Gage to Lord Townshend, in
order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the
Ungrateful people of this distressed country."
And there, in London, a year later, Governor Hutchinson, of
Massachusetts, saw it at Lord Townshend's house in Portman
Square. Lady Townshend, he said, went to a sofa and uncovered a
large gilt head which her husband had received the night before
from New York, and which, although "the nose was wounded and
defaced," he at once recognized by its striking likeness to the
king. We do not know what became of it after this, or whether it
is still in existence.
There were one or two other pieces of this monument which also
had eventful histories. The slab, on which the horse had stood
with one foot in the air, was used as a gravestone for Major John
Smith, of the Forty-second, or Royal Highland, Regiment, who died
in 1783, and later it served for a time as a stepping-stone in
front of a well-known house in New Jersey.
Nearly one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence
the tail of King George's horse was dug up on a farm in Wilton,
Connecticut, and a piece of his saddle was found there at about
the same time. The tradition in Wilton is that the ox-cart
carrying the broken statue passed through Wilton on its way to
Litchfield, and that the saddle and the tail were thrown away
there. Just why, no one knows; perhaps the load was too heavy;
possibly--some people think--because it was found that they were
not of pure lead and could not be used to make bullets. Most of
the statue, however, seems to have reached Litchfield safely.
On the beautiful broad South Street of that village, high in the
Connecticut hills, the house of General Wolcott, afterwards
Governor Wolcott, of Connecticut, still stands under its old
trees much as it stood in the summer of 1776.
When the pieces of the leaden statue reached Litchfield, they
were buried temporarily in the "Wolcott orchard under an apple
tree of the Pound variety" that stood near the southeast corner
of the house. And then, sometime later, there came a day when
King George, who had once sat so securely on his solid steed,
close to his fort in his good city of New York, was taken out of
this last hiding-place and, together with his leaden horse, was
melted down and run into bullets to be fired at his own soldiers.
Bullet-moulds of the time of the Revolution can be seen now in
historical museums. Some of them are shaped like a large pair of
shears. The work of running the bullets that day in Litchfield
was done by women and girls, for the men were away at the war.
The only man who took part in it, besides the general himself,
was Frederick, his ten-year-old son, and he, many years later,
told how he remembered the event, how a shed was built in the
orchard, how his father chopped up the fragments of the statue
with a wood-axe, how gay the girls were, his two sisters a little
older than himself and their friends, and what fun they all had
over the whole affair. A ladle, said to have been used in pouring
the lead into the moulds, is still kept in the Historical Museum
at Litchfield, and among Governor Wolcott's papers is a
memorandum labeled, "Number of cartridges made."
_Cartridges_
Mrs. Marvin, 6,058
Ruth Marvin, 11,592
Laura, 8,378
Mary Ann, 10,790
Frederick, 936
Mrs. Beach, 1,802
Made by sundry persons, 2,182
Gave Litchfield militia on alarm, 50
Let the Regiment of Colonel Wigglesworth have, 300
------
42,088
Mary Ann and Laura were Frederick's sisters, twelve and fourteen
years old. Some of the bullets made, and which were given to the
"Litchfield militia on alarm," were probably used the next year
to repulse a British invasion of Connecticut, so that it was said
then that "His Majesty's statue was returned to His Majesty's
troops with the compliments of the men of Connecticut."