Episode 11: The Resistance

Episode Transcript
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Jim Ambuske (00:00):
This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is
supported by the McCormickCenter for the Study of the
American Revolution at SienaCollege. Learn how you can
support the series atrstudios.org.
The dawn of a new day broke onthe morning of May 21, 1766 to

(00:24):
the sound of church bellsringing throughout New York
City. Only a day earlier, newshad arrived from Boston and
Philadelphia of the Stamp Act’srepeal, sending young boys
racing through the streetswielding poles affixed with
handkerchiefs, to the delightand huzzahs of the crowd.At 1:00

(00:45):
o’clock in the afternoon a crowdled by the Sons of Liberty
assembled on the city’s Commons,and fired a twenty-one gun
salute in honor of JosephAllicocke, whom they called
their general.Allicocke’sorigins are as confusing as the
chaos that reigned in BritishAmerica in the months prior to

(01:05):
the Stamp Act’s repeal. He mayhave been born in Antigua to a
mixed race mother, though inlater years he would claim he
was Irish by birth. Whatever hisstory, by the early 1760s
Allicocke had found work as aclerk provisioning British
soldiers stationed in the city,only to become a merchant in his

(01:26):
own right, and one of theleaders of the Sons of Liberty.
Like the Loyal Nine in Boston,the Sons of Liberty in New York
had led the resistance movementagainst the Stamp Act, to
Parliament’s claim of supremeauthority, and its alleged right
to tax the colonies withouttheir consent. The ashes of
effigies, rioting, and boycottsattested to their fury. But

(01:50):
Parliament had recovered itssenses. It had repealed the
hated act. British Americanslived in an empire of liberty
after all. As two bonfires –one to honor the city, one to
honor themselves – warmed thealready humid air, the Sons of
Liberty hoisted a tall pole madeof pine on the Commons, within

(02:11):
sight of the Upper Barracks, thehome to British soldiers
stationed in the city. A Britishofficer named John Montresor
simply called it a “flag staff.”To New Yorkers, it would soon
become a “liberty pole.”To thepine mast, Liberty’s sons
attached a board bearing theworlds “George 3rd, Pitt – and

(02:35):
Liberty,” to honor the king whohad consented to the Stamp Act’s
repeal, the politician who hadurged its demise in Parliament,
and the ideal that bound Britishsubjects together across the
king’s dominions. With theirmonument raised, and with grand
illuminations casting shadows inthe city, as church bells gave
way to the celebratory sounds offireworks and musket fire, the

(02:59):
Sons of Liberty in all theirdrunken glee, drank 28 toasts in
local taverns, including one tothe King, one to William Pitt,
one to a “Perpetual Unionbetween G. Britain and her
Colonies,” and one to “All trueSons of Liberty in America.”
Warmed by wine, rum punch, andstrong beer, they processed to

(03:20):
the fort on the southern tip ofManhattan Island to congratulate
the new governor Henry Moore andthemselves on their successful
defense of their English rightsand liberties. Notwithstanding
their inebriated state, threeSons of Liberty were admitted to
the fort to pay their respectsto the governor. For Thomas

(03:41):
Gage, a sensible man and thecommander-in-chief of British
forces in North America:

Charles Townshend (03:47):
“The Rejoicings on this Occasion have
been remarkably great, beyondwhat Many Moderate People wished
to see, but tho’ Some may haveexulted as for a Victory, I am
persuaded that the Majoritymeant only to testify their Joy
and Thankfulness.”

But to some of Gage’s soldiers who were
stationed in New York, theheadquarters of the British Army
in North America, the rejoicingwas something else entirely. In
the weeks that followed thecelebrations and the planting of
the Liberty Pole, the 28thRegiment of Foot arrived in New
York City and went to quartersin the Upper Barracks. The

(04:28):
regiment was an unwelcome sight.First in Montreal, and then in
Quebec, it had gained areputation for ill-temperament,
ill-discipline, and evenviolence against civilians. As
the regiment marched from Quebecto Albany and then south to
Manhattan, it received orders toassist local sheriffs and civil

(04:51):
magistrates in evictingsquatters from the lands of the
great river lords. This, theregiment did with vigor, leaving
farms aflame and houses looted.Once quartered in the Upper
Barracks, the soldiers couldonly grumble as they looked
across the Commons to see theliberty pole and the crowd that

(05:13):
frequently gathered around it.To them, it seemed as though New
Yorkers were taunting them. Intruth, many of them were. The
city had long played host tosoldiers, but only very few
since the end of the SevenYears’ War. And new demands from
Parliament that the coloniststax themselves to pay for the

(05:35):
soldiers’ provisions only souredtheir impression of their fellow
Britons.For some soldiers of the28th Regiment, the liberty pole
guarding the Commons was not abeacon of freedom, nor a tribute
to their king, but an act ofdefiance and a symbol of

(05:56):
sedition. Under cover of nighton August 10, 1766, a party of
soldiers slipped out of thebarracks, and cut it down. On
the following day, some 3,000people – led by the Sons of
Liberty – gathered on theCommons to mourn the remains of
their Liberty Pole and erect anew one. Shouting between

(06:20):
soldiers and civilians quicklyturned to shoving, before the
king’s subjects began peltinghis soldiers with brickbats, and
the redcoats brandished theirbayonets. British officers
managed to get their men backinto the barracks, but not
before one soldier slashed acivilian with a bayonet, another
fired his weapon into the crowd,and the mistrust between the

(06:42):
civilians and the soldiersliving in their midst only
deepened. In the days ahead,as the soldiers watched the Sons
of Liberty raise yet anothermonument to mob rule, as their
officers delivered 500-lashes tothe soldier who had wounded the
civilian, and as the colonialgovernment struggled to restore

(07:04):
order in one of the mostimportant cities in the British
Empire, it was becoming muchharder to say who really ruled
British Americans, and who hadthe power to rule them at home.

(07:26):
I’m Jim Ambuske, and this isWorlds Turned Upside Down, a
podcast about the history ofthe American Revolution. Episode

11 (07:34):
“The Resistance.” In the spring of 1766, British
Americans widely celebrated theStamp Act’s demise. In Boston, a
published broadside reveled inthis “Glorious News.”

Boston Broadside (07:49):
“It is impossible to express the Joy
the Town is now in, on receivingthe above, great, glorious, and
important NEWS -- The Bells inall the Churches were
immediately set a Ringing, andwe hear the Day for a general
Rejoicing will be the beginningof the next Week.”

Philadelphian James Gordon reported to his friend in
Grenada that:

Unknown (08:14):
“to Morrow Evening the City is to be illuminated and
next Day a great Dinner at theState House, where will be all
the gentlemen in the Place; weare in hopes we shall carry on a
greater Trade than ever, [even]in the best of times. ”

Colonists ended their boycott of British goods
and ordered teapots from Englandinscribed with the words “No
Stamp Act” and “American LibertyRestored.” For the king’s
birthday in June, some colonistspledged to wear new suits made
in England and give theirhomespun clothes to the poor.
Even in Jamaica, a colony thathad obeyed Parliament’s will,

(08:52):
merchants in Kingston marked theStamp Act’s repeal by burning
effigies of stamp distributorJohn Howell and George
Grenville, the former primeminister who had inflicted the
hated law on the colonies.

Patrick Griffin (09:06):
When the Stamp Act was passed. Americans are
upset, but that's what happenswith all provincials. Things are
passed by the center. They getupset, they push back, they
riot, they write things. There'snothing unusual about this. My
name is Patrick Griffin. I'm theMadden-Hennebry Professor at the
University of Notre Dame. TheScots did this kind of stuff.

(09:28):
The Irish did this kind ofstuff. This is just the way it
is. And then you find is afterthe Stamp Act, the Americans are
going to be euphoric, far fromsaying we're on the road to
revolution or we're going to bebreaking away, you know, like,
let's just kind of sharpen ourquills and get ready to sign
that declaration. It's nothinglike that. They're euphoric, and
they say we have the best of allkings. This demonstrates that

(09:50):
the process works, that theypass something in the center, we
push back against it, and thencooler heads prevail, and
everybody's happy. And isn't itgreat to be part of this? And.
Empire, the greatest empire theworld had ever seen.

Shira Lurie (10:04):
For most of the 1760s and into the early 1770s
most white Anglo Americans woulddefine the British Empire as an
Empire of Liberty. This is howthey viewed it, the freest
empire in the world. ShiraLurie, Assistant Professor of
American history at St Mary'sUniversity, located in

(10:24):
Mi'kma'ki, colonially known asNova Scotia. There is also this
thread, this principle in AngloAmerican thought, of a theory of
resistance, that individuals andcommunities have a right to
challenge and attempt to correctgovernment when it functioned

(10:44):
improperly. They have a right toresist unjust authority. And to
some people, this is sort of acritical check on power and a
critical foundation for how thesystem should work. For some
people, this was not a challengeto authority or the system, but
sort of a necessary part of thesystem itself.

Wendy Bellion (11:03):
Liberty is a complicated concept for this
moment. My name is WendyBellion. I am a professor and
the Sewell Biggs Chair ofAmerican Art History at the
University of Delaware, whereI'm also the Associate Dean for
the Humanities. Britishcolonists are inheriting a
number of ideas from Europe, anumber of definitions of liberty

(11:26):
that include the idea of naturalliberty, the condition of really
living within nature, civilliberty, the idea that society
is governed and protected bylaw, and then political liberty.
And political liberty is onethat the colonists really glom
onto their everydayunderstandings of liberty, the

(11:46):
ability to participate inpolitical life, either as
individuals or via consent thatthey understand to be granted to
them by governing bodies. It'sthat idea of political liberty
that the British colonistsreally understand. It's that
idea that leads them to raisethese things called Liberty

(12:08):
polls to protest for theirrights, to protest against
taxation without representation.

They were proud and grateful to their government for
recognizing their rights, forreversing course, repealing this
hated tax, but it also signaledthat the people can have an
impact on the system that it waspopular organizing by the
colonists that had pressuredparliament to repeal the Stamp

(12:36):
Act. The poll attests to thecolonists gratitude and their
loyalty to the king andparliament, but it also attests
to their own political strengthand their ability to affect
change.

Jon Kukla (12:49):
But with the repeal, they also enact what's called
the Declaratory Act, which saysthat pay no attention to the
fact that we're repealing aStamp Act. We have the
authority, we Parliament havethe authority to legislate a tax
in all matters whatsoever and soon. And so it's a complete
affirmation of parliamentarysovereignty over the colonies

(13:11):
and the Americans exuberant overthe repeal of Stamp Act. Pay
very little attention to thefact that the Declaratory Act
comes with it.

That's John Kukla, a historian of early America.

Jon Kukla (13:24):
And that's not quite as sticking your head in the
sand as it sounds, because oneof the reasonable positions that
people like William Pitt hadtaken during this whole debate
was to say, yes, we have theauthority, but it's not prudent
to use it. It's not entirelywillful or wishful thinking that

(13:46):
the Americans ignore this. Theyjust hope that this is a face
saving measure for parliament,and we're done with the stamp
duties. This is wonderful, andnow we hope we go back to
everything like it was in 1763,when the Empire was wonderful.

But as it would only become slowly and painfully
clear to British Americans overthe next 10 years, there would
be no going back.

Jon Kukla (14:12):
There's a very real sense in which grenvilles Stamp
Act elevated the conflictbetween the colonies in
Parliament elevated it to alevel of constitutional
abstraction from which it neverretreated. And that the whole
period from 1764 with theannouncement that we might think

(14:33):
about stamp duties, that wholeperiod up to 1774 when the First
Continental Congress was dealingwith this was a period in which
the Americans were trying tofind some middle ground, and
there wasn't any.

The almost universally reviled Stamp Act
had made Parliament’s claim tolegislate for British America
“in all cases whatsoever,” asource of serious contention
between the colonies and theMother Country. It called into
question the very foundations ofthe empire itself, what
legitimate power Parliament didhave over the colonies, what

(15:09):
obligations colonists had toresist Parliament’s overreach,
and how provincials could workwithin their own colonies to
achieve the common imperialgood. The euphoria surrounding
the Stamp Act’s repeal onlymasked persistent questions that
remained unanswered. And therewere few places in the colonies

(15:29):
where these problems were moreevident than in the city that
some historians have called thesecond most important city in

the British Empire (15:36):
New York. So, how did colonies and cities
like New York navigate theturbulent politics of empire in
the aftermath of the Stamp Actand its repeal. And how did
those choices pit New Yorkersagainst the soldiers sent by
Parliament to defend theirempire of liberty? To begin

(15:58):
answering these questions, we’llhead first to New York, to walk
the streets of Manhattan, aplace dominated by two rival
political factions who agreed onmuch, and then very little.
We’ll then head to London, wherepoliticians arguing over how to
quarter the king’s soldiers inBritish America arrived at an
imperial compromise, beforesailing back to New York, where

(16:22):
the provincial assembly’sreluctance to support the
British Army in the colonyprovoked a response from
Parliament itself.
In the mid 1760s Manhattan was afar different world than the
city it would become, and yet itwas a place strikingly familiar.

Chris Minty (16:45):
New York City is the most important urban center
in the colonies before theRevolution, and it's the second
most important in the BritishEmpire. My name is Christopher
Minty. I'm a Project editor atThe Center for Digital Editing
at the University of Virginia.New York City is the base of the
British Army in North America.So there's a lot of important

(17:06):
figures, military figures, navalfigures who have spent time in
the city and who live in thecity and in terms of trade. By
the time of the AmericanRevolution, New York is on the
up. Where you look at placeslike Boston, like Philadelphia,
they're declining in comparisonto New York.

New York City in this period is a thoroughly
multicultural place. We knowthat European settlers are
settling on indigenous land. Weknow that the Dutch originally
settled what they call NewAmsterdam, and then when the
English begin to develop thecity, they are still very much
working within the spaces thatthe Dutch had settled in the

(17:45):
17th century. So for all intentsand purposes, this is a small
settlement today. When we talkabout lower Manhattan, we often
mean an area from, say, 14thStreet, South Union Square,
south. You have to think muchfurther south when you're
thinking about the 18th centurycity, you need to think about
Wall Street, and south of WallStreet, with a little bit of

(18:07):
settlement above that area, it'sa densely settled city.
Architecturally, it still lookslike a Dutch port city, because
much of the architecture wouldhave remained from the 17th
century.

What did this 17th century Dutch port city look
like in 18th century BritishAmerica?

Think tall gabled buildings, and by gables, I mean
the kind of large triangularshapes that you see at the very
top of buildings. Even today, wehave some 18th century prints
that will show us two to threestory buildings. We still have a
lot of timber construction, butwe might also have brick

(18:47):
construction.

I loved thinking about what New York City must
have been like then compared towhat it is now. When I try to
visualize New York, I thinkabout, okay, New York was just
basically the tip of ManhattanIsland, 42nd street where the
New York Public Library is,that's uptown. That's far up. So
if you can imagine walking fromsomewhere like the Bowling Green

(19:12):
or Francis tavern, both stillthere, all the way to the New
York Public Library, it's quitea long walk. But once you get
down to the Bowling Green andFraunces Tavern, the whole
layout of the city kind ofchanges. The streets aren't as
rigid and structured as they arefurther up. They're all kind of
mish mashed together.Everything's on top of one
another.

It is a space that you walk from Bowling
Green, which is a small greenspace at the very tip of
Manhattan, surrounded by aBritish fort and the governor's
mansion, moving north upBroadway, which is even by the
18th century, a major conduit oftraffic, foot traffic and
carriage traffic, moving northup to the space called the

(19:56):
commons. We're talking about anarea of one Geographic mile, a
straight shot north and south,bounded on the north by this
open green space, sometimessimply called the green or the
fields, more often called thecommons, as it appears on maps
of the day, we can think about acity that's also very much

(20:17):
oriented toward the water. Themajor ports of the city at that
point would have been on theEast River, the North River,
which today we call the HudsonRiver, wasn't so much a site of
traffic. You

You can walk from one end the East River to the
Hudson River. Take you a while.Take you a wee while, but you
could do it. And you're walkingaround, you're seeing all the
shops, all the stores, all themarketplaces, all the coffee
houses and the taverns. You'reseeing a lot of people walking
around. There's a water pumpwhere people go to get water.
People congregate there. It's avery social city where there's a

(20:52):
lot of activity. There's a lotof people like it is today, put
into a small space almost on topof one another.

Manhattan was home to a constellation of cultures,
peoples and religions.

New York, like it is now, was then a diverse city,
lots of different religions,lots of different churches. If
you looked at the skyline of NewYork, you can see the skyline
being punctured by all of thesechurch steeples.

As they walked through this densely settled
space visitors would have seenand heard many different
peoples, English, indigenous,Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French,
Huguenots, West African, WestIndian, free and enslaved.

There is a sizable concentration of people
of African descent within thisconfined geography of lower
Manhattan, the story ofenslavement in New York at this
time looks quite different thanthe the understandings that many
of us have of plantation slaveryin the American colonial south.

(21:57):
So over the course of the 18thcentury, about 5000 people of
African descent are forciblybrought to Manhattan. This peaks
during the 1740s where thepopulation of enslaved people is
at about 20% and most of thoseenslaved individuals are being
brought from the Britishplantation colonies of the West,
Indies. After that time, we havea larger population of enslaved

(22:20):
people coming directly from Westand Central Africa. By the
period of the Seven Years War,enslaved people account for
about 17% of New York's urbanpopulation, and by the time that
the Liberty polls go up at thecommons, there's about more than
3000 people who are enslavedliving in Manhattan, about 14%

(22:42):
of that population prior to therevolution, only a small
proportion of New York's blackpopulation is free, and black
and white, New Yorkers areliving in fairly close
proximity. So in contrast tosouthern plantations, where many
enslaved people are living andlaboring at some distance from

(23:03):
the mansions of white people onthe plantations. The free and
enslaved populations of New Yorkare encountering each other with
some degree of frequency indomestic spaces, in shops, in
the streets and in the kitchens,and especially at places like
the docks on the East River,where enslaved men are crossing

(23:24):
paths with black sailors who hadtraveled across the globe. We
need to understand, though, thatNew Yorkers are not generous
slave holders just because theconditions of slavery look
different than they did in theplantation south. This does not
mean that New Yorkers did notrespond brutally and violently

(23:45):
to any threat of resistance byenslaved people. The colony
introduces what's called a BlackCode very early in the 18th
century and 1712 that's intendedto regulate the movements of
enslaved people around the city.That said black New Yorkers do
find ways to resist thesurveillance of white new

(24:07):
yorkers. One of those spaces inwhich that happens is a space
that, in the 18th century, wasknown as the African Burial
Ground, and the burial groundwas just what it sounds like. It
was an active cemetery, but itwas also a space of ritual
practice for many enslavedpeople in the city.

In many ways, Manhattan's urban geography
reflected the colony's socialorder.

The British Crown very deliberately decides to
establish a fort at the very tipof the island because it's as
much for purposes of monitoringcommerce. It's for defensive
purposes. It's a grand space,and it's a space that they can
control geographically. Much ofthe city does develop
organically. That's why, if youlook at very early maps of the
city, you do see these shortstreets kind of criss crossing

(24:54):
along a plan that looks morelike an old European city than
the grid likes. That we get inthe 19th century in Manhattan.
So the settlement really movesfrom south to north, and very
early on, the various wards thatdivide up the civic spaces of
New York City become associatedwith different things. So a

(25:17):
crown government presence, aresidential area, this open
space of the commons, and beyondthat, spaces that were settled
by both free and enslaved peopleof African descent, and then a
commercial district, which isreally the area of Wall Street
and the East River docks. Thathas really been consistent since

(25:37):
the 18th century. When we thinkabout that area of lower
Manhattan. We still think aboutglobal commerce today, and that
was true even in the 18thcentury.

New York City, as a commercial city, is really sort
of central to its identity. Andfor merchants who are dealing in
trade and places in theCaribbean, places in Europe,
particularly London or the EastIndies, that's part of their
identity as part of who theyare. Like they see New York as a
commercial city, and it fitswithin the British Empire. And

(26:08):
the British Empire can work forthem because it opens up doors
for them to trade with placespretty much all over the world,
and they have access toeconomies that they wouldn't
otherwise be able to have accessto.

The circulation of newspapers throughout the
Atlantic world only reinforcedNew York's connection to the
Empire and a sense ofBritishness, of a common British
identity.

Brad Jones (26:31):
It helps that by the 1730s and 40s, 1000 or more
ships are crossing the Atlantic,carrying goods and prints and
newspapers to and from virtuallyevery major port city in the
North Atlantic. There's alsoefforts by the government to
establish a packet service, anactual formal network of
communication. This is hugelyimportant during all these wars

(26:52):
against France and Spain, but onthese ships, they're carrying
newspapers. My name is BradJones. I'm a professor of
history at California StateUniversity, Fresno, in any port
city, say, New York orPhiladelphia or Boston,
virtually every week, a shipsurviving from somewhere across
the North Atlantic, bringing notjust goods and other things and

(27:13):
people, but it's also bringingnewspapers from those places. So
18th century newspaper printerswould take those newspapers,
they would pull stories out ofthose newspapers and publish
them in their own It'sremarkable. We start to see by
the middle of the 18th century,news and information being
shared across the Atlantic. Thevery same stories are being read

(27:35):
by a Glaswegian, a person livingin Glasgow or a halogeny, and
person living in Halifax orKingston or New York or they're
all reading the same stories,sometimes weeks or maybe a month
or more apart, because it'sstill, you know, a fair distance
to cover here. This has aprofound impact on how they
conceive of themselves.

High literacy rates, especially in the
northern colonies, allowed NewYorkers and other British
Americans to imagine themselvesas part of a much larger British
community.

Brad Jones (28:04):
But here's the thing, literacy ultimately
mattered very little in thecontext of accessing news. This
is something really lost, Ithink, on us today. This is
really still a largely oralculture in which it was
perfectly common and ordinaryfor people to read things aloud.
In Glasgow, New York andHalifax, I know of actual places

(28:26):
in the cities where people wouldgather to hear the news read. We
know that in taverns and coffeehouses that travelers and people
frequent in these places wouldwrite about hearing people
reading newspapers. If youweren't literate, you could
actually go every, you know,once a week, or once every two
weeks, to this place asnewspapers came in, or your

(28:47):
local newspapers are published,and there would be somebody
actually reading the news to you

In New York, taverns were a place to gather,
to drink, to debate, to read orhear the news and to mobilize.
Christopher Minty explains:

Tavern culture is central to political
mobilization, building socialbonds, building political bonds.
In New York, there are moretaverns in New York than
anywhere else in the colonies.Now, I think that might be
because there were so manyBritish soldiers there in the
1750s and early 1760s and manyof them just stuck around. And

(29:22):
New Yorkers like to drink. Andthe British, the British Army,
the regiments who were stillthere, they also liked to drink.
So there's a lot of taverns. Youhad a lot of opportunities to go
somewhere and have a drink.People would go to one of the
many taverns to drink, to talkto their friends, to learn about
what was happening, not just inNew York, but across the

(29:42):
colonies and the British Empire.

New Yorkers also went to taverns to share a drink
with like minded people. By theearly 1760s two families, the
Lvingstons and the De Lanceys,dominated New York politics.

Both are families of immigrants. So the
Livingstons are Scottish andDutch. They moved to Dutch
Republic 17th century, and thenmoved to New York. The De
Lancies fled France in the late17th century, went to London
very briefly, and then came overto New York. The Livingstons,

(30:19):
they were primarily based northof the city in Livingston Manor,
because New York was dividedinto these manorial estates, and
they were absolutely ginormous,like well over 100,000 acres, so
very large, they had a lot oftenants, and that's how they
earned a lot of money from thepeople who were living on their
land. Their estate was dividedup in the 18th century just into

(30:41):
another manorial estate calledClaremont. It's still there.
Livingston Manor is now, is atown in New York now.
Livingston, New York, is on theoriginal patent for where they
were, because they're a littlebit further north. Their trade
is primarily domestic, andthat's how they make their
money. The De Lancies areprimarily based in the city.
They have a lot of commercialdealings going out of the city

(31:04):
into the British Empire, andmerchants who feed into that.
And the first prominent Delanceyfamily member in New York was
someone called Etienne DeLancey, and when he moved he
anglicized his name from Etienneto Stephen, so he fully embraced
life in the British Empire, andhe went on to become a very
prominent member of society. Hemarried well into the Van

(31:26):
Cortlandt family. Became amember of the assembly, a
prominent member his son, JamesSr, solidified the delances
within sort of New York and NewYork City's political fabric.
Serving as Chief Justice,Lieutenant Governor. He was
governor, he was probably one ofthe most powerful people in all
of colonial North America, andhe really established the

(31:49):
family's fortune, buying a lotof land in what is now like the
Lower East Side. So if you thinkof Manhattan today, there's De
Lancey Street down there. The DeLancey family owned pretty much
all of that, and as they startto become wealthier and get more
prominent, members of eachfamily start to serve in the
assembly. In 1765

In 1765 when Parliament passed the Stamp Act,
the Livingstons controlled thecolonial assembly, like the De
Lancey faction, they opposedParliament's presumed right to
lay direct taxes on BritishAmericans without their consent,
believing that only provincialassemblies had such power, but
they mobilized oppositionagainst Parliament's attempt to

(32:31):
bind the colonies more closelyto the mother country in very
different ways.

By this time, the Livingstons because they've been
around for So long, and they'reso powerful, and people live on
their estates, and they have alot of sway about how people can
live their life, and they canmake things harder for them if
they wanted. They rely on sortof traditional modes of
mobilization, which is primarilydeference, like you should
support us, because we areelites. We are essentially bit

(33:00):
better than you, and you alwayshave. So why would you change
that? During the 1760s the DeLanceys tried to involve
ordinary New Yorkers in thepolitical process more than
there had ever been, and thelivingstons didn't do that. So
the de Lancers were happy to goto taverns with New Yorkers, and
they would pay for everythingengage with one another, and

(33:21):
they helped. Because of eventslike that, the delanceys were
able to build a like mindedpolitical association that had
people who were as elite as EtonCambridge educated James De
Lancey served in the BritishArmy, absolutely loaded, while
also with watchmakers,carpenters, blacksmiths, people
who were very different tosomeone like James De Lancey,

(33:44):
but they operated within thesamepolitical circle. And because
the delanceys brought people whowere politically like minded
together, these people stucktogether, and they realized that
they actually quite like eachother, and those political bonds
that brought them together soongrew into social bonds.

A visit to Benjamin Stout's Tavern on Bowery Lane in
1768 helps us to understand justhow the De Lancies used the
power of the pub to greatpolitical effect

In the run up to the 1768 election, the delanceys
had events in that Tavern onMonday, Tuesday, Wednesday and
Thursday, and they paid foreverything, and it's an open
bar, and you can drink as muchas you want. And when Benjamin
stout presented James De Lanceywith his what is essentially an
invoice, it was like over 100bottles of wine, lots of beer,

(34:38):
lots of cider, lots of whiskeyas well, or drams of whiskey,
lots of food, and you couldalmost have as much as you want.
And New Yorkers were like, Oh,well, I'm not going to turn that
down. So you you can imaginethat people having all of this
drink, all of this food you'resat with, say, people who you
might not know when you satdown, but when you were done.

(35:00):
And, and you've had, maybe, Idon't know, Five pints, some
whiskey, some wine. You knowthem at the end, because you
only had this great time witheach other.

It was out of this coalition of clock makers and
Cambridge-educated men that theSons of Liberty emerged in 1765
to mobilize against the StampAct. Men like John Lamb, Isaac
Sears, and Joseph Allicockeassociated with the De Lanceys
and the faction’s embrace ofpopular politics, even if the De
Lancey family itself didn’talways agree with the Sons’

(35:32):
mob-like methods. Theyestablished a Committee of
Correspondence to shareinformation with like-minded
people in other colonies toresist the Stamp Act, and when
Parliament repealed it, theyjoined their friends in taverns
to celebrate. But with thearrival of more British soldiers
in New York beginning in 1766,and a mandate from Parliament

(35:54):
for the colonies to provide forthem, the Sons of Liberty once
again turned to the friendshipsforged over pints and politics
to rally the people against thestanding army among them. While
in the colonial assembly, the DeLancey’s and Livingston’s
treaded carefully to defend NewYork’s rights and avoid
Parliament’s wrath. New YorkCity was the headquarters of the

(36:19):
British Army in North America.By the mid-1760s, soldiers had
been a prominent fixture of thecity’s urban landscape for more
than a century.

John McCurdy (36:29):
New York has this long history of soldiers. There
have been British soldiers inNew York City and Albany going
back to 1664 I'm John McCurdy.I'm a professor of history at
Eastern Michigan University in1664 England seizes control of
the New Netherlands, NewAmsterdam, and sends in Colonel
Richard Nichols with 300 troops,who take the city and rename it

(36:50):
New York. And when they do so,of course, they arrive and they
find there's no place to put allthese soldiers. And so they just
put them in people's houses. Youhave to have some place for
these guys to sleep and live.And thereafter there was a
permanent military presence inboth New York and Albany, and so
New Yorkers are very early onaware of what it means to have a
permanent army in theirpresence.

In the century following the English conquest
of New York, Army officers andgovernment officials dealt with
a recurring problem in BritishAmerica, where to quarter
soldiers.

Quartering is literally where you're
quartering the soldiers, whereyou're putting them, where they
will sleep, where they willstore their effects, and where
they will even take command togo off to fight a battle.
Quartering in colonial Americabefore the Seven Years War is
really an irregular practice.It's only during war time there
is no standing army in most ofcolonial North America, there's

(37:43):
no permanent militaryinfrastructure. In the era
before tanks and nukes, thedeadliest weapon of war was the
soldier, was the man carryingthe gun. But like any weapon,
you have to figure out where tostore this, this deadly weapon,
where should the weapon beallowed to go and not When can
it be used? When is aninappropriate time to use it.
There's not a lot written interms of the law for the

(38:04):
colonial law, because it's suchan infrequent practice. There
are English laws which most ofthe colonies will look to. If
you're an officer who shows upwith soldiers and you need to
put them up for the night,you're supposed to produce a
billet, literally, a bill sayingthat, because these people have
stayed here the colony or somegovernment official will later
compensate you for your troubleand your time. That's what's

(38:25):
supposed to happen. It doesn'talways happen, but there aren't
legal restrictions on wheresoldiers can go. There's only
one place before the SevenYears' War that really states we
want to have a control overquartering as a practice, and
that's New York, partly becauseof the experience of having
these English soldiers arrive in1664.

The army's presence was more intrusive than we might
first imagine. Most

Most houses in the colonies before middle of the
18th century are pretty small,probably two room structures.
This is the air in whicheveryone sleeps together in the
same bed, mother, father, kids,servants, slaves, even soldiers
might even go into the same bedwith the family, or probably
more likely, they're on thefloor, which would not be
unusual for people in ahousehold in this era, they'd
eat at the family table.Families usually are expected to

(39:10):
feed the soldiers along with therest of their family. The idea
is the homeowner will becompensated for their space and
for their food, for theirefforts during this time,

During the Seven Years’ War, as tens of thousands
of British soldiers poured intothe colonies to fight the French
and their Indigenous allies,colonial assemblies clashed with
British commanders-in-chief overwhere to quarter the king’s
troops, and how to pay for it.To keep soldiers out of civilian
homes, and to exercise somemeasure of control over their

(39:43):
presence among civilianpopulations, provincial
governments began buildingbarracks in cities like
Philadelphia, Charleston, andNew York.

If you know where City Hall is in New York today,
that's where a massive barracksis built a barracks capable of
holding 2000 men. It's about acity block long. It'd be larger
than the city hall that standshere today, that at the time,
was the comment for the city ofNew York, where you could raise
your animals, where militiamusters would take place, where
George Whitefield gave sermonsduring the Great Awakening, with

(40:14):
the most public of spaces. Andthis land is taken over and a
barracks is built there. Ofcourse, once you build a
barracks, you change everythingaround it, because if you do
have 500 men or 1000 men inuniform with weapons, that
changes how people feel aboutthat neighborhood. It also
causes the erection of newbusinesses. In New York, for
example, a series of publichouses, or basically cheap

(40:36):
taverns open up all around thebarracks to supply the men with
alcohol, but also to supply themin with prostitutes. We know
prostitution really takes off inthese places, right around the barracks

When the war ended, however, George III and his
ministers believed that the nextone with France was just over
the horizon. Prime MinisterGeorge Grenville intended his
Stamp Act to pay for a standingarmy of over 10,000 soldiers in
the colonies to defend againstFrench perfidy. From the army’s
headquarters in New York City,British officers planned the

(41:10):
defense of British America inconjunction with the king and
his ministers in London. In thecolonies, that task fell to
Thomas Gage, commander-in-chiefof British forces in North
America. As a young armycaptain, the English-born Gage
had survived Major GeneralEdward Braddox’s disastrous
defeat at the Battle of theMonongahela in 1755. Gage

(41:35):
married a New Jersey woman namedMargaret Kemble in 1758, and he
rose through the army’s ranks tobecome military governor of
Montreal after the city’ssurrender in 1760. Three years
later, Major General JeffreyAmherst’s failure to quell an
Indigenous uprising led in partby the Odawa warrior Pontiac

(41:56):
cost him his command. The kingappointed Gage to replace
Amherst as commander-in-chief.Gage was responsible for the 10
regiments the British planned tostation in the colonies after
the Seven Years’ War, inaddition to the regiments
already there. And it was hisstruggles to quarter British
soldiers in New York thatbrought the colony to

(42:17):
Parliament’s attention.

Gage is overseeing a massive army. At the end of
the Seven Years' War, Britaindecides to leave 15 regiments of
troops, of regular army troopsin North America, and they
scatter these troops from StAugustine out to Illinois, up to
Quebec, over to Newfoundland,some in the American colonies
like New York and Philadelphia.Gage is responsible for all of
them. He's receivingcommunications from governors,

(42:42):
from assemblies, of course, fromthe Ministry back in Britain,
and trying to coordinate all ofthis. And a big issue is often
for him ordering what to do withthe soldiers, how to make sure
they get fed, how to make surethey have utensils they need,
and other supplies they need tolive. And so it's Gage who sort
of is on the front line of thisissue, because Americans,
especially once the Seven Years'War ends, the Americans start

(43:04):
pushing back and saying, Well,why are the soldiers still here?
I thought the war was over. Whatare we paying for? Why are these
guys in the middle of the publiccommon what's going on? And so
it's Gage who tries to startfiguring a solution to that.

British Americans in New York and elsewhere were
as wary of standing armies astheir fellow subjects in Great
Britain, where a strict lawcalled the “Mutiny Act” offered
them constitutional protectionsby governing where soldiers
could and could not bequartered.

Gage wants, initially, the English Mutiny
Act to be expanded to NorthAmerica and simply include that
as well. And the Mutiny Act laysout the rules for quartering
that when troops come to town,the city or the local
authorities have to find a placefor these soldiers to live. They
also have to provide basicaccouterments to the men,
utensils, alcohol, in someinstances, vinegar, other items

(43:54):
like that. They need to pay fortransporting troops and also
their supplies from place toplace. Gage says we should
expand this to North America.However, in England, the troops
can only go into public housesor barracks. They're not allowed
to go into private houses.Engage says, Well, this would be
impractical in America, becausewe don't still have a lot of

(44:15):
barracks, especially as you gooutside of the major cities, we
don't have a lot of publichouses. Engage says we want to
write a law for America, butwe're going to need to include
that the troops will have theright to go into private houses.
This is how it's originallywritten and sent off to
Parliament to be considered forpassage in what becomes the
Quartering Act.

But for the king, as well as many members of
Parliament, quartering troops inprivate homes was a breach of
the colonists' rights andliberties.

It's actually George the Third who says,
"Well, this will never fly. Ican't believe anyone's got ever
going to approve this inParliament. This is a clear
violation of Englishconstitution to not have
soldiers in your privatehouses." And he's right. This
bill goes to Parliament in early1765 and it's voted down. It's
handily defeated because peoplethink the idea of forcing

(45:05):
Americans to accept troops intheir houses is
unconstitutional.

In London, members of Parliament turned to Benjamin
Franklin, the crown-appointedpostmaster general for North
America and agent for the colonyof Pennsylvania for advice on
how to revise the defeatedQuartering Act.

Franklin is living in London at the time as the
agent for Pennsylvania. He'sbasically a lobbyist. And
Franklin gets wind of what'sgoing on and works out a
compromise. And he says, Well,okay, I can assure you, the
Americans don't mind paying fortroops. They don't mind paying
to quarter them. They do notwant them in their private
houses. And so the QuarteringAct is rewritten. And so it
states emphatically thatsoldiers, when they come to your

(45:43):
town, they will either go tobarracks or to public houses or
to an empty, uninhabitedbuilding. It doesn't say it
specifically, but it isexpressly implied the troops
will not go into private houses.And it lays out these rules,
where will soldiers go? It laysout compensation. The property
owners will be compensated ifsoldiers are on their property.

(46:05):
If someone chooses to rent anempty building, it gives local
control to quartering soldiers.So when soldiers come to town,
it's the local magistrates thatdecide where they're going to go
and how many will go into whichplace. The Americans are way on
the hook for of course, payingfor this. They'll pay this to
their taxes.

Parliament passed the new Quartering Act in May
1765, one week before it passedthe Stamp Act. The two were
meant to work together tosupport the army and the
colonies, one to fund it, theother to house it. Yet British
Americans felt the collectiveweight of one act much more than
they felt the other.

Americans, I would never say they love the
Quartering Act. By comparison tothe Stamp Act, they kind of
ignore it. There's a couple waysof thinking about this. One.
Unlike the Stamp Act, theAmericans get something for the
Quartering Act. They've receivedthis guarantee, and the British
Army lives up to it, with veryfew exceptions. In the colonies,
in what becomes United States,there's very, very few instances

(47:04):
where troops ever go intoprivate houses again, and when
that happens, they arereprimanded. The Americans do
get that guarantee in exchangefor their money. It's also
uneven. Stamp acts don't applyto everybody. Anyone who touches
paper is going to have to paythe Stamp Act. The Quartering
Act only comes in when soldiersare in town, soldiers aren't in
most colonies, so most Americansaren't having to deal with the

(47:26):
presence of soldiers, nor arethey having to deal with the
cost of quartering soldiers.Through my research, I was able
to find that at least eightprovincial assemblies
appropriated money for theQuartering Act without much
objection. In fact, oppositionarises in two places. One is New
York, and the other is Boston.

In New York, as Christopher Minty explains, the
Quartering Act was:

Wildly unpopular. Many, if not most, New Yorkers
were opposed to the QuarteringAct. They didn't like having any
troops in New York, they justthey didn't like it. They wanted
them gone. They didn't want astanding army.

For many New Yorkers, the Stamp Act and the
Quartering Act were two sides ofthe same coin - the one an
illegal attempt by Parliament totax them, and the other lacking
an express guarantee that thearmy would not billet troops in
private homes.

New York Assembly (48:23):
“This Billeting Bill on the Carpet is
a new Matter of seriousSpeculation, People say they had
rather part with their Money,tho’ rather unconstitutionally

(48:46):
than to have a parcel ofMilitary Masters put by Act of
Parliament a bed [next to] theirWifes & Daughters.”

In December, another New Yorker exclaimed:

New Yorker (48:56):
”The Stamp Act and billeting act were hatched at
once, and God grant they may beboth repealed at once.”

In the summer and fall of 1765, as colonists
rioted and burned effigies ofStamp distributors and prime
ministers to protest the StampAct, General Gage wisely
recognized that trying toenforce the Quartering Act would
only make matters worse. Hedelayed its implementation by a
year.But the rioting also ledGage to see the Quartering Act’s

(49:27):
potential in a new light. AsGage knew, quartering troops in
the colonial backcountry wasexpensive. The British had to
ship supplies to the Ohio andIllinois countries, and build
barracks where none existed. Ashe told his superiors in London,
it made good economic sense toredeploy soldiers to the east

(49:48):
coast, to colonies with goodinfrastructure and shorter
supply lines. Gage alsobelieved that the presence of
British soldiers would deterfurther civil disorder in major
cities. The army had no formalpowers to act as a police force,
nor could it act as one withouta direct request from civilian
authorities. But with the StampAct crisis abating by May 1766,

(50:13):
Gage argued that soldiers wereneeded to protect powder
magazines in case of future“tumults” and offer “support to
the civil government” should therioting resume.

by 1766 Gates has moved three regiments to New
Jersey, Pennsylvania and NewYork, putting most of those in
major cities.

The 28th Regiment of Foot arrived in New York city
from Quebec that summer. Theyjoined a contingent of Highland
soldiers from Scotland,artillerymen, and the 46th
Regiment in the city, about1,500 soldiers in all. As the
new arrivals took up residencein the Upper Barracks, built on
the Commons, the city’s LibertyPole, erected earlier that May,

(50:55):
stood watch over them. Here'sShira Lurie.

Colonists raised the first Liberty Poll, actually
not as a method of resistance,but of celebration. People in
New York had just received wordthat Parliament repealed the
Stamp Tax, and they are veryexcited, so they have a party.
Everyone goes down to the commonsometimes called the fields.

(51:21):
They light fireworks. They roastan ox, they drink heavily, they
fire cannon. Salutes, and theyraise this liberty pole, which
was a ships mass, and they put asign on it that says, George the
third hit and liberty

As Wendy Bellion explains, Liberty Poles were no
ordinary pieces of wood.

Liberty poles don't get their name until the
late 1760s and they're veryearly on associated with flag
poles. They might have beenabout that height they derived
from tall straight white pinetrees, trees that were known as
mast trees, and trees that wereincredibly valuable to the

(52:02):
British Navy, trees that couldbe logged and could be used for
all manner of ship constructionin the 18th century, and in
particular masts. These weretall, straight timbers that were
regulated and used specificallyfor logging by the British Navy,
so that they could be used forall kinds of maritime purposes,

(52:24):
commercial as well as martial.Many of these trees are farmed
in upstate New England, NewHampshire and Maine, and they
would have been very carefullylogged, conveyed down these vast
rivers, very dangerous work, aspolitical tensions begin to heat

(52:44):
up, in part caused by the StampAct and the many acts that would
follow, a group of New Yorkerswho begin to resist British
taxation efforts, a group thatbegins to call themselves the
Sons of Liberty begin to seizesome of these logs, some of
these mass trees from the portson the East River, these are
very long pieces of timber inexcess of at least 50 sometimes

(53:09):
70 feet. So imagine trying tomake your way through these
tight corners and streets oflower Manhattan, conveying these
enormous pieces of timber. Andthen imagine the sheer human
power required to raise thesethings when you don't have
something like a crane to helpyou do that, you have to imagine

(53:30):
these men coming together to diga hole, to raise this pole, to
insert it into this space, toshore up all the foundations
around this so this so thisthing is not going to come down,
and once it's raised, it couldserve like a flagpole. You could
literally raise flags and othersigns and insignias up and down

(53:51):
these flagpoles, but over time,these effectively become
monuments. The Sons of Libertyunderstand themselves to be
raising monuments to their ownsense of liberty. When these
things first go up, they aremeant to be celebratory objects.

But in New York, as in other colonies, monuments to
liberty for some cast longshadows that illuminated its
absence for others.

We have to think about the Commons as a space
that is being crossed by whitepeople of European descent as
well as enslaved people ofAfrican descent every day as
they went about their everydaybusiness in New York City, we
assume that it was whitecolonists who were raising the
Liberty polls. We don't reallyknow for sure, we don't have
clear records of who did thelabor. It's entirely conceivable

(54:45):
that enslaved people of Africandescent were asked to help raise
these poles into place, polesthat paid tribute to liberties
that only white free men couldhave enjoyed in the colonies. At
this time, there's a terrible.Irony, there's a very cruel
irony for many enslaved peopleseeing these Liberty poles
within their midst, theseLiberty poles broadcast a kind

(55:08):
of political liberty thatenslaved people could not have
access to at this time period.

Even so, enslaved people might have found other
meanings and other memories inthe pine mast standing on the
city's Commons.

The forms of the Liberty pole may well have
resonated with architecturalforms that people in the African
diaspora might have beenfamiliar with. So this is where
we need to think about culturalmemory, about Memorial forms
that enslaved people might havecarried with them across the

(55:45):
Atlantic. So, for example, thecolumnar form of the Liberty
poles might have resembled formslike sacred trees and altars
that were part of vernacularlandscapes in West Africa as
well as the colonial Americas.And some of these trees, and
these were often trees that hada certain kind of significance,

(56:05):
because they too, were tall andthey were very old. Sometimes
they were located in sacredgroves. These are the kind of
trees that would have carriedspiritual resonance in Congo and
Yoruba communities, some of thecommunities from which enslaved
people in New York were drawn aswell as the greater Caribbean
plantations to which someenslaved people were

(56:27):
transported.

For the British soldiers quartered in the Upper
Barracks. The Liberty Poles wereno ordinary pieces of wood
either.

Over time, they become contested objects,
because what the Sons of Libertydecide to do in raising these
Liberty poles at the Commons isto put them up in front of the
very barracks that Britishtroops are occupying on the
Commons. So you can imagine thatthese become very antagonistic
objects.

The soldiers are clearly reading into some of
those more subversive subtextsabout popular power. New York
colonists and these Britishsoldiers in the city don't have
the best relationship. Colonistsare really upset generally about
having this large standing armyin the colonies following the
Seven Years War. They think it'sunnecessary, they think it's

(57:22):
expensive, they think it's apotential threat to their
liberty. There's a lot oftension between the colonists
and these soldiers. The soldiersmay have taken that also as kind
of a provocation.

What begins to happen is that the Liberty boys,
as they're also known, begin tocall their supporters to the
Commons, and they do this byliterally calling this becomes a
very noisy space, a space ofpolitical language, a space of
political action. But they alsodo that by printing and posting

(57:54):
what were known as broadsides,effectively posters that are
calling people to politicalaction. We need to think about
the Liberty poles as the centerof an acoustic space, as the
center of a sonic landscape. Andit is also this broader sonic
landscape reverberating outwardfrom the center of the commons

(58:15):
itself that is summoning peopleto action. If you think about
when you hear a church bell, andyou can hear a church bell for
miles beyond where the bell isactually ringing in the tower,
and it too, summons people to acenter. It summons people to a
social space. Summons people todo and perform a certain kind of

(58:37):
ritual. That is precisely whatbegins to happen with the
Liberty poles. It's not just theLiberty boys who are calling
people to the commons. It's thepole itself. It's endowed with a
kind of anthropomorphicpresence, the presence of human
agency to be able to summonpeople to its own defense and to
declare the liberties of Britishcolonists on their behalf.

The pole was a celebration that they lived in
an Empire of Liberty. But then,of course, that changed,

Called by the Sons of Liberty and the Liberty pole
itself to the Commons, NewYorkers, who were angry about
the army's very presence in theheart of the city, rallied
around the pine mast tocelebrate the Stamp Act's repeal
and their commitment to liberty,all within sight of the soldiers
in the barracks when some of thesoldiers, cloaked in darkness,

(59:33):
cut the Liberty pole down onAugust 10, 1766, they did so not
as a means of disrespect toGeorge the Third of William
Pitt, whose names the Sons ofLiberty had affixed to the pole
as defenders of British Americanfreedom, but as an act of
resistance to what they saw asmob rule and seditious disorder.

(59:54):
And yet, by doing so, theytransformed its meanings in ways
they never intended.

Shira Lurie (01:00:00):
By tearing down the pole, they confer a lot more
significance and meaning than ifthey had just allowed it to
remain standing. Andcontemporaries say this one
newspaper article says NewYorkers would have considered
their pole quote a trifle andthey wouldn't have mined it if
it just sort of naturally fellto the ground over time. But

(01:00:21):
after quote being destroyed byway of insult, we could not but
consider it as a declaration ofwar against our freedom and
property. End quote. So byattacking it, the soldiers
really strip away the polesendorsement of the king and
Parliament's authority, and theyreally transform it into this
symbol of the colonists struggleagainst tyrannical exercises of

(01:00:45):
imperial power, and crucially,they also marked it as an
important symbol. This is worthyof an attack. This is worthy of
destruction.

Jim Ambuske (01:00:54):
The nearly 3000 people who descended on the
comments the following day foundtheir Liberty pole lying on the
ground with its meaning remade,though they managed to erect a
new one. The ensuing clash withBritish soldiers left two
civilians wounded before GeneralGage and the regimental
commanders could get their menback in the barracks. As Gage

(01:01:16):
wrote to London:

Charles Townshend (01:01:18):
“The Mob afterwards in Presence of the
Magistrates Surrounded theBarracks, and vented so much
abuse and provoking Language,that some of the better Sort of
People who had assembled there,did not think it possible that
the Officers could commandthemselves, or restrain the Fury
of their Men and pressed theMagistrates to Support their own
Dignity and disperse the Mob.The Soldiers were however kept

(01:01:41):
quiet and no Mischief ensued.”

They kept quiet until the night of September
23rd, when soldiers from theTwenty-Eighth Regiment cut down
the Liberty pole’s replacement.Once again, the Sons of Liberty
sallied forth from their tavernsto erect a new pine mast pole.
Once again, the soldiers cut itdown. On March 19, 1767, New

(01:02:10):
Yorkers awoke to find theirlatest liberty pole destroyed.
The New-York Gazette played coyin its description of the
perpetrators, but anyone in thecity reading the newspaper would
have known who had wielded thesaw.

New York Gazette (01:02:24):
“Last Thursday Morning, the Pole erected as
sacred to Liberty, on the CityParade, by a great Number of the
principal Inhabitants of thisCity, and called the Liberty
Pole, was found cut down by someevil-minded Persons unknown.”

Nor did the paper have any doubt about what Master
the malignant men served.

“This Pole has been cut down several Times
before, by Persons who couldnever be discovered, and who
could not have the leastTemptation to such a malicious
Job, there being neitherPleasure, Profit, or Honour in
doing it, and can be done onlyby such as are actuated by an
infernal Disposition, and arequite Volunteers to Satan, to

(01:03:09):
serve him without Fee orReward.”

The 2,000 people who assembled on the Commons on
March 19th, the morning afterthe destruction of the latest
pine mast, chose to reject Satanand all his works by erecting a
new, armored liberty pole. Theysunk a new mast deep into the
ground. And then:

Wendy Bellion (01:03:30):
Blacksmiths went to work. The Sons of Liberty
realized that they almost need aprotective framework around the
pole itself. Part of the soniclandscape that is involved in
raising these poles are theblacksmiths who are banging
these pieces of iron into placeto prevent those British saws
and to prevent anyone reallyfrom getting close to these

(01:03:54):
Liberty poles and messing withthem.

The Iron Skin encasing this latest Liberty
pole and the constant vigilanceof the Sons of Liberty deterred
British soldiers from fellingit. But it was not for lack of
trying, as the New York Gazettereported

“[O]n Monday Evening last, a Number of the
Soldiers armed, were seen aroundit, ‘tis said with a Ladder, to

fell it above the Iron Work: When many of the Sons of Liberty (01:04:17):
undefined
took the Alarm; and it is morethan probably if some of the
Military Officers had notappeared, and commanded off the
Soldiers, there would have beenbloody Work.”

And then the paper issued a warning.

“the Cutting this Post down can only be done
with a Design to affront all theSons of Liberty in this Place,
the Perpetrators would do wellto consider the Consequences;
let their Motives for doing itbe what it may: for they may
know, that such a Body of Peoplewho would not yield to be
enslaved by [Parliament], themost august Body on Earth, will

(01:04:58):
not tamely submit to such a meanlow-lived Insult on their
Liberty, as this is.”

Despite the soldiers best efforts, the iron
Liberty pole would remainstanding like a sentinel on the
commons in front of the upperbarracks for now. While General
Gage was struggling to preventviolence between the king’s
troops and his subjects in NewYork city, he was also battling

(01:05:25):
on a second front with thecolony’s provincial assembly. By
the summer of 1766, Gage couldno longer afford to put off
implementing the Quartering Actin New York and other colonies.
The arrival of the soldiers whowere quickly drawing the ire of
the Sons of Liberty were in needof support. To provide for them,

(01:05:46):
and to obey Parliament’s law,Gage invoked the Quartering Act.
He sent requests to the coloniesfor funds to purchase supplies
and housing for his men. In NewYork, the headquarters of the
British Army in North America,the commander-in-chief met with
a rather uncooperative colonialassembly. Here's John McCurdy.

John McCurdy (01:06:04):
New York starts complaining rightly so, that
it's being over taxed, that ishaving to pay quarter soldiers
in ways that other coloniesdon't. The New York assembly in
the late 1760s start playinggames. They send complaints to
England. Why should we have topay for this, they will
appropriate colonial money topay for quartering troops, but

(01:06:25):
they won't acknowledge thatthey're doing so because the
Quartering Act requires them todo so.

In June 1766, the New York assembly contributed
nearly £4,800 that was left overfrom the Seven Years’ War to

New York Assembly (01:06:39):
“ the barracks in the cities of New
furnish
York and Albany with beds,bedding, firewood, candles, and
utensils for dressing ofvictuals.”

But the assembly didn't mention the Quartering
Act when it appropriated thefunds, nor did it agree to
supply the soldiers with salt,vinegar and cider or beer, also
in violation of the act.

It's a way of sort of skirting parliamentary
authority and possibly evenquestioning parliamentary
authority. Or they will say,we'll pay for certain items, but
not other items. New York is oneof the places that says we won't
pay for alcohol. We're not goingto pay for soldiers to drink,
because that just makes themreckless and destroys our town.

Governor Moore signed the bill anyway. Like
Gage, the New York legislature’sbrinkmanship frustrated the
colony’s governor. And Moore wasno stranger to colonial
discontent. Before the kingappointed him to New York, Moore
had spent nearly a decade asJamaica’s lieutenant governor.

(01:07:42):
In 1760, he won much praise fromwhite Jamaicans and British
authorities for leading thesuppression of Tacky’s Revolt,
the uprising launched by theenslaved men Tacky and Apongo.
Five years later, in November1765, Moore sailed into New York
amidst the Stamp Act crisis,where his willingness to listen

(01:08:03):
to New Yorkers who were angryabout the stamp duties reduced
some of the tension in thecolony. And he prudently decided
against asking Gage for soldiersto suppress the liberty pole
mobs in August 1766, fearingthat would only make matters
worse.Gage and Moore were bothpragmatic men who understood

(01:08:23):
colonial politics far betterthan the king’s ministers in
London. Even if the New Yorkassembly hadn't fully complied
with the Quartering Act, or evenacknowledged it, its members did
authorize some provisions forHis Majesty’s soldiers. The
general and the governorrecognized that in this moment,
something was better thannothing. As Gage explained

(01:08:47):
himself to London:

“In my demand for quarters, it was necessary
to manage matters.”

That wasn’t good enough for the Earl of
Shelburne, the new Secretary ofState for the Southern
Department, who had oversight ofthe colonies. Shelburne ordered
Governor Moore to enforceParliament's will “in the full
extent and meaning of theact.”Facing pressure from
London, the royal governor hadlittle choice but to do as he
was commanded. When New York’sHouse of Representatives

(01:09:16):
reconvened in November 1766, itallocated £400 to buy candles
and firewood for the soldiers inFort George on Bowling Green. As
they had done in June, therepresentatives complained of
the burden imposed on New Yorkcompared to other colonies, and
they declined to mention theQuartering Act in their bill.

(01:09:37):
Governor Moore declined to signit. Instead, he prorogued the
assembly, sending the membershome to think on their actions,
and informed London that NewYork continued in its
obstinance.By early 1767,Parliament’s patience with New
York’s non-compliance with theQuartering Act had run out.

It's this type of pushback. Act that gets the
attention of Charles Townsend,who's the Chancellor of the
Exchequer at the time, but heis, in many ways, running the
British government at thismoment. In 1767, he decides
we're gonna look at what's goingon in the colonies. He looks at
several of the colonies andfinds that several are not
living up to their obligationsunder the Quartering Act.
Decides he's going to make anexample of New York

For Townshend, New York was playing games that went
far beyond its failure toprovide for the king’s soldiers.
The Declaratory Act had madeplain that Parliament could
legislate for the colonies “inall cases whatsoever.” Either
Parliament had supreme authorityover British America, or it did
not. In the late spring andsummer of 1767, as Townshend was

(01:10:46):
drawing up a new, grand visionto reform the empire in the wake
of the Stamp Act’s repeal,theChancellor of the Exchequer
believed that New York ought tobe made to do its duty, As he
argued in the House of Commons:

“The superiority of the mother
country can at no time be betterexerted than now”

And so the New York Restraining Act is passed
by Parliament in July of 1767and it disallows the New York
law that had provided moneyunder the Quartering Act, and
also dissolves the assembly. TheNew York restraining act will
then state that the New Yorkassembly cannot reconvene until
it is going to do so and approvethe Quartering Act without any

(01:11:29):
reservation. It's a reallyaggressive response to this
colonial objection.

For it was in New York, a colony that Townsend
believed had:

“boldly and insolently bid defiance to
[Parliament’s] authority andthreatened the whole legislative
power of this country,obstinately, wickedly, and
almost traitorously in anabsolute denial of its
authority”

That he saw everything wrong with British
America.
On June 18, 1768, Major GeneralThomas Gage had his eyes fixed

(01:12:18):
on the west. From theheadquarters of the British Army
in New York city, the commanderin chief reported to the king’s
ministers that a trade disputebetween white settlers and
Indigenous people had beenresolved at Fort Niagara in
western New York, a conferencein Pittsburgh between British
officials and delegates from theHaudenosaunee, Shawnee, and

(01:12:40):
Delaware nations had preservedpeace between them, and that
seven companies of the RoyalRegiment of Ireland were on
their way to relieve soldiersstationed at Forts Pitt and de
Chartres.Ten days later, Gage’sattention turned north. Since

(01:13:00):
the early spring, Bostonians hadbeen protesting new taxes on
paper, paint, lead, glass, andtea, and stewing over the
creation of a new customs boardto enforce them. Matters became
much worse on June 10th, whencustoms officials seized a
merchant ship owned by JohnHancock under suspicion of

(01:13:21):
smuggling. They began towing ittoward the warship HMS Romney,
anchored in Boston Harbor.Hancock had named his offending
vessel Liberty. RiotingBostonians – some 3,000 in
number - hunted for JosephHarrison, the port’s collector

(01:13:41):
of customs, but Harrison andother officials had already fled
to the Romney. Harrison’spersonal boat, however, was
another matter. The mob draggedit out of the water, dumped it
under the city’s Liberty Tree,and burned it.For Gage:

“The Reports spread in this Place of the
Outrageous Behavior, thelicentious and daring Menances,
and Seditious Spirit of thePeople of all Degrees in Boston,
are alarming; those of the lowerSort inflamed by Many, who
should know, and act better.”

Gage offered to send Massachusetts Bay Governor
Francis Bernard two regiments tosupport the civil government in
his colony, but the governorpolitely declined. Though
Bernard would have welcomedsoldiers, his provincial council
unanimously advised againstit.But unbeknownst to both the
general and the governor, Londonhad made the decision for them.

(01:14:40):
The king’s ministers, too, hadgrown tired of the disorder in
one of Great Britain’s oldestcolonies in North America. In
August 1768, Gage receivedsecret orders from the Earl of
Hillsborough, only recentlyappointed to the new office of
Secretary of State for theColonies, to send soldiers

(01:15:02):
stationed in Halifax, NovaScotia to the town of Boston.
Thanks for listening to WorldsTurned Upside Down. Worlds is a
production of R2 Studios, partof the Roy Rosenzweig Center for
History and New Media at GeorgeMason University. I'm your host.

(01:15:25):
Jim Ambuske. This episode ofWorlds Turned Upside Down is
supported by the McCormickCenter for the Study of the
American Revolution at SienaCollege. Learn how you can
support the series atrstudios.org, where you’ll also
find a complete transcript oftoday’s episode and suggestions
for further reading. Worlds isresearched and written by me,
with additional writing researchand script editing by Jeanette

(01:15:46):
Patrick. Jeanette Patrick and Iare the executive producers.
Grace Mallon is our BritishCorrespondent. Our lead audio
editor for this episode isJeanette Patrick. Special,
thanks to Curt Dahl of CDsquared. Hayley Madl is our
graduate assistant. Specialthanks also to Amber Pelham and
Alexandra Miller. Special.Thanks also to Amber Pelham. Our
thanks to Wendy Bellion, ShiraLurie, Jon Kukla, Patrick

(01:16:09):
Griffin, Brad Jones, ChristopherMinty, and John McCurdy for
sharing their expertise with usin this episode. Thanks also to
our voice actors Adam Smith,Melissa Gismondi, Mills Kelly,
Nate Sleeter, Anne Fertig, andDan Howlett.Subscribe to Worlds
on your favorite podcast app,Thanks, and we'll see you next

(01:16:30):
time you.

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