Golden Hill
Stories in this Chapter:
• Liberty Poles and “Redcoats”
• Whores & Bastards
• The First Blood Shed in the American Revolution
• New York and the Boston Massacre
Liberty Poles and Redcoats
Like most colonists, New York did not view peacetime armies kindly. But for decades they had warmly embraced the British soldiers in their city, because they represented Parliament’s lavish military spending and the drive to push imperial rivals and Natives off the frontier. Crowds regularly came to the commons, near the main Barracks, to watch soldiers drill or parade, especially on the king’s birthday, a major holiday.
The welcome faded rapidly, however, with the conquest of New France, the Proclamation of 1763, and the end of salutary neglect. More than 18,000 sailors and 22,ooo troops were pulled from New York by the end of 1761, and some believed the cost of living doubled. While the “Redcoats” brought desperately needed hard currency and employment, they became an everyday physical symbol of a distant government imposing the conditions of economic depression. They also competed with residents for work during off-hours.
Nowhere was the opposition to “quartering” greater than in New York, which had the largest number of soldiers in North America, the Barracks looming as the second-biggest structure in the city after Fort George. Between the mid-century wars, London had no more than a few hundred soldiers in North America. But then, with Pontiac’s Rebellion and troubles in French Canada, it sent 10,000, under the command of Gen. Thomas Gage, headquartered in New York from 1763-73. During the Stamp Act crisis, Gage watched radical merchants attempt to drive the “lobsterbacks” out of the city, pressuring stores, inns, and taverns not to serve or sell to the men. Printers widely circulated the rumor (or threat) that “Vox Populi” or the equally mysterious Sons of Neptune planned to storm the Fort. Although British regulars were only carrying out orders, and often hailed from the same backgrounds that produced the maritime workforce, rebels painted them as the enemy. The soldiers in turn often came to hate New Yorkers generally, an equally foreign population they were ostensibly protecting. Across the colonies, they began deserting in large numbers.
In January 1765, Gage therefore asked for the Quartering Act to be extended to North America, explaining: “The Colonies are taking long strides towards Independency.” Parliament renewed the law in March, well beyond his request, with the American Mutiny Act. Now colonial assemblies had to pay for the soldiers’ housing, food, drink, wood, and other essentials. And New York had to bear a disproportionate share, because it had the greatest number. After the Stamp Act repeal in 1766, the city saw two more regiments arrive, plus artillerymen and Highlanders. The soldiers renewed protest in the street, and with the Suspending / Townshend Acts of 1767 the Sons of Liberty began erecting liberty poles — tall white pines, reserved for Navy masts and legally forbidden to use — on the commons to provoke the soldiers.
On the west side of City Hall Park stands a flagpole topped with a gilded vane that reads “LIBERTY.” Below a plaque explains that the staff memorializes five liberty poles that rebels hoisted outside the main Barracks during the Imperial Crisis. It was a newspaper in New York which popularized the term “liberty pole,” but the practice dated to ancient Rome, when Caesar’s killers supposedly erected these beacons as standards of democracy. The Sons of Liberty initially raised these giant white pines (tightly restricted for use in shipbuilding) to express a devotion to Britain. Rebels described these “sacred” works of nature as monarchical, comparable to a king’s majesty. Critics used the language of the Reformation and the subjugation of animist lands, describing this kind of language as idolatrous, associated with the “anarchy” of “natural liberty.” Charles MacKubin Lefferts’s Scenes from the American Revolution: Fifth Liberty Pole on the New York Commons (ca. 1910) shows the last pole, raised after the Battle of Golden Hill.
The first was hoisted on June 4th, 1766. Like the statue merchants erected to King George, the Sons put it up to express their devotion to British government after the Stamp Act repeal, the pole reading “George, Pitt, and Liberty.” They staged a large bonfire on the Common that night for the king’s birthday (the last in the city’s history), while the mercantile elite held a feast at the Governor’s mansion in the Fort (attended by every government official). But soldiers destroyed the pole on August 10th, after the Livingston faction declared that New York’s assembly would not provision the Redcoats per the new Quartering Act. The next day, almost 3,000 New Yorkers — an eight of the city — showed up to a meeting the Sons had called under the pole, only to find it gone. Amid sweltering heat, the mob hurled brickbats at the soldiers, while the radical Sears demanded to know what happened to the Sons’ monument. The Redcoats drew bayonets and prevented another pole from being raised, but withdrew on Gen. Gage’s command.
An increasingly tense tit-for-tat followed, with sometimes giant crowds raising new poles on the commons, only to be destroyed by soldiers. British regulars found it unsafe to walk the streets, “daily insulted… without the least provocation,” and heckled while drilling at the Fields. The Sons began petitioning to disarm off-duty soldiers and forbidden their drumming in the street. When that failed, they began coercing vendors not to service them, and began gathering signatures to remove the garrison entirely.
A cartoon drawn in 1770 by a French visitor to New York, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière. This is the only image we have of the poles from this era. They ranged from 50-80 feet, making them some of the most visible structures in the city’s landscape, rivaling Trinity’s spire and British warships. The geography depicted here is loose, but rightly emphasizes the symbolism. The main Barracks is pictured in the center (in actuality, it lay behind the almshouse, flanked by the debtor prison and the jail). On the right is Montagne’s, the rebel tavern west of the Common, where soldiers lay the pole after destroying it before the Battle of Golden Hill. Bars were a regular scene of violence between seaman and soldiers. (Library Company of Philadelphia.)
The Stamp Act repeal had produced an economic boom, after the incredibly harsh winter of 1766. But it disappeared as quickly as it came. And the larger set of Townshend duties levied in the summer of 1767 arrived during a heat-wave and cholera outbreak, feeding popular anger. But Parliament attempted to preempt New York’s resistance by dissolving the legislature in June 1767. It did bring an uneasy end to the liberty pole struggle. But that fall, the everyday hostilities grew so large that Redcoats were attacking the city’s residents in broad daylight, and in their homes. Gen. Gage reminded New York’s governor that the King gave the North American commander-in-chief authority over colonial executives, which Moore feared could “introduce a Military Government,” like that in Canada — something Montresor and others were pushing. When the assembly finally relented on the Suspending / Quartering Act one year later in Dec. 1769, they placed another tax on New Yorkers. But the city revolted, and the liberty pole struggle resumed. Tensions came to a head that winter in a series of reprisals culminating in the Battle of Golden Hill, the “first blood shed in the American Revolution.”
Whores & Bastards
In 1768 and 1769, as New York’s economic and political leaders jostled over how best to pressure repeal of the Townshend duties, the question of quartering soldiers mounted. With £18,500 in arrears, Gov. Moore began surveying land grants to find new sources of revenue, worrying the colony’s giant landowners in the dominant Livingston faction. The wealthy merchants in the DeLancey faction, hoping to supplant these figures, threatened to introduce the Massachusetts proposal for another boycott. But neither group wanted to acquiesce on quartering. And both wanted to see the Assembly reinstated.
At the Merchants Coffee House, men from both parties agreed to provide a sum of hard currency to pay for the soldiers. But when the legislature reassembled in Dec. 1769 (nineteenth months after the Board of Trade dissolved the body), they decided on a tax. The decision was shocking to voters, who had backed the newly dominant DeLancey faction in the most recent election. Sears had to overcome great resistance, convincing the Sons to back the elite merchants. And the faction may also have coerced the maritime workforce — which depended on them for jobs and housing. New York did not have the secret ballot, and more than a quarter of the working-class stayed home in 1769, while both parties continued to avoid taking definite stands on any of the questions dealing with the Imperial Crisis. When a large crowd gathered to watch the assembly debate the Quartering / Suspending Act issue, perhaps the most important of the day, they found the gallery doors closed. Only later did they learn from Mayor Cruger of the decision.
The DeLanceys hoped that soldiers might provide a long-term solution for New York, the desperate need for hard currency. They also yoked the bill to an enormous outlay of paper currency, a condition Sears made for accepting the bill, structured as credit to finance the soldiers in part. The faction also secretly agreed to partner with the rebels on enforcing the Townshend boycott, although they had grown weary of the protest, like their counterparts in Boston. Lt. Gov. Colden reluctantly signed the measure. The Livingstons, although privately supportive of the legislation, opposed it now that they were in the elected minority. This proved wise, because New Yorkers had grown so angry over the depression they now appeared to refuse the idea of having any soldiers in the city at all.
News spread quickly of the DeLanceys’ “betrayal.” And the decision prompted Alexander McDougall, a relatively unknown member of the Sons, who had opposed Sears from the beginning, to join the radicals. Writing under a pseudonym, McDougall (a friend of the Livingstons) blasted the DeLanceys in a fiery broadside entitled To the Betrayed Inhabitants of the City and Colony of New-York. Calling the Quartering Act the “Design of Tyrants,” McDougall argued that New York should have continued to defy the law, as Massachusetts and South Carolina did. As the headquarters of the British army, the city would now forever have to bear a disproportionate share of the cost. And it was clear, he said, that soldiers were being stationed in the colonies “not to protect,” but to “enslave a free People.” The DeLanceys, he argued, were using the soldiers and partnering with Colden “to secure… sovereign lordship” of New York in a Townshend-restricted market — not to advance the common interest, as they had claimed in recent elections. The handbill / poster ended with a “call-to-arms,” inviting everyone but legislators to a meeting at the Common to decide what to do about the law and those who passed it.
McDougall’s essay became one of the most influential of the Revolution. James Parker, a former partner of Holt’s print empire who operated a shop near Hanover Square, had teenage boys post and circulate the accessibly written leaflet on walls and trees across the city. Colden put out a healthy reward for anyone who might reveal the fiery document’s author. But two days after its release, 1,400 New Yorkers gathered at the commons, where Sears joined McDougall in publicly turning on the DeLanceys. William Livingston and John Morin Scott also crossed over to support McDougall. Along with the future Loyalist William Smith Jr., these lawyers made up the “triumvirate” of lawyers in the Livingston faction, long hated by rebels. Hoping to make up for the lost electoral ground, they soon aped the DeLanceys in using the press to undermine the new ruling faction’s authority with the venomous “Watchman” series.
Alexander McDougall grew up delivering milk from his father’s cows, a tenant on Beekman’s farm, but went off to sea at 14 years old, commanding an eight-gun sloop by 25. During the Seven Years War, he made a fortune (£7,000). Thereafter, he became a land speculator, agent for sugar planters in St. Croix, and reported waterfront “slop-shop” owner. But, garishly dressed with a heavy brogue, he was regarded as nouveau riche by most of his peers. After Golden Hill, he went on to become a powerful force in organizing New York’s rebel government, enforcing non-importation on fellow merchants and readying the city for the British invasion, thereafter becoming a Major General under Washington, commander of West Point after Benedict Arnold, and finally a member of the Continental Congress. (Edgar Brown Smith, Alexander McDougall, c. 1900-10, Fraunces Tavern Museum.)
Meanwhile, everyday hostilities between residents and soldiers intensified. Several weeks after McDougall’s broadside, Redcoats made two attempts to destroy the Liberty Pole — which had been girded with iron hoops at its base, and stood unmolested for 2.5 years since Parliament suspended New York’s legislature. The Sons followed up by posting and circulating another handbill, denouncing the legislature for squandering the colony’s revenue, while stressing that British soldiers denied poor New Yorkers employment by moonlighting in piecework. More explosively, the author (almost certainly McDougall), said the hated 16th Regiment drained New York’s revenue by forcing it to pay for their “Whores and Bastards.” The reference was to the red-light district near the Barracks, which soldiers frequented. Dubbed the “Holy Ground” because it stood on Trinity land, at least 500 “ladies of pleasure” operated in this area of high-end gambling dens and taverns. Soldiers read the insult as slighting their honor, and that of their wives and children, many of whom lived among them as “camp followers.”
Lying between the Hudson River and Broad Way, Holy Ground was the most popular elite night-time destination in late colonial New York. But while this red-light district was located on Trinity property and drew wealthy merchants, British soldiers, King’s College students, and government officials, that made it a frequent target for rebels — who raided the area in the Great Riot of 1765, for example, and may have targeted it during the Great Fire of 1776. While its clients were high-end, the neighborhood was a slum. It was also somewhat feared, because prostitutes had to take law into their own hands, yielding a few notorious murders.
In response, they attempted to destroy the Liberty Pole again on January 13th. But patrons at a nearby rebel tavern, Montagne’s, spilled out into the street to stop the (probably also well-lubricated) soldiers. The Redcoats then stormed the bar with sword and bayonet, threatening its owner’s life and smashing eight-four windows, lamps, and bowls. The following night, after the Sons called for another meeting under the Pole, the soldiers returned in the dead of night with a boring drill and blew it up with gunpowder, leaving its wreckage in front of Montagne’s. The next day 3,000 people — roughly an eighth of the city — arrived to a vacant spot on the Common, and voted to treat British soldiers “with all that abhorrence and contempt which the enemies of our happy constitution deserve.” When the crowd voted to petition the Council to demolish the Barracks entirely, soldiers drew their swords and bayonets, daring them to do it then and there. The idea was nearly as unthinkable as storming Fort George. But New Yorkers were more disturbed by the soldiers’ actions. Fearing they might indeed be under some kind of dictatorial military occupation, sailors began moving in gangs on the waterfront, forcing any soldier working in shop or ship to return to barracks.
“Tavern Scene,” A Rake’s Progress series of paintings by William Hogarth, 1735.
The First Blood Shed in the American Revolution
Days later, on January 19th, 1770, Sears found a small group of British soldiers debuting the first broadside of their own, near the Fly Market. The poster denounced the Sons as the “real enemies” of the city, said that New Yorkers were “ungrateful” for their protection, called the Liberty Pole “a piece of wood” rebels unnaturally venerated, and stressed their own devotion to God, country, and family. It was an attempt to humanize themselves, and deflate the notion that soldiers represented “tyranny.” Before they were able to post the leaflet, however, Sears and other rebels “collared” and “arrested” the pair of Redcoats, marching them to the mayor’s home nearby. While the official debated what to do, reinforcements arrived from the lower Barracks in the Fort, demanding release of the soldiers. A large crowd had gathered by then, causing a nervous standoff.
Jonathan Carriel (annotations of Ratzer map), “The Grand Affray at Golden Hill,” All Things Liberty, Feb. 25, 2020.
Crisis was narrowly averted when the regiment was ordered to retire and began the half-mile walk to the upper Barracks. But instead of taking their normal path, they went past the Fly Market and the overcrowded tenements and workshops of the East Ward. Locals joined the mob, pushing and shoving the badly outnumbered soldiers and occasionally hitting them with rock, club, and fist. More soldiers joined at Golden Hill (named for the wheat that fell off carts on the small land-rise) and tried dispersing the crowd. According to Parker’s Gazette, a commander finally ordered, “Soldiers, draw your bayonets and cut your way through!,” unleashing a furious street fight. Although none died (muting the event’s historical memory), dozens of New Yorkers were seriously wounded by axe, club, and bayonet. Another riot occurred the next day on the Nassau St. waterfront, between fifteen soldiers of the same regiment and several sailors, most likely initiated by the latter. Holt’s Journal claimed the Redcoats attacked with “the greatest rage and would have killed them,” had civic leaders and military officers not intervened.
“Defense of the Liberty Pole in New York,” by Felix Octavius Carr Darley, 1879. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, New York Public Library.
New York and the Boston Massacre
Ten days later, the Sons petitioned the Council to erect another liberty pole, ostensibly to replace the Stamp Act Repeal memorial, now destroyed four times in all. Wary of the fragile peace in New York, the DeLancey faction rejected the appeal. But Sears immediately purchased a small patch of land at 252 Broad Way (btw. Murray and William Sts.), even closer to the Barracks. On February 6th they raised the pole, now virtually indestructible, encased with iron hoops half an inch thick for all but a third of its length. Placed in a 12-ft. hole, the 68-ft. mast was carried by a team of thirty horses with a marching band playing “God Save the King.” Holt’s Journal reported that several thousand attended. While many of the 16th Regiment were present, they supposedly “neither gave nor received any Affront.” The pole stood until the British invasion of the city, easily one of the most visible icons puncturing the skyline.
Because of the communications network rebel merchants and printers established, however, news of the “battle” traveled quickly — particularly to Boston. Its Evening Post had prominently featured a story on the Liberty Pole struggle, and in February they published a letter from McDougall outlining the situation in New York that ran nearly half the length of the paper. By then, the city had already learned of Golden Hill, and its own Sons held a protest in solidarity. A riot ensued, with a crowd of adult men and schoolboys raiding a shop refusing to boycott imports. As the “the rage of the people increased,” a Loyalist friend of the looted shopkeeper reportedly “fired into the crowd,” wounding a 19-year-old and killing an 11-year-old. For radicals like Samuel Adams, the murder was a breaking point. Violence against British soldiers and Loyalists exploded one week later in the Boston Massacre. Golden Hill, a now-forgotten event, was the “fundamental catalyst.”
Meanwhile, one day after the new liberty pole went up, the DeLanceys learned that McDougall wrote the offending broadsides, when a young Irish journeyman whom Parker had fired revealed McDougall’s authorship, and the printer, confronted by two more employees and granted immunity, reluctantly confirmed the allegation. McDougall was jailed on charges of seditious libel. But, refusing bail, he sat in the New Gaol (between the Barracks and the Common) for the next 162 days. So many fans came to see him that officials had to establish visiting hours, the rebel gaining fame in song as “the John Wilkes of America,” named for the English radical who attacked Parliament for impressing sailors and curtailing the press. What began as a protest of the Quartering Act thus ended as a cause of free speech and fair trial. McDougall won amnesty in 1771, when a key witness for the trial died.
Elites were still divided, but pragmatic on how to manage the popular rebellion. Rivington wrote one official, saying: “The dirtiest subjects of the English Realm are at the bottom of this association. It would be of eminent advantage … were the third George to send warrants over to decimate these vagabonds and weed our community.” Lt. Gov. Colden agreed. But William Smith Jr. pressed Gen. Gage to remove all troops from the city, fearing there would be more violence. James Duane, another Livingston backer, expressed the common sentiment that New York had “run mad with Faction.” Gage moved the Sixteenth Regiment to Pensacola in West Florida and isolated the city’s remaining soldiers, hoping to calm New Yorkers. Members of the DeLancey faction introduced legislation for secret-ballot voting.
Meanwhile, attention shifted back to the Townshend boycott. Enthusiasm had waned as New York’s imports plummeted from £482,930 in 1768 to £74,918 in 1769. Just a few months after Golden Hill, the Sons discovered from a door-to-door poll that most merchants, under heavy influence from the DeLanceys, wanted to end the protest for all but tea. Rebels in Philadelphia and Boston reacted angrily. But their merchants were also cheating on the pledge. New York enforced the boycott far more rigorously than other port-cities — the Sons collaborating with the DeLanceys all through the Quartering Act crisis. Remarkably, popular opinion remained decidedly for it, even though New York may have been “the greatest Sufferer” of the campaign, as Gen. Gage said. Employment remained scarce on the waterfront, and there was no charity for seamen, except the Marine Society fund for captains and the proceeds from a banquet the Sons held each year on the Stamp Act repeal anniversary, supporting sailors in the debtor prison.
By early 1770, however, London had reached the conclusion that, like with the Stamp Act, taxes on exports were not producing the expected revenue and were encouraging colonial desire for independence. In April and May, Parliament repealed all of the Townshend duties except for the tax on tea, and permitted the DeLancey bill to issue paper currency. While the faction moved quickly to end the boycott, McDougall and Sears wanted to keep it going — demanding free trade, where the rest sought to make the British system work. But in June rebels in Boston and Philadelphia swiftly rejected the New York rebels’ proposal for a continental congress, “to adopt one general solid System” for the colonies. The issue died. And peace returned for the next few years, with New York’s Sons promptly ordering English goods for their own ships, like their counterparts in every other port. Alongside Philadelphia, however, New York remained the only city to persist with the boycott on tea. New York would take another leading role during the next major crisis, in which McDougall helped Sears organize the city’s own tea party after persuading rebels in Boston to press the idea of a congress.
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On Golden Hill, see Russell L. Weber, “ ‘God Is Forgotten, And The Soldier Slighted’: New York City’s Golden Hill And Nassau Street Riots And The Affective Rhetorics Of Crowd Violence,” Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, January 28, 2021; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 54-60; Joseph S. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763-1776 (Cornell University Press, 1997), 148-50; Michael Rapport, The Unruly City: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution (Basic Books, 2017), 20–23; Lee Reese Boyer, “The Golden Hill and Nassau Street Riots,” PhD. Diss., University of Notre Dame (1972), 124-62.
For more on the attitude toward quartering, see Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries (1997), 57–58, 90–91, 108–9, 110-12, 147-49; and John Gilbery McCurdy, Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2019).
On the history of the liberty pole in New York, see David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, 37–49.
On McDougall, Sears, and the politics of the Liberty Boys, see Luke Feder, "The Sense of the City: Politics and Culture in Pre-Revolutionary New York City" (Ph.D. dissertation, SUNY-Stony Brook, 2010), Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760- 1790 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 77-78 and Carl Becker’s still influential The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1909).