Pulling down statues? It’s a tradition that dates back..

Fireworks, bands, and cookouts are essential ingredients of any Fourth of July celebration. What’s usually not on the menu is toppling statues, ripping down signs, or burning portraits. But in the days following the new nation’s declaration of independence, Americans went on a frenzy of destruction that makes today’s attacks on Confederate and other symbols of white supremacy pale by comparison.

The most dramatic act took place in New York City on July 9, 1776. Early that evening, General George Washington and his troops, along with hundreds of citizens, crowded into what is now City Hall Park to hear a reading of the document that had just arrived from Philadelphia. The enthusiastic throng then headed for Broadway and the two-ton equestrian statue of King George III on Bowling Green.

This was the same route protestors took in 1765 when New Yorkers demonstrated against the Stamp Act taxing a host of goods. The following year, the colony’s assembly commissioned the statue in recognition of the king’s support in repealing the despised legislation. Modeled on the classical equestrian sculpture of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, it arrived from London in 1770 and was erected with great pomp. When John Adams paid his first visit to New York in 1774, he wrote to his wife Abigail that the king’s statue was “very large, of solid lead, gilded with gold, standing on a pedestal of marble very high.”

Two years later, fervent New Yorkers, with the help of Washington’s soldiers, quickly pulled it from its plinth and broke it into pieces. Much of the lead was shipped to Connecticut and melted down to make 42,008 bullets.

And the destruction was just beginning. The British coat of arms in New York’s courthouse was destroyed, a stone pediment with the same image was smashed, and the king’s portrait in the council chamber was “thrown out, broken, torn to pieces, and burnt, of all which the people testified their approbation by repeated huzzas.” 

When the British regained control of New York in August, the royal governor reported that “every vestige of royalty, as far as has been in the power of the rebels, has been done away with.” Even the crowns decorating the wrought-iron fence surrounding the king’s likeness were ripped out.

Statues and royal portraits were relatively rare items in the colonies, however, so “revolutionaries eliminated scraps of paper, tokens, anything signaling royal authority,” says Brendan McConville, a Boston University historian. “Crowds attacked tavern signs with the king’s arms or crowns on them. Even coins bearing the king’s likeness were refused or devalued.”

Destroying these symbols was “not wholly or principally an act of erasure,” argues University of Delaware art historian Wendy Bellion. The Americans were, in fact, following an old English tradition. A year after England’s King Charles I lost his actual head in 1649, Parliament ordered his statue at the Exchange in London “to be demolished, by having the head taken off, and the scepter [taken] out of his hand.” In 1689, Protestant soldiers in Newcastle removed a statue of Catholic King James II and dragged it through the streets before tossing it in the river.

As 18th-century New Yorkers would learn, however, it proved relatively easy to tear down a symbol of oppression, but it took years of struggle to make that era’s entrenched authority reflect the will of the people. “They could execute the tyrant’s symbol in their towns and villages,” says McConville. “Ending the monarchy within each of them proved more difficult.” The ongoing effort to end racism—and live up to the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence—doubtless will prove just as challenging.