ON MAY 20, 1766, news reached New York of the repeal of the stamp act, and on the following day, the people gathered in the Fields to show their delight in every possible way. Still further to show their loyalty and gratitude to the king, they assembled again on his birthday, June fourth, and celebrated the event with feasting and drinking.

1A great pole with twelve tar barrels at its top was erected, and twenty-five cords of wood were placed at its base. Then while a salute of twenty-five guns was fired in another part of the fields, the great bonfire was kindled and the royal standard raised amid the cheers of the crowd. Still another pole was raised on this memorable day, bearing the inscription, "The King, Pitt, and Liberty", the first liberty-pole, which was to serve as the rallying point of the citizens for several years, the visible sign of the principle of no taxation without representation.

This liberty-pole stood not far from the barracks of the soldiers, on the north side of Chambers Street. On the tenth of August, a party belonging to the 28th Regiment cut the pole down. The next day, while the citizens were assembled on the Commons preparing to erect another, they were attacked by the soldiers, and several of the Sons of Liberty, among whom were Isaac Sears and John Berrien, were severely hurt. Though complaints were made by the citizens, the British officers declared that the affidavits submitted were falsehoods and refused to reprimand or punish the offenders.

A second liberty-pole was erected and the soldiers allowed it to stand for a few days and then cut it down, on September twenty-third. Within two days, a third pole was raised; and this time the pole was allowed to stand, as the soldiers were restrained by the orders of Governor Moore, who was believed to have been instigator of the previous attacks.

On the eighteenth of March, 1767, the citizens assembled on the Commons to celebrate the anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act. The celebration aroused the anger of the soldiers, and that night the pole was again leveled to the ground. The next day the Sons of Liberty set up another and more substantial one, well secured with iron bands. An unsuccessful attempt was made to destroy it that night. The following night another attempt to blow it up (or down) with gun-powder was made, but this, also, was unsuccessful. Then the Sons of Liberty set a strong guard about the pole; and for three successive nights attempts were made to destroy it, but the soldiers were beaten off. The peremptory orders of the governor compelled the soldiers to desist from their attacks, and the pole stood undisturbed for three years.

During these years, affairs were moving in the direction of armed resistance to the impositions of the British Parliament, and frequent were the meetings on the Commons and burnings in effigy of offensive individuals. At last, on January 13, 1770, attacks were renewed upon the liberty-pole by a party of the 16th Regiment, who attempted to blow it down with gun-powder. In this they were unsuccessful, and they then attacked a party of citizens
in front of Montagnie' tavern in Broadway opposite the Fields, at that time the headquarters of the Sons of Liberty.

The citizens were driven indoors and attempted to barricade themselves from the unruly mob; but the soldiers broke in with drawn swords and wrecked the building and furniture. In the midst of the destruction, their officers came up and ordered them back to their barracks. On the two succeeding nights, the attacks were resumed against the pole without success; but the third night, the pole was leveled to the ground and sawed into pieces which were piled up in front of Montagnie's in derision of the patriotic club.

This insult aroused the Sons of Liberty; and on the evening of the seventeenth, handbills were circulated calling a meeting that night upon the Commons. Three thousand citizens assembled and passed strong resolutions in regard to the daily outrages committed by the soldiery and threatened to regard those found outside their barracks after roll-call as enemies of the city. The next day there began a two days' conflict with the soldiers in which several lives were lost. Since the various affrays occurred in the neighborhood of John and William streets--a locality known at that time as Golden Hill, the conflict has been termed the "Battle of Golden Hill." It occurred two months before the Boston Massacre, and it was here that the first blood of the coming conflict was shed.

The Sons of Liberty requested permission to erect another liberty-pole, but the Common Council refused permission. While the council was considering the request, Lamb and several others of the club purchased a plot of ground eleven feet wide and one hundred feet deep near the site of the former pole. Here, on February 6, 1770, the last of the liberty-poles
was raised. It was a mast of great length, sunk twelve feet into the ground, and encased for two thirds of its height with iron bands and hoops firmly riveted together. 

Amid the shouts of the people and the sound of music, it was stepped into its place. It bore the inscription, "Liberty and Property," and was surmounted by a gilt vane bearing the same inscription in large letters. This inscription was not of so loyal a tenor as that placed upon the first pole and shows how the feelings of the people were changing. The concluding paragraph of the handbill distributed by the Liberty Boys reads as follows:

And now, Gentlemen, seeing we are debarred the privilege of Public Ground to erect the Pole on, we have purchased a place for it near where the other stood, which is full as public as any of the Corporation Ground. Your Attendance and countenance are desired at one o'clock on Tuesday morning, the 6th instant, at Mr. Crommelin's Wharf, in order to carry it up to be
raised.

By Order of the Committee

New York, February 3, 1770.

The Liberty Boys had had quarters at Burns's and also at Montagnie's, both on Broadway; but the latter was now let to the opposite party for the anniversary celebration of the nineteenth of March. Not to be balked by the action of the recreant Montagnie, the club bought a house in the Spring Garden, corner of Ann Street and Broadway, where Barnum's Museum stood long afterward, and named it Hampden Hall in honor of the great English patriot. On the forty-fifth day of the year (February fourteenth) they marched to the New Jail, where McDougal, one of their leaders, was in prison, and in order to compliment him gave forty-five cheers, drank forty-five toasts, and ate forty-five beef-steaks. This number had for them a peculiar significance; for it was on the forty-fifth page of the journal of the Assembly that the proceedings against McDougal were entered. On the nineteenth of March they paid another visit to their leader at his place of temporary imprisonment.

A party of British soldiers, who were on the point of leaving for Pensacola, vowed that they would take a piece of the pole with them as a trophy; and so, on the twenty-ninth of March, they made another attempt upon it. Their effort to unship the topmast was discovered and the alarm given. Upon the rallying of the Liberty Boys the soldiers retired to their barracks
where they received reinforcements and forced the patriots to retire to Hampden Hall, which the soldiers swore they would burn. The alarm bells were rung and the citizens flew to arms; while the British officers, fearing a repetition of Golden Hill, drove their men back to the barracks. A strong guard was placed about the pole; and after the departure of the soldiers on the third of May, the pole remained unmolested until 1775.

During the anniversary celebration of the Stamp Act repeal in that year, Sergeant William Cunningham and a companion made an assault upon the patriots gathered about the pole. They were driven off; and Cunningham, who had been a Liberty Boy himself before joining the army, was severely whipped. That whipping was dearly paid for in the lives of eleven thousand
American prisoners who died during the British occupation of the city under the treatment of the vengeful provost-marshal, Captain William Cunningham. One of the earliest of his acts after the occupation of the city by the British, in September, 1776, was to order the liberty pole leveled to the ground. It probably seemed to him a visible reminder of the humiliation of the whipping he had received. In 1897, the Mary Washington Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, caused a tablet to be placed in the post-office to commemorate the erection and maintenance of the liberty-pole from 1766 to 1776.

The Liberty Pole Riot

2 The British troops in garrison naturally disliked the townsfolk, on whom in turn their mere presence acted as an irritant. The soldiers when out of barracks and away from the control of their officers were always coming into collision with the mob, in which the seafaring element was strong; and the resulting riots not infrequently involved also the respectable mechanics and small traders, and even the merchants and gentry. The great source of quarrel was the liberty pole. This had been erected on the anniversary of the king's birth, June 6, 1766, to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act; there was a great barbecue on the occasion, an ox being roasted whole on the common,-while hogsheads of punch and ale were broached, bonfires were lit, and amid the booming of cannon and pealing of bells a flag was hoisted with the inscription, "The King, Pitt, and Liberty,"-the colonists being enthusiastically devoted to their two great parliamentary champions, Pitt and Burke.

The liberty pole was an eyesore to the soldiers in the fort, and its destruction or attempted destruction became one of their standing pastimes. Several times they succeeded, usually when they sallied out at night; and then the liberty pole was chopped down or burnt up. The townsfolk, headed by the Sons of Liberty, always gathered to the rescue. If too late to save the pole, they put up another one, and stood guard over it; if in time to attempt a rescue, a bloody riot followed. In the latter part of January, 1770, parties of soldiers and townsfolk fought a series of pitched battles in the streets, the riot lasting for two days. It began by a successful surprise on the part of the soldiers, who cut down the pole early one morning. 

The townsfolk held an indignation meeting and denounced vengeance on the soldiers, who retaliated by posting derisive placards on the walls of the fort and public buildings. A series of skirmishes ensued in which heads were broken, and men cut and stabbed,-the soldiers being usually overcome by numbers, all of the working-men and every sailor in town swarming out to assail the redcoats. Some of the hardest fighting occurred when a troop of soldiers attacked a number of sailors, who were rescued by some of the Liberty Boys who had been playing ball on the Common. Several persons were badly injured, and in one scuffle a sailor was thrust through with a bayonet, and slain; after which his comrades, armed with bludgeons, drubbed the soldiers into their barracks. The upshot was that the townsfolk were victorious, and the liberty pole was not again molested. 

This was the first bloodshed in the struggle which culminated in the Revolution. It occurred six weeks before the so-called "Boston Massacre,"-an incident of the same kind, in which, however, the Americans were much less clearly in the right than they were in the New York case. Even in New York the soldiers had doubtless been sorely provoked by the taunts and jeers of the townsmen; but there was absolutely no justification for their cutting down the liberty pole, and the New Yorkers were perfectly right in refusing to submit tamely to such an outrage. The chief fault seems to have lain with the garrison officers, who should have kept their men under restraint, or else have taken immediate steps to remedy the wrong they did in cutting down the pole. This rioting however produced no more than local irritation.

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