Liberty pole

Soon after the appearance of William Hogarth's 1763 print of John Wilkes holding a liberty pole topped with a liberty cap, American colonists embraced the symbols to represent their own views of political liberty. Liberty poles with various banners were raised in numerous towns to protest the Stamp Act of 1765 and to celebrate its repeal in 1766. In New York, British troops on at least four occasions destroyed the liberty pole erected by the Sons of Liberty, leading to a minor skirmish in January 1770. Soon the liberty pole became the public symbol of American opposition to king and Parliament; suspected Tories were sometimes forced to kiss the liberty pole, and tax collectors were hung in effigy from them. In response to such events, British troops purposefully cut down Concord's liberty pole before the battle began there in April 1775.

The enduring political importance of the symbol was reflected in the first design for the Great Seal of the United States in 1776, depicting the goddess of liberty holding a liberty pole and cap, and it also was represented on U.S. coins from 1793 until 1891. The icon is still found today on the state flag of New York and the state seals of New Jersey, North Carolina, and Arkansas.

After the American Revolution, the raising of liberty poles continued as a form of protest against policies of the new national government. Liberty poles were raised by insurgents during the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries' Rebellion against federal taxes and by Republicans protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. As early as 1792, depictions of the liberty pole and cap also became associated with the critique of slavery. During the nineteenth century, the term "liberty pole" came to mean practically any flagpole, whether permanently erected in a community or raised to support particular issues.

Bibliography

Olson, Lester C. Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. "Liberty Tree: A Genealogy." New England Quarterly 25 (1952): 435–457.

Raising the Liberty Pole in New York City, 1770 pen and ink drawing by Pierre Eugene du Simitiere depicting one of six liberty poles to be alternately raised and later removed over ten years in confrontations among the Sons of Liberty and British troops stationed in the city prior to the American Revolutionary War.

A liberty pole is a tall wooden pole, often used as a type of flagstaff, planted in the ground, which may be surmounted by an ensign or a liberty cap).

A liberty pole was often erected in town squares in the years before and during the American Revolution (i.e., Concord, Massachusetts; Newport, Rhode Island; Caughnawaga, New York; Savannah, Georgia). Some colonists erected liberty poles on their own private land (such as in Woburn, Massachusetts - the pole raising there is reenacted annually). An often violent struggle over liberty poles erected by the Sons of Liberty in New York City raged for 10 years. The poles were periodically destroyed by the royal authorities (see the Battle of Golden Hill), only to be replaced by the Sons with new ones. The conflict lasted from the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 until the revolutionary New York Provincial Congress came to power in 1775.^[1] The liberty pole in New York City was crowned with a gilt vane bearing the single word, "Liberty".

Liberty pole at the border to the Republic of Mainz., a product of the French Revolutionary Wars, watercolor by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1793

In some locales - notably in Boston - a liberty tree rather than a pole served the same political purpose.

When an ensign was raised (usually red) on a liberty pole, it would be a calling for the Sons of Liberty or townspeople to meet and vent or express their views regarding British rule. The pole was known to be a symbol of dissent against Great Britain. The symbol is also apparent in many seals and coats of arms as a sign of liberty, freedom, and independence.

During the Whiskey Rebellion, locals in western Pennsylvania would erect poles along the roads or in town centers as a protest against the federal government's tax on distilled spirits, and evoking the spirit embodied by the liberty poles of decades earlier.^[2]

The arbres de la liberté ("liberty trees") were a symbol of the French Revolution, the first being planted in 1790 by a pastor of a Vienne village, inspired by the 1765 Liberty Tree of Boston. One was also planted in front of the City Hall of Amsterdam on 4 March 1795, in celebration of the alliance between the French Republic and the Batavian Republic. İn 1798, with the establishment of the short-lived Roman Republic, such a tree was also planted in Rome's Piazza delle Scole, to mark the legal abolition of the Roman Ghetto (which was, however, re-instated with the resumption of Papal rule).

Footnotes

1. ^ Resistance and Dissent : Independence & its Enemies in New York
2. ^ Baldwin, Leland Dewitt (1968). Whiskey rebels: the story of a frontier uprising. University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 208. http://books.google.com/books?id=QMF2AAAAMAAJ. 

See also

• Liberty Tree
• Maypole

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