by Eric Rutkow
Without New England masts, the Royal Navy was weakened, if not crippled. During the war, many ships were stuck in port with broken masts, and masting problems also delayed the outfitting of multiple British fleets throughout the war, leaving the British at a disadvantage. New Englanders, meanwhile, sold their masts to the French, whose navy assisted the colonial army during the conflict. Robert Albion, one of the greatest naval historians, has argued that “the lack of masts deserves more of a place than it has yet received among the various reasons for England’s temporary decline in sea power” during the American Revolution. Some think he overreaches, but his basic point is true: New England white pines, in their role as naval masts, were an unsung hero in America’s gaining its independence.
Regardless of what role masts played in the naval history of the American Revolution, England’s colonial mast policy proved an outright disaster for deeper reasons. The disrespect for private property rights, draconian cutting laws, and generally shoddy enforcement drove a wedge between the colonists and the Crown. England might have saved itself money and aggravation by simply purchasing a gigantic masting nursery from the colonists. In the lumbering regions of New England, white pine masts became a symbol of English repression.
But in the cities and towns of the colonies another type of tree was becoming a symbol of something different—American liberty. Trees, it turned out, would help unify the colonies around the belief that liberty was an ideal to hold above all others.
The Tree of Liberty
THE BOSTON TOWNSPEOPLE who walked past Deacon Eliot’s house on the morning of August 14, 1765, encountered something unexpected. Hanging from the branches of a great elm at the corner of Essex and Newbury Streets was the body of a man. Closer inspection revealed it to be a straw-stuffed dummy wearing the letters “A.O.,” the initials of Andrew Oliver, secretary of the province. Next to the effigy, swinging in the breeze, was a boot with a little devil “peeping out and thrusting the [effigy] with an Horrid Fork,” according to one account.
Oliver was not only secretary of the province but also the royal official commissioned with distributing papers for a new English tax on the colonies, the Stamp Act. The legislation had not gone into effect yet, but when it did it would require that almost all colonial papers carry a stamp that showed payment of a tax. The range of documents covered was staggering, everything from legal transactions and licenses down to dice and playing cards. Boston already had economic problems that summer, and the threat of new taxes enraged nearly all the colonists. The words written near Oliver’s hanging effigy summed up the sentiments: “How Glorious is it to see, a Stamp officer hang on a Tree.”
Oliver’s dummy remained in the great elm for all to observe throughout the day. At one point, according to an eyewitness, “[t]hree Guineas was offerd to any one that should take it down and no one dard to make the Tryall.” People openly mocked Oliver and the act, pantomiming stampings on various goods. As evening approached, a spontaneous crowd gathered under the tree. Witnesses counted one thousand participants, a massive number in a town of fifteen thousand. They cut the effigy from the tree and “with great solemnity” placed it in a coffin. Then a procession, led by about fifty well-dressed tradesmen, paraded the two dummies through the streets of Boston, past the house of the royal governor. They continued toward the newly built stamp office and leveled the brick building with a makeshift battering ram. The mob scene concluded with a bonfire in front of Oliver’s house, where the crowd burned the effigy and broke all the windows in his house. By 11:00 p.m. the rioters had dispersed. Oliver made it known the next day that he would not serve as stamp distributor.
Though the riots failed to dissuade Parliament from enforcing the Stamp Act, they succeeded in forging a new folk hero: the large American elm where the entire affair began. The tree, in many respects, had grown up in tandem with colonial Boston. Early Massachusetts Bay colonists had planted it in 1646 on a spot near the city’s common. During the intervening six score years, it matured into a mighty elm around one hundred feet tall, its leafy crown towering above the nearby houses. And by the 1760s, it had become one of the greatest trees in the entire city, just as Boston had become one of the greatest cities in all of the colonies.
The elm was formally recognized as a symbol of public protest the month after the anti–Stamp Act riot, on September 11, 1765. That day, the Boston Sons of Liberty, a group of leading patriots that included Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, affixed a copper plate to the mighty tree at Deacon Eliot’s house that read “The Tree of Liberty” in gold letters. The cause of liberty suddenly had an icon. Soon everyone knew of Boston’s Liberty Tree, even members of Parliament in London, who talked of “the Affair at Liberty Tree.” Local carpenters pruned the elm for free as “it was for the public good” and “they were always ready to serve the true-born Sons of Liberty.”
The American colonies had a long tradition of using trees as meeting spots. John Eliot, a Puritan missionary who reached Massachusetts Bay in 1631, had spent much of his life preaching to Indians beneath a great white oak, known as Eliot’s Oak until its death in the twentieth century. William Penn had signed a peace treaty with the Lenape Indians in 1683 beneath the graceful branches of an American elm. Black slaves often met in “hush arbors” in the woods, where their activities were shielded from the eyes of white masters. In colonial New York City, businessmen routinely gathered around a buttonwood tree (better known in the modern day as an American sycamore) to meet and trade stocks—the New York Stock Exchange would formally begin in 1792 with the signing of the Buttonwood Agreement.
And trees had also served as symbols of the colonies themselves. Connecticut’s Charter Oak, for instance, took its name from a story, considered apocryphal, stating that in 1687 a Connecticut colonist had successfully secreted the state’s charter inside an oak tree when King James II attempted to seize it. Early Massachusetts colonists minted a shilling with the image of a pine tree—the coin’s designer observed, “What better thing than a tree to portray the wealth of our country?” In the eighteenth century, New Englanders began using a flag with a pine tree emblem, a practice that became commonplace during the Revolutionary War. A pine tree flag would wave at Bunker Hill and also when the Massachusetts navy sailed down the Charles River to attack British-held Boston.
The newly christened Liberty Tree was both symbol and stage. It became an active participant in the decade of activity leading up to rebellion in 1775. The Sons of Liberty claimed the tree as their own and used it as an outdoor meeting spot, an area dubbed Liberty Hall. This became an egalitarian point of organization capable of holding thousands of people and excluding none. The Sons of Liberty also erected a flagpole “a good deal above the Top of the Tree,” and they would hoist a flag to signal meetings. The tree enfranchised the mobs and functioned as the locus of popular rebellious actions, the first place Bostonians looked for news and demonstrations against the more opprobrious policies of Parliament. Official meetings occurred in nearby Faneuil Hall, but the so-called lower-class mobs held court around the elm in Liberty Hall. One disgruntled American Tory referred to the Liberty Tree as “an Idol for the Mob to Worship.”
The de facto custodian of the tree, at least at the outset, was a man drawn from the lower classes, twenty-seven-year-old Ebenezer Mackintosh. His status as a shoemaker distinguished him from merchants like Adams and Revere, who formed the core of colonial resistance. Mackintosh donned the title “First Captain General of the Liberty Tree,” a half-mocking allusion to the royal governor’s official moniker. His biggest job qualification was his captaining the South End company, a neighborhood artisans’ group that participated in the annual Pope’s Day festival, a celebration in November when various artisan factions paraded through the streets. Mackintosh had led the festival before, and he would apply this experience to directing angry mobs that formed around the Liberty Tree.
Such was the situation on November 1, 1765, the next time that the Liberty Tree made internationa
l news. The Stamp Act went into effect that day, and in the morning two new effigies, those of the prime minister and a member of Parliament associated with the act, appeared hanging from the boughs of the Liberty Tree. A crowd of “several thousand” formed around the site during the day, and at 3:00 p.m. the dummies were cut down from the tree, with Mackintosh leading the protesters through the streets. Eventually, “in token of their utmost Detestation,” members of the crowd “tore [the effigies] in Pieces & flung their Limbs with Indignation into the Air,” according to one witness.
More Liberty Tree protests followed during the subsequent months. On December 17, 1765, upward of two thousand people gathered to hear Oliver reaffirm for the third time his commitment not to enforce the Stamp Act: “I do hereby in the most explicit and unreserved Manner declare . . . that I never will . . . take any Measures for enforcing the Stamp-Act in America; which is so grievous to the People.” Two months later, in February, the Sons of Liberty erected a stage below the Liberty Tree with a gallows. A representation of the devil lay along the top, handing a copy of the Stamp Act to two new effigies below, one of which was the prime minister. A crowd of between two and three thousand assembled around the tree and followed the Sons of Liberty, along with the gallows, a half mile to a spot where they set the entire structure ablaze.
The Liberty Tree gained mythic status in late May 1766, when news reached Boston that Parliament had finally repealed the Stamp Act. The Sons of Liberty gathered around the tree and, according to a contemporary account, “regailed themselves on the Occasion with firing Guns, drinking loyal Toasts, & other decent expressions of Joy.” On nearby Boston Common, an oiled-paper obelisk designed by Paul Revere glowed with 280 interior lamps and entertained the reveling crowds. One side of the obelisk showed an image of the Liberty Tree with an angel above and an eagle nesting in the upper branches. The Sons of Liberty meant to move the obelisk in front of the Liberty Tree “as a standing monument of this glorious era,” but the object caught on fire and was consumed. The following night, they hung 108 lanterns on the Tree of Liberty, the number representing the members of the “glorious majority” in Parliament. The Sons of Liberty, it must be noted, remained loyal to the Crown at this point—it was tyranny and oppression they had been contesting with the Stamp Act protests.
Soon the Liberty Tree concept began to spread to the other colonies, establishing outdoor, public forums for the various Sons of Liberty groups that dotted the Eastern Seaboard. The earliest such copycat—the only known imitator preceding the repeal of the Stamp Act—was a buttonwood tree in Newport, Rhode Island. The grantor stated that he was bequeathing a “Tree of Liberty” as “a Monument of the spirited and noble Opposition made to the Stamp-Act” that should be “considered as emblematical of Public Liberty.” Colonists later dedicated trees at such wide-ranging locations as Norwich, Connecticut; Braintree, Roxbury, and Salem, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; and Charlestown (Charleston), South Carolina.
In New York, the Liberty Tree took on a different, though related, form. There, Sons of Liberty had erected a wooden pole in City Hall Park, near the city’s British barracks, upon hearing the news of the Stamp Act’s repeal. This irritated the English soldiers, who chopped it down repeatedly, only to see it spring up once again. In March 1767, the New York Sons of Liberty reinforced their most recent pole with ironwork around the base. A letter posted in the colonial papers warned that those who dared to cut this pole down were “volunteers of Satan” who “may be almost assured New York will be too hot to hold [them] long.” Liberty Poles, typically pine masts or flagstaffs, soon rivaled Liberty Trees as symbols opposing British oppression.
Back in Boston, the original Liberty Tree became a self-perpetuating generator of antityrannical sentiment. The twin dates of the original August anti–Stamp Act protests and the act’s repeal (celebrated in March instead of May) were now semiannual holidays. In August 1766, at the first of these new rituals, the Sons of Liberty gathered at Liberty Hall to the sound of ceremonial cannon fire. While there they drank a series of fourteen toasts that presaged the conflicts of the next decade. At first, cheers rang out for King George III, the Prince of Wales, and the British Empire, and revelers raised their glasses that “the Union between Great Britain and the Colonies never be dissolved.” But later, the Sons of Liberty asked that “the Colonies ever be watchful to obviate any evil Designs, or clandestine Measures to disturb their Harmony.” The closing toast demanded that “the everlasting Remembrance of the 14th of August, serve to revive the dying ‘Sparks of Liberty,’ whenever America shall be in Danger of Slavery.” Soon these sparks set the colonists’ anti-British sentiment aflame.
One of the first violent clashes before the Revolution began took place around the Liberty Pole in New York. On the night of January 16, 1770, a group of redcoats managed to fell the ironclad pole that had been erected in 1767. Colonists called for justice the next day at a meeting that three thousand people attended. A street fight broke out two days later between soldiers and colonists, the scene threatening to explode into an uncontrollable battle before British officers arrived and dispersed the soldiers. Both sides, however, suffered serious injuries and at least one New Yorker died of a stab wound. The clash became known as the Battle of Golden Hill and preceded the better-known Boston Massacre by six weeks.
These sorts of bloody encounters hardened many of the Sons of Liberty against the British Parliament. However, their antityrannical passion was tempered by Parliament’s abandoning nearly all colonial taxes in 1770 with the repeal of the Townshend duties, a series of revenue-raising measures that it had imposed on the colonies three years earlier. All that remained was a tax on tea, which had been retained as a symbolic assertion of British authority. But in May 1773, Parliament revived the simmering hard-line opposition when it granted the East India Company a functional monopoly over the colonial tea market. The Boston Sons of Liberty, like those of the other colonies, now demanded an outright boycott on tea imports and directed their anger toward the colonial tea importers.
On the morning of November 3, 1773, a flag was again waving atop the Liberty Tree. The Sons of Liberty had called a meeting to insist that the local traders swear to reject and return any East India tea shipments. The traders posted their own opposition flyers, also supposedly signed by the Sons of Liberty, that labeled the day’s gathering “the deceitful Bait of those who falsely stile themselves Friends of Liberty.” This counternotice insisted that traders were entitled “to Buy and Sell when and where we please.” Its authors urged Bostonians to avoid the protest altogether.
The Liberty Tree, however, had become the most respected representation of the Sons of Liberty, and no public postings could undermine its flag-flying call to order. A crowd several hundred strong gathered throughout the morning and decried the traders who would not comply with the boycott. As with the events of August 1765, the mob insisted that these tradesmen appear at the Liberty Tree to declare their fealty to the nonimportation of tea. But this time it was not to be. The traders sent letters explaining that it was “impossible for [them] to comply with the Request of the Town.” Repeated attempts to coerce these businessmen failed, and eventually, on December 16, the rebuffed Sons of Liberty, dressed as an Indian party, snuck onto the tea ships sitting in Boston Harbor and dumped their supplies overboard, a sabotage known, of course, as the Boston Tea Party.
Over the next eighteen months the situation devolved rapidly. Parliament, reacting to the Tea Party, adopted the Intolerable Acts in the spring of 1774. The following fall, representatives of the thirteen colonies convened in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress. Liberty Poles now began to shoot up throughout the colonies like cornstalks in July. They appeared at too many new sites to mention individually. In Plymouth, colonists attempted to erect one pole on their famous rock, but split the mighty stone in the process, a fitting metaphor perhaps of the spirit of revolution cracking open the legacy of colonialism. Hostilities formally began on the
morning of April 19, 1775, at the town of Lexington in Massachusetts.
One of the war’s earliest casualties was the original Liberty Tree itself, the great elm near Deacon Eliot’s house that had first enlivened the Boston mobs a decade before. A party of British soldiers decided in August 1775 that they needed to fell this tree that gave the rebels so much inspiration. According to a newspaper account, “After a long Spell of laughing and grinning, sweating, swearing and foaming, with Malice diabolical, they cut down a Tree, because it bore the Name of Liberty.” One of the redcoats, while working to sever a branch, fell to the ground and died instantly.
The following year, in August, Bostonians erected a pole atop the Liberty Tree’s stump. The location had not changed, but this new sign of liberty was no longer rooted in English soil. One month before, the nation’s founders had signed the Declaration of Independence.
IN 1787 THOMAS JEFFERSON famously said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Liberty Trees and Liberty Poles would remain symbols of popular protest in America long after the last British soldier departed. Pennsylvania farmers would raise poles during the Whiskey Rebellion, a 1794 reaction to the federal whiskey tax. Another wave of poles would appear in protest of the 1798 Sedition Act, which made it illegal to libel the government. In the 1832 presidential election, supporters of Andrew Jackson, known as Old Hickory, would erect Hickory poles, while those who favored Henry Clay, from Ashland, Kentucky, would use Ash poles. Other isolated incidents would continue up until the Civil War, when the practice seemed to finally die out, a timely end to a tradition that assisted the nation in taking its first steps.
But while the original Liberty Tree helped to unite the colonies in their opposition to tyranny, that did not mean the thirteen colonies were united otherwise. The diverse groups that banded together to defeat the English came from different cultures, religious beliefs, and geographies. A lumberer in Maine, after all, shared little with a Virginia tobacco grower.