Looking Back at Downtown’s First Independence Day
On the evening of July 9, 1776, soldiers of the Continental Army, under the command of General George Washington, assembled at the Commons — then the northernmost edge of New York City, and today’s City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. The American Revolution had been underway for over a year. Months earlier, Washington and his army had successfully pushed their opponents, the British Army, out of Boston. But now, British naval ships had just been spotted in New York Harbor, and a massive battle was looming on the horizon.
With tensions at a high, words began to ring across the Commons: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them…” When the public reading came to an end, the soldiers erupted into cheers. These words were from a long-awaited proclamation, a Declaration of Independence. The Continental Congress, a governing body comprised of representatives from the 13 North American colonies, had officially declared what was now the United States of America free and independent from Great Britain. Surely, this — downtown’s first Independence Day — was a day to be remembered.
We now celebrate the birth of the United States on July 4, the day the Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Declaration of Independence. But in 1776, Philadelphia was a few days’ horse ride away from New York, where George Washington, then the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, was headquartered. Washington did not receive official word of the Declaration until a letter from Congress President John Hancock arrived around July 9.
In the aftermath of the Declaration’s public reading that night, a rowdy crowd of soldiers and civilians marched from the Commons down Broadway to Bowling Green. There, zealous revelers pulled down an equestrian statue of King George III, which had been erected only six years earlier, in 1770. The toppled statue, now a symbol of an erstwhile regime, was then symbolically beheaded. The rest of the statue was carted off to Connecticut, where it was eventually melted into musket balls to be used against the King’s men in the war. If you visit Bowling Green Park today, you can still see remnants from this ebullient, if brutal moment; if you look closely at the posts on the iron fence surrounding the park, you can see where the crowd cut off golden crowns that once topped them.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the revelry, and on July 10, Washington, disapproving of the crowd’s behavior, proclaimed in his General Orders:
“Tho the General Doubts not the persons, who pulled down and mutilated the Statue, in the Broadway, last night, were actuated by Zeal in the public cause; yet it has so much the appearance of riot and want of order, in the Army, that he disapproves the manner.”
Yet, the events of downtown’s first Independence Day gave the new citizenry a needed moment of celebration, as the bloody summer of 1776 would make New York City a linchpin of the American Revolution.
Theresa DeCicco-Dizon is a public historian and museum educator based in New York City.
image: ”Pulling Down the Statue of George III,” oil painting by William Walcutt (1819-1882), circa 1854.
