Eight months ago, we invited the historian Jonathan Horn to take us week by week through the personalities, battles, events, and ideas that led British colonists in the New World to risk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor in the glorious cause of becoming Americans. Along the way, Jonathan has illuminated other parts of our history, too. And now, having reached the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, he signs off with one more great column about one of the most famous acts of iconoclasm in American history. Thank you, Jonathan. —The Editors
Among the many excuses offered for the mobs of monument topplers during the summer of 2020 was that our Founders had done no less. It was popular to point out that on the night of July 9, 1776, some of George Washington’s own troops had scaled the iron fence surrounding Bowling Green in New York City, thrown ropes up over the two-ton equestrian statue in the middle, and pulled down the gilded-lead horse and its rider, King George III.
Conveniently left out of certain tellings of the story was what happened afterward: Washington rebuked the vandals for, as he explained in his orders the next day, “the appearance of riot and want of order.” With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence behind us, the fate of the king’s statue serves as a reminder of what Washington hoped the American Revolution wouldn’t become.
Unlike many of the statues taken down in 2020, the one of George III by the English sculptor Joseph Wilton wasn’t much of a historical relic. It had stood for only six years. At its unveiling in New York in the summer of 1770, soldiers had paraded through the city to cheers. “Our loyalty, firm attachment, and affection to His Majesty’s person was expressed by drinking the king’s health and a long continuance of his reign, under a discharge of 32 pieces of cannon,” wrote New York’s lieutenant governor after the ceremony.
