Two-hundred fifty years ago this month, the British chopped down an important symbol of American freedom – the Boston Liberty Tree. To add insult to injury, they ignominiously turned that once-stately elm into mere firewood.
I knew virtually nothing about the Liberty Tree – until I was informed by Dr. Peter Lillback, the founding president of Providence Forum, for which I serve as executive director. Lillback has even begun a project to restore Liberty Trees, but that is the subject for a future column.
Noted historian Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote on the importance of Liberty Trees as a powerful symbol in America for the New England Quarterly in 1952.
The Liberty Tree has all but been forgotten by most Americans, yet it was an important symbol of our resistance to tyranny during the late colonial times. In fact, in the heyday of the American War for Independence, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Liberty Trees throughout the colonies, according to History.com.
And it all began in Boston – as did so many key developments in early America.
Here is the context: After the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the British Parliament, with the king’s blessing, decided to tax the American colonists, since a large piece of the government budget went to protecting them. But these taxes were imposed on the colonists without American input. In 1765, Parliament declared one such tax, the Stamp Act, which put a tax on virtually any paper product in the colonies – newspapers, stationery, receipts, even playing cards.
As the Stamp Act was being debated in Parliament, pro-American member of Parliament Isaac Barré argued that it was the oppression of the British that caused the colonists to flee in the first place. Indeed, British anti-Christian tyranny caused the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Catholics, etc. to flee to America. In that speech, Barré coined the phrase “sons of liberty.” It became a welcome label to many of the American patriots.
After hearing the news of the Stamp Act, many patriots gathered in the shade of a large elm tree near Boston Common. This tree had been planted in 1646 by the Puritan settlers.
Soon this tree became known as the Liberty Tree – again, the prototype of others to follow. It became the center of controversy in August 1765.
The Constitution Center notes: “Hoisted on the tree was an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the city’s stamp tax agent. Soon, a mob of several thousand people attacked Oliver’s office and his home, and the effigy was stomped, decapitated and burned.”
Oliver was so intimidated, he resigned the post of Stamp Act collector, before he even worked one day at it.
The seminal figure Samuel Adams – whom we could call the grandfather of America – was not there, but he would write about this momentous event later: “The Sons of Liberty on the 14th of August 1765, a Day which ought to be forever remembered in America, animated with a zeal for their country then upon the brink of destruction, and resolved, at once to save her.”
Ironically, the Stamp Act proved ineffective in collecting revenues – but it did one thing: It awakened the sleeping giant of America. In his 1997 book, “A History of the American People,” the late historian Paul Johnson writes of George Grenville, England’s prime minister at that time: “His Stamp Act cost a lot in administration too but raised nothing. It proved unenforceable. Colonial assemblies pronounced it unconstitutional and unlawful. The irresistible popular catchphrase, ‘No taxation without representation,’ was heard. The stamps were publicly burned by rioters.”
The Boston Liberty Tree was routinely used as a type of bulletin board with many postings for patriotic consumption. And it was there that the Sons of Liberty hoisted a banner that had nine red-and-white stripes hanging down – a clear forerunner to the U.S. flag.
Schlesinger points out that it is no coincidence that the chopping down of the Liberty Tree in Boston came the same year as the actual start of the war: “The outbreak of hostilities in April, 1775, at Concord and Lexington released all the pent-up fury of the British adherents against the hated tokens of insurgency. Fittingly enough, Boston’s Liberty Tree, progenitor of the numerous brood, fell the first prey, the beleaguered redcoats ‘with malice diabolical’ hacking it down in August.”
But, as the patriots remarked after the tree was chopped down, the British may have destroyed that symbol, but in reality, the “Grand American Tree of Liberty” had begun to “spread its branches over the whole continent,” notes Schlesinger.
In modern America, as the beneficiaries of the patriots who won our freedom 250 years ago, we would do well to learn about the brave men and women who resisted tyranny, using such symbols as the Liberty Tree.
