Pulling down the king

Rothbard’s account

From Conceived in Liberty, chapter 34, pp. 1295–1297 (2011 edition). Every sentence here comes from Rothbard’s text; the words in quotation marks are his.

Rothbard opens with the Declaration proclaimed and the colonies united states: “But New York had not yet signed!” (p. 1295). Its “ruling landed oligarchy,” the Livingstons, Jays, Duanes and Schuylers, was set against independence, and in April archconservatives had swept the New York elections (p. 1295). He calls the revolutionary cause “fortunate” to have the Continental Army stationed in New York from mid-April, and Washington “was able to cow the province’s Tories” (p. 1295).

A mighty British invasion fleet carrying nearly 35,000 troops appeared off New York in mid-June, and Rothbard writes that “the very imminence of the British military threat necessarily drove” even the conservative Committee of Seven “to more radical anti-Tory measures” (p. 1295). An outright move for independence was extremely difficult for most of the New York aristocracy, but their Whig peers, he argues, showed “a shrewd ability to compromise with the spirit of the times in order to keep control of affairs at home” (p. 1296), and by the end of May Jay, Morris, Livingston and John Morin Scott were beginning to move cautiously toward independence. The New York Committee of Mechanics, by contrast, “was ardently for independence from Great Britain” (p. 1296). The provincial congress decreed the dissolution of the old royal government on May 27 but “dallied” over instructions on independence, and new elections at the end of June secured a large majority of supporters of independence (p. 1296). On July 9 the Fourth New York Provincial Congress, meeting at White Plains, “sedately voted unanimously to join the Continental Declaration of Independence” (p. 1296).

“It was now unanimous; all the states were united on independence,” Rothbard writes (p. 1297). “The Declaration of Independence was proclaimed throughout the land,” with toasts “to liberty and to the union of states, to freedom and independence,” and “the royal arms were everywhere stripped and burned” (p. 1297). An effigy of the king was paraded through Baltimore, and “a lead statue of King George in New York City was happily toppled and melted down into bullets” (p. 1297).