Bayonets against chains and sticks

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 46 for his account.

In January 1770 New York and its garrison were already at odds. The soldiers took casual work for low pay, cutting into the wages of the city’s laborers, and they kept cutting down the Sons of Liberty’s Liberty Pole. On 19 January men of the 16th Regiment tried to post a handbill that called the Sons of Liberty dangerous enemies of the country. Isaac Sears and a group of Liberty Boys seized the soldiers and took them to Mayor Hicks. A larger party from the barracks, about twenty soldiers, came to get their comrades back, and on Golden Hill they met the crowd with bayonets and cutlasses. The townsmen had fence rungs, sticks and chains. Several people were cut, among them bystanders, and nobody died; officers marched the soldiers back to barracks. Rothbard points out the two months’ head start on Boston and then the difference. New York was ruled by a conservative landed oligarchy, not a popular radical leadership, so the fight made conservatives determined to crush the Sons. Within weeks Alexander McDougall was in jail for his broadside.