Michael Hattem

And it's such a rousing and inspiring reading of the declaration.

Mm-hmm.

That people end up marching down from the commons down Broadway to Bowling Green, where there was a statue erected of George III just a few years earlier.

It was commissioned after the repeal of the Stamp Act as a sort of sign of goodwill.

And they march down, they tear the statue down.

And there's a sort of myth that it's then melted down and used to make bullets.

But the other interesting thing about that is that the iron-wrought fence that surrounded the statue on each pike had these little crowns.

And the colonists used their bats, the sailor bats, you know, to knock the crowns off the fence.

And that fence is still there at Bowling Green in downtown New York City.

And you can see it and you can see where they knocked the crowns off.

Yeah.

I mean, you have to think about the perspective of France or of Spain.

These are absolute monarchies, right?

They are actually the kind of monarchies that the Declaration of Independence criticizes George III for being.

Even though most, you know, most people in England knew that, you know, George III, that the monarch in Great Britain had been, his prerogative had been lessened over the years.

And, you know, he wasn't really, that wasn't very powerful.

But the, you know, but Louis XVI, you know, was an absolute monarch.

And so how do you appeal to an absolute monarch to support your republican leadership?

seemingly anti-monarchical revolution.

So it's a very dicey situation and it doesn't happen.