Revolution and Symbols

Sons of Freedom Pulling Down the Statue of King George III

Print from Steel Engraving, John C. McCrae (1859)

Growing up, it seemed every time I brought a history textbook home, my dad would turn to a page on American History and point to an image in the book much like the one above. Then he would say, "Your great-great-great granddad pulled that statue down." Of course, no school textbook, ever, said who pulled it down.  Most simply read, "A crowd of colonist gathered in New York City and pulled down a statue of King George to make bullets for the war."

In 2017 I was visiting New Orleans.  At the time there was great controversy in the nation about history, culture, and symbols of hate as many local governments began removing several statues that commemorated leaders of the Confederacy. While there were some exceptions most of these decisions were made and achieved peacefully.

In April 2003, images flooded the news medias as some Iraqi citizens attempted to bring down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad. When unsuccessful the US Marines from the 3rd Battalion assisted in the activity. 

These moments—New York in 1776, New Orleans in 2017, Baghdad in 2003—share a common thread: statues as symbols. Each represented a regime, a legacy, or a wound. King George was a symbol of the tyranny the colonist had begun to loathe. The confederate statues were both symbols of history and symbols of hate. Saddam was a symbol of an era the people believed was now gone. Each case marked an inflection point.

This grandfather was Oliver Brown. He was the Revolutionary war ancestor used by my father, grandfather, great-aunt, and great-grandmother to gain their memberships into the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) and Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), respectively. My great-great-grandfather was written up in a Lawrence County Ohio newspaper in the early 1900s discussing his encounters with his grandfather, Oliver Brown. 

The story of Oliver was etched in our family memories.

Captain Oliver Brown’s Revolutionary journey began even before its first battle at Lexington.  As a lad of twenty, he happened to be in Boston conducting business on behalf of his family, on the day of the Boston Tea Party.  There he witnessed the events of that day.

His father, Benjamin Brown, was a Selectman in Lexington and on the Committee of Correspondence; his father-in-law, Edward Richardson, was on the Committee of Correspondence in Watertown. His brother, Solomon Brown, fired some of the first shots of the American Revolution on the Green.

Oliver had been living with the family of Captain Thatcher  (and Thatcher's wife; Oliver's first cousin) in Cambridge since the early 1760s. Naturally, he became one of Thatcher's Woburn Minutemen that arrived to repel the British regulars along the Battle Road. He stood against the first British cannon fired on colonial forces that day. He was part of nearly every major turning point of the war’s northern theater. He fought at Bunker Hill, commanded artillery at Harlem Heights, and endured defeat at White Plains. 

He served under General Washington for four years, rising to captain-lieutenant in the Massachusetts artillery line. With the artillery he fought at Trenton and Princeton during the winter campaigns, manned defensive posts at Bound Brook, and engaged in the pivotal battles of Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth. His artillery, he recalled, “did much execution” and his company of thirty men and two field pieces was entrusted with “many small adventures”.

After Oliver's service he returned to Middlesex.  He purchased several pieces of property in and around Concord. He was owner/operator of Wright Tavern for about three years starting in 1786. During his management there in September 1786 some townspeople met there to draft up a petition to address concerns about unrest associated with Shay's Rebellion. Then by 1789, he was having difficulty generating enough revenue to cover his mortgage, so he moved west to the region that is now Wellsburg, WV.

Oliver lived and participated in a pivotal time and place in American history.  Granddad didn't show up in standard history textbooks - but he was there. The retelling of his story in our family concretely connected us to the transition from American colonies to these United States.  

Oliver expressed only one regret about his actions and adventures.  It was that he had disappointed General Washington by defacing the statue of King George. Yet, I wonder what he thought in the moment of the event.  Was he just caught up in the mobbish fervor? Did the reading of the Declaration of Independence that day move him toward celebration? Was he thinking about the scarcity of lead for bullets? Like the Marines in 2003, perhaps he was thinking: How can we do this safely and successfully? 

We know he wasn't thinking, "What will General Washington think about this?"

An aside:  In 2022 Smithsonian published an interesting article on the subject that referenced Oliver indirectly with a link to his biography.