This Day in History

July 9, 2026

They Melted a King Into 42,088 Bullets

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On July 9, 1776, the day George Washington read the Declaration of Independence to his troops in New York, a gilded statue of King George III was pulled from its pedestal and melted down into ammunition meant to shoot at his own soldiers.

The statue at Bowling Green was a thank-you note. The New York Assembly had commissioned it in 1766 to honor the king for repealing the Stamp Act, and it had stood since 1770: King George on horseback, four thousand pounds of lead gilded in gold, posed like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill. Army lieutenant Isaac Bangs, passing through the city, described it in his journal as a figure "about 3 feet larger than a natural Man," its horse in proportion, "neatly constructed of Lead gilt with Gold," raised on a marble pedestal "about 15 feet high."

Six years later, the gratitude had soured. On the evening of July 9, Washington ordered his brigades drawn up at six o'clock on the parade grounds of the City Commons to hear the Declaration read aloud. Congress, his General Orders announced, had "dissolved the Connection" between the colonies and Great Britain. The Declaration's long list of grievances all pointed at one man, closing with the verdict that "A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

The fuse was lit. Within hours, a crowd armed with axes and ladders, led by the Sons of Liberty and Captain Oliver Brown's soldiers, marched down Broadway and heaved the king off his horse. Someone beheaded the figure; others dragged the pieces through the streets. A Philadelphia newspaper crowed that the statue lay "prostrate in the dirt," the "just des[s]ert of an ungrateful tyrant."

Then the lead mattered as much as the symbolism. By 1776 the colonies were so short of lead for musket balls that it was being pried from window casings. Bangs grimly anticipated "Emanations from the Leaden George" making "deep impressions in the Bodies of some of his red-Coated and Torie Subjects." The broken statue was carted to Litchfield, Connecticut, to the foundry of General Oliver Wolcott, where his family and neighbors cast it into 42,088 musket balls for the Continental Army, twenty balls to the pound.

Washington was not delighted. He commended the men's "zeal" but warned that anything resembling "a riot or want of order" would not be tolerated, and that future such acts should be left "to the proper authority." The general, who could see Bowling Green from his headquarters at One Broadway, did not order the statue restored.

Not all of the king reached Litchfield. The head disappeared, reportedly shipped to England and lost. Some pieces were stolen by loyalists at a tavern along the route. But the horse's tail survived, and it sits today in a glass case at the New-York Historical Society, beside musket balls recovered from Revolutionary War barracks.

The surprising echo: the iron fence that ringed the statue still stands at Bowling Green, its crown-topped posts sawn flat where the royal finials were hacked off. And the question that night posed, of which monuments deserve to stand and who gets to decide, has never gone away. In 2022 the New-York Historical Society mounted an exhibition called "Monuments and Controversy," placing pieces of the toppled king beside the same debates over statues still being argued about today. A 1770 act of iconoclasm turned out to be the start of an argument, not its end.

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