Liberty caps and liberty trees

Past & Present, Feb, 1995 by J. David Harden

Already in Great Britain, liberty had been represented by the pileus in political imagery, but subversive undercurrents seem to be absent from the icon until William III arrived from the Netherlands in November 1688.(28) It is likely that William brought the Dutch political context and a specifically seditious meaning for the pike and liberty cap to England when he landed at Torbay. A medal struck to commemorate the landing displays a warrior with William's coat of arms protectively embracing the female allegory of Great Britain. Behind the pair stands a column topped with the cap of liberty - the pileus. The legend, proclaiming the restoration of British liberties by the Dutch, reads, "M[agna] Brit[annia] Exp[editione] Nov[ali] Bat[avorum] Lib[erata], Rest[ituta], Asserta".(29) In spite of the apparent adoption of the Dutch "meaning" of the cap in this context, it is the English pileus, the egg-shaped helmet, not the wide-brimmed Dutch cap, which stands for liberty in this case, a testimony, perhaps, to the formal limits of symbolic exchange and the resilience of frameworks of reception.

This symbolic migration from the Netherlands to England might be traced across the Atlantic as well. It is possible that in America this learned tradition may have coincided with certain urban rituals of insurrection employing trees, maypoles and liberty caps, American counterparts to those French rituals of rebellion in Perigord and Quercy. On 14 August 1765, market-day in Boston, an effigy of the stamp-agent, Andrew Oliver, and a large boot emblematic of Lord Bute, the First Lord of the Treasury, were hung from the branches of a great elm that stood near the town common. Both farmers and townspeople gathered about the tree to jeer and ridicule the images of those thought to be responsible for the proposed Stamp Act. It was a day of mirth and festival. A description of the event in the Boston Gazette described a "joyous" crowd. One observer recalled, "You would have laughed to have seen two or three hundred little Boys with a Flagg marching in Procession on which was King, Pitt and Liberty".(30) At day's end, Oliver and Bute were taken from their branches, placed in a coffin and paraded through Boston by an animated crowd cheering "Liberty and Property!" and "No Stamps!" Along the march to Fort Hill, a site where effigies were traditionally burned, the rebellious Bostonians stopped to raze a building mistakenly thought to be the new Stamp Office. According to at least one account, the procession was thousands strong. They paused a second time at the house of Andrew Oliver himself. Jeers, insults and many more substantial objects were hurled through the windows. In view of the house, they hung the effigy, tore off its head and set fire to the straw figure. Oliver resigned his commission the following day.(31)

A month later, on 11 September, a large copper plate was affixed to the great elm that had served as the centre of the demonstration against the Stamp Act. Gold letters proclaimed the "Tree of Liberty". Peter Oliver, a Tory and the brother of the former stamp-agent, offered this spiteful interpretation: the Liberty Tree, a once harmless elm, had been "consecrated as an Idol for the Mob to Worship".(32) A testament to the insurrections against British authoritarian rule and a focus for celebrations commemorating patriot successes, the liberty tree functioned as a symbolic political centre for the rebels of Boston and elsewhere. The ritual was reproduced throughout the American colonies. Framed by a population dependent on pre-modern forms of communication, the function of this naked pole as a centre, a rallying point for the community, would intensify its potency as a symbol.(33) But are we speaking of poles or trees?