Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [173]
The denouement came on Friday, January 19. Led by Isaac Sears, a crowd of angry seamen and workingmen armed with cutlasses and clubs brawled with bayonet-wielding soldiers on Golden Hill, a former wheatfield at the crest of John Street (near William). That the Sixteenth had just completed a tour of duty in Ireland must have been an inspiration to those of Sears’s followers who had so recently escaped that island. The ensuing Battle of Golden Hill—perhaps the first head-on clash between colonists and redcoats of the American Revolution—resulted in numerous injuries and one fatality, a seaman who was run through by a bayonet. It ended when officers ordered the soldiers back to their barracks, but scattered confrontations between civilians and troops took place the following day as well. The biggest took place in Nassau Street, when a large party of seamen, fed up with the loss of jobs to moonlighting military personnel and vowing to revenge the death of a fellow Jack Tar the day before, came to blows with some soldiers. Timely intervention by the mayor and members of the City Council quelled the disturbance before anyone had been seriously injured. Word of the clashes in New York roused the ire of British troops in Boston, however, and six weeks later the colonies would be horrified by news of the Boston Massacre.
Well before then, a committee chaired by Sears and McDougall had arranged for the erection of a new liberty pole. On February 6, escorted by flag-bearers and a marching band, a team of six horses drew a huge eighty-foot pine mast up from the East River shipyards to a site just across from the Common on private land. Several thousand onlookers cheered as the mast was then sunk in a hole twelve feet deep, girded with iron bars and hoops, crossed by a twenty-two-foot topmast—the influence of sailors on its design and construction couldn’t have been plainer—and capped off with a gilt weather vane inscribed with the word LIBERTY. There it stood for the next half-dozen years, virtually impregnable. Weary of seeing his establishment used as a battleground, publican Montayne refused to host the Sons’ annual celebration of the repeal of the Stamp Act. Sears, Scott, McDougall, and eight others quickly put up the money to purchase a nearby tavern for the Sons, which they promptly christened Hampden Hall in memory of John Hampden, who had given his life to the struggle against arbitrary taxation a century earlier.
One day after the new pole went up, McDougall was identified as the author of To the Betrayed Inhabitants and arrested for seditious libel. Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden, now seventy-six years old, set bail at two thousand pounds—a prohibitive figure—and McDougall was hustled off to prison to await formal indictment. New York’s Sons of Liberty promptly hailed him as the “American Wilkes.” The allusion was astute. By linking McDougall to Wilkes, the Sons made McDougall’s arrest and imprisonment common knowledge everywhere in America. Prominent visitors from other colonies came for interviews and returned home with reports of McDougall’s selfless struggle against corruption and tyranny. In the city itself, crowds gathered outside his cell window to hear him speak while his friends ingeniously employed the Wilkseite number “45” to emphasize the political nature of his arrest. On the fourteenth of February,