PETER NAVARRO: How the Revolution turned a royal monument into American ammo
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In 1776, most Americans attended King George III’s Palace in Bowling Green, New York City. He looked at the toppled statue of George III and saw a shattered symbol of British oppression.
Oliver Wolcott saw ammunition.
Four thousand pounds of lead. If collected, transported, melted and molded properly, it’s enough to help start a revolution.
SECRETS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR BATTLEFIELDS ARE REVEALED 250 YEARS AFTER THE FOUNDATION OF AMERICA
The statue was erected in 1770 as a gilded monument to imperial authority in America’s busiest port city. King George sat on horseback, dressed in Roman fashion, and towering over the city as a daily reminder of who rules and who obeys.
But by the summer of 1776, this reminder had become unbearable.
On July 9, George Washington had the newly adopted Declaration of Independence read aloud to his soldiers and the people of New York. Words have done what words sometimes do in history. They became action.
A crowd of soldiers, sailors, and patriots flocked from Broadway to Bowling Green. The king stood there: gilded, mounted and untouchable.
So they touched it.
They threw ropes around the statue, pulled it, and knocked the symbol of British power to the ground.
The action itself was strong enough. A people who declared themselves free had physically overthrown the image of the ruler who claimed to own them.
But Wolcott understood something deeper. The revolution required more than gestures. It required supply chains.
The Continental Army didn’t need just speeches and declarations. He needed gunpowder, guns, food, wagons, uniforms and ammunition. Freedom had to be produced.
Thus Wolcott helped turn an act of protest into an act of war.
King George’s broken pieces were collected, loaded onto boats, and shipped to Connecticut. From there oxen carts carried the royal wreck over rough roads over sixty miles to Wolcott’s home in Litchfield.
Then manufacturing started.
Ovens were built and bullet molds were prepared in the Wolcott family orchard. Laura Wolcott, her daughter Mariann, and local neighbors worked on melting crucibles, pouring the king’s lead into molds. Children helped shoot musket balls. Mariann kept count.
They eventually produced 42,088 rifle rounds from the statue of George III.
It remains one of the greatest acts of political poetry in American history. The British built a monument to remind Americans who ruled them. The Americans melted it down and sent it back in a form the British could understand.
Some of this “molten majesty” appears to have made its way onto the battlefield. Forensic evidence shows that musket balls fired at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778 came from the lead of the statue of King George.
Monmouth did not decide the war in one fell swoop. It wasn’t Saratoga that brought France into the war. It wasn’t Yorktown that effectively ended this. But Monmouth proved something vital: after Valley Forge, Washington’s army could stand against British regulars in the open field and not break.
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This is the profound lesson of Wolcott’s sculpture.
Americans didn’t just destroy a symbol. They redesigned it. They organized the work, transported the materials, built what they needed, and transformed the monument of tyranny into the arsenal of freedom.
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Long before Pittsburgh steel, Detroit assembly lines, or the Armory of Democracy, the American instinct was already there: improvise, produce, and outpace the enemy.
The revolution was fought with ideals. But it was won by men and women who knew how to translate ideals into action and lead to freedom.
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