PETER NAVARRO: How the Revolution turned royal souvenirs into American coins
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In 1776, most Americans looked at the deposed statue of King George III at Bowling Green in New York City and saw a broken symbol of British brutality.
Oliver Wolcott saw the letters.
Four thousand pounds of lead. Enough, if properly collected, drawn, melted, and molded, to help equip the revolution.
SECRETS OF WARS FOR LIFE EMERGE 250 YEARS AFTER AMERICA’S FOUNDATION.
This statue was built in 1770, a refined monument to the imperial authorities in America’s busiest city. King George sat on a horse, dressed in the Roman style, towering above the city as a daily reminder of who rules and obeys.
But by the summer of 1776, that memory had become unbearable.
On July 9, George Washington had the newly adopted Declaration of Independence read aloud to his troops and the people of New York. Words do what words do at other times in history. They became an action.
A crowd of soldiers, sailors, and patriots marched down Broadway to Bowling Green. There stood the king: shaved, groomed, and untouchable.
So they touched him.
They threw ropes around the statue, pulled, and brought the symbol of British power to the ground.
The action itself was strong enough. The people who declared themselves free had toppled the image of the king who claimed to be theirs.
But Wolcott understood something deeper. Transformation required more than a physical touch. It needed supply chains.
The Continental Army needed more than just speeches and proclamations. It needed powder, guns, food, wagons, uniforms and ammunition. Freedom had to be done.
So Wolcott helped turn the act of protest into an act of war.
The broken pieces of the King George were collected, loaded onto boats, and sent to Connecticut. From there, oxcarts pulled the royal litter more than sixty miles over dirt roads to Wolcott’s home in Litchfield.
Then the production started.
In the Wolcott family’s orchard, a hearth was built and molds were prepared. Laura Wolcott, her daughter Mariann, and neighbors worked over melting pots, pouring lead into the mold. The children helped throw the musket balls. Mariann kept count.
In the end, they had produced 42,088 musket balls from the statue of George III.
It remains one of the great acts of political poetry in American history. The British built a monument to commemorate the Americans they ruled. The Americans melted it down and put it back in a way that the British could understand.
Some of that “molten glory” seems to have found its way to the battlefield. Forensic evidence suggests that the 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 fight with one stroke. It was not Saratoga, which helped bring France into the war. It wasn’t Yorktown, which ended successfully. But Monmouth proved something important: behind Valley Forge, Washington’s army could stand in the open against the British generals and not break.
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That is a profound study of Wolcott’s figure.
Americans didn’t just tear down the sign. They repurposed it. They organized work, delivered goods, built what they needed, and turned the monument of tyranny into weapons of freedom.
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Long before the steel of Pittsburgh, the assembly lines of Detroit, or the Arsenal of Democracy, the American instinct was already there: develop, produce, and take out the enemy.
The Revolution was fought on ideas. But it was won by men and women who could turn ideas into action – and lead to freedom.
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