250 and Counting

Category: Sons of Liberty

  • August 31, 1775: The Liberty Tree Dies

    The cover art for today’s episode may be one of the most famous art pieces depicting an event of the American Revolution, and it happened under the Liberty Tree, which is clearly marked here.

    This event, the tarring and feathering of Loyalist John Malcolm, took place about 18 months earlier and shows Malcolm already tarred and feathered, and now he’s having (also marked) tea poured into his mouth. The Stamp Act is nailed to the tree, upside down. Really, there’s a lot to unpack in this picture. So it makes sense that people were upset that the tree had been cut down.

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  • June 6, 1775: A Disarming Guy in New York City

    Cover art for June 6, 1775: portrait of Marinus Willett, ca. 1791 by Ralph Earl. Image donated to Wikimedia Commons by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    We’ve mentioned the Willett family in prior episodes. They were a prominent family at the east end of Long Island, and in what we’d now call the Queens portion of New York City, at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of much else between the two. There are some landmarks around Long Island that have the Willet (the other ‘t’ dropped off somewhere in history) name attached to them; in fact when I was young I lived quite close to one of the roads named after that family.

    (Spider Robinson fans please note: it’s less than a mile from where I think Callahan’s Saloon is located.)

    Marinus Willett made a name for himself early on; first in the French and Indian War and then again during the American Revolution. In between, he attended college. He was so ambitious that he managed to distinguish himself after the Revolution as well, but I’ll let Mike tell you about that.

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