The Liberty Tree: America's First Symbol of Resistance
Near Newport, Rhode Island
On the morning of August fourteenth, seventeen sixty-five, the people of Boston awoke to find two effigies hanging from an elm tree at the corner of Essex and Orange Streets, placed there overnight to protest the hated Stamp Act. The crowd that gathered that day christened the tree the Liberty Tree, and it became the first gathering point of organized American resistance to British taxation.
Colonists across the thirteen colonies adopted the symbol. Liberty Trees and Liberty Poles went up from New Hampshire to South Carolina, each one a rallying marker for Sons of Liberty meetings. The original Boston elm was cut down by Loyalists in seventeen seventy-five.
This memorial elm in Rhode Island carries on that tradition, planted to honor the idea the original tree represented: that ordinary people had the right to publicly resist unjust government.
