The Liberty Tree in Boston, Massachusetts
On August 14, 1765, a defiant group of American colonists rallied beneath the mighty boughs of a century-old elm tree to protest the enactment of the highly unpopular Stamp Act. The young rebels, who called themselves the Sons of Liberty, decorated the tree with banners, lanterns & effigies of the British stamp master & prime minister.
Over the next decade, patriots regularly gathered around the tree for meetings, speeches & celebrations until British soldiers & Loyalists under siege in Boston chopped it into firewood during the summer of 1775. The Liberty Tree became such a powerful patriotic symbol that towns throughout the colonies followed Boston’s lead in designating their own versions.
The Liberty Tree was an elm that was planted in 1646 about one block east of the Boston Common. Prior to the American Revolution, angry dissenters of British rule & taxation, used the tree to hang effigies of men who supported the hated Stamp Act & also hung lanterns on its branches to symbolize unity.
As news of the Liberty Tree spread, local patriots in all 13 colonies formed their own patriotic liberty groups & chose a large tree or erected a pole to be used as a meeting place. During the siege of Boston in August 1775, Loyalists cut the original tree down & used it for firewood.
This act further united the livid patriotic colonists & flags with the Liberty Tree emblem were often displayed at the battles of the American Revolution. The Liberty Tree became a symbol for liberty & resistance to tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”
After England’s King James II assumed the throne, he sought to revoke the royal charter issued to Connecticut in 1662 by his predecessor & late brother, King Charles II. The colonists of Connecticut, however, had no desire to turn over the document & relinquish the limited autonomy that it granted.
According to legend, the king’s royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, met with colonial leaders in a Hartford meeting house soon after his arrival in 1687. After the governor demanded the charter, the candles in the room suddenly blew out. When light was restored, the parchment had vanished. Captain Joseph Wadsworth supposedly squirreled the document away in the trunk of a nearby white oak tree. The charter remained in colonial custody & was used to govern Connecticut until 1818. The centuries-old “Charter Oak,” which blew down in a storm in 1856, remains a treasured state symbol.
The 9/11 Survivor Tree in New York City
Weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, recovery workers at Ground Zero discovered a lone sign of life amid the rubble of the World Trade Center—a Callery pear tree, crushed & scorched, yet somehow still alive. The New York City Parks Department transplanted an eight-foot stump of the severely damaged tree to a Bronx nursery & slowly nursed it back to health. The “Survivor Tree” was replanted at the site in 2010 & is now part of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum as a symbol of survival & resilience.
How Washington, D.C. Got Its Japanese Cherry Trees
The flowering of the cherry trees, living symbols of peace between the United States & Japan, lining the Tidal Basin is an annual rite of spring in Washington, D.C. The first shipment of Japanese cherry trees that arrived in 1910 was infected with insects & parasitic worms & ordered destroyed by President William Taft. The second shipment of more than 3,000 cherry trees, composed of a dozen varieties gifted by Tokyo, arrived in March 1912 in perfect condition & were planted on the parkland reclaimed from the Potomac River’s mud flats.
In the fall of 1861, the children of enslaved people who had escaped to the refuge of Union-held Fort Monroe gathered underneath the sprawling canopy of a southern live oak to listen to free African American Mary Smith Peake as she began to teach them how to read & write. Previously, enslaved people had been forbidden an education under Virginia law. Underneath the same oak tree, now on the grounds of Hampton University, African Americans congregated in 1863 to listen to the first reading in the South of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln.
