In the decade leading up to the American Revolutionary War, Boston wasn’t the only scene of intense friction between British soldiers and American colonials. Imperial troops had likewise been stationed in New York. It’s a truism in history that occupying armies, whatever their original intentions, eventually breed resentment from the locals. While Boston had its Liberty Tree, here the Sons of Liberty had been erecting liberty poles—wooden poles mounted by a cap—since at least 1766, when the first was raised during celebrations of the repeal of the Stamp Act. That original pole, hoisted in “the Fields”—today’s City Hall Park in Manhattan, at the time located just outside the city but, not coincidentally, right in front of a British barracks—stood as a reminder to all of colonial rights. Liberty poles invoked a well-known classical motif: the spear mounted by the cap of a freed slave, symbolizing the freedom of the Romans …