The Destruction of the Royal Statue at New York on July 9, 1776

After the Declaration of Independence was read out in Manhattan on July 9, 1776, a group of patriots moved along Broadway to topple the monument to George III at Bowling Green. Later, the metal statue would be melted down to make bullets. This imaginative re-creation of the event by a German artist accurately shows enslaved and free Black men performing the labor but dresses them in invented, stereotypical attire common to depictions of enslaved people in European art. The Baroque architecture is also more characteristic of a large European city than colonial New York. First published in Augsburg, the print was replicated in Paris, demonstrating the broad European interest in events unfolding across the Atlantic.