The Signer Who Melted King George’s Heart (and Then Some)
Born: November 20, 1726
Died: December 1, 1797
Age at signing: 49
Profession: Soldier, lawyer
Buried: East Cemetery, Litchfield, Connecticut
Oliver Wolcott, one of the four signers from Connecticut, is at the center of a curious, modern-day mystery that stretches back to the week the United States became a new nation. Wolcott was born in Windsor, Connecticut, the fifteenth child of a Connecticut royal governor. He graduated from Yale and studied law, though it’s unlikely he ever practiced as a conventional attorney. He was far too busy being a major general in the Connecticut militia. Wolcott fought in the French and Indian War and later in the American Revolution. He fought in the pivotal Battle of Saratoga, recruited troops for the Continental Army’s New York campaign, defended Long Island, and quelled Loyalist raids along the coastline of his native state. A skilled negotiator, he hammered out peace treaties with various Indian tribes and confederacies at least three times and arbitrated land disputes between feuding states.
Though Wolcott clearly would have voted for independence, illness kept him away from Philadelphia as the crucial vote drew near. (Signer William Williams was sent in his place but arrived in Philadelphia too late to cast his vote with Roger Sherman and Samuel Huntington.) Later that week, Wolcott was in New York City on his way home to Connecticut when he witnessed a larger-than life demonstration in the streets. The date was July 9, 1776. General George Washington had received a copy of the Declaration of Independence, which had just been read to his troops. At the conclusion of the reading, the troops cheered wildly, then all hell broke loose. A mob of soldiers, patriots, and ne’er-do-wells stormed Bowling Green in the Wall Street area and toppled a four-thousand-pound statue of King George III astride a magnificent horse. The statue, which was made of lead coated with a fine layer of gold leaf, either shattered or was smashed by the jeering mob. The king’s head, severed from its body, was supposedly paraded on a pike and eventually shipped to London as a taunt.
When Wolcott saw the fallen statue, inspiration struck. He had the pieces collected and shipped to the port of Norwalk, Connecticut, where they were then loaded onto ox carts and rolled the sixty-odd miles to the general’s home in Litchfield. There, in the orchard behind his house, Wolcott put his wife, children, and some local ladies to work melting the lead and shaping them into bullets for the war effort. Wolcott’s son Frederick would later attest that his father-who was tall and muscular-took an ax and chopped some of the lead pieces himself. A careful scribe reported that the Wolcotts and their merry band of melters fashioned 42,088 bullets from the statue. Laura, age fifteen, made 8,378; Mary Ann, age eleven, 10,790; and Frederick, age nine, a respectable 936. Proud papa took the bullets to Saratoga, where he and his militia helped defeat Burgoyne with hot blasts of “His Melted Majesty.”
Wolcott signed the Declaration when he returned to Philadelphia in October 1776, and in 1777 he was able to sneak away from the war long enough to add his name to the Articles of Confederation. After the war, he settled into a semi-peaceful life, though he did remain active in politics. In an ironic twist, when signer Samuel Huntington died in 1796, Wolcott became the governor of Connecticut, a position his father had held forty-five years earlier- but within a radically different nation. Shortly before Wolcott died in 1797, he had the pleasure of voting for John Adams as the second president of the United States.
And there the story of Wolcott would have ended were it not for that pesky statue. About twenty-five years after Wolcott’s death, people started finding pieces that were apparently never melted down. A boy digging in a field near Wilton, Connecticut, six miles from where the statue was unloaded from the ship, found a huge piece of what had been the king’s saddle. Another man found a piece under the floor of his aunt’s milk room. Throughout the nineteenth century, pieces kept turning up near an old swamp in Wilton: parts of an arm, a thigh, saddle straps. In the early twentieth century, people in and around Wilton were presenting pieces as gifts or inheriting them from deceased relatives. In the New-York Historical Society collection is a piece of the horse’s tail. People have turned up bits of the statue as recently as the 1990s. Clearly, from the moment the statue tumbled, New York and Connecticut citizens swiped a few mementos. Modern number crunchers note that such a large statue would have yielded far more than 42,000 bullets. To date, about 1,400 pounds’ worth of the statue is still missing, and though Connecticut state archaeologist Nicholas F. Bellantoni swept Wilton with metal detectors in 1997, he found no additional pieces. In 2008 Bellantoni admitted that new technology might yield better results, but local citizens need to make a formal request to his office before he can investigate the area a second time. If you visit Bowling Green Park in New York City, you’ll find the original fence that encircled the statue. The tops of the main posts once held crown-shaped ornaments, but all were sawn or wrenched off in that raucous celebration more than 230 years ago.
