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Friday
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine memorably wrote in December of 1776, when the inexperienced American army was reeling from a series of defeats. On this July 4th, Paine’s words seem all too timely as we experience the greatest assault on our democracy since the Civil War.
Paine finds some consolation in having to struggle. “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph,” he writes, seeking to galvanize “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.” George Washington read the words to his troops prior to his daring Delaware River crossing, where he defeated Hessian troops on Christmas Eve.
What Paine says of his readers could be applied to those of us today who have esteemed our freedoms “too lightly”:
[I]t is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
Paine concludes his opening with charges that can be leveled, with very little change, at our own tyrant. In the “Big Beautiful Bill” that is on the verge of being passed, billions of funds are being directed towards ICE, which is increasingly functioning as Trump’s private militia:
Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.
Over this past half year, I have found myself returning to poems about the American Revolution that I encountered in grade school, which now speak with new power. I was unfamiliar, however, with Paine’s “The Liberty Tree,” which he wrote in 1775.
As I learned from a Smithsonian article, colonists protesting the Stamp Act of 1765 gathered around an elm tree standing on the Boston Commons, and the site thereafter served as a rallying point for demonstrators. The elm became known as the Liberty Tree and the surrounding ground Liberty Hall.
When the Stamp Act was repealed, scores of lanterns were hung from its branches. Protesters rallied again under the tree when they were protesting the Tea Act of 1773, and they even burned a custom commissioner’s boat following a mock trial. On a darker note that recalls Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” protesters tarred, feathered, and threatened to hang a British customs official from the branches unless he cursed the governor. (The Smithsonian article reports, “He didn’t, and they didn’t.) “This tree,” complained one loyalist, “was consecrated for an Idol for the Mob to Worship.”
Eventually, in August of 1775, loyalists cut down the Liberty Tree, using it for firewood. This was the direct occasion for Paine’s poem, who talks of the king and Parliament—”Kings, Commons and Lords”— “uniting amain/ To cut down this guardian of ours.”
As was customary for neoclassical poetry, Paine resorts to classical imagery in his poem, imagining a Goddess of Liberty bestowing the tree–excuse me, “celestial exotic stuck deep in the ground”–upon America. In what we can now read as a rejection of Trump’s preference for “the right kind of immigrants,” the poet says the symbol attracts people from all over the globe:
Unmindful of names or distinctions they came,
For freemen like brothers agree;
With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.
These immigrants at first found peace and willingly supported the British crown. Paine compares them to “patriarchs of old,” a reference to Abraham, who planted a tamarisk tree to commemorate the treaty he had forged with the Philistine ruler Abimelek. America, meanwhile, is framed as an Edenic paradise where the colonists at first ate “their bread in contentment” and were “unvexed with the troubles of silver or gold/ The cares of the grand and the great.” When the crown turned tyrannical and cut down Liberty Tree, however, they had no choice but to “blow the trumpet to arms.”
Here’s the poem:
The Liberty Tree
By Thomas Paine
In a chariot of light from the regions of day,
The Goddess of Liberty came,
Ten thousand celestials directed her way,
And hither conducted the dame.
A fair budding branch from the gardens above,
Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.The celestial exotic stuck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourished and bore;
The fame of its fruit drew the nations around,
To seek out this peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinctions they came,
For freemen like brothers agree;
With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old,
Their bread in contentment they ate,
Unvexed with the troubles of silver or gold,
The cares of the grand and the great.
With timber and tar they Old England supplied,
And supported her power on the sea;
Her battles they fought, without getting a groat,
For the honor of Liberty Tree.But hear, O ye swains (’tis a tale most profane),
How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons and Lords, are uniting amain
To cut down this guardian of ours.
From the East to the West blow the trumpet to arms,
Thro’ the land let the sound of it flee;
Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer,
In defense of our Liberty Tree.
As we ourselves find our souls tried, Paine lays out our task. Liberty Tree was planted here, it became our temple, we have honored it, and now we must defend it. Happy July 4th.
