In 1776, most Americans looked at the deposed statue of King George III at Bowling Green in New York City and saw a broken symbol of British brutality.

On July 9, George Washington had the newly adopted Declaration of Independence read aloud to his troops and to the people of New York. The words did what words sometimes do in history. They became an action.

A crowd of soldiers, sailors, and patriots surged down Broadway to Bowling Green. There the king stood: shaved, groomed, and untouchable.

So they touched him.

The Continental Army needed more than just speeches and proclamations. It needed powder, guns, food, wagons, uniforms and ammunition. Liberty had to be manufactured.

So Wolcott helped turn an act of protest into an act of war.

In the Wolcott family orchard, furnaces were built and bullet molds prepared. Laura Wolcott, her daughter Mariann, and local neighbors worked over melting pots, pouring the king's lead into molds. Children helped cast musket balls. Mariann kept count.

Some of that “melted majesty” appears to have found its way to the battlefield. Forensic evidence suggests that the musket balls fired at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778 came from the lead of the statue of King George.

Americans did not simply tear down a symbol. They repurposed it. They organized the work, moved the material, built what they needed, and turned a monument to tyranny into ammunition for freedom.

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Long before the steel of Pittsburgh, the assembly lines of Detroit, or the Arsenal of Democracy, the American instinct was already there: develop, produce, and take out the enemy.