page_title: Liberty pole
section_title: Other uses
hierarchical_section_title: Liberty pole / Other uses
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Hollandse duit. In de Hollandse tuin staat een Hollandse leeuw met vrijheidshoed op een lans. Zilver, 22 mm., 3,17 gram.
context_page_description: A liberty pole is a wooden pole, or sometimes spear or lance, surmounted by a "cap of liberty", mostly of the Phrygian cap form outside the Netherlands. The symbol originated in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar by a group of Rome's Senators in 44 BC. Immediately after Caesar was killed the assassins, or Liberatores as they called themselves, went through the streets with their bloody weapons held up, one carrying a pileus carried on the tip of a spear. This symbolized that the Roman people had been freed from the rule of Caesar, which the assassins claimed had become a tyranny because it overstepped the authority of the Senate and thus betrayed the Republic.
  The liberty pole was not thereafter part of the normal Roman depiction of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, who is very often shown holding out a pileus, and carrying a pole or rod. Both refer to the ceremony granting freeman status to a slave, where the subject was touched with the rod, and given the hat.
context_section_description: During the Whiskey Rebellion, locals in western Pennsylvania would erect poles along the roads or in town centers as a protest against the federal government's tax on distilled spirits, and evoke the spirit embodied by the liberty poles of decades earlier.
  The arbres de la liberté ("liberty trees") were a symbol of the French Revolution, mostly living trees newly planted.  The first was planted in 1790 by a pastor of a Vienne village, inspired by the 1765 Liberty Tree of Boston. One was also planted in front of the City Hall of  Amsterdam on 4 March 1795, in celebration of the alliance between the French Republic and the Batavian Republic. In 1798, with the establishment of the short-lived Roman Republic, a liberty tree was planted in Rome's Piazza delle Scole, to mark the legal abolition of the Roman Ghetto. After resumption of Papal rule, the Vatican reinstated the Roman ghetto.
  The image of Liberty holding a pole topped by a Phrygian cap appears on many mid- and late-19th-century U.S. silver coins. These are broadly classified as United States Seated Liberty coinage.
caption: A Dutch coin of 1753 depicting the Leo Belgicus (national lion) holding a liberty pole
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