There was no Bowling Green “massacre” — but there was a beheading.
In 1770, a statue of King George III was erected in lower Manhattan’s Bowling Green park to commemorate “the eminent and singular blessing derived from him,” according to the Journal of the American Revolution.
Six years later, New Yorkers believed the English monarch was anything but a blessing, so down he went.
After a reading of the Declaration of Independence at City Hall Park on July 9, 1776, an angry crowd stormed Bowling Green and pulled down the gilded lead statue.
They cut off its head and trotted it around town, while the rest was melted into roughly 42,000 musket balls.
“The Rebels cut the king’s head off . . . cut the nose off, dipt the laurels that were wretched round his head, and drove a musket Bullet part of the way through his Head, and otherwise disfigured it,” a British officer wrote at the time, according to the history journal.
But that episode was not the event Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway was imagining Thursday night, when she claimed on MSNBC that two Iraqis living in Kentucky city of the same name were “the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre.”
Although the men were convicted of terrorism charges, there was no such massacre.
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