married women of non-English origins." However, by the 1730s over three fourths of the Dutch men and women still married within their own groups, though by this point there was a generation of children of mixed European ancestry. Freedom of worship was part of the city's foundation, and the trial for libel in 1735 of John Peter Zenger, editor of the New-York Weekly Journal established the principle of freedom of the press in the British colonies. Sephardic Jews expelled from Dutch Brazil after Portuguese recapture, were welcome in New York when the governor realized their value and gave them exemptions from restrictions on Jews. The New York Slave Insurrection of 1741 raised accusations of arson and conspiracy. Many slaves were executed on unclear charges. Revolution The city was the base for British operations in the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years' War) from 1754 to 1763. That conflict united the colonies for the first time in common defense and moreover eliminated the main military threat that the colonists had relied upon Britain to defend them from. When two years after the conclusion of that war in 1765, the British Parliament imposed a Stamp Act to augment local expenditures for defending the colonies, delegates from nine colonies met for the Stamp Act Congress, at what would later be known as Federal Hall in Manhattan, to protest. The Sons of Liberty, a secret and sometimes violent patriot group, formed chapters in New York and other cities and frightened the royal officials. The "Sons" engaged in a running conflict with British authority in the city over the raising of liberty poles in prominent public locations (see Battle of Golden Hill), from the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 until rebel control of the city in 1775. The poles, often when a signal device such as a red cap was placed atop the pole, served as rallying points for public assemblies to protest against the colonial government. The city was the main location of organized political resistance in the form of the Committee of Sixty and then later the New York Provincial Congress. Following the first reading of the Declaration of Independence, the statue of King George III in Bowling Green was torn down and melted into musket balls. The city, however, was a hotbed of Royal fervor and probably held a larger proportion of Tories than