Prologue: Rethinking New York's Place in the American Revolution
from The Battle for New York by Barnet Schecter
"After the commencement of hostilities in 1776, New York being situated near the centre of the colonial sea-board, and readily accessible from the sea, was selected by the enemy as a principal point for their future operations.” So began a front-page column in Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn Daily Eagle on August 27, 1846, the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major clash in the contest for New York during the American Revolution. Whitman himself introduced the historical account with his impassioned annual plea for the nation to commemorate, with the same fanfare as the Fourth of July, the anniversary of “that sad and yet most glorious Day for America, and for human freedom.”*1

*It was called the Battle of Long Island at the time, when Brooklyn was the name of a township and a tiny village in Kings County. The modern name for the battle reflects that the action took place across the entire area of today’s borough of Brooklyn. See Stevenson and Wilson, The Battle of Long Island, (“The Battle of Brooklyn”), p. 3.

      Whitman’s ancestors lived on western Long Island during the Revolution, and his grandmother told him tales of rapacious British invaders and defiant American patriots clashing on the wooded hills and lush farmland that became the city and later the borough of Brooklyn. One of Whitman’s granduncles fought and died in the battle on August 27, which began a military campaign lasting almost three months. The British captured New York, but maintaining control of it for the next seven years in large part cost them the Revolution. “See—as the annual round returns the phantoms return / It is the 27th of August and the British have landed,” Whitman later wrote in his famous poem “The Centenarian’s Story,” in which he conjured a conversation between a Revolutionary War veteran and a young Union Army volunteer in the first year of the Civil War. Soldiers drill on a bright day in Fort Greene Park, and the veteran suddenly remembers the real fighting he took part in eighty-five years earlier on the same hills:

Aye, this is the ground, My blind eyes even as I speak behold it re-peopled from graves, The years recede, pavements and stately houses disappear, Rude forts appear again, the old hoop’d guns are mounted, I see the lines of rais’d earth stretching from river to bay, I mark the vista of waters, I mark the uplands and slopes; Here we lay encamp’d, it was this time in summer also.

The Declaration of Independence had been issued by Congress on July 4 and read to George Washington’s army in New York on July 9, 1776. Whitman’s centenarian continues: “ ’Twas a bold act then—the English war-ships had just arrived, / We could watch down the lower bay where they lay at anchor, / And the transports swarming with soldiers.”2


Having succumbed to the American siege of Boston six months earlier,* and having regrouped in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the British saw New York as the key to subduing the rebellion. New York’s strategic location secured one end of the Hudson River, and they expected their northern army, descending from Canada, to hold the other. Control of the Hudson, they anticipated, would sever the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies from New England.

*After the clashes at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, the British had been besieged in Boston until St. Patrick’s Day, 1776.

     Adding to New York’s strategic value, the size and location of the harbor had also made the city a vital center of trade in the British Empire. It kept the profitable sugar islands of the British West Indies supplied with food, allowing them to devote more land to their cash crop. Ships left New York laden with wheat, rye, and corn; bread, butter, and cheese; pork, beef, and lamb; apples, peas, onions, and pickled oysters. They returned with holds full of sugar, molasses, hides, lumber, and silver. They also brought “bills of exchange,” credits that enabled New York’s merchants to buy manufactured goods from Britain. New York’s merchant ships also sailed to Africa, where they traded rum and British manufactures for slaves to be sold in the West Indies.3

     Until 1763, Britain had looked the other way as New York’s merchants grew rich on illegal trade with the Dutch and French West Indies.*4 The added wealth went back to Britain in the long run, because it enabled New York to improve its balance of trade and continue to buy manufactured goods and luxury items from Britain. (British laws prohibited the colonists from developing their own factories.) The landed and commercial aristocracy of the colony thrived within the mercantilist, imperial system.

*With the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, the British began looking for ways to cope with the enormous war debt. The conflict began in North America as the French and Indian War in 1754, with the British and the American colonists pitted against the French and their Native American allies. In 1756, Britain officially declared war on France and the conflict spread to Europe, Africa, and the Philippines. In this second phase, called the Seven Years’ War, the British drove the French from North America. Unlike most colonial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which began in Europe and spread outward, this contest reversed the pattern and reflected America’s growing importance on the world stage (Faragher, Encyclopedia, pp. 147–148).

     Until the troubles began in Boston in 1775, New York had also been the British military headquarters in America and consequently home to a large population of royal functionaries. By 1776, New York felt comfortable and familiar to them, offering the perfect mix of urban and rural pleasures: a cosmopolitan town with a full schedule of glittering social events either at the fine houses and taverns or at the exquisite country estates a short carriage ride to the north. When the ministry in London dispatched the British fleet and the army to New York during the summer of 1776, it was on the assumption that the city and its environs were full of loyalists ready and waiting to hand the city over to the king’s forces. The British commanders in chief, Admiral Richard Howe and his brother General William Howe, counted Americans generally as their friends, ever since the government of Massachusetts funded a monument to their older brother, a popular officer who led both British and provincial troops in the Seven Years’ War. The Howes hoped the massive show of force in New York would help them negotiate a peaceful settlement of the American rebellion.


Over the summer of 1776, the British accumulated in New York’s harbor the largest expeditionary force in their history prior to the great embarkations and landings of World Wars I and II.5 Four hundred and twenty-seven ships carried 34,000 professional soldiers and seamen—roughly the population of Philadelphia, then the largest city in the colonies.6 In addition to the combined total of 1,200 cannons projecting through the square gun ports of the battleships, the holds of the supply ships were packed with “an artillery more considerable than was ever brought before into the field,” according to a British admiral on the scene. These transport vessels, also loaded with vast quantities of munitions, horses, and provisions, were “not to be counted,” their masts “appearing as thick as trees in a forest.”7

     The British armada reached full strength in mid-August and landed troops on Long Island on the twenty-second. Washington’s army of 23,000 poorly trained and ill-equipped troops was reduced by sickness and spread out in a precarious defensive line from New Jersey to Long Island via Manhattan. The Battle of Brooklyn, five days later, was the first battle ever fought by the United States as an independent nation.8 It was also the largest battle of the Revolutionary War when measured by the number of participants.9 Washington’s baptism as the commander of an entire army was undeniably a disaster; the Americans were soundly defeated on the twenty-seventh, and the Revolution could easily have ended there had it not been for the Howes’ failure to follow up their victory, and the intervention of the weather, which helped Washington carry out a miraculous escape to Manhattan.

The campaign in New York continued over the next three months with battles at Harlem Heights, Pelham Bay, White Plains, and back on Manhattan at Washington Heights as the Howes repeatedly failed to encircle the Americans. Most of Washington’s army ultimately escaped across the Hudson to New Jersey, and the British settled into New York City, their goal all along, though some among them realized that a crucial opportunity had been lost. The Howes controlled all of Manhattan, but their three attempts to encircle the Continental Army had consumed the whole summer and fall, and the conditions that gave the British such an enormous military advantage in New York would not come again.

The Continental Congress had felt that New York, the second-largest American city, should not be given up without a fight, or the damage to American morale might prove fatal to the cause of independence. Once the city had been lost, Washington and Congress spent the rest of the war trying to get it back, while the British remained equally obsessed with protecting it as the hub of their operations.

Comfortably ensconced in New York, the military regime turned the city into a vortex of corruption and brutality that depleted Britain’s financial resources and its moral authority; as the war progressed, the city became a trap for the British in more ways than one. When the French joined the American cause and naval warfare became an important element of the Revolution, the British discovered that the city’s enormous and spectacular harbor was the worst possible location for a naval 4.10 The treacherous sand bars at Sandy Hook bottled the fleet up at critical junctures in the war as it waited for the wind and tide to cooperate.

The unique topography of the New York area also played a decisive role in shaping the strategy and tactics of both sides. Since New York City consisted of merely 4,000 wood and brick buildings covering less than a square mile at the southern tip of the island,11 Manhattan retained most of its primordial landscape. To the north, two main dirt roads, a few cross roads connecting them, and some country lanes traversed a sparse patchwork of farms and villages scattered amid wooded hills and rocky outcroppings, salt marshes and streams.12

     The entire area was then, and remains, an archipelago, its islands and peninsulas, rivers, channels and straits, creeks and inlets formed by the advance and retreat of a glacier.13 The underside of the thick, heavy ice sheet raked the flat terrain some 50,000 years ago, carrying rocks and soil forward while leaving behind new troughs and valleys. Where the glacier stopped, it deposited the rocks and soil and created a terminal moraine—a line of hills that runs lengthwise across the middle of Long Island and continues on the southern part of Staten Island. The portion of this ridge at the western end of Long Island includes the hills of today’s Prospect Park and was called Gowanus Heights.

     When the climate became warmer, about 17,000 years ago, these hills trapped the melting ice, and the New York area was submerged under glacial lakes. Several thousand years later, the water broke through the hills, creating the Narrows (between Staten Island and Brooklyn)* and draining the landscape. However, as temperatures increased, approximately 9,000 years ago, rising sea levels sent water coursing back up through the Narrows, flowing into the depressions that the glacier had excavated and establishing New York’s waterways: Upper New York Bay, the Arthur Kill, the East River, the Harlem River, Long Island Sound, and numerous smaller creeks and inlets.

*The strait now spanned by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

     Below the Narrows, the Lower Bay connected to the Atlantic Ocean through the gap between Coney Island and Sandy Hook. A wide sandbar extended almost continuously between these two points, leaving only a few narrow channels by which ships could enter the port. The only other access to New York from the Atlantic was farther north, through Long Island Sound. Here, too, ships had to pass through a narrow strait—Hell Gate— an aptly named, rocky passage at the western end of the Sound where it meets the East River, and where the colliding currents, at that time, created roaring whirlpools.14 Native American lore recalled that towering ancestors used to cross the treacherous channel on foot by stepping from rock to rock.15

To Native Americans, Manna-hata meant “hilly island,”16 a characteristic that today is mostly confined to the rock formations in Central Park and the northern reaches of the borough, above West 110th Street. However, many of the area’s physical features are still visible, despite the overlay of asphalt and concrete, of brownstones and skyscrapers, that obscures the battlefield in our midst. Fortunately—in a city famous for obliterating its past—the motivated tourist can also follow a trail of relics and reminders in all five boroughs and Westchester County that tells the forgotten tale of American heroism embedded in the defeat at the hands of the British: historic villages, houses, and churches; bronze plaques, gravestones, and colonial mile markers on the routes of the armies. In Green-Wood Cemetery, Prospect Park, the Cemetery of the Evergreens, Westchester County, and Washington Heights, one can walk on the very hills where the battles took place.

     The tour at the end of The Battle for New York offers surprising contrasts between old and new: a walk beside a picturesque salt marsh in the shadow of the New England Thruway, leading to a stunning eighteenth-century fieldstone church preserved in an industrial zone at the northern edge of the Bronx; George Washington’s headquarters in a farmhouse dwarfed by a cement factory in Westchester County; a bronze plaque in the middle of Park Avenue at Thirtyseventh Street, marking the site of a mansion on a rural estate where Mary Murray served cakes and Madeira to the invading British generals and, according to legend, delayed them long enough to save thousands of American troops. These markers and structures set in the densely developed urban fabric can evoke the patchwork of fields, hills, and marshes as it appeared in the eighteenth century. Like the centenarian in Whitman’s poem, one may feel the battle “pouring about me here on every side.”

Whitman’s fictional centenarian may have stood for the granduncle he never knew. Fortunately, many of the real participants on both sides of the battle for New York—from privates to generals, politicians to clergy—left diaries, letters, and memoirs. Excerpts of these materials are reproduced here, just as they were written, and they make vividly clear what it was like to live through the ordeal. Standing out among the original sources, the remarkable diaries of William Smith Jr., a lawyer, judge, and adviser to New York’s governors, trace his odyssey from early days as a recent Yale graduate and Presbyterian propagandist against the city’s Anglican, mercantile elite, to his middle years as a prosperous and increasingly conservative lawyer calling for reconciliation and reform to preserve the British Empire. Unable to remain a neutral, Smith slid by degrees into the loyalist camp, and by the war’s end, he was in exile, never to see his native New York again. He embodies the painful dilemma that New Yorkers and all Americans faced, of choosing between the security of membership in a united empire and the uncertainties of independence and freedom.

     Unlike Smith, the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, including Isaac Sears, were merchants who had risen from humble origins by making fortunes in the Seven Years’ War. They galvanized the city’s disenfranchised working class with calls for open resistance to the Crown—for radical measures that included mob violence—and kept the protest movement alive for a decade until the mounting conflict verged on war. They hounded New York’s loyalists, whom they accused of conspiring with the royal governor and the mayor to hand the city over to the British. The radicals’ words are preserved in the handbills they gave out at mass meetings on the Common* or at the Exchange on the waterfront.

     Once the war came to New York, American recruiters plucked fifty-year- old Joseph Plumb Martin from his grandparents’ farm in Connecticut and sent him to the trenches, where he persevered all the way to Yorktown. His sardonic memoirs describe combat, hunger, exposure, and tedious weeks of inactivity on the front lines and reveal that a sense of humor was essential to his, and no doubt to many of his less eloquent fellow soldiers’, survival. 7

*The wedge of land now occupied by City Hall Park and the converging traffic lanes of Broadway and Park Row.

     Martin’s commentaries echo those of General Henry Clinton, who was frustrated with the cautious, slow-moving William Howe. Clinton served for three years as Howe’s second-in-command and then replaced him as the British commander in chief in 1778. He constantly and correctly disagreed with Howe’s tactics, and his narrative, written after the war, is a revealing blend of impressive military achievements, thinly veiled critiques of other commanders, and abundant self-justification that also displays his single-minded concern, verging on paranoia, for holding New York City throughout the war.

     As with all defining moments in history, the battle for New York hinged on both courage and human frailty: General Howe’s infatuation with an American femme fatale, his young mistress, Elizabeth Loring, became a popular explanation for his halfhearted, sluggish pursuit of the rebels. The loyalist judge Thomas Jones declared that “as Cleopatra of old lost Mark Antony the world, so did this illustrious courtezan lose Sir William Howe the honour, the laurels, and the glory of putting an end to one of the most obstinate rebellions that ever entire.”17 As another historian later quipped, “The success of American arms owed a heavy debt to the success of hers.”18


Because of its geography, its culture, its people, and its hold on the imagination of eighteenth-century military strategists, New York was, without exaggeration, the pivot on which the entire Revolutionary War turned.19 The Revolution, John Adams famously wrote, was won first in the “minds and hearts of the people.”20 In the battle for New York, the struggle on this interior landscape—the difficult and, in some cases, agonizing choice between king and country in the conscience of each individual—had its roots in political and religious conflicts that dated back to the founding of the colonies, and which came to a head in the 1750s.

     For all of the New Yorkers, like William Smith and his circle, or Isaac Sears and the other leaders of the Sons of Liberty, who had participated in the city’s prosperity during the 1750s, and who sought to limit the scope of Britain’s authority in the 1760s, a defining moment on the long road to revolution was the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. Britain’s obstinacy served to reveal who was a radical, a moderate, and a conservative, and to test the extent to which each camp was willing to go in defending American rights. For a brief moment, however, in November of that year—after New York’s polite petitions to the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons were ignored—the city’s residents, dockhands and merchant princes alike, came together and took to the streets.21 Just as the Stamp Act crisis is traditionally identified as the start of the American Revolution, the first skirmish in the battle for New York may properly be dated to November 1, 1765—eleven years before the arrival of the British fleet—when the mutual resentment between the people of the city and British authority erupted as street theater and then escalated into rioting against government targets.22

     The story of the contest for New York provides a fixed point, a compass for orienting oneself amid the many disparate theaters and battles of the long, complex war. Because both sides remained focused on New York, even as engagements unfolded elsewhere, the ongoing battle for the city helps clarify the major turning points of the American Revolution, from Trenton and Saratoga to Yorktown and beyond—to the final departure of British forces from the United States in 1783. A reassessment of New York’s role casts the Revolution itself in a clear new light.



Notes:

1.   Both quotations are from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 27, 1846. Whitman's crusade in the pages of the newspaper and his family history (in the following paragraph): Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America, pp. 11-15.

2.   All quotations from the poem are from Whitman, Complete Poetry, pp. 211-15.

3.   New York's exports, imports, and balance of trade; Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries, p. 16; Wertenbaker, Father Knickerbocker Rebels, pp.4-5. Pickled oysters: Parry, Life at the Old Stone House, p. 17.

4.   Wertenbaker, pp. 4-5.

5.   Mackesy, The War for America, p. 65.

6.   Number of ships and men: Gruber, Howe Brothers, p. 101. Comparison to Philadelphia's population: McCullough, "What the Fog Wrought," p. 191. Population of Philadelphia in 1775 was 34,000 to 38,000 Boatner, Encyclopedia, p. 856.

7.   Both quotations are from Collier, "To My Inexpressible Astonishment, " pp. 298-99. Contents of transport vessels: Field, The Battle of Long Island, pt. 1:149.

8.   Gruber, "America's First Battle: Long Island, August 27, 1776," p.1.

9.   Gallagher, The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776, p. 2. However, casualties were higher in other battle: Peckman, The Toll of Independence, p.22.

10.  Tilley, The British Navy and the American Revolution, p. 84.

11.  Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1: 205; Tiedemann, pp. 13,16.

12.  Augustyn and Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, pp. 84-87. Johnston, Campaign, pt. 1:40.

13.  The following account of the city's geological prehistory is drawn from Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, pp. 4-5.

14.  Mander, The Battle of Long Island, p. 8.

15.  Bushnell, ed., The Adventures of Christopher Hawkins, note on pp. 287-88.

16.  Burrows and Wallace, p. 15.

17.  Quoted in Young, Revolutionary Ladies, p. 61.

18.  Quoted in ibid., p. 63.

19.  The marquis de Lafayette called New York the "pivot" of British operations: quoted in Stokes, Iconography, 5:1114.

20.  Quoted in McCullough, John Adams, p. 15.

21.  Wertenbaker, p. 1.

22.  Tiedemann, pp. 1, 88-89.