“The United States came out of violence,” the historian Maya Jasanoff reminds us in our series “The American Revolution” (premiering tonight on PBS). And in 1776, the awful violence of war was centered in and around New York City.
Between late August and mid-November, five significant battles were fought within New York City’s present-day borders — Long Island (Brooklyn), Kips Bay, Harlem Heights, Pell’s Point and Fort Washington.
Redcoats and Continentals fired musket balls at close range into each other’s lines, while artillery shattered limbs from a distance and bayonets made the killing intimate. Trying to escape death or capture, fleeing Patriots drowned in Gowanus Creek. Many who surrendered would die in captivity, starving to death aboard cramped prison ships anchored in the East River. Smallpox, typhus and dysentery swept through both armies’ camps and killed indiscriminately. Then, in mid-September, much of the city burned to the ground.
But even before the battles, even before the British Army’s arrival, New York City was a seat of violence. While Boston had been the beating heart of resistance and Philadelphia its political center, New York remained deeply divided, with strong Loyalist sympathies and a commercial elite that had far more to lose than gain from a break with Britain.
When the Patriots took control in town in early 1776, they persecuted avowed and suspected Loyalists, encouraging thousands to leave town and arresting hundreds more. Several dozen Loyalists were taken to Simsbury, Conn., and held there in an abandoned copper mine, 70 feet below the earth.
After the British Army took New York later that year, the city’s population turned inside out, and thousands of Loyalists poured into town from throughout the former colonies. New York City would serve as the major British headquarters for the war’s remainder, a base not just for the military but for Loyalist society.
The American Revolution, in this light, was never a unified rebellion. It united the states, but it could never unite all Americans. A look at New York City during the war emphasizes what we often overlook when we consider the United States at its founding. Our nation was born not just from a war against Britain, not just through the Patriot coalition’s common cause, but out of irreconcilable divisions among Americans with competing visions for this country — a civil war in everything but name.
***
To Gen. George Washington and his British Army counterparts in 1776, nowhere mattered more than New York City. “New York is a Post of infinite importance both to them and us,” Washington wrote, “and much depends on priority of possession.”
“No Effort to secure it ought to be omitted,” John Adams had counseled Washington, “it is the Nexus of the Northern and Southern Colonies, as a Kind of Key to the whole Continent.”
New York City was not yet important for the reasons a 21st-century New Yorker might suspect. It did not yet have the population, commerce or cultural cachet it would develop in time. But the geographic conditions that would later foster its meteoric rise made controlling New York a paramount strategic objective during the American Revolution.
Then as now, New York linked a nearly peerless natural harbor and the vital Hudson River, the navigable route north to the interior: to Albany and beyond, to the Mohawk River Valley and short portages onto Lake Ontario, Lake George and Lake Champlain. In the age of sail, the Hudson was, Adams noted, “a Passage to Canada to the Great Lakes and to all the Indian Nations.”
And so, in the spring of 1776, immediately after Washington’s victorious Continental Army liberated Boston and forced Britain to evacuate its last garrison in New England, he turned his attention to fortifying New York.
“We expect a very bloody summer of it at New York,” Washington wrote his brother, “and I am sorry to say that we are not, either in Men, or Arms, prepared for it.”
The revolution had already changed New York drastically. Of the city’s 25,000 prewar civilian inhabitants only 5,000 remained. Loyalist, Patriot and neutral refugees had fled at the threat of impending or existing violence.
A visitor had described New Yorkers two years earlier as “in general brisk and lively, kind to strangers.” But that was in peacetime, and the city was now overrun by out-of-towners, Continental Army soldiers and Patriot militiamen from neighboring states.
***
On Saturday, June 29, 1776, Maryland private Daniel McCurtin looked east out a second-story window and spotted the approach of “something resembling a wood of pine trees trimmed.” Those pines, he soon realized, were the masts of the Royal Navy’s enormous invasion fleet. “In about ten minutes, the whole bay was as full of shipping as ever it could be,” McCurtin told his diary. “I do declare that I thought all London was afloat.”
The arriving ships were the first of hundreds Britain sent that summer under Adm. Richard Howe, who, alongside his brother Gen. William Howe, was in joint command of the largest seaborne assault force Britain had ever assembled: 24,000 soldiers and 10,000 sailors and marines.
By late August, Howe had landed more than 20,000 redcoats and hired German auxiliaries at Gravesend on Long Island. And late on the night of the 26th, he marched the bulk of them north toward Washington’s smaller army and its outer defenses on the high ground we now call South Slope, Prospect Park and Crown Heights.
The next day’s fight, The Battle of Long Island, the largest of the entire revolution, was George Washington’s worst defeat in the war. As much attention as he and his subordinates had paid to defending New York, the British Army found their vulnerability and exploited it. The Americans had failed to guard the Jamaica Pass on their left flank. Ten thousand enemy troops found their way to it unnoticed, marched right through, got behind the Bedford, Flatbush and Gowanus passes and routed the Patriots defending them.
Things could have been even worse for Washington had Howe pressed his advantage. But instead of continuing the battle, Howe decided to leave the badly beaten Patriots to their innermost defenses on Brooklyn Heights, while he waited for his brother to enter the East River and surround them. The delay gave Washington just enough time for a daring overnight escape with his army to Manhattan.
After the Patriots were again soundly defeated at Kips Bay two weeks later, the Continental Army abandoned New York City, and the British Army took it without a shot. “If I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings,” Washington wrote after New York fell. “I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.”
Loyalists began pouring into the city immediately, and hundreds would formally reaffirm their allegiance to George III by signing a document they called their “Declaration of Dependence.”
The British Army made New York City its headquarters, and the city became a garrison town for the rest of the war. It was also a beacon for Loyalist refugees, including former slaves who would take up the British Army’s promise of freedom in exchange for their service.
Over the course of the war, as many as 50,000 Americans volunteered in Loyalist militia companies or in provincial units attached to the British Army. Every American knew someone who fought for the other side. Even Benjamin Franklin’s son, William, the deposed royal governor of New Jersey, remained faithful to his king and was imprisoned for it.
***
George Washington’s mistakes in New York were serious. He had spread his troops too thin, misread British intentions and left his flank exposed. His failure on Long Island nearly ended his war. But it also taught him that survival, not perfection, would be the key to victory.
Washington was not a brilliant battlefield tactician. His genius lay elsewhere: in his ability to adapt, endure and hold together a fragile, fractious army even in the face of defeat and disgrace. “He was the glue that held people together,” the historian Annette Gordon-Reed says in our film. “We would not have had a country without him.”
Contrary to Howe’s hopes and Washington’s fears, the capture of New York City did not break the back of the rebellion. The Patriots would stomach more months of embarrassment before Washington’s surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton; they would struggle through the harsh winters at Valley Forge and Morristown; they would see Philadelphia, Charleston and Savannah fall; but they would win great victories, too, at Saratoga, Cowpens, Yorktown.
Until the war’s end, Washington would be obsessed with staging an attack to retake New York and reverse his humiliation of 1776. He never got the opportunity; the city would remain in British hands until the ink dried on the peace treaty. Washington wouldn’t return to Manhattan until November 1783, but when he did, he returned in peace and in triumph.
Loyalists who remained in the city were those who had chosen to take their chances, hoping to resume their old lives in the new country. But tens of thousands had already left New York City for Canada, the Caribbean, Britain or elsewhere in the empire. The American Revolution had cost them their country.
