New York at War (18 page)

It was an inglorious and dismal end to the New York campaign for the Americans. Despite the smoldering ruins of the city’s west side and Howe’s failure to corner Washington once and for all, the British army could find satisfaction in its successes, and assurance that the war was nearly won. Major General James Grant judged the campaign “a cheap and complete victory.” In private, the Continental leaders did not disagree with Grant’s assessment. “We all think our cause is nearly ruined,” Israel Putnam confided to a correspondent. Tories embraced Howe’s arriving troops with open arms; a neighborhood woman had been the first to enter Fort George in September to grind the American flag underfoot in the mud. As fall turned into winter, the presence of thousands of American prisoners of war—ill, filthy, depressed, crowded into makeshift prisons scattered throughout the city and floating on its waterways—was a daily reminder of imperial triumph and rebel ineptitude.
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One of the luckier prisoners was John Adlum, a seventeen-year-old Pennsylvanian who had been captured at Fort Washington. Confined to a private house in the city, Adlum was permitted to run errands, a privilege that allowed him to move through the streets and make covert contact with patriot civilians who now found themselves having to conceal their true allegiance. Late on Christmas day, a grocer pulled Adlum into a back room and, while trying to say something to him, stood speechless, overcome with emotion. “I looked at him and thought him crazy or mad,” Adlum wrote, “but as soon as he could give utterance to his word he says to me, ‘General Washington has defeated the Hessians at Trenton this morning and has taken 900 prisoners and six pieces of artillery!’” As news of Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton was spread through town by riders crossing the Hudson, British expectations of a quick victory abruptly evaporated, and Adlum’s fellow prisoners took heart. Only one thing now seemed sure: the war that George Washington had nearly lost in Brooklyn, and William Howe had nearly won, would go on.
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By the end of 1776, then, New York was, once again, an outpost of the British Empire—indeed, it was
the
outpost, the command center for all of the king’s military operations in North America. Each tide seemed to mark the arrival or departure of another fleet of warships or troop transports, carrying the war to the rebel enemy wherever he lurked—in Connecticut, the Delaware Valley, Rhode Island, the Chesapeake, Martha’s Vineyard, northern New Jersey, the Carolinas. The Sons of Liberty and their allies were gone, having fled to safer quarters or joined the rebel army. Taking their place was a continuous influx of loyalist refugees from Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Savannah, cities held by the insurgents. They settled into houses formerly owned by rebel families—dwellings confiscated by British authorities who, as in some Old Testament chastisement, marked their front doors or lintels with the initials “G.R.” (George Rex) before distributing them to refugees.
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Once again, civilian New Yorkers got into the martial spirit, especially when lured by the prospect of profit. “Seldom a day passes without a prize by the privateers,” boasted William Tryon, New York’s wartime royal governor, in March 1779. Over 180 vessels sailed forth to prey on rebel maritime traffic, returning with fortunes in flour, sugar, tobacco, and gunpowder, all of which flowed through the city’s shops and auction rooms. Perhaps six thousand men and boys, including deserters from Washington’s army, crowded onto the privateers in order to strike a blow for the empire while filling their pockets. Even loyalist ladies got into the act. In 1779, several well-heeled Manhattan women agreed to fit out a “fast privateer” christened
The Fair American
(later renamed
The Royal Charlotte
, after the queen) to “aid in chastising the rebels.”
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Other forays against the rebel enemy were fueled more by hatred than by profit taking. As displaced Tories flooded into the city, they joined New York loyalists in military units raised to wreak vengeance on their persecutors. They did not have to travel far, for a sporadic but deeply bitter guerilla war persisted just beyond the city’s outskirts. The Continental Congress continued to control much of the territory surrounding the city, including parts of northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, eastern Long Island, and coastal Connecticut. As a result, the so-called neutral ground of farmland lying between the British and American lines became a zone of recurrent skirmishes, pillaging, kidnapping, and terrorist raids conducted by partisans of both sides, as well as by apolitical marauders who used the war as a cover for plundering. Tory dragoons and irregulars known as “cowboys” rode at night through southern Westchester and northeastern New Jersey, punishing alleged pro-rebel farmers by stealing their livestock and burning their homes. Patriot “skinners” responded in kind. In their boldest retaliation, a band of New Jersey rebels crossed the Hudson in dead of night and ransacked the suburban mansion of Brigadier General Oliver De Lancey, one of the city’s leading Tories, a few miles above the city.
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One community of loyalists had an added incentive for crushing the revolution. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, had issued a proclamation offering freedom to any slave who ran away from a rebel owner in order to aid His Majesty’s forces in putting down the rebellion. Nine months later, Dunmore was on Staten Island, recruiting additional runaways to join the “Ethiopian Regiment” he had brought north to take part in Howe’s New York campaign. Sir Henry Clinton, who replaced the unsuccessful Howe as British commander in North America in 1778, repeated Dunmore’s promise, making New York City a mecca for hundreds of slaves who fled patriot masters in order to gain their liberty by serving the king. Patriot families who had fled the city for refuge in New Jersey or the Hudson Valley learned to their consternation that their bondsmen preferred to slip back into Manhattan in order to become black Tories.
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But the influx into New York also included refugees from farther afield, men with names like Ralph Henry (lately the property of the patriot who had declared, “Give me liberty or give me death!”) and Harry Washington (who viewed British Manhattan with emotions different from those of his recent master, the rebel commander in chief). British warships raiding the Chesapeake and the Carolinas brought back whole extended families of runaways from rebel plantations. In Manhattan, the men enlisted as foragers, teamsters, woodcutters, seamen, and soldiers, while their wives found employment as laundresses, seamstresses, and hospital orderlies. Fugitive slaves and free blacks understood that the British offer of emancipation was opportunistic and one-sided; loyalist masters were permitted to keep their human property, and slave auctions continued on the wharves of British Manhattan. But they also recognized that serving the British was their best hope for freedom. A revolution led by Virginia planters was most decidedly not going to provide their ticket to emancipation.
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For all their determination to sustain the empire, loyal civilians faced another, bleaker side of wartime New York, one that threatened to overwhelm them. With the British army in residence consuming enormous quantities of local foodstuffs, hay, and firewood, supplies plummeted and retail prices skyrocketed, staggering even well-to-do civilian families. Overcrowding and homelessness also became endemic. Hundreds of poor squatters—workers and seamen, British enlisted men, refugee families, prostitutes—hunkered down in the charred ruins of the city’s burned district, where they scavenged fragments of ship’s sails and spars to raise roofs over their heads. To respectable New Yorkers, “Canvass-town” stood as an open sore, but it was also a vivid proof of the war’s lingering disorder.
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Tories grew increasingly unhappy with the way the British military was managing the city’s affairs. The refusal by Clinton and royal governor William Tryon to reinstate civil courts and a representative assembly was an affront to some of the Crown’s most ardent local allies. So were the bribes, kickbacks, and padded contracts that made a mockery of honest dealing in the army’s local provisioning system. New Yorkers inundated the army’s courts-martial with charges of theft, assault, and rape against marauding redcoats; officers often let their accused men off lightly. Those New Yorkers with open eyes and open consciences were, perhaps, also appalled by the condition of the thousands of rebel prisoners of war—sick, hungry, “mere walking skeletons . . . overrun with lice from head to foot,” as one captive put it—who were crammed into poorly adapted warehouses, confiscated churches, and decrepit “prison hulks” that the British kept anchored in Wallabout Bay and the harbor. (As many as 18,000 of these prisoners may have died in and around Manhattan from diseases aggravated by hunger, cold, and abuse, dwarfing the war’s 6,800 American battlefield deaths and making them the largest group of human beings to perish during the city’s entire military history.) So disenchanted had the king’s loyal New Yorkers become by March 1782, one of them claimed, that if George Washington attacked with his army, half the city’s populace “would receive him with open arms.”
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The failure of the British military to bag the fox, to bring Washington to ground and end the rebellion, was the single most aggravating topic of conversation in Manhattan’s taverns and drawing rooms. The fox himself had New York on his mind more or less constantly. He had learned on the ridges and farms of Brooklyn that he would lose the war if he tried to fight the king’s army in conventional open-field battles with inferior numbers, armaments, and supplies. “The war should be defensive,” Washington wrote nine days after the East River evacuation. “We should, on all occasions, avoid a general action . . . unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.” Let the British get frustrated and weary, Washington argued, by avoiding battle when it offered the enemy the prospect of a decisive victory. Let the war drag on until Parliament and the English people got tired of it. The lesson Washington learned from the near disaster in Kings County was the lesson he would hew to through the seven years of war that followed.
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Washington also recognized the city as a prize to be retaken. “New York is the first and capital object upon which every other is dependent,” he wrote. “The loss of the army and fleet there would be one of the severest blows the English nation could experience.” The question was how to do it while avoiding a “general action” in which his forces would be hopelessly outnumbered and crushed. The answer was to enlist the revolution’s French allies in a coordinated attack on Manhattan. Three times between the summer of 1778 and the summer of 1780, Washington sought to enlist the French navy for a joint assault on New York. Twice, Admiral Charles-Hector, Comte d’Estaing, drew near the port with a fleet of warships and transports carrying troops, as Washington prepared his main army, encamped in the hills around White Plains, for an attack on Manhattan. But each time, d’Estaing sailed away, evidently daunted by the prospect of facing Admiral Howe in the city’s Upper Bay. A third time, in 1780, the Marquis de Lafayette attempted to convince General Rochambeau that New York, “the pivot on which turn the operations of the enemy,” warranted conquest. But Rochambeau concluded that a vast fleet and thirty thousand fit men would be required to win a siege of Manhattan, a number even the combined Franco-American forces could not muster, and Washington had to acquiesce—for the time being.
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The persistent threat of an American or French attack rattled many in New York, both in and out of uniform. Howe and Clinton had already turned Manhattan and its environs into an armed camp, a place girdled by fences made of intertwined tree trunks and branches, earth embankments bristling with sharpened stakes, and hilltop artillery batteries. Despite the fortifications, many expected Washington to make a bold move sooner or later. It was now the loyalists’ turn to fear enemies within the gates—covert rebels and spies who watched everything and reported it to the rebel foe.

Indeed, these hidden enemies did exist within the city, and George Washington used every opportunity to employ as many as he could secure. The commander took a personal hand in creating a network of spies inside New York City, men who could report on troop and ship movements, regimental strength and location, and the state of provisions and morale. Washington, who relished playing the role of spy master, corresponded directly with several key agents. One network ran from a Peck Slip store from which shopkeepers Amos Underhill and Robert Townsend wrote coded letters (some in an invisible ink) carried by courier to agent Abraham Woodhull at Setauket, Long Island. Woodhull sent the letters across Long Island Sound to a command post in Connecticut, from which riders carried them to wherever Washington’s headquarters happened to be.
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His preoccupation with the city also led Washington to grasp a useful truth: so long as New York remained the British center of power, it could also be made a burden on the British war effort. Clinton’s need to protect the city forced him to keep troops there who might more effectively be used in aggressive campaigns against the rebels elsewhere. Washington wanted to keep it that way, so repeatedly during the war his army launched raids into British-held territory daringly close to the city—at Paulus Hook (today Jersey City) in 1779, Staten Island in 1780, and Washington Heights in 1781. These hit-and-run attacks accomplished their goal of keeping numerous regiments of redcoats, Hessians, and Tory militia tied down in defensive positions, as well as reminding Manhattan’s loyalist populace that their enemy remained cunning and close.
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