History of New York City (1665–1783)

The history of New York City (1665–1783) began with the establishment of English rule over Dutch New Amsterdam and New Netherland. As the newly renamed City of New York and surrounding areas developed, there was a growing independent feeling among some, but the area was decidedly split in its loyalties. The site of modern New York City was the theater of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early American Revolutionary War. After that, the city was under British occupation until the end of the war, and was the last port British ships evacuated in 1783.

Early English period

Settlers of New Amsterdam blended into new English colony. The Rapalje Children, 1768, children of trader of early New Amsterdam descent

The English had renamed the Colony the Province of New York, after the king's brother James, Duke of York and on June 12, 1665 appointed Thomas Willett the first of the Mayors of New York Town. The city grew northward, and remained the largest and most important city in the Province of New York and became the third largest in the British Empire after London and Philadelphia.

The Dutch regained the Colony briefly in 1673, then finally lost it permanently to the English in 1674 after the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

Leisler's Rebellion, an uprising in which militia captain Jacob Leisler seized control of lower New York from 1689 to 1691, occurred in the midst of England's "Glorious Revolution". It reflected colonial resentment against King James II, who in the 1680s decreed the formation of the provinces of New York, New Jersey and the Dominion of New England as royal colonies, with New York City designated as the capital. Royal authority was restored in 1691 by English troops sent by James' successor, William III.

New York was cosmopolitan from the beginning, established and governed largely as a strategic trading post. One visitor during the early revolutionary period wrote that "the inhabitants are in general brisk and lively," the women were "handsome," he recorded—as did others new to the city—though, he added, "it rather hurts a European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the streets."[1] There were numerous marriages of people from different ethnic groups. "Joyce Girlfriend's study of colonial New York City, for instance, suggests that many interethnic marriages occurred more because of a lack of opportunity to marry within in their own group than a desire to marry outside it. ...over 60 percent of Englishmen in the New York capital in the late 1600s married women of non-English origins." However, by the 1730s over three fourths of the Dutch men and women married within their own groups. Though, by this point there were already a generation of children of mixed European backgrounds.[2] 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.[3]

The New York Slave Insurrection of 1741 raised accusations of arson and conspiracy. Many slaves were executed on unclear charges.

Revolution

A drawing of New York City, created in the 1770s. Trinity Church (Anglican) on Wall Street is visible in the distance.

The city was the base for British operations in the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years' War) from 1754-1763. 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 to protest at what would later be known as Federal Hall on Manhattan for the Stamp Act Congress.

The Sons of Liberty, a secret and sometimes violent patriot group, formed chapters in New York and other cities and frightened the royal officials.[4] 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. Though the Sons of Liberty were active in the city and the lead statue of King George III in Bowling Green was torn down and melted into musket balls in a celebration of the Declaration of Independence for the new United States of America, the city however was a hotbed of Royal fervor and probably held a larger proportion of Tories than any other place in the colonies before hostilities - though likely still short of a majority.

Washington and his men moved in to defend Manhattan and New York Harbor in 1776, and their letters provide a rare behind the scenes look at the city during the revolution. Prior to roughly 1/3 of New York City's population fleeing the expected combat, the Continental soldiers came upon a grand city of wealth, a bustling center of commerce, shipbuilding and maritime trade. This was a city built for seafaring transit and trade, Manhattan's only connection to the mainland was the narrow, wooden King's bridge over the Harlem River, nearly 11 miles north of the city, and ferries across the North (Hudson's) River; most of its population of 20,000 was crowded into an area of less than a square mile near the East River wharves and the sprawling natural New York Harbor of the Upper New York Bay and Lower New York Bay.[1]

The city's sharp-elbowed traders, stock brokers, and mariners brought with them great wealth. Henry Knox wrote his wife admiring New Yorkers' "magnificent" horse carriages and fine furniture, but condemning their "want of principle," "pride and conceit," "profaneness," and "insufferable" Toryism.[5] Manhattan's free-wheeling ways did create an environment of loose tongues and loose women. A young Presbyterian chaplain "worried what the consequences might be to the American cause of so many of all ranks so habitually taking the name of the Lord in vain." "But alas, swearing abounds, all classes swear," he lamented.[6]

The abundance of prostitutes in New York City—an estimated at 500 women plying "their trade" in 1776[7]—was particularly distressing for many of the Continental soldiers of a puritan-bent, George Washington included. From Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of Massachusetts comes one of the most complete accounts of prostitution in revolutionary America; he had a medical degree from Harvard, and took it upon himself to tour the brothel district to inspect the health conditions of the neighborhood and investigate the seedy side of the city that so worried General Washington. He was absolutely appalled by the women of the bawdy houses, who, he thought, "nothing could exceed them in impudence and immodesty," but "the more I became acquainted with them, the more they excelled in their brutality."[7]

April 22, barely a week after the "Continentals" arrived in the city, two soldiers were found dead hidden in a bordello, one corpse "castrated in a barbarous manner," Bangs reported. Soldiers went on a rampage in the brothel district "in furious retaliation." General Washington condemned all such "riotous behavior" and ordered military patrols in the district, a strict curfew, and other restrictions.[8] General Washington understood the crucial strategic importance of New York and its waterways to the war effort, but "...had seen enough of New York on prior visits to dislike and distrust the city as the most sinful place in America, a not uncommon view."[1]

American Revolutionary War

General Washington correctly surmised that after their defeat at the Siege of Boston, (April 1775 - March 1776) the British strategy would be to divide the colonies by capturing the strategic port and waterways of New York City. He then began to fortify the city and took personal command of the Continental Army at New York in the summer of 1776.

Toppling the statue of the King in New York City

Five battles comprising the New York Campaign were fought around the city's then limits in late 1776, beginning with the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn on August 27—the largest battle of the entire war. A quarter of the city structures were destroyed in the Great Fire on September 21, a few days after the British Landing at Kip's Bay and the Battle of Harlem Heights - the lone American victory in this part of the campaign, but doing much to improve morale and keep the army together. Following the highly suspicious fire, British authorities apprehended dozens of people for questioning, including Nathan Hale, who was executed a day later for unrelated charges of espionage. The British conquest of Manhattan was completed with the fall of Fort Washington and the evacuation of Fort Lee (on the Hudson River western shore in New Jersey) on November 16, 1776, and thereafter they held the city without challenge until 1783. Major General James Robertson, commandant in charge of the city confiscated houses of rebels who had left and distributed them to British officers.

Manhattan and environs, late in the war

Early British military success resulted in military occupation of the city, and the exodus of any remaining Patriots combined with a large influx of Loyalist refugees from throughout the former colonies, making the city solidly Loyalist for the remainder of the British occupation. The city became the British political and military center of operations for the rest of the conflict. For this purpose the map now known as the British Headquarters Map was drawn in 1782, the best map of Manhattan Island's largely natural, unengineered condition.[9]

The city's status as the British nexus made it the center of attention for Washington's intelligence network. American prisoners were held under deliberately inhumane conditions on rotting British prison ships in nearby Wallabout Bay on the East River between New York and Brooklyn (future Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park) for much of the war. The policy of making prison conditions unbearable was ostensibly to encourage the soldiers to volunteer to join the British navy as an alternative. More American soldiers and sailors died on these ships from deliberate neglect than in every battle of the Revolution, combined.

The anniversary of Evacuation Day, in which the last British troops and many Tory supporters and collaborators departed in November 1783, was long celebrated in New York.

Social upheaval

When the British left in 1783, they took along many loyalists including prominent businessmen, lawyers, financiers and clergymen.[10] The Anglican Church had been especially powerful in the colonial era, and it began to lose much of its influence in the area as many prominent members departed. It lost its funding from the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, was soon after disestablished by the state in 1784, and therefore it lost control of King’s College (now Columbia University). The city was now more democratic, and much more open to ambitious entrepreneurs from middle-class and poor backgrounds.[11]

A formerly working-class institution, tampering, became the locus of many patriot activities, and tavern keepers often moved into political activism.[12]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 McCullough 2005, p. 122
  2. ↑ Template:Daily Life in the Colonial City - Krawczynaski
  3. ↑ Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1998). Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. pp. 133–34.
  4. ↑ Robert Kumamoto (2014). The Historical Origins of Terrorism in America: 1644-1880. Routledge. p. 108.
  5. ↑ McCullough 2005, pp. 122–123
  6. ↑ McCullough 2005, p. 123
  7. 1 2 McCullough 2005, p. 124
  8. ↑ McCullough 2005, p. 125
  9. ↑ The Mannahatta Project British Headquarters Map of Manhattan Island
  10. ↑ Edward Countryman, "The uses of capital in revolutionary America: the case of the New York loyalist merchants." William and Mary Quarterly (1992): 3-28 in JSTOR
  11. ↑ Kyle T. Bulthuis, Four Steeples over the City Streets: Religion and Society in New York's Early Republic Congregations (NYU Press, 2014)
  12. ↑ Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (2007).

References

Further reading

Primary sources

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