New York at War (11 page)

The second lesson—that New York was now a relatively prominent outpost in a worldwide empire—had more complex ramifications. As New Amsterdam, the city had been like a lonely and neglected child, its needs largely ignored or denied by the Dutch trading company that had founded it. As New York City, it found itself with an at least sporadically attentive mother in the London-based imperial government, a mother who provided numerous siblings, places with names like Bristol and Glasgow, Dublin and Boston, Port Royal and Charles Town, Tangier and Calcutta. As the fur trade declined in relative importance, New Yorkers prospered and built their city through trade with their fellow imperial subjects in the British West Indies, shipping them lumber, horses, pork, whale oil, and, most importantly, Hudson Valley grain and flour, in exchange for sugar, molasses, dye woods, and slaves. London and the other British ports became the emporia from which New Yorkers imported the manufactures and refinements that put the finishing touches on their new identity as Englishmen.
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Royal Navy warships fill the East River before the “flourishing city of New York” in 1717. Engraving by John Harris,
A South Prospect of ye Flourishing City of New York in the Province of New York in America,
ca. 1719. COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY,
WWW.NYPL.ORG
.

Membership in the empire could be empowering and liberating, a source of profit and pride through commerce and war. But it could also prove confining. New Yorkers faced the obligations as well as the benefits of empire—taxes, requisitions, and trade restrictions, especially during wartime. At the same time, city dwellers usually sidestepped, ignored, or bribed their way out of enough of these burdens to keep them satisfied with their place in the imperial firmament and make any notion of serious disloyalty to the empire unthinkable. Still, being obliged to fight the empire’s wars also reminded New Yorkers of their constant vulnerability to attack by the empire’s enemies, which might literally make war profits—and much more—go up in smoke. The city’s economy and the daily experiences of its people were tied as never before to a boom-and-bust cycle of international war. And that cycle would infest the dreams of New Yorkers with visions of new kinds of enemies within the gates, enemies even Peter Stuyvesant had never imagined.

In June 1697, a few weeks before Captain Kidd turned pirate in the Babs-al-Mandab, a visiting doctor from Boston named Benjamin Bullivant received a tour of Fort William at the tip of Manhattan Island from its master, the soon-to-be-replaced royal governor, Benjamin Fletcher. Like all royal governors appointed by the Crown to serve in the colonies, Fletcher’s official commission included the title “captain general and vice admiral” of New York. This signified that he was the commander of a garrison devoted to the defense of the English Empire, which in this instance meant ensuring that the city and colony of New York would not fall if invaded by the French foe.

Fletcher showed Bullivant around his residence within the fort, its walls lined with “about 300 choice fire arms . . . 8 or 10 large and well cleaned blunderbusses . . . some scimitars very pretty to behold and set in good order.” Moving outside, the Bostonian beheld forty cannon lining the fort’s walls at a height of twenty feet above the surrounding city streets, “well disposed to make a gallant defense, if an enemy should come before it.” Bullivant also noted that the governor stored 1,500 guns, bayonets, swords, drums, and “other furniture for the war” in a nearby magazine, and that Fletcher was building “a low battery of 8 or 10 guns” in front of the fort at the island’s tip, facing the mouth of the Hudson River—an emplacement that would one day give its name to the public promenade Battery Park, which today stands on its shoreline. Bullivant was duly impressed.
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Indeed, Fort William (the former Fort Amsterdam, to be known later as Fort Anne and Fort George, its name changing with the accession of each new English monarch) now constituted a crucial link in a chain of defenses stretching the length of the colonial coast and down into the West Indies. The garrison of redcoats on Manhattan played a special role in imperial strategy, a role dictated by the geographical significance of the colony. Situated roughly at the midpoint of the British North American seaboard, New York could play an equally useful role in operations against French Canada, Spanish Florida, and the islands of the French and Spanish Caribbean. Poised on the edge of the Atlantic, Manhattan provided an excellent base for incoming or outgoing navy fleets or troop convoys, an asset not shared by Philadelphia, located one hundred miles up the sometimes ice-bound Delaware River.

Of equal importance for its military role, New York was an unambiguously royal colony, secured for the Crown by James Stuart, Duke of York, who had become King James II in 1685. The same could not be said for such colonies as Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, or Maryland, which continued to belong to private proprietors or chartered bodies, or resented the imposition of royal dominion. Garrison commanders in those colonies sometimes looked over their shoulders, wondering whether the most hostile force they might confront would be the local populace. New York, in fact, which Bellomont hailed as “the key and bulwark of all His Majesty’s colonies,” would be the only North American province to have troops stationed in it over the entire period of British rule, an emblem of its centrality and fealty within the empire.
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To be sure, New York had its own prolonged moment of turmoil. In 1689, a German-born merchant and former WIC soldier named Jacob Leisler became the leader of a faction of the city’s middling and poorer Dutch residents, who resented the second-class status they felt they were being handed by newly arrived English officials and by the dominant clique of wealthy Dutch merchants who cozied up to them. Leisler and other staunch Calvinists were also outraged that the English king James II had openly embraced Roman Catholicism; they feared an international Catholic conspiracy whose agents might be found among new English colonists and other Manhattan residents. Leisler seized Fort James (as it was then named) at the head of a band of militia and made himself dictator of the colony. When a new (and Protestant) English king, William III, dispatched an army and a new governor to New York to restore stability in 1691, Leisler refused to relinquish authority, forcing a stand-off and an exchange of gunfire in which several men were killed. Upon Leisler’s surrender, his local enemies made sure that he was convicted of treason, hanged until dead, and then decapitated (supporters sewed his head back on before burial). The lasting legacy of Leisler’s Rebellion was the rise of partisan politics in Manhattan: for twenty years, embittered factions of his supporters and detractors fought their battles in acrimonious campaigns for election to the representative assembly King William sanctioned for the colony in 1691. But while legislators denounced each other in debates and pamphlets, Crown control of the colony was secured. New Yorkers would not threaten royal authority so drastically again for another seven decades.
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Another factor besides its loyalty and its coastal primacy made New York a strategically critical province of English America: the city’s location at the mouth of the Hudson, the great highway into the northern interior. No other river played so important a role, for the Hudson led directly from the open ocean and the shores of Manhattan to the heartland of two critically powerful entities: the Iroquois Confederation and, beyond it, French Canada. Both proved to be troublesome to British strategists, albeit in different ways. By the time the Earl of Bellomont replaced Benjamin Fletcher in Fort William, the Iroquois of the northern frontier had become adept at playing the French and English against each other, squeezing gifts and trade concessions out of both sides, deigning to ally with one side or the other momentarily, while preserving their long-term independence.
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But it was the French in Canada, able to muster the support of various frontier Indian allies, who posed the most ominous threat. Unbeknownst to New Yorkers, in 1689, at the start of King William’s War between England and France, the French king Louis XIV approved a plan to send 1,600 Canadians and French regulars from what is now Quebec Province down Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson to seize Albany and New York City, where they would be aided by two warships sailing in off the Atlantic to secure Manhattan. Most Protestants would be expelled, and New York would become part of Catholic New France. Poor coordination and a raid on Montreal by hostile Iroquois kept the plan from getting off the ground, but the following year, a force of French Canadians with Algonquin, Sault, and pro-French Iroquois warriors did descend on English settlements, destroying the town of Schenectady and sparking fear of a combined French and Indian assault down the Hudson.
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The proximity of the French scared New Yorkers. At the onset of the French and Indian War in 1755, no less a personage than the Reverend Samuel Johnson, president of King’s College (later to become Columbia University), noted that “things look somewhat terrifying. . . . How God will deal with us he only knows.” After news arrived of the defeat of General Braddock’s redcoats (including detachments from Fort George) by French and Indians in Pennsylvania, Johnson commented that “this put us yesterday in a great panic.” Until 1760, when Britain wrested Canada from the French, Manhattan residents remained painfully aware that the Hudson River, their prized artery of commerce, might also prove an effective road for an onslaught of Frenchmen and Indians bent on spreading havoc and terror to the very shores of their Upper Bay. A chill perhaps ran up the backs of spectators when, in June 1753, they watched a delegation of seventeen Mohawk sachems march from their encampment on the city’s outskirts (near what is now the exit ramp from the Holland Tunnel) down Broadway to confer with Governor Clinton at the fort, carrying, as one spectator later recalled, “a number of human scalps, suspended on poles, by way of streamers, which scalps they had taken from the French and Indians, their enemies.”
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Just as frightening was the idea that the French or Spanish—or worse yet, a combined force of French
and
Spanish—could sail a fleet in off the Atlantic to blockade or besiege the port. On a modest scale, New Yorkers got repeated and unpleasant tastes of what this might mean for the city. At least sixteen times between 1690 and 1760, enemy privateers from the French or Spanish Caribbean prowled between Sandy Hook and the waters off eastern Long Island. In 1704, a French privateer with fourteen guns stopped an incoming ship off Sandy Hook, intercepting letters from the Lords of Trade in London to New York’s Governor Cornbury. In 1758 another French predator seized the supply ship bringing in the baggage and clothing of the Forty-seventh Royal Regiment. More tempting to enemy privateers were the vessels carrying commercial cargoes into or out of New York port, a number of which they captured during the successive colonial wars.
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New York sent out naval vessels, hastily commissioned “coast guard” sloops, and its own privateers to defend the city’s ocean gateway. On some occasions this produced spectacular outcomes. In 1748, Captain John Burges sailed the
Royal Catharine
out past Sandy Hook and engaged the French privateer
Mars
in a running battle that resulted in the enemy’s surrender; when Burges escorted the defeated
Mars
into New York harbor, the city’s relieved merchants subscribed 100 pounds as a reward to the victorious captain. But coastal defenses were porous, and the enemy was unpredictable. In 1704, a French raiding party came ashore at Navesink on the New Jersey shore, a mere twenty miles from the city, where they burned several houses before rejoining their privateer. Such a raid seemed a foretaste of what the city might expect should a French fleet ever arrive in force.
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The sense of vulnerability felt by many in the city was compounded by a virulent and anxious anti-Catholicism that Protestant New Yorkers imbibed almost with their mother’s milk. Like the Dutch colonists before them (and from whom many were descended), New Yorkers saw the battle against Spain and France not merely as a global clash of dynasties and empires but as a Protestant crusade against the forces of the Vatican. While few overt Roman Catholics actually lived in New York (and no Catholic church would be allowed to open in the city until after the American Revolution), many Protestants saw themselves living in a besieged world, one where French and Spanish Papists would gleefully massacre defenseless Protestants and where Canadian priests might unleash cannibal Indians to collect Protestant scalps and feast on Protestant flesh.