New York at War (19 page)

Even more critically, the prospect of an American attack on New York City repeatedly led the British to deplete their forces in the field to reinforce Manhattan, thereby seriously hampering the king’s military effort throughout the colonies. “The most powerful diversion that can be made in favor of the Southern states will be a respectable force in the neighborhood of New York,” Washington wrote in March 1781, and he now kept the bulk of his army in a ring of encampments around the city’s periphery, from Morristown in New Jersey and West Point on the Hudson to King’s Bridge on the Bronx side of the Harlem River and Danbury in Connecticut.
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For the fourth time, the prospect of a concerted Franco-American assault on New York surfaced in the spring of 1781, when, in a conference in Connecticut, Washington and Rochambeau agreed that the attack should be attempted, provided that an expected French fleet commanded by Admiral de Grasse made its landfall near the port. Once again, Washington believed that, at the very least, a French naval blockade of the harbor might frighten Clinton into recalling thousands of troops from Virginia, where they were enjoying success against Continental forces. Not until mid-August did dispatches arrive from de Grasse, explaining that he would make his landfall with twenty-eight ships and three thousand men in the Chesapeake rather than near the mouth of the Hudson. Washington and Rochambeau abandoned the plan to attack New York, agreeing instead that six thousand Continental and French soldiers encamped in Westchester would march south to cooperate with Lafayette’s southern army and de Grasse in bottling up British troops on the Virginia coast.
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Once more indulging his taste for covert operations, Washington planned an elaborate ruse to conceal his true intentions from Clinton. Continental regiments attacked British outposts near the city, as if in preparation for a major assault; in reality, Washington left a mere 2,500 men near the city to keep Clinton’s 14,500 soldiers pinned down. The Americans and French left fires burning in largely empty camps in the New Jersey meadows, much as Clinton’s men themselves had done during the Battle of Brooklyn; army bread ovens were set up to convince Clinton’s spies that a siege was in the offing. Meanwhile, by crossing the Hudson from Westchester and marching to the west and south of the city, the Continental and French armies slipped away. Not until the last week of August did New Yorkers learn that they had been spared—and that Washington’s true target was the 7,000-man army operating in coastal Virginia under the command of General Charles Lord Cornwallis.
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As Washington’s army and de Grasse’s fleet closed in on Cornwallis at Yorktown, the British field commander sent tense dispatches to Clinton, pleading for reinforcements to withstand the enemy siege; if they did not arrive, he warned, he would leave the field to the enemy and retreat toward New York. Leading Tories in the city were beside themselves with anxiety. “A week will decide perhaps the ruin or salvation of the British Empire!” William Smith Jr. wrote upon hearing of the situation at Yorktown. On September 5, de Grasse fended off a British fleet sent from New York in the waters off the Virginia Capes. Cornwallis, however, sat tight, persuaded not to evacuate by letters from Clinton promising that additional troops were making their way to him.
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But Cornwallis’s situation on the Yorktown Peninsula was getting desperate; the relief force of five thousand men that Clinton now organized seemed to be taking an agonizingly long time to leave the East River and Upper Bay. Finally, on October 19, the fleet set sail. Four days later, New Yorkers were stunned by news carried into the city by a group of redcoats arriving from New Jersey as part of a prisoner exchange: Cornwallis had surrendered on the very day the relief force had sailed forth. Many refused to believe it; Smith felt it was probably another rebel ruse. But as other travelers arrived with confirmation, hearts sank throughout loyalist New York.
⁵⁹

On the afternoon of November 25, 1783, General George Washington, mounted on a white steed and accompanied by General Henry Knox and New York State’s revolutionary governor, George Clinton (no relation to Sir Henry), led a triumphal procession down Broadway to mark the conclusion of the British evacuation from the city and thus the end of the War for Independence. For the thousands of “rebels”—now confirmed citizens of the United States of America—who had flocked back to their old homes in New York City, Washington’s entry represented the victorious end of an eight-year struggle that had repeatedly brought chaos to the island of Manhattan. On the whole, only minimal friction attended Washington’s reentry. The reason for the generally tranquil mood was starkly clear: not only had the bulk of the British army and navy already withdrawn, but thousands of Tories had also left the city to begin new lives as refugees from their homeland.
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In early 1782, when a majority in Parliament had supported resolutions to end “a fruitless war” and concede American independence, the dark hour that loyalists had been dreading descended upon them. “Never was despair and distraction stronger painted than in the countenances I momentarily see,” noted an Englishman in Manhattan. Writing in his diary, William Smith Jr. was more succinct: “We are slighted and cast off as beggars.” While some loyalist New Yorkers received pensions and honors from the British government, many never fully made peace with their sense of abandonment and betrayal or the bitterness of exile.
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By March 1782, wealthy loyalists had begun putting their suburban estates on the auction block and making arrangements to immigrate to England or the British West Indies. By autumn the British government had offered to transport loyalists, free of charge, to land set aside for them in Nova Scotia. By the spring of 1783, flotillas of brigs, sloops, and schooners were beginning to shuttle back and forth between the East River and the Bay of Fundy. New York became the designated embarkation point for this mass migration, and loyalist families flooded into Manhattan from all points in the colonies. The city became host to one of the greatest out-migrations in American history. In sum, twenty-nine thousand civilians left, as did twenty thousand redcoats and German mercenaries. Some nine thousand loyalists settled at Port Roseway, almost overnight turning that Nova Scotian outpost into a frontier replica of Tory Manhattan. Three thousand black loyalists left New York to take up the king’s offer of land in Nova Scotia, although the racism and poverty many experienced there eventually led some to the abolitionist colony of Sierra Leone. Other black Tories accompanied the king’s army back to England; Bill Richmond, born a slave on Staten Island, became one of the British Isles’ most renowned bare-knuckle boxing champions.
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The patriots who flooded into New York City in the wake of the British evacuation by and large wanted to put the war and its miseries behind them. New Yorkers of all political views heeded the toast that returning patriots offered at a banquet at Cape’s Tavern honoring Washington: “May an uninterrupted commerce soon repair the ravages of war.” True to form, Isaac Sears and Alexander McDougall, once leaders of the leather aprons, embraced the city’s revived spirit of commerce: Sears as a merchant in the incipient China trade, McDougall as first president of the Bank of New York. Manhattan was back in business; indeed, thanks to its many wartime industries, it had never really been out of business, even at the war’s most critical moments.
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Yet despite the rebounding of the city’s economy, the war’s handiwork lingered, as did an awareness of how the city’s vulnerability to attack had opened the door to occupation, chaos, and devastation. In the incised letters “G.R.” adorning doorposts, in the weed-sprouting earth embankments surrounding the city, in the charred shambles of Canvasstown, in the unmarked graves of countless war prisoners, and in memories of neighbors, friends, and enemies gone forever, the Revolutionary War, the single most destructive sequence of events in the city’s history, remained omnipresent. Little did New Yorkers suspect that another revolution would soon slow the healing of their own wounds and open new ones.

CHAPTER 5

Hot Shot and Heavy Metal

France, England, and War at Sea, 1793–1815

T
he spectators had come to see a duel, and they were not disappointed. This duel, however, differed from those fought on land by two gentlemen armed with pistols. It was being fought by six hundred men and boys at the muzzles of sixty-four cannon on the waters of the Atlantic, six miles southeast of Sandy Hook. It was the morning of August 1, 1793, and excited New Yorkers lined the decks of nine chartered excursion boats to watch Jean-Baptiste Bompard, captain of the French Republic’s frigate
Embuscade
(“Ambush”), take up the gauntlet thrown down by Captain William Augustus Courtney of His Majesty’s frigate
Boston
. Four days earlier, Courtney, cruising off the Narrows near New York harbor, had asked an American go-between to carry a challenge to Wall Street’s Tontine Coffee House, crossroads of Manhattan’s maritime traffic: “Tell Captain Bompard that I have come all the way from Halifax, on purpose to take the
Embuscade
, and I shall be very happy to see her out this way.” By July 31, Bompard had posted his reply in the Coffee House, for all to see: “Citizen Bompard will wait on Captain Courtney tomorrow, agreeably to invitation; he hopes to find him at the Hook.”
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The
Embuscade
sailed forth from its anchorage on the lower Manhattan waterfront to defend the honor of the French Republic and the Revolution that had given it birth, and to defy the English foe the Republic had been fighting on the high seas for six months. At 5:30 in the morning, the
Embuscade
found the
Boston
, and the battle began. For two hours, the two frigates hammered at each other, while the boats full of city spectators (many with bets riding on the outcome) bobbed on the waters nearby. According to a French prisoner on board the
Boston
, Bompard could be seen calmly striding the quarterdeck of his ship “with his hands behind his back, now and then . . . taking a pinch of snuff,” seemingly impervious to the efforts of English musketeers to gun him down. The
Embuscade
’s artillery shattered the
Boston
’s main topmast and hurled it into the sea. By around 7:30, when the
Boston
disengaged and limped southward toward Delaware Bay, Courtney and at least eleven of his crew were dead; between twenty and thirty others were wounded. Bompard was unscathed, but he, too, had ten men killed and fifteen wounded. After pursuing the
Boston
for a while, the Frenchmen pounced on the
Two Brothers
, a “richly laden” cargo brig flying the Portuguese flag (despite Portugal’s claim of neutrality, the French Republic viewed it as an English ally). The
Embuscade
sailed triumphantly back into New York harbor with its prize in tow.
²

In New York as elsewhere throughout the nation, the gallantry of the
Embuscade
, and the presence along the coast of at least fourteen French privateers (some of which had recruited sailors in Manhattan and other US ports), triggered an outpouring of pro-French fervor. When the
Embuscade
returned to port after battle, New Yorkers hoisted Bompard on their shoulders as a hero. When his wounded sailors were carried off the vessel, one witness noted, “the ladies tore their chemises to bind up their wounds. . . . Surgeons and nurses in numbers repaired to the sick ward.” In gratitude to New Yorkers, Bompard’s crew formally presented their tattered battle flag to the city’s Tammany Society “as a token of that respect which those virtuous patriots merit, in our opinion, from their Republican Brethren of France.”
³

The gesture was significant. Originally an apolitical patriotic club, the Tammany Society was rapidly becoming a nerve center for the New York allies of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Congressman James Madison, men who believed that the brave new world ushered in by the French Revolution—a world wiped clean of kings, aristocrats, and priestly superstition—represented the best and brightest legacy of America’s own revolution. Tammany Hall would soon become an organizing base for the Democratic-Republicans (or Republicans for short), the incipient national political party through which Jefferson and Madison sought to bind the fortunes of the United States to those of revolutionary France, while maintaining a cautious neutrality in the maritime shooting war.

Not everyone, however, was cheering the
Embuscade
’s valor. Some New Yorkers remained unconvinced that the rights of humankind required sympathy for the radicals who had overthrown the French monarchy a year earlier, beheaded their king in January, and declared war on Britain in February. Americans had responded with near-unanimous enthusiasm to the Paris uprising in 1789. But as news of massacres, mass executions, and plans to export revolution throughout Europe reached New York, enthusiasm evaporated in some quarters. The ties of language, culture, and Protestantism continued to predispose numerous New Yorkers toward England rather than France, despite vivid memories of the hardships of the War for Independence. The city’s economy also remained predominantly tied to the transatlantic trade with London and Bristol, not Le Havre or Bordeaux. Many wealthy merchants and lawyers, fearing the French Revolution as a contagion fatal to order and hierarchy on both sides of the Atlantic, soon were flocking into the emerging Federalist Party to quash the anarchic delusions of “the gaping infatuated mob” and to vanquish Jefferson’s Republicans.
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