New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  What Kidd did not realize was that the haven of New York could not shelter him from the aroused fury of the English Empire. Royal Navy officers, East India Company lobbyists, and Tory members of Parliament out to discredit the Whig “Junto” to which Bellomont belonged had all made Kidd’s name anathema in London. It was only a matter of time before the net tightened around him. Desperate to salvage his own reputation and political career, Bellomont lured Kidd from Long Island to Boston (where the busy earl also filled the office of royal governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire). There, Bellomont sprang his trap, dispatching a marshal to drag the flabbergasted Kidd off to jail just as he was knocking at the front door of Bellomont’s townhouse. Kidd was shipped to London, where he was tried, convicted of piracy and murder, and, alongside one of his crew, fellow New Yorker Darby Mullins, hanged until dead from the gallows on Execution Dock overlooking the Thames on May 23, 1701.6

  Amid the complexities and multiple betrayals of Captain Kidd’s story are two lessons about New York City in its new guise as an English colonial port. The first is that New Yorkers had come to understand organized violence and predation, whether defined as privateering or piracy, as a source of profit for themselves and their city. (To be sure, the line between the two was decidedly blurry: one New Yorker defined “privateers” as “a soft name given to pirates.”) This connection between waging war and making money would characterize life and business in Manhattan throughout its decades as an English town and beyond. From 1689 to 1763, England and its colonies would fight five wars against France and/or Spain (King William’s War, 1689–1697; Queen Anne’s War, 1702–1713; a brief maritime war against Spain, 1719–1720; King George’s War, 1739–1748; and the Seven Years War, 1756–1763, known in its North American campaigns as the French and Indian War). As seaport, market town, military garrison, and imperial outpost, New York would play a key role in each of these conflicts. The cycle of war and peace shaped the daily lives of the city’s people, putting bread in their mouths (and sometimes withdrawing it) and filling them with a succession of emotions—pride, exultation, anger, and fear—as the fortunes of war revolved. Above all other impulses, however, the eagerness to make money from war (as well as from every other endeavor they engaged in) became a hallmark of New York’s identity, recognized by New Yorkers themselves and by English subjects elsewhere.7

  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.8

  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.9

  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.10

  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 th
at 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.11

  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.12

  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.13

  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.”14

  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.15

  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.16

  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.

  The fear and hatred of Catholicism—a presence that continued to loom in English politics, with Catholic Stuart “pretenders to the throne” launching rebellions against the Protestant monarchy in 1715 and 1745—shaped popular consciousness at every turn in eighteenth-century New York. The monarch’s orders to royal governors extended “freedom of conscience” to Protestants and Jews but not to Catholics, who could be expelled from New York without question, while “Jesuits and Popish missionaries” could be jailed for life. Manhattan crowds celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, which marked the triumph of English Protestants over a Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, by burning effigies of the pope and his companion, the Devil. When, in 1753, plans were underway for King’s College, lawyer William Livingston argued that the school should be a bastion for the “equal toleration of conscience” but should, “for political reasons, exclude Papists from the common and equal benefits of society.” Such hatred and fear only reinforced the expectations of New Yorkers that their port city, a bulwark in the line of defense against Catholic France and Spain, needed to be fortified by and for the English Empire.17

  Yet despite New Yorkers’ hopes for security against foreign foes, the truth was that New York’s defenses were a house of cards. Governor Fletcher could put on a good show for the sight-seeing Dr. Bullivant, and Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic might talk themselves into believing that Manhattan was the bulwark against the French and Indians for all the colonies west and south of the Hudson. But anyone taking the time to make a careful inspection wou
ld have found the port’s defenses beset with problems, just as they had been under the Dutch. For all the majesty of the fort’s walls and cannons, its sod ramparts were endlessly crumbling, its gun carriages decaying, and its barracks in a perpetual state of disrepair. Outside the fort, defenses remained minimal: the battery of guns at the island’s tip, the “half moon” (a semicircular artillery emplacement) on the East River waterfront, and a few other clusters of cannon placed here and there. The weakness of the city’s defenses surprised visitors. Viewing the unfortified Governors Island in 1744, Alexander Hamilton, a Maryland doctor (and no relation to the later New York statesman of the same name), thought that “an enemy might land on the back of this island out of reach of the town battery and plant cannon . . . or even throw bombs from behind the island.”18