New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  British New York in the 1730s. The shoreline in front of Fort George holds the artillery battery that later provided the name for Battery Park. Engraving by John Car-witham, A View of Fort George with the City of New York from the SW., 1736. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

  As in Dutch days, money—or more precisely, the lack of it—remained at the root of most of New York’s defense difficulties. For all of Parliament’s high-sounding phrases about safeguarding the empire, funding for defense was often meager and slow in coming. Many in Parliament opposed the notion of a standing army and especially in peacetime found ways to skimp on the military budget. Moreover, when royal councilors thought about the defense of America, they focused on protecting the Newfoundland fishing banks (seen as a training ground for seamen and hence the “nursery of the navy”) and the lucrative sugar-producing Caribbean islands, and less on funding troops to guard the fur and cereal trade of the Hudson or the city that channeled those goods to the rest of the empire.

  While the troops defending New York were better behaved than their Dutch predecessors, moreover, they were no better treated. The fort at Manhattan’s tip was the headquarters for four independent companies of fusiliers and grenadiers raised in Britain and accountable to the governor. Their total number fluctuated between about two and four hundred men as successive governors dispatched contingents to outposts at Albany, Schenectady, Oswego on Lake Ontario, and Fort Hunter on the Mohawk River. Service as a foot soldier in the king’s army was the lot of poor men, recruited or forcibly enlisted in Britain’s cities and countryside, where the alternatives were often hunger and joblessness. Pay was low and sometimes literally took years to arrive from London. Basic supplies were often nonexistent; one observer in New York described soldiers “lying in their red coats and other clothes on the bare boards or a little straw.” Common soldiers may also have been at least partly aware that everyone from the governor on down to their own officers were skimming off as much of their pay as they could get away with. Governor Bellomont boasted to London in 1699 that he could feed and clothe a soldier for 12 pence sterling a day—only 3 pence more than it cost him to similarly accommodate a slave imported from the Guinea Coast of West Africa.19

  Exploiting armed men is always a risky proposition, and tensions exploded in October 1700, when a newly arrived contingent of 129 redcoats from Dublin—“a parcel of the vilest fellows that ever wore the King’s livery,” Bellomont claimed—mutinied on the parade ground in front of the fort, demanding their pay and clothing. “Damn me! Don’t stir a man,” the soldiers shouted when ordered to march. Their cry was answered by a sentry on the fort’s ramparts: “Gentlemen, don’t march till you have your pay for now is the time to get it. O! God! . . . I can’t be with you but my heart is with you.” Bellomont promptly called out the city militia—in effect, the adult male population of the city, who were required by law to arm themselves and drill in preparation for any emergency. Two hundred militiamen obeyed, outnumbered the mutineers, and faced them down. The only shots fired were those of Bellomont’s firing squad after his court-martial reached its verdict. Two men were executed, and two others were “severely whipped,” while four were kept for a month in an isolation tank in the fort known as “the hole.”20

  In the future, desperate soldiers learned to mutiny by using their feet rather than their muskets; their desertion rate was steady and high, not surprising given the wages such men could make as artisans or common laborers in the colonial economy. Other redcoats, as well as sailors from the Royal Navy “station ship” in New York harbor, gained permission to live in rented quarters in the town, where they could find part-time work and sustain families.21

  While a succession of royal governors repeatedly implored London for more soldiers and more funding, they also wrangled over defense matters with the elected colonial assembly. The tug-of-war over appropriations that had beset Stuyvesant’s relationship with his burghers now took on a distinctly English cast. Governors and their appointed councils demanded or cajoled military funds from assemblymen who, as “free-born Englishmen,” insisted on their right to determine whether defense expenditures were the responsibility of the colonists or the Crown. The city government, now consisting of an appointed mayor and an elected common council of aldermen and assistants, also entered the fray, turning debates over military spending into three-way struggles.

  Resisting a governor’s insistence on raising war monies proved to be good politics, combining as it did appeals to English freedom and sheer opportunism. No New Yorker wanted to pay higher taxes, and most had also imbibed English political ideas, sincerely believing that the duty of the colonial legislature was to manifest its fealty to the Crown while opposing anything that smacked of royal encroachment on popular liberties, including the right of the assembly to determine how the people’s money would be spent. As for the governors, their conviction that the crown was doing its share by providing sheer manpower—soldiers and sailors whose duty, after all, was to defend the colonists’ homes, property, and lives—often spurred them to fury toward what they viewed as “a selfish niggardly people.”22

  Typical were the disputes over protecting the Narrows, the mile-wide channel between Staten Island and Long Island that served as the main passage from the ocean to the city and the Hudson. In April 1703, during Queen Anne’s War and in the face of rumors of an impending French naval attack, Governor Cornbury and the assembly agreed to erect batteries of guns on both sides of the Narrows. Next came wrangling over who should pay for the batteries. Assemblymen asked Cornbury to press Queen Anne or neighboring colonies for the money, which the governor refused to do. In June the assembly agreed to impose a special defense levy on New Yorkers. Three years later, however, the batteries remained unbuilt. Charging that the assembly had never collected the tax, a seething Cornbury reminded New Yorkers that the city “yet lies very open, naked and defenceless.” In 1756, during the French and Indian War, Governor Charles Hardy advised that heavy guns be placed at the Narrows. After half a century and three wars, the batteries did not yet exist.23

  Legislators were not always so evasive. Many recognized the need for defense and voted to provide funds for protection, as well as to underwrite the provisioning and quartering of royal troops and enlistment of local volunteers for wartime campaigns. During Queen Anne’s War, King George’s War, and the French and Indian War, the legislature sponsored an early-warning system of shoreline “beacons”—tall poles topped by barrels filled with pitch, to be lit by militiamen or local residents to alert the city at the first sighting of an enemy fleet. In 1745, when the city again feared a French invasion from the sea, officials built a protective wall of cedar logs from river to river on the city’s outskirts at what is now Chambers Street to stave off an attack from the north. The colonists, however, sought to subsidize these works on their own terms, doing their best to hold out for the maximum funding from London before committing themselves to the full expense.24

  This frugal strategy seemed shrewd when English monies arrived. Manhattan pedestrians could only gape in wonder when, in August 1756, they watched as twenty-four cartloads of gold and silver coins worth 115,000 pounds sterling, the English government’s “reimbursement” to the northern colonial legislatures for monies spent against the French and Indians, trundled up their streets from the wharfs. Ultimately, however, such subsidies, most of which were earmarked to feed, clothe, and arm troops on the frontier, could not pay the bill for city defense. As New Yorkers worried about preventing invasion while safeguarding their liberties and purses, legislative frugality impeded preparedness just as surely as royal and parliamentary parsimony did. Pitch-filled barrels might be cheaper than cannon at the Narrows, but they were no substitute.25

  New Yorkers spent their own money on defenses with great reluctance, but it was another story entirely when it came to profiting from war. In each of the colonial wars, New York City became the marshaling yard, supply depot, and jumping-off point for British expeditions aiming to w
reak havoc in the French and Spanish Caribbean and French Canada. The first two wars, King William’s and Queen Anne’s, brought mixed results at best to the city’s economy: Manhattan-based privateers gleefully plundered cargo ships belonging to the Catholic foe, but war also disrupted New York’s markets in the Caribbean, slowing trade in a period when mounting rivalry with Philadelphia was already hurting profits in the city’s all-important grain and flour trade.

  It was King George’s War and the French and Indian War that brought prosperity with them, as Westminster and Whitehall sought to strike ever more decisive blows in the Americas. The city and its harbor, stuck in economic doldrums before the outbreak of each war, became a crossroads and a staging ground for military missions whose size dwarfed anything colonists had ever seen before. Fleets of men-of-war and transports came and went, filling the skies of the port with sails and disgorging hundreds of redcoats from Gibraltar and Cork sent to Manhattan in preparation for attacks on Cartagena, Louisbourg, or Martinique, or buckskin-clad militiamen from Virginia and Maryland on their way up the Hudson by sloop for assaults against Canada. Officers, troops, and sailors brought money to spend, to the profit of the city’s tavern keepers, artisans, and clothiers, as well as the prostitutes who cruised the Battery after dark.26

  Big money was to be made during wartime by those with the right connections. Leading gentlemen like Oliver De Lancey and John Watts, already enriched by large landholdings or by trade links to England, got richer by providing war loans of hundreds or even thousands of pounds at 5 and 6 percent interest to the provincial government, or contracted on a grand scale to provide the troops and militias with food, clothing, and supplies. Others, less established, found war a stepping stone into the ranks of well-heeled traders. Except for the two groups—African slaves and Roman Catholics—who were banished from equitable treatment in New York society, war proved an equal opportunity employer, bringing profit to enterprising Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Huguenots, Germans, Jews, and others in Manhattan’s increasingly diverse population. Complaining of the way pious and puritanical New Englanders viewed New York during wartime, a city newspaper, the Mercury, carped in 1756 that “they constantly speak of us . . . as a province whose whole politics consists in forming schemes to enrich ourselves, at the expense of every thing, that ought to be held sacred amongst men.” But neither self-consciousness nor the sincere patriotism of most New Yorkers impeded the moneymaking.27

  The most controversial and covert financial opportunity war offered was that of trading with the enemy. From the inception of their commerce with the West Indies, New York merchants had recognized that Jamaica, Barbados, and other English islands were not the only markets beckoning to them. New Yorkers exchanged their flour, grain, and lumber for sugar, molasses, and slaves on Spanish and French islands, often for better prices than they could get in the English colonies and in flagrant disregard of English measures that sought to regulate or prohibit such trade. War turned such smuggling into a form of aiding the enemy, of outright treason in the eyes of English admirals and parliamentarians, but skyrocketing prices on the enemy’s islands proved too tempting to Manhattan businessmen like Thomas Lynch, James de Peyster, Waddell Cunningham, and dozens of others. To the north, supplying the French at Louisbourg on the Canadian coast with food, canvas, and gunpowder also proved profitable. But by doing so, a writer in the New-York Mercury complained in 1756, Manhattan merchants were providing the French “with everything necessary for our destruction.”28

  Some also found a useful cover for trade in the prisoner exchanges fostered by both mid-century wars. Each conflict brought a stream of prisoners of war to Manhattan: French and Spanish sailors, French troops captured in Canada, Catholic families expelled from Nova Scotia. Each enemy prisoner was poised to collect information about the city’s defenses, and local officials were eager to rid themselves of potential spies who, moreover, had to be fed and housed. But in authorizing New York shipowners to carry prisoners to Saint Domingue and to bring back British prisoners of war, royal governors sparked a lucrative trade in which captains filled their holds with valuable trade goods. A small group of French merchants, who managed to stay in the city despite fears of wartime subversion and espionage, covertly provided ship captains with passports and licenses facilitating this trade with the enemy.29

  The fortunes of war did not lift everyone equally. Higher wartime insurance rates on shipping cut into profits from overseas trade, hurting some merchants (including smaller traders) while benefiting those who sold insurance. Wartime inflation burdened the city’s poorest people—widowed, orphaned, ill, disabled, or aged laborers, servants, seamen, soldiers, lesser tradesmen, and their families. “What must our poor suffer!” the New York Post Boy lamented during the winter of 1747, after noting steeply rising prices for poultry, butter, and firewood. Carpenters and shipwrights, meanwhile, hated being “impressed” by the army to build bateaux (small boats used in the Canadian campaigns) at fixed prices. The threat of actual impressment, however, was very real: most despised and feared in both war and peace was the press gang, the detachment of Royal Navy sailors who rounded up seamen, waterfront workers, and even landsmen for forced labor on His Majesty’s warships at low pay under miserable conditions for what might become a lifetime of service.30

  War drained off some of the city’s poorer or transient men, like nineteen-year-old German-born tailor Jacob Murweis, twenty-year-old stonecutter and native New Yorker Mathew Sindown, forty-seven-year-old laborer Walter Murphy from Dublin, and forty-year-old Scotsman John Ramsey, who wryly described himself to a recruiter as “an old smuggler.” In 1759 these men enlisted in newly formed colonial regiments that the legislature raised for one of the repeated assaults on Canada. High bounties and wages attracted enlistees. So did patriotism, which motivated at least some of the seven hundred men who enlisted for frontier duty after news arrived in town of the disastrous loss to the French at Fort William Henry on Lake George in 1757. But the prospect of risking one’s life to French bullets, Indian tomahawks, or disease in a remote wilderness clearly deterred many men who had something to live for in New York City.31

  For rich and poor, privateering was one of the most attractive opportunities the wartime city offered. As the scale of each successive imperial conflict grew, so did the number of privateering vessels sailing from East River docks: from seventeen during Queen Anne’s War to seventy-three during the French and Indian War, the latter number unrivaled by any other port. In a given year, a thousand men might be on board New York privateers. “The country is drained of many able bodied men,” Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey explained to William Pitt in 1758, “by almost a kind of madness to go a privateering.” Members of some mercantile families, like the Beekmans and Van Hornes, got into the habit of launching privateers from war to war and generation to generation. They recruited crewmen through word of mouth on the waterfront or through advertisements in that new urban vehicle of information, the newspaper (New York’s first weekly, the Gazette, had begun publication in 1725). For seasoned seamen, accustomed to low pay, hard labor, and the hazards of life at sea, privateering made obvious economic sense. The only group kept from privateering was that half of the population consisting of women: when, in 1743, a woman trying to pass as a man was discovered shipping out on the Castor and Pollux, the crew ducked her in the water from the yard arm and then tarred her “from head to foot.”32

  Once furnished with an official letter of marque from the royal governor, New York sloops and brigs, well-armed with cannon and men, usually headed south for the cruising grounds north of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, where they had the maximum chance of catching rich French and Spanish prizes. But privateering could be dangerous. Out of 108 New York privateering vessels in the two mid-century wars, 25 never returned home; hundreds of crewmen died, were wounded, or ended up languishing in French and Spanish prisons.33

  In the face of the many risks that accompanied privateering, crew members fo
cused on the rewards. Privateers returned to New York harbor with captured cargo ships loaded with European textiles, wine, and hardware. Even more lucrative were the ships seized while carrying sugar, molasses, rum, coffee, cocoa, or indigo from the West Indies to Europe. Enslaved Africans were another valuable commodity ripe for pillaging. The return of privateers with their prizes was a stirring event that brought thousands of New Yorkers out to the wharves along Dock Street to look and cheer. Merchants now learned whether their investments had paid off (indeed, the speculative trading of shares in privateers, driven by news of the shifting fortunes of given vessels still plying the Caribbean, became one of New York’s earliest securities markets). Sometimes the results were spectacular, as in the Great Capture of August 1744, when the privateers Royal Hester, Polly, Clinton, and Mary Anne entered the harbor with six captured French vessels and their freight valued at 24,000 pounds sterling. The vessels “saluted the town with near 50 guns to the rejoicing of the inhabitants.”34

  Once anchored off Manhattan, prize vessels and their cargoes had to be “condemned” in the city’s Vice Admiralty Court, where Justice Lewis Morris Jr., a friend of the merchants through thick and thin, ensured that most prizes quickly became the legal property of the New Yorkers who had captured them—an outcome that also guaranteed hefty fees to Morris and a small army of attorneys, registrars, and appraisers, as well as to the auctioneers who offered the looted merchandise for sale. Most privateering contracts stipulated that, after costs, the vessels’ owners would receive one-third of prize revenues, with the remaining two-thirds divided among officers and crew.35