New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  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reason for the generally tranquil mood was starkly clear: not only had the bulk of the British army and navy already withdrawn, but thousands of Tories had also left the city to begin new lives as refugees from their homeland.60

  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.61

  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.62

  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.63

  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

  The 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.”1

  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.4

  No wonder, then, that angry words and deeds repeatedly disrupted the chorus of huzzas for Bompard. Politically, the summer of 1793 had been a long and hot one in New York City. By June, the “vast throng” that filled the Tontine Coffee House every evening had divided into “two parties,” and one night a brawl erupted between “Whig & Tory, or, to modernize it, Democrat & Aristocrat”—labels that linked the fracas to two revolutions. On the afternoon of the Embuscade’s triumphal return to the city, a Tontine crowd roughed up a British naval lieutenant, who escaped only by jumping over an iron railing to the street below. Charles William Janson, an English businessman, believed that a similarly pro-French “mob” at the Tontine “would have torn me piece-meal had I been pointed at as a stranger just arrived from England.” In mid-August, two melees broke out between roaming bands of French and English sailors.5

  The passions of the French Revolution, and the global war it had sparked, were boiling over into the streets of New York. Yet even the most agitated Republicans and Federalists recognized that the United States had no navy, that its small army might subdue frontier Indians but was good for little else, and that local militia units would be no match for a European enemy sailing in through the Narrows. In their cooler moments, New Yorkers could hope that the Atlantic would be vast enough to keep the conflicts of the Old World at bay. But they would learn over the next twenty years that the agents of conflict would not stay away.

  The truth was that New Yorkers could not easily disentangle their domestic concerns from international affairs. For one thing, Manhattan remained a global crossroads, attracting a dissonant array of émigrés: French refugees, some from the mother country and others fleeing a bloody slave rebellion in Saint Domingue (Haiti), who brought their own antagonistic royalist and revolutionary loyalties with them; Irish emigrants, many aflame with the French Revolution’s challenge to English domination; radical English workingmen and intellectuals, alienated from their king; loyal Britons like Janson, appalled by the French assault on the very idea of monarchy itself. These adversaries sharpened the animosities of native Republicans and Federalists, already busy hurling the epithets “monarchist” and “Jacobin” at each other.

  More crucially, the city’s economy was also enmeshing its inhabitants in the European conflict. New York was riding the wave of a new commercial prosperity that depended on the ability of its merchants to exploit the global shortage in shipping caused by the Anglo-French war. As the French and British navies blockaded each other’s ports and seized each other’s ships, American shippers—New Yorkers prominent among them—stepped into the breach. New York–based brigs and schooners, their holds bulging with English manufactures, French West Indian sugar and molasses, and Hudson Valley flour, grain, and lumber, were soon conveying highly profitable cargoes across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. This trade positioned New York to surpass Philadelphia as the nation’s busiest seaport by the mid-1790s. “Every thought, word, look, and action of the multitude seemed to be absorbed by commerce,” noted an English visitor a few years later as he walked through streets “jammed up with carts, drays, and wheel-barrows” near the East River docks.6

  As the maritime war dragged on, and neither Britain nor France proved able to score a knockout blow, the belligerents began to cast hostile glances at America’s merchant fleets, the “neutral carriers” whose cargoes provided aid and comfort to the enemy. By January 1794, Governor Clinton was warning the state legislature of “the naked and exposed condition of our principal seaport” and its vulnerability to “insult and invasion.” The war-driven trade that was enriching them, New Yorkers understood, might end up imperiling their city; taking advantage of Europe’s disorder might draw them into Europe’s conflicts. If London or Paris felt sufficiently provoked, either the British or French navy might descend on New York to blockade it, attack it, or even occupy it.7

  Over the next decade, the issue of whether Britain or France posed a greater threat seesawed back and forth. In 1794, as the Royal Navy seized 150 American vessels suspected of trade with the French West Indies, contingents of civilian volunteers worked to fortify the Upper Bay, restoring the trenches and redoubts built on Governors Island by American troops in 1776. In 1796, when the French Revolutionary government authorized French vessels to prey on American merchantmen, the New York state and city governments used volunteers and paid laborers to tear up the Battery promenade, “the finest walk in the world” in the view of one observer, to make room for new gun carriages and breastworks. Eager enlistees in the Patriotic Blues, Washington Troop of Horse, and other volunteer “uniform companies” drilled on the Battery and readied themselves to “march at a minute’s notice” if the French dared to land.8

  Meanwhile, partisan bands continued to taunt each other on the streets, as Samuel Malcolm, President John Adams’s young secretary, learned during a visit to New York in July 1798. While singing “Hail, Columbia,” a Federalist anthem, during an evening stroll to the Battery with friends, Malcolm was recognized. In the words of a Federalist Philadelphia paper, a crowd “of boatmen and low fellows, from the wharves and docks, immediately collected . . . instigated by the deluding demon of French Jacobinism,” and retaliated with the French Revolutionary song “Ca Ira.” A brawl erupted, with the “low fellows” outnumbering and beating Malcolm and his comrades. Even more sinister was the spiking, or disabling, of one of the Battery cannon by persons unknown, evidence to Federalists that pro-French extremism was becoming outright treason. A Europe at war seemed to guarantee that Manhattan would remain a battleground in microcosm.9

  On March 4, 1801, New York’s Republicans greeted the presidential inauguration of their hero, Thomas Jefferson, with cannon fusillades at the Battery, the ringing of church bells, and the hoisting of colors on vessels in the harbor. By voting for the “Sage of Monticello,” New York’s Jeffersonian coalition of artisans and liberal merchants had played a pivotal role in what the new president himself called the “Revolution of 1800,” the nation’s first peaceful transition of power from one party to another.

  Gaining power, however, did not cool the hostility of Republicans toward England, especially as the Royal Navy replaced the French as primary predator on American merchant vessels. Perpetually short-handed during the wars of the Napoleonic era, British commanders resorted to imp
ressment, seizing any able-bodied mariner or landsman they deemed to be a British subject. Seamen aboard American cargo ships were considered fair game; indeed, many were native Britons who had never obtained US citizenship. But by the late 1790s, the taverns and coffeehouses of waterfront Manhattan were also alive with stories of Royal Navy captains seizing naturalized American citizens and even native-born Yankees. The Royal Navy justified its indiscriminate roundups by arguing that thousands of British sailors were working on vessels out of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston under the cover of fraudulently obtained citizenship certificates (known as “Protections”) that were issued by federal customs officials and circulated freely in waterfront boardinghouses.10

  But for New Yorkers who now feared British confiscation of men as well as of “contraband” goods and vessels, the cry of “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” drowned out arguments over legal niceties. In new neighborhoods of modest two-story clapboard houses that replaced meadows and swamps north and east of the old city limits, families of working seamen and artisans felt the full impact of impressment in the void left by a missing husband and father or the fear that one’s brother or friend might be the next sailor to disappear into the ranks of the Royal Navy. An unknown number of New Yorkers shared the experience that befell John Bateman in early 1807. A mariner who lived near the East River waterfront, Bateman was taken off the brig Ulysses at sea by the press gang of HMS Demerara. Nine months later, Bateman managed to get a letter to the US Customs office in New York: “I have got a wife & children in Bedlow Street. . . . [I have] suffered much in my mind in consequence of my helpless family. . . . They may be in much want of all necessaries. . . . I am all they have to look to for that.” Bateman added that, for alleged “neglect of duty,” he had suffered a dozen lashes applied to his back.11