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July 19 - July 28, 2020
The city of New York was set in an archipelago with almost eight hundred miles of waterfront,
The Hudson, nearly a mile wide at New York and navigable for 150 miles to the north, would be difficult to barricade against a determined Royal Navy assault; so, too, the East River, a twisting, sixteen-mile tidal strait connecting New York Bay and Long Island Sound.
Two bushels of salt—more than a hundred pounds—were needed to cure a thousand pounds of pork. Beef required even more. Salt also was used to tan leather, fix the dyes in military uniforms, churn butter, and supplement livestock feed. Before the war, Americans had imported 1.5 million bushels annually,
The British trade embargo strangled two-thirds of those imports.
Eight of the ten wealthiest men in America were said to be South Carolinians, and Charleston’s collective worth was supposedly sixfold that of Philadelphia. “Every tradesman is a merchant, every merchant is a gentleman, and every gentleman one of the noblesse,” a local newspaper boasted.
Every farthing of Charleston’s affluence derived from slavery,
plagued with malaria, yellow fever, and an infamous climate—“in the spring a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital”—Charleston countered with grace notes.
for decades South Carolina’s militia had been designed primarily to suppress slave revolts. After the bloody Stono Uprising of 1739 left scores of blacks and whites dead, white men were required to carry weapons to church on Sunday and plantations had to employ at least one white for every ten blacks in servitude.
Slaves now outnumbered whites in South Carolina, 104,000 to 70,000,
British encouragement of slave defections and the emancipatory antics of Governor Dunmore in Virginia had sparked hysteria in South Carolina.
Henry Laurens, who would succeed Hancock as president of the Continental Congress and whose career as a merchant prince in South Carolina included handling the sale of more than ten thousand plantation slaves, insisted that a bondsmen revolt was among Britain’s “dark hellish plots for subjugating the colonies.”
South Carolina law now made it a capital crime for slaves to seek sanctuary with the enemy. Anyone encouraging chattel to abscond would also be executed “without the benefit of clergy.”
Dunmore and his fugitives spent three more weeks wandering around the Chesapeake and up the Potomac River, seeking recruits, stealing cattle, and pillaging rebel homesteads. “We landed, did what mischief we could, and reembarked,”
Of the fifteen hundred runaway slaves who had reached British sanctuary since the previous fall, roughly a thousand had perished. Dunmore ordered some black defectors returned to owners who swore loyalty oaths, a betrayal useful to rebel propagandists. The Ethiopian Regiment, nearly obliterated by pox, war, and dreams of freedom, would soon be formally disbanded.
Rebels completely controlled four colonies that now called themselves states—Virginia, Georgia, and the two Carolinas—
Each brigade major would then read—“with an audible voice”—the proclamation intended to transform a squalid family brawl into a cause as ambitious and righteous as any in human history.
describing the “long train of abuses and usurpations,” then denouncing royal despotism, then enumerating twenty-seven grievances.
That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”
Here George III, identified that very evening in the Declaration as a tyrant “unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” sat atop his gilt horse on Bowling Green. Whooping vandals broke through the iron fence surrounding the statue, clambered onto the marble pedestal, and lassoed the equestrian figure.
The baying crowd decapitated the king, whacked off his nose, and clipped the laurels from his brow. Someone fired a musket ball into the head, and more balls punctured the torso. Others scraped away the ten ounces of gold leaf that covered rider and mount. With fife and drums playing “The Rogue’s March,” the severed head was first wheeled in a barrow to the Mortier house, then impaled on a spike outside the Blue Bell Tavern.
fragments to a Connecticut foundry, where patriot women melted the lead, ladled it into molds, and soon sent the army 42,088 bullets.
General Howe had an answer to the Declaration of Independence, and he sent it on Friday afternoon, July 12.
Led by the frigates Phoenix and Rose, with sixty-four guns between them, the squadron curled along the lower lip of Manhattan and opened fire at 4:05 p.m. “The balls and bullets went through several houses,” a pastor wrote, “… and the air was filled with the smell of powder.”
the enemy had breezed unhindered up the Hudson past defenses many months in the making and were now anchored in seven fathoms at Tappan Zee, thirty miles into the American rear.
Few issues would flummox the British more than how to move inland: waging war away from the coast and navigable rivers required transport for artillery, baggage, and supplies. Otherwise, the rebels could simply dance out of reach, stripping the land of provisions and leaving the regulars like “a cow catching a hare,” as a London newspaper indelicately observed. A brass 12-pounder and carriage weighing more than a ton and a half might require six horses to move down a country lane. Howe calculated that his grand army would need almost 4,000 horses and 277 wagons.
“I am extremely sorry to inform Congress our troops are very sickly,” Washington wrote Hancock in early August. Of his 17,225 privates, only 10,514 were present and fit for duty; many were unfit, as an ensign informed his diary, because “a dysentery prevails considerable in the army at this time.” Typhoid and typhus also prevailed; the diseases, respectively spread by fecal contamination and by lice, would not be distinguishable until the next century.
Two more Hessian brigades—over 4,000 men—soon crossed from Staten Island, giving Howe more than 20,000 troops on Long Island, among a total army and naval force of 34,000 at New York.
“After a few beatings, the people will begin to return to their senses,” another officer predicted, “… wearied with disorder and panting after the sweets of peace.”
“When they caught only a glimpse of a blue coat, they surrendered immediately and begged on their knees for their lives,” Heister reported. “I am surprised that the British troops have achieved so little against these people.” With each surrender, the captors let out a triumphant bellow. A Hessian lieutenant told his diary, “The prisoners who knelt and sought to surrender were beaten.”
“Great God!” he was quoted as muttering. “What must my brave boys suffer today?” On this hard day they had indeed suffered: General Howe would list almost twelve hundred American prisoners taken, including three generals, three colonels, and four lieutenant colonels, plus thirty-two cannons seized.
British commanders on Long Island swaggered and crowed. “If a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses,” wrote General Grant, “the fever of independence should soon abate.”
Though Congress wanted New York defended, Washington had failed to recognize that holding Long Island—the key to holding New York—would be impossible with a weak, divided, overmatched army that lacked naval power.
Britain was nearing full employment. Stocks held steady, and a second consecutive bumper crop of wheat had brought lower bread prices. War contracts helped compensate for lost trade in America, and the government expected record revenues in 1777.
In the two years since shots first rang out on Lexington Common, combatants had fought more than 450 military actions and 90 naval skirmishes, according to a tally by the historian Howard H. Peckham. American casualties now approached 9,000, almost a third of them killed or wounded; of the 6,500 Americans captured, an unconscionable number would die in British prisons.
