The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Fear of fire had distressed New York for well over a hundred years. In the mid-seventeenth century, the town bought its first ladders and fire hooks and commissioned cordwainers to make 150 leather water buckets. Officials banned wooden chimneys, thatched roofs, and haystacks. Wardens prohibited blazes in hearths on windy days, and all fires had to be banked or covered in the evening. Watchmen with rattles walked the streets, sniffing for smoke. Two new fire engines were purchased from a London firm in 1731 for £200; twenty men pumped foot treadles on each machine to force water through the leather pipes. Ten fires plagued New York in the spring of 1741, including one in Fort George that spread to the governor’s mansion, an army barracks, and a Church of England chapel; confessions of arson—in some cases coerced if not extracted by torture in the “Great Gaol” below city hall—led to hysterical cries of “The Negroes are rising!” The town convicted and executed almost three dozen suspects, burning thirteen black men at the stake and hanging another seventeen blacks and four whites—the supposed ringleaders. Eighty-four slaves were also sold into West Indies bondage, and seven white men were exiled.