The current war, however, had defaced New York. “This haughty city is now subjected to all the inconveniences of a garrison town,” Lieutenant Colonel William Tudor, the Continental Army’s judge advocate, wrote a friend in the spring of 1776. “The fife & drum are continually dinning our ears with Yankee music, & we have few sights more entertaining than the parading & marching of the ill-dressed ragamuffins which compose the army.” Hardly a shot had been fired in anger around New York, but perhaps half or more of the twenty-five thousand residents had fled their homes in fear of bloody things
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