USA > New York > New York City > History of New York city from the discovery to the present day, V.1 > Part 21
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house of Colonel Roger Morris (between 160th and 161st Streets); while Colonel Cadwallader, with eight hun- dred men, was posted along the lower lines which crossed the island. At length, on the 15th of November, an attack being made by the enemy under Lord Percy, Cad- wallader held them in check on Harlem Plains for more than an hour and a half, until Washington had been able to cross the Hudson from Fort Lee, reconnoitre the ' position, and return in safety. But the gallant efforts of Cadwallader were of no avail; for Lord Percy, having been reinforced, ruined the position of his adversary, 'and, compelling him to retreat to Fort Washington (already in possession of the British), made him prisoner. The capture of Fort Washington compelled that of Fort Lee. " Washington retreated with his troops through the Jerseys, and the struggle for liberty in New York was over."
It would seem, however, as if the idea of firing the city-though given up by Washington and Greene-was still cherished by some of the residents of the city. Scarcely had the British fairly taken possession, when, on the night of the 20th of September-only six days after they had marched in-a terrific fire broke out, which was not subdued until one thousand houses, or about one- fourth of the city, were reduced to ashes .* The fire was first discovered in a low dram-shop, tenanted by abandoned men and women ; but, in a few minutes afterward, flames were seen to break forth from several other buildings, lying in different directions, at the same moment. For some time previous, the weather had been dry; and at the moment, a brisk southerly wind prevailing, and the build-
* Hogh Gaine, in his Universal Register for 1787, states that before this fire the city contained about four thousand two hundred houses, and thirty thousand inhabitants.
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ings being of wood and covered with shingles, the flames soon caught the neighboring houses and spread with incon- ceivable rapidity. The fire swept up Broad and Beaver Streets to Broadway, and thence onward, consuming all
VIEW ON WASHINGTON HEIGHTS.
that portion of the town lying on the North River, until the flames were stopped by the grounds of King's (Colum- bia) College at Mortkile Street, now Barclay. St. Paul's
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Church, at one time, was in great danger. Fortunately, however, the roof was flat, with a balustrade on the eaves. Taking advantage of this circumstance, a number of citi- zens went into the balustrade and extinguished the flakes of fire as they fell on the roof. Trinity Church, with the Lutheran Chapel, on the opposite corner of Rector Street. ยท was also destroyed. The Rev. Dr. Inglis was then rector of Trinity ; and with this sacred edifice, his parsonage and the Charity School-two large buildings-were consumed, entailing a loss of church property to the value of twenty- five thousand pounds. The organ of Trinity, alone, cost ' eight hundred and fifty pounds.
/ At the present day, it is difficult to say whether the fire was or was not the result of incendiarism on the part of disaffected Americans. Even reliable contemporaneous writers differ widely in their opinion on the subject, some affirming positively that the city was set on fire, and others, again, quite as positively affirming the contrary. For ourselves, we are inclined to believe that the fire was the result of a deliberate design ; nor, if the newspapers and private correspondence of the day can be believed, is there much room left for doubt. According to these authorities, one man was seized in the act of setting fire to the col- lege, who acknowledged that he had been employed for the purpose. A New-England captain, who was seized at the same time with matches in his pocket, also acknowl- edged the same. One White, a carpenter, was observed to cut the leather buckets which conveyed the water. "The next day, Saturday," says Steadman, in his history of the American War, "a great many cart-loads of bundles of pine-sticks dipped in brimstone were found concealed in cellars of houses to which the incendiaries had not had time to set fire." "The rebels," says the Rev. Charles Inglis, in writing on the same subject, a few days after, to the Venerable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
TRINITY CHURCH.
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in Foreign Parts, "carried off all the bells in the city, partly to convert them into cannon and partly to prevent notice being given speedily of the destruction they medi- tated against the city by fire, when it began. * * Several rebels secreted themselves in the houses to execute the diabolical purpose of destroying the city." Notwithstand- ing, however, this seeming mass of testimony, it was found impossible to obtain legal proof sufficient to fasten the act
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THE OLD SUGAR-HOUSE IN LIBERTY STREET.
upon any particular individual-for all who had been caught at the time with matches, &c., had been killed on the spot by the enraged soldiery-and the result was, that several of the citizens, who had been arrested and imprisoned on the charge of being the incendiaries, were acquitted.
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The history of New York city during its occupation by the British is not one that Americans can recall with . pleasure. True it is that this period has invested a few of the old buildings, yet standing, with interest; but these very associations are of a saddening, melancholy nature, and only calculated to make Americans, even at the pres- ent day, blush at the remembrance of the fact that British officers-having their blood, and the same ancestry, and speaking the same tongue-could ever have been guilty of such horrid atrocities upon the persons of inoffensive captives. Of the numerous prison-pens in the city during the Revolution (among which was the old Sugar-House), only two yet stand, like charred and battered monu- ments of cruelty and tyranny-the North Dutch Church, on William Street, and the Middle Dutch Church (the present Post-office). In the former edifice, eight hun- dred prisoners were incarcerated, without fuel or bed- ding, during two of the coldest winters New York has ever known .* Their provisions were scanty, and of the poorest quality ; and, as a natural and probably anticipated consequence, many died from cold and starvation. "We never," says Oliver Woodruff, one of the prisoners, "drew as much provisions for three days' allowance as a man would eat at a common meal. I was there three months during that inclement season, and never saw any fire, except what was in the lamps of the city. There was not a pane of glass in the windows, and nothing to keep out the cold, except the iron grates." f "The allowance," says
* During one of these winters-that of 1779-'80-the river and bay between Cortlandt Street, New Jersey, and Staten Island were frozen over for forty days. Hundreds of people crossed daily on the ice, which was so thick that artillery was also conveyed across.
t It is very true that, at times, the British themselves were often in want of food, and suffered from cold, and also that provisions were dear; still, that need not have prevented them from giving the prisoners bedclothes, and min- istering to their necessities, and alleviating their condition as far as possible
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Adolph Meyer, another prisoner, " was one loaf of bread, one quart of peas, half a pint of rice, and one and a half pounds of pork, for six days. Many prisoners died from want; and others were reduced to such wretchedness as to attract the attention of common prostitutes, from whom they received considerable assistance. No care was taken of the sick ; and if any died they were thrown at the door of the prison, and lay there till the next day, when they were put on a cart and drawn out to the intrenchments, beyond the Jews' burial-ground, where they were in- terred by their fellow-prisoners, conducted thither for that purpose .. The dead were thrown into a hole promiscu- ously, without the usual rites of sepulcher." But the state of things was even worse in the Middle Dutch Church (the present Post-office), into which three thousand prisoners were crowded. "Here," says John Pintard, an eye-wit- ness of these scenes, " the prisoners taken on Long Island and at Fort Washington-sick, wounded, and well -- were all indiscriminately huddled together by hundreds and thousands, large numbers of whom died by disease; and many were undoubtedly poisoned by their inhuman attend- ants for the sake of their watches and silver buckles." " The beds of the prisoners," says Dunlap, writing at the time, " were straw, intermixed with vermin. For many weeks, the dead-cart visited the prison every morning, into which from eight to twelve corpses were flung and piled up, then dumped into ditches in the outskirts of the city." The bones of the unfortunate victims of British cruelty, thus disposed of, were collected after the Revolution, and buried with proper funeral rites .*
* But none of these prison-pens were so horrible as the Jersey prison- ship. " This vessel was originally a British line-of-battle ship, built in 1736, and carried sixty guns. She had done good service in the war with France, and had several times served as a part of the Mediterranean squadron. In the spring of 1776, she sailed for America as one of the fleet of Commodore Hotham, and arrived at Sandy Hook in the month of August. She was subsequently
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But while the American prisoners were thus languish- ing in prison, the British officers and their wives were passing their time in a round of gayety and frivolity. The best view, perhaps, of the interior and social life of New York at this time-now become in reality a British city-is given in the letters of Mrs. General Riedesel .* This lady was the wife of the German general who com- manded the Brunswick troops at the battle of Saratoga, where he was captured with Burgoyne. After her hus- band was exchanged, she spent nearly two years in New York city (1779-'80), and her letters to her mother at this time are of great interest. From these letters we make the following extracts:
. " Finally, late one evening, at the end of November, 1779, we reached New York, where my husband, who had gone ahead of us, had already arrived before me. 1779. A soldier who, at the gateway, had been ordered to show us the way, conducted us to a very great and
used as a store-ship, then employed as a hospital-ship, and was finally, in the winter of 1779-'80, fitted up as a prison-ship, and anchored near the Walla- bout in the East River, near what is now the Navy Yard, where she lay until the close of the war, when the day of retribution arrived, and she was broken up and sunk beneath the muddy waters of the East River to rise no more. Dismantled of her sails and stripped of her rigging, with port-holes closed, with no spar but the bowsprit, and a derrick to take in supplies, her small lone flag at the stern became the appropriate but unconscious signal of the dreadful suffering that raged within. Hundreds of captured prisoners were packed into this small vessel, where, with but one meal of coarse and filthy food per diem, without hammocks, or physician, or medicines, or means of cleanliness, they wretchedly perished. Thousands of emaciated skeletons were, during these perilous years, cast into the billows of the bay. or left half covered in the sand- banks and trenches. The bones of the dead lay exposed along the beach, dry- ing and bleaching in the sun, whitening the shore until washed away by the surging tides. About twelve thousand prisoners are believed to have died on these vessels, most of whom were young men, the strength and flower of their country."
* Letters and Journals relating to the War of the American Revolution, and the Capture of the German Troops at Saratoga, by Mrs. General Riedesel. Translated from the original German, by William L. Stone. ALBANY : J. MUNSELL. 1867.
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beautiful house, where we found everything prepared for our reception ; and, better than all, a good supper. I was too much occupied in putting the children to bed, and too tired to inquire where I was, and supposed I was in a public-house. My husband, who had taken tea with Gen- eral Cornwallis, came home late. The next morning, a servant came in to ask ine what I desired for dinner, and how many visitors I would probably have daily at table. I replied that as my husband did not dine at home, I should , not need more than three dishes for six persons, namely : myself, my children, my women-servants, and the pastor, Mylius, the chaplain of my husband's regiment, whom we retained in our family, and who gave my children instruc- tion in everything useful. He was a man of piety, and of excellent character and good humor, and the children and we all loved him very much. I was then told that the order had been given to serve up on my table every day six large and four small dishes. Being still under the impression that I was in a tavern, I decidedly forbade this profusion, as I dreaded the bill. But I soon discov- ered that I was staying at the house of the Governor, General Tryon, who had forbidden them to tell me where I had been taken, through fear that I would not accept of his house .* This noble-minded man, moreover, in order
* The site of the present (1871) Bank of New York.
"On the night of December 29th, 1773, the Government House accidentally caught fire. So rapid was the progress of the flames, that in a few moments after the alarm was given a thick cloud of smoke and flame pervaded the whole building, and in less than two hours it was entirely consumed. From this dreadful conflagration, nothing in the building, except a few articles of furni- ture taken from one of the parlors, was saved. The manner in which the fire originated was not discovered. The deep snow which covered the roofs of the . other buildings in the city contributed to their protection, and the fire depart- ment of the city showed great activity in preventing the progress of the flames. Governor Tryon was a resident of the Government House in the fort at the time of its destruction, and was a heavy loser by the event. He afterward resided in a house on the corner of Wall and William Streets, the same house having been subsequently, and until late years, occupied by the Bank of New York."- Valentine's Manual for 1864, page 643.
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to avoid my thanks, crossed over to Long Island, where he had a provisional command. All my wishes were anticipated, and I was only in continual fear lest I should abuse so much kindness. I also received a call from Gen- eral Patterson, the commandant of the city, who told me that they were still busy with the arrangement of the house, which we were to have as our own residence. Lord Cornwallis and General Clinton likewise came to see me. The former went off soon afterward upon an expedition. The latter offered me a country-seat, of which he had the disposal, where I might have my children inoculated with ' the small-pox, an operation which it would be dangerous to have performed in the city, as that disease was raging there violently. I. accepted his offer with much satisfac- tion, and we made all necessary preparations to go there. I gave our cook ten guineas to purchase all kinds of pro- visions. But when he very soon came back and asked for more money, I learned, to my surprise, that the money I had given him would scarcely last for two days, so dear was everything, even the commonest thing. For example, one pound of meat, reckoning according to our money, cost twelve groschen; * one pound of butter, eighteen groschen ; one turkey, four rix-thalers ; a fowl, twenty groschen; an egg, four groschen; a quart of milk, six groschen; a bushel of potatoes, two rix-thalers ; a half bushel of turnips, two florins ; ten oysters, eight groschen ; and six onions, one rix-thaler. But what was there left for me to do but to bear it with patience ? t
* A groschen, as has been mentioned in a preceding note, is a fraction over three American cents.
+ All contemporaneous accounts fully corroborate the statement of our authoress. The rich in the city at first strove to keep up their six courses, their three-side services, and their profusion of fish, flesh, and fowl; but at length their resources failed. Many articles of food could no longer be obtained, and others were so dear as to exhaust the means of the wealthiest. A turkey was cheap at four dollars, Good meat could seldom be procured, and vegetables were extravagantly dear. Fifty dollars, says an eye-witness, would not feed a
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" One day a general was announced. I received him, and in the course of conversation he asked me, among other things, whether I was satisfied with my quarters. My heart was too full of thankfulness for all the kindness that had been chown me, not to give full vent to my feel- ings in this regard, and I at last expressed the wish to know personally my noble benefactor who had treated me with so much delicacy. He laughed, and just at that moment my husband stepped in, and said to me, " This is 'the man who has shown us so much kindness." I was so delighted at seeing him, that I could not find words to express my feelings. Upon seeing my emotion, the man was very much affected. I have invariably received from him the greatest proofs of his friendship.
" The country residence of General Clinton, where we went, was an hour's ride from the city. The grounds were beautiful, as was also the house; but the latter was arranged more for a summer residence, and, as we had come there in the month of December, we suffered much from the cold. Notwithstanding this, however, the inocu- lation was perfectly successful. Accordingly, as it was now completed, and we had nothing more to fear from the infection, we got ourselves in readiness to return to the city, and sent our cook and the rest of our servants ahead to prepare everything for our arrival, which we expected would be upon the following day. During the night, however, we had such a terrible storm that we
family for two days. Sir Henry Clinton entreated the farmers of the vicinity to bring in provisions, but in vain. Nor was he more successful in the forag. ing parties he sent out. At sight of. the enemy, the alarm was given. The farmers of Westport and Southport, of Elizabethtown and Rahway, hastily buried their corn and oats beneath the snow, and old family furniture was car- ried off at midnight and hidden in the depths of the forest. The British foraging parties accordingly found the barns empty, the cattle driven off, and the farm- houses deserted. In their rage, the foragers set fire to the old homesteads and desolated whole districts, thus increasing the general misery without accom- plishing the least good.
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believed the whole house would be overturned. As it was, an entire balustrade actually fell down with a dreadful crash, and on getting up the next morning we saw that on account of snow having fallen during the night four or five feet on the level, and eight feet in drifts, it would be utterly impossible to venture forth without sledges. I therefore went to work to hunt up all that I could find for our dinner. An old hen that had been forgotten served us for soup, and some potatoes which the gardener gave us, with some salt meat that still remained over from our stock of provisions, made up the entire meal for more than 'fourteen persons, which number we then were.
"On our return to New York, I found, to my great amazement, our new dwelling fitted up throughout with mahogany furniture. I was at first frightened at the expense which this would occasion. But Captain Willoe informed me that the entire cost would be defrayed by the Governor, and that the Commandant, General Patter- son, considered himself fortunate in being able to justify the confidence which I had placed in the English nation. To render this remark intelligible, I must here state that I had assured him, when he consulted me upon the arrangement of our house, that I would leave everything entirely to the English, from whom, up to the present time, I had received sincere kindness and courtesy, and who certainly would still preserve toward us that full confidence which they had shown toward us.
" They overwhelmed us with distinguished marks of courtesy and friendship, for which we had, in a great meas- ure, to thank General Phillips, who, in New York, was very much beloved, and was so strong a friend of ours that he declared that whatever was done for us would flatter him more than as if done for himself. I had also the good fortune, during our stay, to make many friends on my own account.
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" As the birthday of the Queen of England was approaching (which really comes in summer, but, as the King's birthday also comes in that season, is celebrated in winter, to give more custom to the trades-people, as every one upon those days appears at court in gala-dress), they wished to celebrate the day with a great fete; and as it was the general wish-partly to please General Philips, and partly to make me forget my own suffering-to confer on me a distinguished honor, they desired me to be queen of the ball. In order to bring this about, they persuaded the wife of General Cornwallis's adjutant-who, as an English lady of noble birth, would have had precedence over me-to remain at home, on the ground that she was near her confinement. When at length the great day arrived, all the ladies assembled at Governor Tryon's, where they received me with all ceremony. The General introduced me to all the ladies, some of whom were envi- ous of the honor which was shown me. But I immediately declared that I received this distinction only on account of
the day, as they had conferred on me the honor of repre- senting the Queen, and that in future I would give place to those ladies who were older than I. As there were quite a number present who were my elders, my explanation conciliated them. Their countenances, accordingly, quickly brightened up, and I was soon upon a pleasant footing with the whole company.
" At six o'clock in the afternoon I was obliged to seat myself on a carriage with Generals Tryon and Patterson, to be driven to the ball, where we were received with kettle-drums and trumpets.
" At supper, I was obliged, as I represented the Queen, to sit under a canopy, and drink the first toast. I was certainly much touched at all the marks of friendship I received, although extremely tired ; still, in order to show . my gratitude, I cheerfully stayed as long as possible, and
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remained until two o'clock in the morning. Not only on this occasion, but during the whole of my sojourn in this place, I was loaded with kindness; and I passed the remainder of the winter very pleasantly, with the excep- tion of suffering very much from the cold, as the commis- sary had not had a sufficient quantity of wood cut. To save expense, he had this work done by his negro slaves; and the winter setting in earlier than usual, and being impossible, as the river was frozen half over, to bring in wood either by boats or sledges, many of the garrison suf- fered for fuel. We, indeed, received an order for it ; but ' how did that help the matter, since there was no wood to be had ? We were, therefore, often obliged to borrow wood of General Tryon for Saturday and Sunday, which we would return on Monday if we received any. The cold was so intense that I frequently made the children lie in bed in order to keep them warm. Wood could not often be purchased for money; and if by chance a little was for sale, it cost ten pounds by the cord. I have myself paid one. piaster (which is a crown with us) for a single stick. The poor were obliged to burn fat, in order to warm themselves and cook their meals .*
- "One day I was at the house of the lady of General Cornwallis's aid-de-camp, who had been confined, and com- plained bitterly of this lack of wood; whereupon, she promised to send me some coals, which I could return at my own convenience. I showed so much joy at this, that a certain major, named Brown, who happened to be pres- ent, and was attached to the commissariat, and who had
* " The wealthy," writes a contemporary, " shivered for cold in their splendid apartments. In vain did Sir Henry Clinton issue proclamations to the farmers of Long Island to send in their wood. In vain did he dispatch foraging parties to cut down the forests on the large estates of the patriots William Floyd and William Smith, the patroons of Long Island. The demand for fuel could not be supplied, and the Baroness Riedesel, the caressed of all the army, suffered severely in that inclement winter."
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