USA > New York > New York City > History of the city of New York : its origin, rise, and progress. Vol. II > Part 45
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THE BATTLE OF MONMOUTH.
coming down the narrow road, and would be upon them in fifteen minutes. Washington swiftly formed his retreating regiments into a barricade, and planted other troops upon higher ground. Lee was ordered to the rear, and while sitting idly upon his horse, explaining to by-standers that the attack was madness and could not possibly be successful, Washing- ton effectually checked the advance of the enemy, and after a pitched battle drove them back to the ground which Lee had occupied at first. At night two brigades hung on the British right, a third on their left ; while the rest of Washington's forces planted their standards on the field of battle, and lay on their arms to renew the contest at daybreak. Wash- ington himself, wrapped in his cloak, reclined at the foot of a tree. When the morning dawned the British had departed. Clinton had not even given his weary troops opportunity for a nap, but at ten o'clock in the evening had marched after the division with the baggage-train, abandon- ing the severely wounded and leaving his dead unburied. The loss of the British was more than four hundred; and during their march through New Jersey above eight hundred deserted their standard. The American loss in the battle, which took its name from the adjacent village of Mon- mouth, was in killed and wounded two hundred and twenty-nine.
A court-martial found Lee guilty of disobedience, misbehavior before the enemy, and disrespect to the commander-in-chief, and suspended him from command for twelve months. Congress confirmed the sentence, and in 1780, provoked by an impertinent letter, dismissed him from the service. His chief consolation in his disgrace was the most virulent railing against Washington.
When Clinton reached New York, his army went into quarters upon Manhattan, Staten, and Long Islands. Washington encamped his forces at New Brunswick, Elizabeth, Newark, Hackensack, and White Plains. Aaron Burr and other energetic young officers were sent on reconnoiter- ing expeditions to Bergen, Hoboken, and various points of observation, to obtain information concerning the intentions of the enemy. The French fleet commanded by Count D'Estaing anchored at the mouth of the Dela- ware on the 8th of July. A less rough voyage, and it might have inter- cepted Lord Howe's squadron. Having dispatched a frigate with the illustrious M. Gerard, the first French Minister, and Silas Deane, to Philadelphia (Congress having returned to that city on the 2d of July) the fleet followed Lord Howe to Sandy Hook, and would have entered and offered battle in New York Bay could pilots have been found to take its largest ships through the channel. New York City was thrown into the most violent commotion. The loyalists had the mortification of seeing the British fleet blockaded and insulted in their own harbor. The
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metropolis was indeed surrounded by an enemy. Clinton wrote to Germain that he should probably be compelled to retire to Halifax. Young Laurens was sent to Count D'Estaing as aid and interpreter. A frank and cordial correspondence with Washington finally induced the Count to trim his sails for Newport; and Greene and Lafayette were sent to join Sullivan in command of Rhode Island, who was to co-operate in an attempt to recapture that stronghold from the British. Lord Howe, whose intended successor, Admiral Byron, had not yet arrived, sailed in pursuit of the French. The two fleets were on the point of engaging when separated, wrecked, and scattered by a violent storm. The enter- prise against Rhode Island proved a failure in all respects, and the disappointment led to bitter jealousies between the Americans and their allies.
The ceremonials to be observed at the reception of the first minister plenipotentiary to the United States, were a matter of no little study. Richard Henry Lee, Samuel Adams, and Gouverneur Morris comprised the committee who drafted the form of presentation; this was discussed five days by Congress. It was necessary that the details should be in harmony with the peculiar condition of the government, therefore no absolute precedent could be followed.
On the memorable occasion Richard Henry Lee and Samuel Adams, in a " coach-and-six," waited upon the Minister at his house. Presently the Minister and the congressional delegates entered the coach together, the Minister's chariot following, with his secretary. The carriages having arrived at the State House, the Minister was conducted to his chair in the congress chamber, the President and Congress sitting. The Minister being seated, he gave his credentials into the hands of his secretary, who advanced and delivered them to the President. The secretary of Con- gress read and translated them, after which Mr. Lee announced the Min- ister to the President and Congress who all rose together; the Minister bowed to the President and to the Congress, they each bowed, and all seated themselves again. In a moment the Minister rose and made a speech to Congress, the members sitting; after which the President and the Congress rose, and the President pronounced an answer to the speech, the Minister standing; this being ended, all were once more seated. The President, Congress, and the Minister then again rose together, the Min- ister bowed to the President, who returned the salute, then to the Con- gress, who also bowed in return, and withdrew, attended home in the same manner in which he had been brought to the house. During this august scene the door of the congress chamber was thrown open, and about two hundred gentlemen of distinction were permitted to witness
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DESTRUCTION OF WYOMING.
the ceremony, among whom were several foreign noblemen. An ele- gant dinner given to the Minister by Congress was the final event of the day.
Ere these auspicious occurrences had warmed the heart and quickened the pulse of America, Western New York was crimsoned with blood. Niagara was a British post, the common rallying-place of Tories and savages, of refugees and vagabonds. Brandt had retired hither after St. Leger's repulse at Fort Stanwix. And here many a dark deed of ven- geance was planned. In June a party sallied forth, eleven hundred strong, composed of desperadoes and Indians, led by John Butler, formerly in some official connection with Sir John Johnson, and one of the valiant in the battle of Oriskany, who, after laying waste the country on the route, descended upon the fair settlement of Wyoming in the Susquehanna Valley, which consisted of eight townships each five miles square, mas- sacring its inhabitants in the most brutal and fiendish manner. The able-bodied male population - one thousand or more- were chiefly away in the army ; Colonel Zebulon Butler, an officer in the Continental army stationed at West Point, was home on a furlough, and gathering the old men and boys, and such of the farmers as he could hastily collect in the emergency, commanded the defense. But his force, all told, num- bered less than four hundred, and the horde of invaders, more than twice as numerous, knew the woods well, and had come to destroy and deal death, not to recover and hold. In the engagement nine tenths of the heroic defenders were killed and scalped. The British leader boastfully reported having burned a thousand houses and every mill in the valley. He omitted to state that in several instances men, women, and children were shut into buildings and all consumed together ; or that monsters in human shape, painted like Indians, took the lives of their nearest of kin with diabolical fury. A horrified group of survivors fled through a pass in the hills to the eastern settlements. Then the bloodthirsty marauders left the smoking scene of solitary desolation, and turned towards the region of Rochester to continue their terrible work. Early in November Walter, the son of John Butler, commanded the war-party that repeated the terrible drama of Wyoming at Cherry Valley. Human- ity itself was disgraced by the wholesale slaughter, and a thrill of horror vibrated from one end of the country to the other.
Washington passed much of the summer at White Plains, although he visited West Point frequently, and was at the various posts in New Jersey from time to time. On the 7th of August another disastrous fire Aug. 7. raged violently for several hours in New York City, commencing in Pearl Street, near Broad ; sixty-three houses and a number of stores
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
were consumed. The following day, in the midst of a heavy thunder- storm, a sloop at anchor in the East River, with two hundred and forty- eight barrels of gunpowder on board, was struck by lightning, and the explosion unroofed a number of houses, and demolished windows and furniture in every direction. Lord Stirling while in camp at White Plains obtained permission for his wife and daughter Kitty to visit his eldest daughter, Mrs. Robert Watts, in New York City, where they spent the month of August, and were treated with the utmost civility by the British officers. They found Mrs. Watts prostrated from the effects of the alarm of the fire and the explosion, and her husband "heartily sick of British tyranny." They spoke in their letters of courtesies received from Walter Rutherford, whose wife was Lord Stirling's sister ; from Andrew Elliot, collector of the port under the Crown ; from Lord Drummond, son of the Earl of Perth, who was in America to look after his father's interests as proprietor of East New Jersey ; from Nicholas Bayard, whose country- seat was on the eminence above Canal Street ; and from William Smith, the historian, afterwards chief justice of Canada. "They were our con- stant visitors, and desired to be remembered to you," wrote Lady Stirling to her husband. Smith had been an influential opponent of the British measures until a recent date, an intimate friend of Stirling, Governor Livingston, John Morin Scott, John Jay, and Gouverneur Morris. The latter had been a student of law in his office. Suddenly he was appre- hended, examined, and confined a state prisoner in Livingston Manor, for having sent intelligence to the enemy (it was said); and finally, with his wife and family, library, household effects, servants, chariot, and horses, was banished to New York City. On the same sloop with Smith were Major Colden, eldest son of the late Governor Colden, and Samuel Bayard, former secretary of the province, who for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the new State were ordered beyond the British lines.
Walter Rutherford lived in the fine substantial house of the sketch, which stood on the present site of the Astor House. The adjoining dwelling was the home of William Axtell, who prior to the war was one of the governor's council, and whose wife was the daughter of Abraham De Peyster, the treasurer. He had favored the American cause at the start, but when his estate came into the power of the conquerors his sen- timents changed, and he became a loyalist of the first magnitude. He had an elegant mansion in Flatbush, Long Island, and when commissioned as colonel of a regiment of loyalists the men raised, numbering about thirty, were encamped in his courtyard, apparently to guard his premises. Jones says he had a secretary, an aide-de-camp, a chaplain, a physician, and a surgeon in full pay. And to him was confided the power of grant-
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ing licenses to all the public-houses in the county, and passes over the Brooklyn Ferry, which were the sources of a large revenue.
New York City, with its piles of ruins and its poisonous prisons, was no longer the gay progressive metropolis of former years. The late fire had been less extensive that that of 1776, but the wealthy loyalists were great sufferers. The Cruger family lost six houses, Gerardus Duyckink seven, William Bayard six houses and stores, and Peter Mesier and his family not less than fifteen buildings. A strange village of huts had sprung up on the site of the fire of 1776, called " Can- vas Town," which was tenanted by banditti, and soldiers who ob- tained the means of dissipation H by plunder, or starving wretches Home of Walter Rutherford. Home of William Axtell. who turned highwaymen in despair; it was, in short, a hideous plague- spot. A sense of insecurity destroyed all comfort. No citizen dared walk out after sunset without a guard. Robberies were of nightly occur- rence. The faith pinned to the arms of Great Britain was becoming sadly weakened. The flight of Clinton from Philadelphia, chased across the Jerseys by Washington, the presence of a French fleet cruising off Sandy Hook, and the knowledge that the city was beleaguered on every side by the American army, were not conducive to happiness. The editors of the Tory newspapers exerted themselves to keep up the spirits of the anxious by furnishing exaggerated accounts of "rebel misfortune " and misery. They said Connecticut was in chaotic confusion all through her borders ; that in Maryland only forty recruits responded to the call of Congress ; that fevers were raging in Philadelphia and the people were longing for King George ; that the whole South was weary of the war, and would rise at the first landing of a British army and shake off the usurping tyranny of Congress ; that the inhabitants were starving and rebellious in Boston, and that all their food was transported from the South by a land- carriage of seventeen hundred miles ; in short, that the chief supplies of the Eastern States were wholly cut off, trade sunk, gold and silver gone, not a piece of coin to be seen anywhere, a cartload of the Continental currency not worth a dollar, and the "rebel army such a miserable set of ragged creatures as was never scraped together before." There were some who believed these statements, but the majority grimly trembled. The loyalists and refugees formed themselves into companies to aid in
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the defense of the city should it be besieged as expected, and commanded by Major David Matthews, paraded in the fields, making a fine ap- pearance.
The poverty-stricken were in a perishing condition, and the rich loyalists and many of the British officers contributed liberally to their needs. Trade had ceased, there was no employment for laborers, and provisions and fuel were scarce and extravagantly high. And if such was the condition of the inhabitants at large, what must the prisoners of war have suffered ! They were confined by thousands. In the Middle Dutch and other churches wounded men would crawl to the windows begging aid, and a sentinel, pistol in hand, would turn back the gifts of the charitable. In the gloomy old sugar-houses hundreds were chained, and those might almost as well have been who were allowed to walk about within their narrow confines. The coarsest food was doled out in scanty measure, and the men devoured it like hungry wolves, or ceased to eat at all. From ten to twenty died daily, and their remains were thrown into pits without a single rite of burial. In the old Provost, where officers chiefly were incarcerated, so closely were they packed that when their bones ached at night from lying on the hard planks, and they wished to turn, it was done by the word of command, and the whole human mass turned at once. In Wallabout Bay, across the river, the hulk of the Jersey, an old sixty-four gun-ship, unseaworthy, with masts and rigging gone, was a scene of human suffering, which even now at the end of a century chills the hand that would draw a pen picture however inadequate. No warmth in winter, no screen from the scorching summer sun, no physician, no clergyman, soothed or consoled the dying in that center of contagious disease, which was never cleansed, and constantly replenished with new victims. It is estimated that eleven thousand of its dead were buried on the Brooklyn shore. Many a New York citizen tried to alleviate the horrors of the prisons and prison-ships, for there were several of the latter, but military law prevailed; no communication with prisoners was allowed, and aid conveyed to them by stealth only doomed the benefactor to a similar fate. Washington was constantly doing all in his power to exchange prisoners ; and when he remonstrated with the British officers as to the emaciated and dying condition in which his brave men were returned to him, the reply came that they were lodged in roomy buildings and fed the same as the British soldiers.
Many of the citizens who remained in New York during the war, taking no active part in the unhappy disputes, had hoped to pursue their avocations undisturbed, or to protect their property interests by their presence. The Stuyvesants were of the latter class: Gerardus Stuyvesant
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resided in the old gubernatorial homestead ; his two sons occupied with their families the comparatively new mansions, known respectively as " Petersfield " and " The Bowery House."1 Frederick Philipse, third lord of Philipse Manor, was living in the city. He had intended in the beginning to maintain a strict neutrality ; but having no faith in the suc- cess of the American arms, and in constant intercourse with the husbands of his two sisters, Colonel Beverly Robinson and Colonel Roger Morris, who had joined the king's forces, he was soon suspected of favoring the enemy, and compelled to take the oath of allegiance to Congress or a final farewell of his ancestral home; thus he removed to New York. He was an ardent Churchman, and a courtly gentleman of scholarly tastes. He lived in a style of great magnificence. His wife, an imperious woman of fashion, was in the habit of appearing upon the roads of Westchester, skillfully reining four splendid jet black horses ; she was killed by a fall from her carriage just before the Revolution. Philipse mixed very little in public affairs, disliked politics, and opened his purse generously for all charitable purposes.
Andrew Hamersley, for whom Hamersley Street was named, an alder- man of the Dock Ward, and a vestryman of Trinity Church, was a rich importing merchant who unostentatiously went about doing good while the city was in gloom and despondency.2 The Revolution seriously im-
1 See sketches, Vol. I. 217 ; Map of Stuyvesant Bowery, Vol. I. 188.
2 Andrew Hamersley was born in 1725. His father was William Hamersley, of the same baronial family as Sir Hugh Hamersley, born in England in 1687 ; he was an officer in the British Navy, who resigned the service in 1716, and took up his abode in New York ; he became a shipping merchant in the Mediterranean trade, and was a vestryman of Trinity Church from 1731 to 1752. Of his three sons, Andrew was the only one who married ; his wife inherited the interests of one of the Lords Proprietors of New Jersey, which has been handed along in the slow process of division to the Hamersley family of the present day. Andrew Hamersley had three sons : 1. William, who was the first professor of the Institute of Medicine at Columbia College, having received his medical degree from Dr. Robertson, the historian, at Edinburgh, and was thirty years connected with the New York hospitals ; he married Elizabeth Van Cortlandt De Peyster, and of their two sons, Andrew was a distin- guished author, and William was mayor of Hartford. 2. Thomas, a gentleman of great learn- ing, who was pronounced by Lorenzo du Ponte the best Italian scholar in America ; he married Susan Watkins, daughter of Colonel John W. Watkins and Judith, fifth daughter of Governor William Livingston of New Jersey. 3. Louis Carré Hamersley, who married in Virginia ; his sons are A. Gordon Hamersley, who married Sarah, daughter of John Mason, and John William Hamersley, who married Catharine Livingston, daughter of Judge James and Sarah Helen Hooker of Dutchess County. Mrs. Hooker was the daughter of John Reade, for whom Reade Hoeck (Red Hook) was named, who was the son of Joseph Reade, one of the governor's council (see Vol. I. 756), for whom Reade Street in New York City was named ; Lawrence Reade, the father of Joseph Reade, was born and married in England, removing to New York in the early part of the eighteenth century ; he was descended from a line of wealthy British noblemen of the name, who for centuries were a power in themselves, Sir VOL. II. 14 401
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HISTORY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
paired his fortune, but an inherited estate in the West Indies, from a maternal uncle, Louis Carré, a Huguenot, subsequently retrieved the dis- aster as far as his children were concerned. He was one of those who made exceptional exertions to alleviate the anguish of the sick and dying prisoners ; and he inspired universal confidence through the strength, beauty, and symmetry of his Christian character. His wife was the grand-daughter of Thomas Gordon, son of Sir George Gordon. Thomas Gordon was one of the twenty-seven original Lords Proprietors of East New Jersey ; he came to live in this country in 1684, and was made one of the governor's council, and chief justice of the Supreme Court of New Jersey. Lord Drummond while in New York was a guest of Andrew Hamersley, and pronounced his household one of the loveliest within the circle of his knowledge.
Military rule in New York was far from being agreeable to her citizens. They felt aggrieved because the courts of justice were closed, and be- lieved that the laws of the land ought to prevail. It was to secure the re-establishment of constitutional civil authority that the petition to the Howes, in the autumn of 1776, was projected by Chief Justice Horse- manden, Judge Ludlow, and others, and signed by nearly one thousand men of all degrees and conditions in life, and of all denominations of Christians. Lord Howe received the delegation who presented it with courtesy, read the petition, and promised to consult his brother, Sir William, who was then in New Jersey with the army. But no answer was ever vouchsafed to the petitioners.1 It was perceived that
William Reade and Sir Richard Reade being his more immediate ancestors. The mother of Mrs. Hooker was Catharine Livingston, great-granddaughter of the first Lord of Livingston Manor, and granddaughter of Colonel Henry Beekman, "the great patentee " of Dutchess County. The only sister of Mrs. Hooker's mother married Commissary-General Hake, and their only daughter was the mother of Frederick De Peyster, president of the New York His- torical Society. One of the sisters of Mrs. Hooker married Nicholas William Stuyvesant ; another sister married Philip Kearney. The children of John William Hamersley and Cath- arine Livingston Hooker are : 1. Mary, died in infancy; 2. James Hooker ; 3. Virginia, married Cortlandt De Peyster Field ; 4. Helen ; 5. Catharine L., married John Henry Liv- ingston, great-grandson of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston.
1 Jones's Hist. N. Y. Vol. II. 116, 117, 118, 433- 453. " No single incident in the Revolution," writes De Lancey, " has been more misunderstood, and none more misrepresented, than this attempt of the people of New York to obtain the re-establishment of constitutional civil power in place of military rule." The petition was the first step that could be taken in that direction. The style and language was only that in common use at the time in public documents, and no evidence in itself of "Slavish Submission." Historical writers have through the entire century past spoken of the petition as a " complimentary address," etc., and called the names of the signers the "Black List." "These misrepresentations," con- tinues De Lancey, "it is believed, in case of later writers especially, have been simply the result of mistake and misapprehension of the object and purport of the petition." To the document is attached a certificate from William Waddell and James Downes, who superin- tended the signing, that the signatures were all affixed voluntarily.
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the Howes designed to govern by the law military wherever the conquests of the royal army extended, which many of the most intelligent loyalists esteemed a violation of right and inconsistent with the manifest design of the Ministry. Thus the whole city, incorporated by a royal charter, became virtually a garrison town; and the inhabitants writhed under the arbitrary courts erected by the proclamation of a military commander.
During the latter part of September Chief Justice Horsemanden died at his residence in Flatbush, in the eighty-eighth year of his age, and was interred in Trinity Churchyard. At this time numerous New York families whose names have become familiar to the reader occupied country-seats in the fair, rich town of Flatbush, long noted for its pleasant homes ; Mayor David Matthews, Augustus Van Cortlandt, Miles Sherbrooke, David Clarkson, Mrs. Van Horne, Jacob Suydam, Major Moncreiff, and Theophylact Bache were among the householders. Captain Alexander Graydon, taken prisoner at the surrender of Fort Washington, was billeted upon the Suydams ; and up to the 15th of June, 1778, saw little prospect of an exchange. That night William Mariner, one of the daring spirits of the day, crossed from New Jersey with eleven men, landed at New Utrecht, made a dash upon Flatbush, liberated Graydon, and carried off Major Moncreiff and Mr. Bache, reaching Middletown at six o'clock the next morning. The prisoners were taken to Morristown, and soon after exchanged ; the object of their capture having been to obtain the means through which to procure the release of some American officers in the New York prisons.
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