Tour Stop No. 1
The BATTERY
“I had no idea of finding a place in America… Such as city that a very few in England can rival it is in its show, gentility, and hospitality.”
-British Naval Officer, 1756
The CAPITAL of
BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
By the mid-1700s, many depicted New York as the unofficial capital of the thirteen colonies. London’s Board of Trade, which steered policy for the empire, had long argued that it should be the official capital if the colonies were ever consolidated. At the start of the French and Indian War (1954-63), it became the military headquarters of British North America. By then, its trade was second only to Philadelphia and London itself. And it was the only city to get information, or ships, directly from England. Visitors from Europe frequently described it as “London in miniature.” Seen as a model colony, it was rumored to be the king’s favorite. Yet it produced the largest and most fearsome protest at the start of the Imperial Crisis (1763-75).
In the early 1700s, New York was just a small imperial outpost, like most in the empire. No more than a village really, the city had less than 12,000 people and 1,000 houses, crammed into the southern tip of Manhattan. It was a town where everything lay within a couple of hours’ distance and nearly everyone was a neighbor. Today’s metropolitan region had an even smaller population, living in a few isolated hamlets, nestled between farms, orchards, meadows, swamps, forests, and ponds.
But it had one of the world’s best natural harbors. And lying closer to the “sugar islands” (Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica), the most lucrative part of Britain’s empire, it gradually replaced Boston as the leading northern port. Philadelphia had a busier dock, with a more developed hinterland and larger population. Yet by 1730 already, George II described New York as “exceedingly necessary… to our kingdom.” By 1740, it was the third-largest port across the British empire. Crowds gathered at the East River waterfront every April and October to welcome the ships, touching off weeks of frenzied shopping over perfume, handkerchiefs, ribbons, lace, umbrellas, snuff, gloves, and other luxury goods. By 1755, there were 477 vessels in harbor. By 1763, there were nearly 700. No place consumed more British wares.
This detail from Bernard Ratzer’s Plan of the City of New York in North America (1770) visualizes the mid-century growth, with estates and farms creeping up Manhattan island. By 1760, James DeLancey, perhaps the richest man in all the colonies, was breaking ground on a 339-acre housing development in today’s Greenwich Village, on the “post road” leading to Boston.
William Burgis’s A south prospect of ye flourishing city of New York (published in 1719, with only slight variation in later years) offers a rare view of the city’s waterfront. By mid-century, it would have been a thicket of sails.
This watercolor of the British evacuation from New York in 1783, published in the journal of a British warrant officer named Robert Raymond, is the best contemporary visualization of Fort George and its enormous scale.
The dotted line above today’s City Hall indicates where the “upper” (main) barracks stood at the northern edge of colonial New York. During the Revolution, another three buildings were constructed.
The mechanics, shopkeepers, grocers, carpenters, druggists, printers, and other middle-class artisans who clustered in the North Ward, at the center of New York, benefited greatly, too. As did tavern-owners, innkeepers, and the mass of sailors, cart-men, and ordinary laborers — everyone servicing the mass of British soldiers. Jobs, wages, housing, and trade increased rapidly. Within a generation, especially during the French and Indian War (1754-63), New York doubled in population and quadrupled its built footprint. The city still had the same feeling of intimacy. But it had changed enormously, becoming perhaps the most important entrepôt after London.
Thus, just a dozen years before the Revolution, visitors to New York would have found a thriving city, relishing the high point of “the first British empire.” By 1763, Britain had gained control of early global trade, ports and shipping lanes in the Atlantic Ocean connecting merchants to markets in the eastern Mediterranean, west Africa, India, and China. It had also ousted its main rival, France, from the largest part of its empire, North America, while relegating Spain to Florida. Britain now had all of the land from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River, plus larger swaths of the Caribbean and Canada. And New York had played a key role in those conquests. It hoped to enjoy the spoils.
This map, created by the surveyor general Samuel Holland in 1776, reveals a far more developed city. Isaac Bangs echoed other rebel soldiers who came to New York that year, saying the city “vastly surpass[ed] my expectations.” John Adams noted its “splendor and opulence,” but complained that New Yorkers “talk very loud and fast.” Visitors from Europe almost uniformly described New York as “the most splendid Town in North America.”
New York also had enormous strategic importance. Lying at the mouth of the Hudson, it offered greater continental access than any port below Canada: over 315 miles of river. Officials in London described it as "the only bulwark and safe guard of all Their Majesty's plantations.” For that reason, it was chosen as military headquarters for North America in 1755.
As New York’s value to the British empire had grown, so had its fortification. Royal officials bolstered the old Dutch barricades on the East and Harlem rivers, and transformed the largely wooden Fort Amsterdam into a giant fortress of stone, renamed Fort George; easily the city’s largest edifice. The battery walls around it had 100 cannons guarding the port, and by extension the Hudson. New York also had the only large, permanent garrison in North America, most of whom lived in a set of barracks at the northern edge of town, the city’s biggest housing complex. These military buildings defined New York’s geography. Sandwiching the population at both ends, they also became the major flashpoints of protest before the Revolution.
New York gained enormously from Britain’s expansion, none more so than sea captains who served as privateers, attacking rival merchant ships and building small fortunes without royal connection. Many of the figures who joined the Sons of Liberty came from this background, most importantly Isaac Sears. Between 1739 and 1763, roughly 200 of these men were able to seize upwards of 2 million pounds, an “immense accession of wealth” that produced many of the city’s nouveau riche.
The biggest windfalls came in the French and Indian War (1754-63). For nearly a decade, New York served as the “general magazine of Arms and Military stores” for British North America in what is often considered “the first global conflict.” The lawyer William Smith noted “Universal joy” among the city’s merchants when the fighting began. New York’s assembly began spending unprecedented amounts of money to supply His Majesty’s Forces with “gargantuan quantities of food, clothing, shoes, alcohol, horses, wagons, and other materiel.” The boom “staggered contemporary imaginations,” not least for rival merchants in Philadelphia and Boston, who fumed in jealousy as 25,000 soldiers and 14,000 marines poured into New York.
The families which had long ruled the colony — the DeLanceys, Livingstons, Alexanders, Beekmans, Morrises, and others — became unimaginably wealthy during this period, too; by contemporary standards. Expanding into luxury goods, realty, and slave trading, they built lavish mansions in the South Ward around Fort George (“crown town”) and the West Ward on the Hudson River, decorated in the finest Georgian style. Broad Way became a promenade for dandies, showcasing the latest fashions. Many visitors compared it to London’s Broad Street.
The petit bourgeois clustered in the Dock Ward, east of these neighborhoods, where their houses doubled as storefronts, near the East River waterfront. Yet those narrow cobblestone streets were remarkable: shaded by elm, linden, and beech trees during the hot summers, illuminated by lamps at night, and patrolled by watchmen. Their roofs, painted in dazzling color, had balconies looking out at sparking bays filled with oyster, turtle, and lush varieties of fish, passing seal, whale, and dolphin, and vast woodlands — the rich smell of wildflower and fruit tree greeting visitors miles to sea. A few of these petty traders even managed to join the old lords, building country manors with elaborate gardens in upper Manhattan and other retreats like Long Island, where “gentlemen” took up sports like horse-racing, fox-hunting, cockfighting, and sailing.
This map done by the surveyor James Lynn, originally published in Martha J. Lamb’s History of the city of New York (1876), outlines the city’s “wards” (neighborhoods) in 1728.
The POLITICS and
ECONOMICS of EMPIRE
Like most colonies, New York was established by merchants — of the Dutch West India Company, the world’s first multinational. Its business had always been business.
The British victory in the French and Indian War carried the promise of even greater wealth. In part because of this expectation, New York’s population grew 20 percent during the late 1760s and early 1770s. By then, it was already the second-largest city in the colonies, roughly twice as large as Boston, with 25,000 residents. Just as many people lived in today’s outer boroughs, with perhaps another 113,000 in the rest of the state.
Home to perhaps the richest merchants and the biggest landowners on the continent, the “state” had the reputation of being a model colony. Such was the devotion that even after New Yorkers staged the largest rebellion in 1765 (the debut year of street protest in the colonies), elite families commissioned a gold-plated statue of George III to be erected on Bowling Green. The only statue of the king in North America, it was extraordinarily large and barely resembled George III in face or dress, modeled instead on a famous sculpture of Marcus Aurelius. New York’s leaders were thus likening the young monarch to the most powerful emperor of ancient Rome, now that England had become a modern equivalent.
By the mid-1700s, after centuries of reform, England had established the world’s first capitalist economy — producing growth rates of 0.5 percent in some years, a quintupling over the global historic average. The radical growth of coal-powered industrialism was still many decades off. But elites in colonial outposts like New York were enjoying a “consumer revolution,” as Britain made its first steps towards becoming “the workshop of the world.”
Agostino Carlini RA, Model for an Equestrian Statue of King George III, 1769. Royal Academy of Arts, London. There is no (accurate) contemporary image of the statue built in New York, famously toppled after rebels heard the Declaration of Independence.
Edward Topham, The Macaroni Print Shop, 1772, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Some historians believe the material culture of the 1700s — the renowned architecture, landscaping, artwork, and furniture of the Georgian Age — helped bind the colonies ideologically. In NewYork, the leading consumer of British goods, visitors compared Broad Way to London's Bond Street, where “gentlemen” and “ladies” similarly displayed all the latest wares. The fashion craze also destabilized class and gender norms, the cartoon above lampooning men who dressed, spoke, or behaved in a feminine or androgynous manner.
But the colonies were colonies: designed to be dependent. As such, they had to purchase finished goods from Britain and take unwanted paupers, criminals, and rebels, while providing the cheap raw materials and labor that allowed the liberal empire to grow. It was a “mercantile” system, with natural resources, people, capital, and manufactures circulating through protected markets, policed by the world’s most powerful navy. Many non-elites found opportunity in the order. But it was designed to flow capital upwards, within and between different parts of the realm. For many, the wealth Britain offered was unrivaled, as was not just its military power but the liberties that a minority enjoyed under its semi-democratic government. Yet if these benefits restrained protest during the Imperial Crisis, the constraints spurred rebellion. As one New Yorker explained: “Without the support of Britain, America must become tributary to some other nation; without America, Britain would cease to be opulent.” By the mid-1700s, roughly half of all British shipping was engaged in North America. The merchant elite in ports like New York, quite rightly, saw themselves as partners in the empire, and were shocked that Parliament did not share this view.
"This Actuall Survey of London, Westminster & Southwark," by Philip Lea, in partnership with Robert Morden and Christopher Browne, originally published in 1690. By 1763, London surpassed Paris as the largest city in Europe. With roughly 750,000 people, it rivaled the world’s biggest metropolises, Thailand’s Ayutthaya, Turkey’s Constantinople, and China’s Beijing.
Most colonists in North America were engaged in farming, which produced little capital outside the surplus big landowners made. But New York was an industrial hub. Local goods were “preserved” (finished and packed) in workshops and then exported to Britain, the West Indies, and southern Europe — in that order of scale. By 1769, the city shipped over thirty different products (e.g., grain, flour, pig iron, shingles, barrel staves, pearl, lumber, potash). These goods were byproducts of “settlement,” forests cut down, wildlife killed, and minerals extracted from the interior. And most of that industrialism was still rural: dependent on wood and water, the most powerful sources of energy. Like all cities, New York thus relied on the agricultural villages around it for the goods that it either consumed and prepared for export in 250 warehouses, distilleries, and refineries.
To a much smaller degree, the city was a port for regional trade as well, serving the hinterland and eastern seaboard. Goods arrived from big towns along the Hudson, the Long Island Sound, and destinations further north and south. But New Yorkers had to import textiles and tableware from small manufacturers in England, tropical goods like sugar and coffee from the Caribbean, and exotic items, like calicos from India and tea from China, from more distant corners of the empire. New York’s press advertised thousands of these items, which arrived monthly on British ships, insured and financed by London’s capital markets.
By design, imports far outweighed exports — in 1750, five times more. The relationship was profitable enough, the imbalance off-set by light enforcement of British rules on trade and currency, or military spending in wartime. But in the situation changed dramatically after the French and Indian War.
The IMPERIAL CRISIS Begins
Under Robert Walpole, Britain’s “first prime minister” (1725-42), London had severely relaxed enforcement of colonial regulations and taxed North America very lightly. New York flourished alongside the other colonies during this half-century of Whig party rule. But the era of “salutary neglect” came to a sudden end in 1763.
Technically, colonies had long been forbidden to establish local currency, forcing merchants to rely on the British for credit. In practice, New Yorkers used local paper money backed in mortgages to get around this rule, like other colonies. But in 1764, Parliament outlawed this practice with the Currency Act, soon after George Grenville became prime minister. The restriction severely curtailed the ability of importers, exporters, shipowners, insurers, wholesalers, and retailers to prosper against competitors in London.
Merchants and big farmers had also long traded with Britain’s rivals, the French, Spanish, and Dutch, even though it was nominally verboten during wartime and subject to tax in peacetime. The Hovering Act of 1763 severely curtailed these illegal markets, too, making it far harder to profit on Britain’s greatest source of revenue, sugar. The Plantation Act of 1764 went further, taxing molasses from the West Indies — even though North America’s colonists had enabled Caribbean planters to focus on the “cash crop” by providing food and other necessities which required land.
These laws marked the beginning of the Imperial Crisis. Boston was the first to act, petitioning London. New York was the first to support them. Rich merchants feared their wealth might shrink. Giant landowners worried their holdings would be taxed. Both factions dreaded the prospect of revolt from below.
Detail from The Great Financier, or British Economy for the Years 1763, 1764, 1765, showing the new prime minister, George Grenville, holding a scale that demonstrated the staggering debt that Britain had racked up creating its empire. Parliament began enforcing and imposing economic regulations and taxes to pay off its debt. Like few of his peers, Grenville also saw that North America would be increasingly difficult to govern now that Britain had ousted France from the continent.
Ten Views in the Island of Antigua (1823). Sugar was the most profitable crop of the late 1600s and 1700s. Most of the 12 million Africans sold into the Caribbean and South America came during this period. And many of the rising merchant class in Britain were absentee landlords in Jamaica, Barbados, or Antigua.
The first act in this wave of taxes and regulations was the Proclamation of 1763. Like other ports, New York depended on colonial settlement inland for growth, and the British military for defense and expansion. Upstate, six nations of Haudenosaunee controlled the mountainous western and northern parts of the state. This so-called “Iroquois” Confederation (from the Algonkian word, meaning “vicious killers”) was the most powerful Indigenous force in North America. They supported the British in the French and Indian War, against their own Indigenous rivals. But colonials expected to seize their land after the war. Instead, King George III shocked colonials by declaring it off-limits.
For wealthy speculators, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, it meant a fortune lost. For poor farmers, the news was even more disturbing. Conquest and disease had made North America a “New World” for Europe’s peasantry. Yet by the early 1700s, landowners had recreated vast holdings, like the churches and nobles in the “Old World.” In New York, just a dozen families owned three-quarters of all royally granted territory — including 1.75 million acres in the Lower Hudson Valley.
In 1756, the Lords of Trade restricted grants to 1,000 acres. But James DeLancey, Cadwallader Colden, William Tryon, and New York’s other governors ignored the edict, rewarding in-laws, friends, and merchants who provided bribes. The result was growing unrest on the vast manors of Frederick Philipse, Beverly Robinson, Philip Schuyler, Robert Livingston, and others in the Hudson Valley, extending into the “rent wars” of the 1800s. Unrest simmered all through the Imperial Crisis, as both tenant farmers and Natives sought land from these estates. Although colonists frequently ignored the Proclamation of 1763 (relaxed in ‘68), it became an oft-cited cause for rebellion.
The “Iroquois” Confederation, after the Tuscarora were adopted in 1722. Graphic created by Eric Doxtator (2017). After epidemics of influenza, smallpox, and measles devastated the other five Haudenosaunee nations in the 1600s, they adopted many from the Canoy, Nanticoke, Tutelo, and Shawnee. They also raided Algonquin-speaking groups for captives, as well as other Haudenosaunee. By the 1760s, the Six Nations numbered just 10,000. Even still, they were the most powerful Indigenous force on the continent — in part because New York was thinly settled, with greater numbers of Indigenous than most colonies, controlling more land.
Daniel Paterson, Cantonment of His Majesty's forces in N. America according to the disposition now made & to be compleated as soon as practicable taken from the general distribution dated at New York 29th. March (1767), Library of Congress. This map shows the enormous swath of Native land gained in the French and Indian War.
The Proclamation was compensation for the Indigenous, who did much of the fighting in the French and Indian War. It was also Realpolitik. With colonials flooding into what had been New France, an Ottawa chief named Pontiac united Natives up and down the frontier in a rebellion that stretched from 1763 to 1766. In New York, the idea of a Native leader uniting the Indigenous reawakened fears the city had not known since Willem Kieft nearly destroyed the colony in 1643-45. The legislature begged the acting governor, Cadwallader Colden, to request troops from the other colonies to put down the “savage Race of Vermin.” The petition added: “their, as well as our, very Existence” was at stake.
As a surveyor, Colden had grown contemptuous of the great landlords and developed empathy for the Natives. He published a number of works, hoping to soften colonial views of the Indigenous, and even lived among them. But he was also “unbending, intolerant, tactless,” and fiercely royalist. Outraging many in New York, he upheld the Proclamation.
To enforce it, and protect the French in British Canada from illegal settlement, London stationed 10,000 troops in North America, too — another shock. Across the colonial period, Britain had never kept more than 3,500 soldiers in the colonies — often just a few hundred, usually in one place (less than 2,000 protecting the empire’s crown jewel, the sugar islands). Colonists had welcomed the military against other imperial powers and Natives. But the point now, as one British official put it, was to keep the colonies “as near as possible to the Ocean” and “subservient to the Commerce of their Mother Country.”
Nowhere was resentment greater than in New York, which had the most troops as the military headquarters of the colonies. Gen. Thomas Gage (pictured left) served as the leading military authority on the continent, speaking regularly with all its governors, customs officials, merchants, and superintendents for Indian Affairs. In 1766, he was forced to send troops into the Lower Hudson Valley, when a tenant riot erupted after two years in which Colden granted vast tracts of land in the Green Mountains (Vermont) to New York’s elite families. Violence returned in 1773-74, after Colden gave the land barons another 2 million acres.
Before, New Yorkers usually saw the British as the guarantors of their prosperity. Now, with the various regulations and taxes of 1763-64, they saw them as the cause of intense depression. Resentment exploded in 1765, when Parliament enacted the StampAct.
Robert Griffing’s Unconquered depicts three Seneca warriors staring down a British fort in Pittsburgh after Pontiac’s Rebellion. The artist’s depiction conveys a vivid reminder of the existential threat settler-colonialism posed.
Gen. Thomas Gage served as commander-in-chief of British North America during the Imperial Crisis, from his command in New York York (until he was relocated to Boston in 1774). A noble who served in the French and Indian War and oversaw the response to Pontiac’s Rebellion, Gage married Margaret Kemble, a scion of New York’s most elite families (the Van Cortlandts, DeLanceys, Bayards, and Schuylers). They lived just outside Fort George.
DEPRESSION & REBELLION
The Revolution sprang from the enormous debt Britain accrued creating its first global empire. Its deficit had doubled fourteen times in the 1700s. By the start of the Imperial Crisis, interest payments on the £42 million and military spending ate up more than three-quarters of its budget. Britain now also had to police vast new holdings, and the British were already one of the most heavily taxed people on Earth. So Parliament began squeezing the colonies.
These laws have long been depicted as radical because they imposed “taxation without representation.” But that was hardly novel. Even in Great Britain, just 215,000 men in 3 million could vote. What they actually did was make it far more difficult to avoid or cheat regulation of the most important aspects of the colonial economy. In smaller parts of Britain’s empire, subjects had to submit. But North America had roughly a quarter the population of Great Britain, spread over a much vaster territory. It was the one realm able to put up resistance.
English holdings overseas, 1700 (above) and the United Kingdom’s first global empire, 1763 (below)
Americans enjoyed perhaps the highest living standard of any people under state rule, and the lowest tax rate — just a sixth of what the English paid. But ports were severely dependent on the imperial trade, and thus faced severe consequences from the regulations of 1763-65. The depression arguably fell hardest on New York. By 1765, many believed the cost of living had doubled. Under the new laws, creditors ran short on capital and demanded payment from merchants, who requisitioned debt from artisans, who stopped hiring. Soon the entire city was affected. The new debtor prison filled rapidly, alongside beggars in the streets. Wealthy churches funded temporary public works, but quickly reverted to evictions and forcing “paupers” into labor. As the gap between rich and poor stretched to a breaking point, feelings of betrayal replaced love of the empire. Poverty had grown in absolute and relative terms during the 1700s. But it would only mount over the next decade. Where the average colonial had enjoyed a higher standard of living than his counterpart in England at the start, by the end of the Imperial Crisis roughly a third of the population in “big towns” were in poverty. Ports like New York were thus the most radicalized, and the first to protest.
This detail from John Wolcott Adams and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes’s draft of the Castello Plan offers an up-close view of the area in 1660. By the 1760s, the battery stretched from the northwestern tip of Fort George to Whitehall, the largest and busiest inlet — at the end of Broad Street (the canal on the right), the only wharf big enough for military ships to lay anchor.
Fort George became the primary target of protest in this era, as the supreme emblem of British rule. The first major event came in October 1765, when the city erupted over the Stamp Act. Thousands marched down Broad Way, smashing thousands of windows in the elite mansions along the way, before gathering outside the fort. The Great Riot lasted ten hours. The next day, Lt. Gov. Colden reported anonymous death threats, seemingly from unemployed or destitute maritime workers, a quarter of New York’s labor-force. That afternoon, Robert Livingston Sr., the dominant political figure in the colonial assembly, reported that merchants calling themselves the Sons of Liberty had pledged a boycott, and that an even more mysterious group calling itself the Sons of Neptune intended to storm the fort. It was “a mad project,” for which he could think of no precedent.
Gen. Gage warned that New York’s military stores, housed outside the fort, would quickly fall into the hands of a mob, unleashing “a Civil War.” Colden ordered the garrison strengthened. But its engineer John Montresor made clear the fort, and its naval battery, would fall to domestic assault. So, in another unprecedented act, the new governor came in promising to demilitarize the city. In the months that followed, demonstrations grew so large and violent that officials living at the Governor’s House inside the fort had to move onto warships in the harbor because of daily threats of violence. As the historian Pauline Maier observed, no colony put forward a stronger rebellion in 1765, the inauguration of street protest in the colonies — just two years after New York delighted in being the unofficial headquarters of British rule.
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On the commercial rise of New York, see Edwin T. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York until 1898 (Oxford, 2000).
On New York as the imagined capital, see Milton Klein, “Shaping the American Tradition: The Microcosm of Colonial New York,” New York History, 59, no. 2 (1978): 173-97.
On New York as military headquarters of British North America, see Rohit T. Aggarwala, “I want a Packet to arrive,” New York History 98, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 7-39.
On the French and Indian War, see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (Knopf, 2000) and Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W.W. Norton, 2016).
On the “Iroquois” Confederation, see Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Knopf, 2006); Daniel K. Richter, et al., eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: the Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800 (Penn State University Press, 2003); and Collin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
On British mercantilism and its impact on New York and other port cities, see Serena R. Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); David Waldstreicher and Staughton Lynd, “Free Trade, Sovereignty and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (October 2011); Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Harvard University Press, 2000); Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980); and Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton University Press, 1965).
On the pivotal role of cities in the Revolution, see Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (Yale University Press, 2010) and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2007).
On military geography in New York, see John Gilbert McCurdy, “From Fort George to the Fields: The Public Space and Military Geography of Revolutionary New York City,” Journal of Urban History 4, no. 4 (2018).