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
While Virginia and Massachusetts have long dominated the history of colonial America, by the mid-late 1700s contemporaries often depicted New York as the “capital Province.” And visitors from Europe frequently described the port at the southern tip of Manhattan as “London in miniature,” figures in the northern and southern colonies likewise calling it a “Cittadel to all the others.” The Board of Trade, which coordinated policy in the British empire, argued consistently from the early 1700s that New York City ought to be the headquarters of the North American colonies, the largest swath of the imperium.
But until the mid-century, it was just a small imperial outpost, like most in the empire. No more than a village, really, New York had less than 12,000 people and 1,000 houses. 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.
What it did have, though, was one of the world’s best natural harbors. And location, location, location. Lying closer to England’s “sugar islands” — (Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica), the most lucrative part of the empire— New York gradually replaced Boston as the leading northern entrepôt. Philadelphia remained the busiest dock, with a more developed hinterland and larger population. Yet by 1730 already, George II described the city as “exceedingly necessary… to our kingdom.” By 1740, it was the largest port in the empire, after Philadelphia and London itself. Crowds gathered in lower Manhattan every April and October to welcome English vessels, touching off weeks of frenzied shopping over perfume, handkerchiefs, ribbons, lace, umbrellas, snuff, gloves, and other luxury goods. By 1755, the city had 477 ships in port, a sevenfold growth on the Dutch era. By 1763, it had nearly 700. No other 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 thirteen colonies, was breaking ground on a 339-acre housing development in today’s Greenwich Village, on the “post road” leading to Boston.
William Burgis’ A south prospect of ye flourishing city of New York , published in 1719 (with slight variations in later years) offers a rare view of the East River waterfront. By mid-century, it would have been a thicket of sails.
New York gained enormously from Britain’s wars of imperial expansion, none more so than sea captains and merchants who became “privateers” (or mercenaries, raiding enemy ships) without royal title or connection. Many of the figures who became leaders in the Sons of Liberty, and Sons of Neptune, came from this background, including the ubiquitous “Sam Adams of New York,” Isaac Sears. Taking “prizes” for Britain in the wars against France, Spain, and others between 1739 and 1763, 200 New Yorkers 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 / Seven Years War. For nearly a decade, in what is often described as “the first global conflict,” New York served as the “general magazine of Arms and Military stores” for the King’s forces in North America. The future loyalist William Smith noted “Universal joy” among the merchants when the fighting began. New York’s colonial assembly began spending unprecedented amounts of money to supply the British with “gargantuan quantities of food, clothing, shoes, alcohol, horses, wagons, and other materiel.” The boom “staggered contemporary imaginations,” not least for men in Philadelphia like Benjamin Franklin, jealously watching the vast majority of Britain’s 25,000 soldiers and 14,000 marines pour into New York.
The families which had long ruled the colony — the DeLanceys, Livingstons, Alexanders, Beekmans, Morrises, and others — became unimaginably wealthy by colonial standards. Expanding into luxury goods, realty, and slave trading, they built lavish mansions, decorated in the finest Georgian style, in “crown town” (the South Ward, around the fort) and the Hudson waterfront (or West Ward, facing Broad Way). The street became a promenade for “macaroni,” or dandies showcasing the latest fashions of the “consumer revolution.” Many compared it to London’s Broad Street. The less elite clustered in the Dock Ward, east of these neighborhoods, where their houses doubled as storefronts, near the main commercial waterfront, the East River. A place of nouveau riche, the narrow cobblestone streets (e.g., Queen, Pearl, Crown, and Hanover) were 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 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 watercolor of the British evacuation from New York, published in the maritime journal of the British warrant officer Robert Raymond, offers the best contemporary visualization of Fort George and its enormous scale.
The dotted line above, over today’s City Hall, indicates where the “upper” (main) barracks once stood at the northern edge of the colonial city.
But 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 from England’s wars, too. So did tavern-owners, innkeepers, and the mass of sailors, cart-men, and ordinary laborers who lived along the river in the notorious East Ward. With everyone servicing the constant mill of British soldiers, jobs, wages, housing, and trade increased handsomely for more than a generation. Before the end, New York doubled in population and quadrupled its built footprint. The city retained the same feeling of intimacy. But it had changed enormously during the mid-1700s, becoming in many ways the unofficial capital of British North America, perhaps the most important city in the empire 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 Britain’s “first” global empire. By the start of the Imperial Crisis in 1763, Britain had defeated the western European empires in a long series of wars for control of early global trade, ports and shipping lanes connecting to markets in the eastern Mediterranean, west Africa, India, and China. As a result, it all but removed the French and Spanish from North America, gaining control of all the land from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River, plus larger swaths of the Caribbean and Canada. New York played a key role in that expansion. And it hoped to enjoy the spoils.
This map, created by the surveyor general Samuel Holland, reveals a far more developed city in 1776. Visitors from Europe almost uniformly described New York as “the most splendid Town in North America.” The rebel Isaac Bangs echoed other colonists that year in saying it“vastly surpass[ed] my expectations.” John Adams noted its “splendor and opulence,” but complained that New Yorkers “talk very loud and fast.”
New York also had enormous military importance. Lying at the mouth of the Hudson River, it offered greater continental access than any port below Halifax. That included the Montreal-Albany corridor, often assumed to be continentally strategic in the North American theater of the wars that raged between England and France from 1689 onwards. Officials in London described it as "the only bulwark and safe guard of all Their Majesty's plantations.” For that reason, and because it was the only city in North America to get ships directly from England (the fast-sailing, largely mail-carrying packets), it was chosen as military headquarters for the North American colonies in 1755, at the start of the misleadingly named Seven Years or French and Indian war. New York became the regular staging-port in that conflict, and it provided the British with the largest fleet of privateers in the colonies, by far.
As New York’s economic value grow, so did its fortification. Royal officials bolstered the old Dutch barricades on the East and Harlem rivers, and likewise transformed the largely wooden Fort Amsterdam into a giant fortress of stone, Fort George, easily New York’s largest edifice. The battery, or cannon-mounted walls outside it, guarded the harbor from rival imperial ships, protecting the colony itself and 315 miles of the Hudson. The city also had the only large, permanent garrison in North America. The soldiers lived in a set of barracks at the northern edge of town, which similarly constituted New York’s biggest housing complex. The military, in other words, literally defined the geography, sandwiching the population at both ends — the key sites of protest during the Imperial Crisis.
This map done by the surveyor James Lynn, originally published in Martha J. Lamb’s History of the city of New York (1876), shows the wards (or, neighborhoods) in 1728.
The POLITICS and
ECONOMICS of EMPIRE
Like most colonies, New York was established by merchants— the world’s first multinational, the Dutch West India Company — only became royal property later, once its profitability was attained. So it was perhaps only natural that during the mid-1700s so many New Yorkers identified as Englishmen. The city’s business had always been business.
Britain’s expansion had brought peace and prosperity to a colony that had often been unstable in harder times. And the vastly larger empire that New Yorkers helped secured carried the promise of even greater wealth: all the land and natural resources over the eastern mountain range, waiting to be cultivated and extracted. Reflecting this speculative optimism, New York’s population grew 20 percent from the late 1760s to the early 1770s. By then, it was already the second-largest city in North America, roughly twice as large as Boston, Charleston, or Newport, with 25,000 residents. Just as many lived in the outer boroughs, with perhaps another 113,000 upstate and on Long Island.
New York had the reputation of being a model “royal colony,” rumored to be the King’s favorite. Such was the devotion that even after the first major wave of protest during the Imperial Crisis, the city commissioned a large gold-plated statue of George III to be erected on Bowling Green, just outside the Fort. The only statue of the King in North America, it was extraordinarily large and barely resembled George in face or dress, modeled instead on a famous sculpture of Marcus Aurelius used in England for busts of the kings who had built the Empire. New Yorkers were thus likening the young monarch to the most powerful emperor of ancient Rome, now that England had become a modern equivalent. Symbolically, it faced the city’s harbor.
By the mid-1700s, after centuries of reform and resistance, England had also distinguished itself by establishing the first liberal (capitalist) economy of the modern era — producing growth rates of 0.5 percent in some years, a quintupling over the global historic average. The radical growth of coal-powered industrialization was still many decades off. But elites in the metropole and 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.
The “consumer revolution” of the late 1700s represented the first appearance of capitalism in the modern age, cities and trade growing rapidly with the liberalization of feudal agriculture in Great Britain. Some historians believe this material culture — the renowned architecture, landscape, furniture, and art of the Georgian Age — helped bind colonies like New York, the leading consumer of British goods. Visitors compared the mansions and residents of 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 the “macaroni,” slang for merchants who dressed, spoke, or behaved in a “feminine” or androgynous manner. (Edward Topham, The Macaroni Print Shop, 1772, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)
But the colonies were also naturally designed to be dependent. Subjects abroad had to purchase finished goods from Britain and take unwanted paupers, criminals, and rebels, while providing cheap raw materials and labor that allowed the liberal imperial order to grow. It was a “mercantile” system, with natural resources, people, capital, and manufactures circulating through protected markets, dominated by the world’s most powerful navy and backstopped in a geographic safeguard (Scotland and Ireland absorbed to prevent invasion). Colonial elites, and even non-elites, found opportunity in the order. But it was designed to flow capital upwards within and between its constituent parts. For many, the material prosperity Britain offered was unrivaled, as was its military protection and liberal (semi-democratic) government. But these affective ties came with seeds of division. While the benefits of the Empire would restrain protest during the Imperial Crisis, the constraints also 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.” And by the mid-1700s already, roughly half of all British shipping was engaged in North America.
London also saw enormous growth in this period, surpassing Paris as the largest city in Europe by 1763, With roughly 750,000 people, it rivaled the world’s biggest metropolises, Thailand’s Ayutthaya, Turkey’s Constantinople, and China’s Beijing.
A View of the Custom House with part of the Tower, taken from ye River Thames, London
Most colonists in North America were engaged in traditional farming, which produced little capital outside the surplus big landowners exported. But New York was an imperial entrepôt. Local goods were “preserved” (or finished and packed by hand) in workshops and then exported to the British Isles, the West Indies, and southern Europe — in that order of scale. To a much smaller degree, it was a regional hub, too, serving the vast hinterland as well as the coastline, receiving goods from big towns along the Hudson, the Long Island Sound, and destinations further north and south. Over thirty different products shipped by 1769, from grain and flour to pig iron, shingles, barrel staves, lumber, potash, and pearl. These commodities were byproducts of colonial settlement, upstate forests cut down, wildlife killed, and minerals extracted, then shipped down-river to the city’s 250 warehouses, distilleries, and refineries for export.
New Yorkers had to import textiles and tableware from small manufacturers in England, tropical goods like sugar and coffee from the Caribbean, and more exotic items from the corners of the Empire, such as calicos from India and tea from China. New York’s press advertised thousands of these items, and by the 1770s they arrived monthly on British ships, insured and financed by London’s capital markets. By design, however, the city imported far more than it exported — in 1750, five times more. Until 1763, the economic imbalance was off-set by military spending and many decades of light enforcement on rules of trade and currency. The Imperial Crisis began when that came to an end.
The IMPERIAL CRISIS Begins
In 1724, New Yorkers could rightly lament, as the young Cadwallader Colden did, that “money imported from the West Indies seldom remains six months in [the city] before it is exported to England.” But under Robert Walpole, Britain’s “first prime minister” (1725-42), London 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 rule. These practices of “salutary neglect” came to a sudden end in 1763-65, however, after the last of the mid-century wars against France and Spain.
Colonies had long been forbidden to establish a sovereign currency, forcing merchants to rely on British wholesalers for credit. But like others in North America, New York’s businessmen had often used paper money, backed in mortgages, to get around this limitation on capital for day-to-day transactions. In 1764, Parliament outlawed this practice with the Currency Act, soon after George Grenville became prime minister. The financial restriction severely curtailed the ability of importers, exporters, shipowners, insurers, wholesalers, and retailers to prosper in competition with London.
During the 1700s, New York’s merchants and big farmers had also often traded with England’s rival empires, the French, Spanish, and Dutch, like other colonists — even though it was nominally illegal during wartime and subject to tax in peacetime. The Hovering Act of 1763 curtailed these black markets severely, and made it far harder to profit on Britain’s greatest source of revenue, the “sugar islands” of Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua. The Plantation Act of 1764 went further, placing import taxes on molasses and sugar from the West Indies — even though North America’s colonists had enabled Caribbean planters to focus on monoculture crops for export, by providing food and other necessities that would have otherwise required the same land.
While mass protest would not erupt in the colonies until 1765, New York was the first to act on a proposal from Boston, a much smaller, weaker colony, to petition London over these laws. Rich merchants like the DeLanceys feared their wealth might shrink. Giant landowners such as the Livingstons worried their holdings would be taxed. Elites in both factions dreaded the prospect of revolt from below.
Detail from The Great Financier, or British Economy for the Years 1763, 1764, 1765, showing George Grenville holding a scale in which debt far outweighs savings. Colonists viewed the prime minister as imposing unjustified austerity to balance Britain’s budget for nearly a century of uninterrupted warfare. Like few of his peers, Grenville also saw that North America would be increasingly difficult to “govern” now that England had ousted France, their main rival, from the continent. The legislation of 1763-65 was thus meant to assert imperial dominance, not simply to pay off debt.
Sugar was the most profitable crop of the late 1600s and 1700s. Many of the British nouveau riche were absentee landlords in the West Indies. Most of the 12 million Africans sold into the Caribbean and South America came during this period.
As in other ports, New York drew materials for export and consumption from settlement inland. But they had often depended upon British military support for that expansion. The Haudenosaunee who controlled the mountainous land in the western and northern part of the state were arguably the most powerful Indigenous military league in North America, the Six Nations known as the “Iroquois” Confederation (from the Algonkian word, meaning “vicious killers”). During the Seven Years War, colonists expected to seize this area to open up the continental interior. But in 1763, London made a shocking reversal. King George III offered Native peoples along the entire frontier protection from illegal settlement, in exchange for their crucial aid in ousting the French and Spanish. This meant speculators would lose a fortune, and the growing number of unpropertied might remain dependents of giant landowners upstate, like the peasants and serfs of feudal Europe.
During the 1600s, European conquest and disease had opened up vast coastal land, making the “New World” far more egalitarian — for colonists. By the early 1700s, however, elites had recreated the vast holdings of the churches and nobles in the “Old World.” In New York, less than a dozen families owned three-quarters of all granted territory — including 1.75 million acres in the Lower Hudson Valley, the country separating today’s metropolitan area from Haudenosaunee land in the rest of the state.
The Lords of Trade had restricted land grants to 1,000 acres in 1756. But James DeLancey Sr., 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, extending into the “rent wars” of the 1800s. Land was the object for nearly everyone, its distribution the primary issue of the age. Unrest simmered in the Hudson Valley all through the 1760s, as tenant farmers and Natives both sought land from these large estates — working in “economies” that functioned largely without coin or trade. Although colonists frequently ignored the Proclamation of 1763 (relaxed in 1768), it became an oft-cited cause for rebellion.
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation, Six Nation Territory Circa 1720, after the adoption of the Tuscarora by the Oneida. Graphic created by Eric Doxtator (2017). After epidemics of influenza, smallpox, and measles devastated the population in the 1600s, the nations adopted many other groups, like the Canoy, Nanticoke, Tutelo, and Shawnee. To rebuild their number, they also took captives from enemy Algonquin-speaking peoples, like the Abenaki, Mahican, Wampanoag, Mohegan, Leni Lenape (Delaware), and Massachusett, as well as other Haudenosaunee, like the Huron (Wendat), Erie, and Susquehannock. By the 1760s, they numbered perhaps 10,000. But the colony was thinly settled. Even after the war greatly reduced their population, New York had the most Indigenous count, and sold the largest tracts of Native land, for nearby states.
Map of territories gained in the Seven Years War. 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.
The Proclamation was compensation for the Indigenous, who did much of the fighting in the Seven Years War. It was also Realpolitik. With colonials flooding into what had been New France, an Ottawa chief named Pontiac united various groups in a rebellion that stretched up and down the “frontier” from 1763 to 1766. In New York, the idea of a leader uniting Indians against encroachment reawakened fears the city had not known since Willem Kieft nearly destroyed the Dutch colony in 1643-45. The legislature begged the acting governor, Cadwallader Colden, to request troops from the other colonies to put down what one petition called that “mysterious & savage Race of Vermin.” It added: on success in the war “their, as well as our, very Existence depends.”
Colden had grown contemptuous of the great landlords as a surveyor, and had developed empathy for the Natives. The Irish-born Scotsman 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, most of all, fiercely royalist. Outraging many, he upheld the Proclamation, even though it was perhaps the first example of a colonial government questioning the “right” of settlement (in truth, only mandating a less destabilizing rate of encroachment).
To enforce the Proclamation, and to protect French Canada from illegal settlement, London also stationed 10,000 troops in North America. For more than a century, it had placed no 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 soldiers when imperial rivals and Natives stood on the frontier. 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 the resentment greater than in New York, where Britain had the most troops. During the Imperial Crisis, the city’s general, Thomas Gage, also became 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 — just before the lurch to armed rebellion for independence. While New York had mostly welcomed soldiers in decades past, now they no longer represented prosperity and protection. Instead they brought downward pressure on wage-labor, and symbolized the depression caused by the restrictions on currency, trade, and settlement, and the new import taxes.
Robert Griffing’s Unconquered depicts three Seneca warriors staring down a British fort in Pittsburgh after Pontiac’s Rebellion. During the conflict, a group of fifty-seven drunken frontiersmen (“the Paxton Boys”) killed twenty Susquehannock near Lancaster, who they conflated with other Natives raiding in Pennsylvania. Whether intentional or not, the artist’s depiction of the clear-cut landscape presents a vivid reminder of the existential threat settler-colonialism posed.
Gen. Thomas Gage served as commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America during the Imperial Crisis. He oversaw the response to Pontiac’s Rebellion and was relocated to Boston in 1774, overseeing the Coercive Acts which touched off the Revolution. A noble who served in the Seven Years War, Gage married Margaret Kemble, a scion of New York’s most elite families (the Van Cortlandts, DeLanceys, Bayards, and Schuylers). They lived just outside the Fort, where the ruling families built mansions along the Hudson, on Broad Way.
DEPRESSION & REBELLION
This sudden about-face on colonial policy sprang from the enormous bill England had racked up creating a global empire. Its deficit doubled fourteen times in the 1700s, the Second Hundred Years War. By the end, payments on the debt (£42 million) and military costs ate up more than three-quarters of its budget. Although Britain now had an imperium twice as large as the Mideastern caliphates or Asian dynasties of the late medieval era, it also had to police those vast new holdings, and the English were already one of the most heavily taxed people on Earth. So Parliament began economically restricting and taxing all its colonies once the Seven Years War came to an end.
These laws have often been depicted as novel because they imposed “taxation without representation.” But that was hardly new. Even in Great Britain, just 215,000 men (in 3 million) could vote. What Parliament’s laws actually did was make it far more difficult to avoid or cheat regulation of the most important aspects of the colonial economy. In other parts of the Empire, merchants and others could not mount an effective protest. But North America had roughly a quarter the population of Great Britain, spread over a vast land. It was the biggest and fastest-growing part of the Empire, the one realm able to put up resistance.
English holdings overseas, 1700 (above) and the United Kingdom’s first global empire, 1763 (below)
American colonists 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 trade ports were especially dependent on the growing market system. They were thus among the first locations to organize and protest. And the depression fell hardest on New York, the leading consumer of goods, consistently importing far more than it exported. With the legislation of 1764-65, creditors ran short on coin, demanded payment from merchants, who in turn 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 conscripting “paupers” into forced labor. As the gap between rich and poor stretched to a breaking point, feelings of betrayal replaced love of the Empire, opening the door to rebellion. Poverty had grown in absolute and relative terms during the 1700s. But it would only mount during the Imperial Crisis. Where the average colonial in North America enjoyed a higher standard of living than his counterpart in England, by 1776 roughly a third of the population in “big towns” were in poverty. Trade ports like New York were therefore also the most radicalized.
This detail from John Wolcott Adams and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes’s redraft 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.
As the supreme emblem of British power in New York, the Fort at the Battery would therefore see repeated protest during the Imperial Crisis. The first major event came in October 1765, when the Great Riot 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 garrison. The riot lasted ten hours. The next day, Lt. Gov. Colden reported anonymous death threats, ostensibly from maritime workers and craftsmen. That afternoon, Robert Livingston Sr., the dominant political figure in the colonial assembly, reported that merchants in the Sons of Liberty 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 in stone buildings outside the garrison, would quickly fall into the hands of a mob, unleashing “a Civil War.” Colden ordered the Fort strengthened. But Gage’s engineer John Montresor made it clear the garrison would fall under domestic attack. So, in another unprecedented act, the new governor came in promising to dismantle it. 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. Ten years later, New York’s governor would have to do the same. And rebels would finally make good on their promise to take over the garrison.
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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).