Bowling Green

Evacuation Day

Bowling Green was New York’s main scene of protest. Although its denizens were the elite — the wealthiest merchants, politicians, military officers, and visitors, who came to bowl or play cricket on the lawn — the park’s location between the Fort and the greatest mansions of the West Ward made it an ideal gathering-spot for demonstrations against British policies. Moderate and conservative rebels often tried to dampen or redirect political resentment in working-class taverns. But on the streets, “social betters” had a harder time controlling the “lesser sorts.” Here 300 protestors burned an effigy of the acting governor and torched his private coach over the Stamp Act, while hurling stones and bricks at the enormous Fort. When Parliament repealed the law, they erected a gold-plated statue of King George III in the very same place. And when the rebels declared independence, a mob of citizens and soldiers returned to destroy it.

So when the final act of British evacuation came, New Yorkers naturally met at Bowling Green and today’s Evacuation Day Plaza to celebrate the end of military occupation and war. By spring of 1783, Loyalists had begun flooding into Manhattan from all over the colonies, as flotillas of brigs, sloops, and schooners carried evacuees to Nova Scotia; 29,000 civilians left the port, with residents selling their property at massive discounts, plus another 20,000 British soldiers and Hessians. P.O.W.’s were released and shipped home. On November 25th, Gen. Washington arrived to formally reclaim the city. Thousands lined Broad Way to watch. As imperial forces evacuated the Fort, the Redcoats nailed a royal standard to the flagstaff and greased the pole as a parting insult. The crowd cheered as rebel sailor John Van Arsdale scaled the pole and hoisted the American ensign. Few would forget how it made them feel.

Despite the victory, however, “Americans” remained economically and culturally dependent on Britain. The decades ahead would require a process of nationalization, undoing the mentality and the materiality of the colonial period, to bind the states and define the boundaries of citizenship.

Liberty poles were also raised across the region on Evacuation Day. But the only one still standing is in Bensonhurst, on the New Utrecht Reformed Church, near the British landing at Gravesend, where you can find an historic marker.

This Land is... Whose Land?

Like any movement, the Patriots were a divided coalition, and historians have long debated what united them. Recently, scholars have begun emphasizing how modern notions of race forged that alliance. Bowling Green’s history, and its proximity to the National Museum of the American Indian, serves as a useful foil to unpack how racist hyperbole of Indigenous violence reinforced the cause.

When New York’s legislature commissioned the statue of George III, they praised the king for protecting his subjects from a “cruel, merciless, and savage Enemy” during the Seven Years War. After that conflict, land-hungry settlers, defying the Proclamation Line of 1763, poured into Indigenous territory, “negotiating” treaties and taking by force. Pontiac’s Rebellion, an unprecedented demonstration of pan-Indian resistance — uniting the Ottawa, Delaware, Potawatomie, Shawnee, Seneca, Wyandot, Ojibwe, Huron, Choctaw, Piankashaw, Kickapoo, Tunica, Peoria, and Mascouten — convinced many White frontiersmen and colonists back east that Native peoples refused to live alongside settlers and would employ all manner of violence to keep out invaders. They in turn weaponized the specter of Indian violence to convince neighbors that British governments had betrayed colonists for Indigenous trading partners.

In what is now one of the most famous renderings, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, New York City (1852-53), Johannes Oertel depicted an Indigenous family exiting the scene. Whether or not the German democrat’s intention, the image is a fitting representation of the use of anti-Indianism to strengthen the rebels’ coalition.

When revolution erupted, polemicists and politicians frequently indicted the British for allying with Natives, despite their own tribal alliances. New York’s public funeral of Maryland frontiersman and Indian killer Michael Cresap at Trinity Church in 1775 was just one illustration of how even urbanites embraced anti-Indianism with newfound fervor. So powerful was the rhetoric that in the Declaration Jefferson concluded his indictments with the blunt crescendo: “[King George] has… endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Shortly after hearing those words read aloud, soldiers and civilians toppled his statue at Bowling Green. But throughout the Revolution, stories about “merciless Indian Savages” and their British collaborators helped hold the unstable, difficult rebellion together.

Pontiac’s Rebellion lasted for several years after the so-called French and Indian War, concentrated around Lake Michigan and Erie. Native peoples destroyed eight of eleven French forts recently gained by the British in the conflict. London responded by declaring the frontier off-limits to colonists. With Independence, the US effectively doubled the size of the thirteen colonies, making the infant nation one of the largest on Earth, and the best-protected.

Anti-Indianism in the Revolution

Here the press served a key role, again. During the war, literate colonials (most) relied on local newspapers for information: to follow the path of armies, to monitor the progress of diplomacy in France and Spain, and to consider the most effective ways to prosecute the war. To keep their audiences engaged and committed, printers relied on exaggerated stories about Black and Indigenous imperial allies. They shared misinformation about Indigenous forces abusing and killing noncombatants like Jane McCrea, too, accounts which helped unite the rebellion. The story appeared in revolutionary papers as often as news of the Battle of Concord.  

To revolutionaries, the suffering of P.O.W.’s was just one example of British villainy then. Ignoring their own behavior, they spread accounts of real and fabricated war crimes: destroyed towns, ruined farms, murdered noncombatants… always emphasizing stories about non-White “Loyalists.” Revolutionaries feared that indigenous forces would raid towns, capture inhabitants, and “ravage the frontiers.” Rumors of enslaved people burning towns along the Hudson proliferated, too, along with tales of interracial “Ethiopian balls” in New York. To many rebels, this comingling with Black and Indigenous was as outrageous as the legislation which precipitated war — including the Proclamation of 1763.

Symbols of Authority

New York was not only a strategic military location in the Revolution. It also showcased many signs and symbols of British authority over the colonies. Both sides recognized the importance of manipulating such icons to serve political ends. Early modern Europeans had, for example, commonly marked the downfall of regimes by pulling down the statue of monarchs, as rebels did with George III. New York’s rebels were not satisfied with a toppled monument either. They severed the crowns adorning Bowling Green’s fence, and placed the disfigured head of the statue on a spike near Fort Washington (quickly recovered by Loyalists). Trinity’s Charles Inglis reported that throughout New York signs of the king’s arms came off churches and other buildings. Such actions carried meaning that also galvanized the dividing line between more and less democratic-minded persons and groups in the rebellion. It was not just Loyalists and British officials who criticized the statue coming down. Washington denounced the mob, fearing it would alienate potential sympathizers: “it has so much the appearance of riot and want of order… in future these things shall be avoided by the Soldiery, and left to be executed by proper authority.”

  • See Wendy Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows, Gotham (Oxford University Press, 1999); Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Arthur S. Marks, “The Statue of King George III in New York and the Iconology of Regicide,” American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (1981): 61–82; Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850 (Profile Books, 2010), 49-56; Alexander J. Wall, The Equestrian Statue of George III, and the Pedestrian Statue of William Pitt; Erected in the City of New York, 1770 (New York Historical Society, 1920).

    On anti-Indianism, see Robert Parkinson, “From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 97-122 and The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2016); and Peter Rhoads Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (W.W. Norton, 2009).

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