Peck Slip
The Forgotten Home Front
War radically changed life on the home front, nowhere more than in New York, which experienced the longest British military occupation by far, the full seven years of war. Here at Peck Slip, where the ferry connected Manhattan and Long Island, and people from all over the region came to exchange goods and information, one could gain a keen sense of what the Revolution meant for different people.
At first, the city’s remaining population and most in the region welcomed the invasion, hoping for a return of law and order. Tryon and other government representatives easily gathered loyalty oaths and the military recruited soldiers heavily for years. Elite New Yorkers returned to fox-hunting, horse-racing, golf, cricket, and billiards, low- and high-born joining the British in lavish public festivals, dinner parties, theater, and balls that made New York infamous among rebels. But Gen. Howe established martial law, and his successors Henry Clinton and Guy Carleton upheld it. The city once again became the main staging base for the Empire’s army and navy. But the waterfront remained still for normal trade, even privateering severely regulated.
Dozens of loyal officials found refuge in the city, but the municipal and colonial government was not allowed to resume — a source of intense protest and distress from the very beginning. Colden, the diehard royalist who served New York’s colonial government far longer than any other figure, at great risk during the Imperial Crisis, had to beg Clinton for a job when he returned from imprisonment and exile in 1778. Given a stipend of $1 per day, the elder statesman was forced to depend on wealthy relatives instead. Over time, commanders increasingly relied on civilians to administrate business and social welfare, hoping they would better convince the undecided and rebellious to support the loyal cause. But in New York, as elsewhere, the conditions gradually undermined British authority. And the governance model established in New York was replicated with similar consequences in every port and region they occupied in all thirteen colonies.
Most New Yorkers went about their lives. While sometimes divided by politics, friends and families obtained passes or travelled in secret across military lines to visit each other. Merchants kept up relations with farmers and overseas retailers in the Empire, hoping to gain exemptions from the trade bans on each side. But, ultimately, it was impossible to ignore the profound changes, everywhere. Unlike the rest of the country, New York had two major armies stationed outside it for the duration of the war. And people in the surrounding region had to constantly watch hordes of desperate refugees carrying their few belongings to it. As the years dragged on, poverty, sickness, hunger, theft, corruption, and brutality in the area only grew.
The Great Fire
Homelessness and overcrowding were perhaps the dominant issue. Shortly after the British captured New York, a fire broke out that destroyed nearly a quarter of it — still, proportionately, the most destructive fire in the city’s history. But that was far below the devastation intended. At least sixteen combustibles were found after the inferno, feeding the local conviction of a conspiracy.
For months, rumor had spread that rebels would burn the city if they could not hold it. They had burned 1,800 houses in Norfolk, after the British burned hundreds in Charlestown. Word spread that Gen. Howe allegedly threatened to burn every colonial port if Washington destroyed New York. Understanding its geostrategic value, the general had in fact asked the Continental Congress if he could burn the entire city. They refused, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Patriots lit the blaze after they escaped. Whether he ordered the arson, or had knowledge of it, will likely remain unclear. And both the rebel government and the military had limited control of their population, meaning the arson may have been unsanctioned. But watching from his command at Roger Morris’s summer house in Harlem Heights, Washington commented: “Providence, or some good fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
Map of area destroyed and combustibles later found unignited, Bruce Twickler, New York Firefighting & the American Revolution: Saving Colonial Gotham from Incineration (2022).
This ubiquitous image of the Great Fire was a "cut-out optique view," designed to be displayed in front of a candle, as rarely shown here. André Basset, Représentation du feu terrible à Nouvelle Yorck, ca. 1776, Colonial Williamsburg Museum.
Of all the events that transformed New York during the Revolution, none had so devastating an impact on the built environment as the Great Fire. The blaze went for nine hours after midnight on September 20th, consuming upwards of 900 houses. Watching from nine miles away, the Continental Captain Alexander Graydon said, the very “heavens appeared in flames.” Without modern pollution, one could apparently see a pin on the ground from the light. Brigades were organized and structures torn down to create breaks in its path. But the rebels had destroyed or removed water pump handles, bells, and other firefighting tools. Windy conditions also proved too fierce a challenge for British troops, seamen, and other New Yorkers desperately attempting to stop it. Rev. Inglis managed to save King’s College and St. Paul’s Chapel, but the fire took Trinity, and most of the expensive property on its land. But for a change in the wind, all of the city would have been lost. At least 3,000 people were immediately rendered homeless.
The British executed several incendiaries found during the event, including a woman and “mulatto.” But the military did not want to alienate colonials, and were in the midst of a war. Investigations then and later were inconclusive. But the result was a smoldering city that had to rebuild with a natural resource that was extremely limited because of two massive armies, plus an exploding refugee population.
The Neutral Ground
as War Zone
While many New Yorkers looked forward to a restoration of law and order at first, the reality of war prevented any return to normalcy. Most of the early battles took place in the state — nearly a third of the Revolution’s military engagements — mostly along the Hudson. George Clinton, the rebel governor, later said, not unfairly, that New York “suffered more by the Enemy than any other on the Continent… being the principal Seat of War.”
The city’s population swelled rapidly as refugees streamed in from these war-torn areas. This included perhaps 25,000 Loyalists from big towns in Connecticut and other Patriot strongholds. It also meant neutral colonists, of a wide-ranging sort, like J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, imprisoned for refusing to swear a rebel loyalty oath and then jailed on suspicion of rebel sympathies after fleeing to occupied New York — even though he brought military intelligence. The famous writer and upstate farmer complained later: “It is for the sake of the great leaders on both sides that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished…”
Eastchester (the northeast Bronx), where apolitical farmers were constantly pinned between Loyalists and rebels.
The so-called “Neutral Ground” between rebel forces in the Lower Hudson Valley and the British garrison in New York was a jurisdictional vacuum. As such, it remained a zone of looting and indiscriminate military violence, as representatives of the staged armies and local “Banditti” engaged in non-stop raiding for wood, food, and other provisions. Oliver DeLancey, the popular merchant who raised three battalions for the invasion of 1776, became infamous as the leader of the “Cowboys” — a Brigade he financed, New York’s largest regiment. With his nephew James, the “Outlaw of the Bronx,” he gained a reputation for barbarism and impunity, regularly stealing from rebels and burning their homes. Roads, bridges, farm-steads, barns, and outbuildings were destroyed. More than 13,000 fled, perhaps a 60 percent decline. The land went back to its natural state. Timothy Dwight, the Continental army chaplain and future Yale president, said of those who remained: “They feared everybody whom they saw; and loved nobody…”
In Dec. 1778, Alexander McDougall, now a Major General, commissioned the wealthy New York lawyer Aaron Burr (left) to restore order to Westchester. For a brief while, the roving banditry and smuggling came to an end, McDougall’s right-hand saying “a country, which for three years []had been a scene of robbery, cruelty, and murder, became at once the abode of security and peace.” James DeLancey is pictured on the right in a painting by Charles M. Lefferts. After Captain John Andre’s death in 1780, his uncle Oliver DeLancey also became spymaster and Gen. Clinton’s aide-de-camp.
The Loyalist stronghold of Long Island fared no better than Westchester. The cowboys raided the entire region, including New Jersey. So did the “skinners,” thugs and highwaymen hired to forage. Rebel guerillas and independent privateers landed constantly from southern Connecticut, across the Sound. Monmouth and Bergen counties in eastern New Jersey were also ravaged.
Waves of refugees also came into New York whenever the British withdrew protection from a region — from New Jersey, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Virginia, South Carolina. Most carried little but the clothes they wore. Among them were thousands of formerly enslaved Black men and women, left behind in the chaos or escaping Patriot masters in response to British promises of emancipation.
Island of Freedom
For many Blacks, the Occupation was revolutionary. In 1775, the governor of Virginia and Earl of Dunmore, desperate for military advantage, promised to emancipate any slaves or indentured servants who escaped their rebel owners to join the Loyal cause. Patriots erupted in anger. On Long Island, slaveowners burned Dunmore (New York’s former governor) in effigy. British enforcement of the vow, however, and the general chaos of war, unleashed the “largest slave revolt in history,” with perhaps 20,000 escaping their masters by the end — roughly half ending up in the greater metropolitan region of New York. The Philipsburg Proclamation, issued by Gen. Henry Clinton in 1779 (from the Loyalist base in Westchester, on Frederick Philipse’s vast stretch of land), accelerated defections from the Neutral Zone.
Unlike the colonial era, more than half of the refugees escaped as families or in groups, too, roughly a third women. Everywhere, they rushed to British military lines. But they also ran to cities. New York was among the first and largest refugee sites created by this migration, housing refugees from upstate, New Jersey, Connecticut, as well as Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and even from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The pace of escape in the region quadrupled. By the end of the war, the city sheltered maybe 4,000 “fugitives.” The metropolitan area had perhaps 10,000, a larger number of runaways than in all previous six decades combined.
Thus, under British military occupation, New York became what historians Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris dubbed “an island of freedom in a sea of slavery,” taking in half the current estimated total of escaped slaves in the war. These refugees worked as servants, cooks, laundresses, trackers, guides, and soldiers for the British army. Or they found normal employment in the region, using time-honored methods of evasion, like forging manumits, painting their faces, or simply pretending to be freemen. With so many strangers, it was now far easier to blend into the crowd. And the military’s intense labor need often trumped Loyalist slaveowner concerns. For most Blacks, it was the first time they received wages and could live as freemen. Boston King, a slave in South Carolina who eventually made his way to New York, later recalled, “I began to feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.”
David Edward Cronin, Fugitive Slaves in the Dismal Swamp, Virginia (1888)
The moral lines were hardly sharp and clear. Abolition was a minority position on both sides of the war. And the British, still the largest merchants in the business, continued to protect slavery in the rest of the Empire. Loyalists, who bemoaned the sudden lack of cheap labor, White or Black, sometimes claimed them as property, as in the case of Dinah Archey. Young Black men had to be as vigilant as their White peers of the British military’s constant search for “volunteers.” And Blacks could find their homes raided or taken, with fewer recourses than some Whites had. But, from exigency of war, the British were the first to liberate significant numbers of the enslaved in the US. James Rivington, who returned in 1777 as the King’s Printer in North America, ran frequent listings for escapees in his Gazette at Hanover Square. Although the buying and selling of life persisted in New York, it grew far more difficult under military occupation. Never before was there such opportunity to radically alter the future of the institution, change wrought ultimately by this “first emancipation.”
Loyalists in Battle
The British expected far more loyalism than they got. These Americans made up an estimated fifth of the population. But they always believed they held a majority. In no colony was that so. Rallying volunteers in the southern colonies, especially on the “frontier,” proved difficult. And the military was loathe to rely on these soldiers, who served on contract, for definite rates of pay and time, unlike the average British regular and officer. While New York and New Jersey’s regiments were different (many veterans of the French and Indian War), most others were poor trained, inexpertly led, and unreliable (with high rates of desertion). Yet 19,000 Loyalists joined forty-one regiments during the Revolution, fighting in 576 of the 772 battles and skirmishes, making it quite literally the nation’s first civil war.
Big landowners and merchants commanded these battalions, like William Bayard (an erstwhile Son of Liberty). But their recruits were mainly small farmers, craftsmen, laborers, and shopkeepers, as well as many runaway slaves and immigrants — Gen. Howe commenting that just a quarter of Philadelphia’s Loyalists were American, the rest Irish, Scottish, and German. The most elite unit was the Queen’s American Rangers, which gathered troops mainly from upstate New York and northeastern Pennsylvania. With quarters on the west bank of the Niagara River (today’s Ontario), they fought principally in New York and Pennsylvania. But they ranged as far west as Ohio and Michigan, and as far south as Virginia and Kentucky. They also coordinated with the Mohawks under Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) and Seneca warriors led by Cornplanter (Sayenqueraghta) in the Saratoga campaign of 1777, which sought to control the Hudson River Valley. Under Capt. John Graves Simcoe, the Rangers became known for their ruthlessness, leading a series of violent attacks on the frontier, including the infamous massacres in the Cherry and Wyoming valleys. They also led the Stockbridge Indian massacre at Kingsbridge, in the Bronx. The Sullivan Expedition devastated the Cayuga and Seneca in this cohort. But the unit expanded from two to ten companies during the last three years of war.
Loyalist regiments were “a different breed,” eager for violence and confiscation for its own sake — partially as revenge for similar acts visited upon them. Benjamin Franklin’s estranged son William, the “voice of militant Toryism” in New York, urged Gen. Clinton to arm the refugees and lay waste to rebel towns and farms. Clinton disliked the idea. But many officers in the most elite Loyalist units supported it: the British Legion, Queen’s Rangers, Royal Greens, and Volunteers of Ireland, as well as the Black Pioneers and Brigade. No one was more eager for a “predatory war” than New York’s ex-governor William Tryon, known as “the wolf.” Under his command, Loyalists raided across the metropolitan area, from the Neutral Ground and southern Connecticut to eastern New Jersey and Long Island. While many prominent Loyalists, such as William Smith Jr., were not hard-liners, quite a number of elite figures in colonial New York, like Trinity’s Rev. Charles Inglis, consistently urged a far more devastating counterinsurgency. The brutality was reciprocated. After taking command in the South, Brigadier General Nathaniel Greene reported to Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s unofficial chief of staff: “The division among the people is much greater than I had imagined… Whigs and Tories persecute each other, with little less than savage fury. There is nothing but murders and devastation in every quarter.”
William Franklin (left) served as governor of New Jersey from during the Imperial Crisis. Placed under house arrest in January 1776, he continued to report on rebel activity, and was placed in solitary confinement for nearly a year in Litchfield, CT, during which time his wife died (buried at St. Paul’s Chapel). After his release in Oct. 1778, he began organizing military units from his base in New York City. In 1782, he eft for exile in London. William Smith Jr. (right) represented the Loyalists’ moderate wing. The former “Livingston lawyer” had empathized with the rebellion, and like DeLancey proposed a kind of commonwealth scheme for granting the colonies greater independence within the Empire. He also sided with the British military command during the war, encouraging more lenient policies toward rebels and neutral colonials — which earned him the distrust of hardliners.
Black Loyalists & Patriots
Blacks constituted a significant part of British forces, too, more than 3,000 working as guards, pilots, spies, interpreters, executioners, horsemen, hunters, drummers, cooks, and soldiers in both regular and irregular units. The British commissioned the first Black Pioneers in New York, which fought in the Battle of Long Island / Brooklyn in 1776. The regiment got equal pay compared to White militia units, and the British raised other all-Black companies — e.g., the Black Guides, the Ethiopian Regiment, the Black Brigade. The British relied especially on their knowledge of American waterways as sailors and guides. Escaped slaves and freemen also served the Loyalist force known as “followers of the Army of the Flag,” who performed nighttime raids on Patriot camps, rendering them weak for the next battle, and taking livestock for the New York garrison. No one was more feared among these guerilla forces than Titus Cornelius (“Colonel Tye”), who attacked Patriots throughout New Jersey’s Monmouth County, just south of the city. Inspired by his example and others, slaves escape from across the region in large numbers.
David R. Wagner’s Death of Col. Christopher Greene depicts the Battle of Pines Bridge in Yorktown, Westchester, on May 14, 1781. DeLancey led a group of 250 in an unusual surprise attack on the officer (a cousin of Gen. Greene) and his small all-Black unit, the 1st Rhode Island Regiment. Appearing to know they were asleep, the Partisan Corps killed eight of the men and cut Greene “to pieces.” The event became grist for the rebel press mill.
Black Continental soldier (National Parks Service)
Thousands of Black men also supported rebellion. Freemen in New York took part in the mob actions of the Imperial Crisis, for example toppling the statue of King George III. Many also enlisted in rebel units — anywhere from 5,ooo to 8,000— perhaps far more (on both sides), historian Alan Gilbert claims. As many as one in ten Continentals at the Battle of Yorktown were Black.
Some were freemen who believed in the cause. Others thought it might provide opportunities for advancement. British emancipation also made the question of recruitment an unavoidable one for Patriots. Washington changed his mind after Dunmore’s Proclamation. New Jersey’s governor William Livingston, a member of the vast land- and slave-owning family that had long vied with the DeLanceys for control of New York’s legislature, considered abolishing slavery just a couple of years into the war. Many of the slaves in both colonies who became rebel soldiers joined because the legislatures promised freedom in exchange for military service, although owners did not always honor their promises. Others were able to earn wages from the army, or used it to escape slavery by disappearing amid the chaos. Still others joined the fight. The 1st Rhode Island Regiment — or Black Regiment, as it came to be known — was the first integrated battalion in US history, and served in many of the war’s key mid-Atlantic engagements. They were decimated by a superior force of Loyalists commanded by New York’s James DeLancey, in a sneak attack on the Croton River in Westchester, known as the Battle of Pines Bridge — revenge perhaps for an earlier attack on DeLancey’s base in Morrisania (today’s South Bronx). But their numbers were replenished with slaves from the state, and members of the Narragansett tribe, the order indirectly approved by George Washington, himself one of the country’s largest slaveholders. They fought in the siege of Yorktown, as well as the ill-fated overnight march in upstate New York across a frozen Lake Oneida in early 1783 to capture the British post at Oswego.
The 1st Rhode Island Regiment is widely regarded as the first all-Black military unit in US history. Black men served in mostly integrated rebel units during the war. (David R. Wagner, Desperate Valor, undated).
The idea of arming slaves struck fear into the hearts of most rebels. Repeatedly, they had accused the British of inciting a slave rebellion, including Thomas Jefferson’s closing argument in the Declaration: “He [King George] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” But Loyalist slaveowners did not welcome it either, and the British did not extend many of the same offers to people fleeing their bondage.
In greater New York, this formed a great tension, destabilizing long-maintained but occasionally explosive racial hierarchies. New sites of integrated entertainment sprang up, from music and dancing to horse-racing and taverns. Although housed in separate “Negro Barracks” and hospitals, Blacks socialized at “Ethiopian balls” with British officers and soldiers, listening to Black fiddlers and banjo players, which outraged rebels across the colonies. Rebel printers blasted these developments as dangerous inter-racialism. But white Loyalists abhorred it, too; some complaining that Black women also developed new assertiveness, now regularly working outside the home and walking around the city. Black tavern life flourished. Gangs in blockhouses along the Hudson raided Bergen County at will, prompting Gov. Livingston to declare martial law. Soldiers at the forts near the ferry landings, including the “Negro Fort” at Kingsbridge, guarded entry to New York, representing civil authority in the Neutral Zone. Internal slave-dealing climbed dramatically, but imports came to an end. The rate of runaways in the region quadrupled the first seven decades of the 1700s.
Elizabeth Freeman was born into slavery in New York, owned by a descendant of Dutch settlers in the Lower Hudson Valley (like another pioneer, Sojourner Truth). Citing the declaration that “all men are born free and equal,” she was the first slave in Massachusetts to win her liberation, suing with the help of a White abolitionist from neighboring Stockbridge in a case that spurred abolition in the state in 1783. Susan A.L.R. Sedgwick, Elizabeth Freeman ("Mumbet"), 1811.
The War for Native America
In the Revolution, natives overwhelmingly sided with the British. A small fraction tried to remain neutral. Fewer still joined the Patriots. Most hoped that if the British won, they would honor the Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting any further colonial incursion of native land, at the forefront for many whites in the rebellion, too. Elites, such as Jefferson and Washington, had made very profitable speculative investments on Native land. Ordinary homesteaders were just as eager to acquire it. So while the battles around New York helped determine the fate of the United States, they also decided the future of Native America. The Wappingers, who had lived in New York’s Highlands (Putnam and Dutchess counties), were one of the few peoples to join the rebels. They had been displaced to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with other northeastern tribes, and their frustration with the British, and shared grievances with small white tenant farmers, convinced their leader Daniel Ninham and the other “Stockbridge Indians” to support the Revolution. Washington initially wavered, but difficulties with recruitment convinced him otherwise. The Stockbridge fought valiantly at Ticonderoga and Saratoga, but on August 31, 1778, British cavalry and infantry surprised them at Kingsbridge; “Indian Field” in today’s Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. Casualty estimates vary, but the result was disastrous. Ninham and his son were mortally wounded.
Don Troiani, Stockbridge Indian Massacre (Tumblr)
A similar fate brought down the four Haudenosaunee nations that supported the British, after they helped lead a series of raids with Loyalists on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania in 1778 that crippled the Continental Army and spread terror on the frontier, destroying settlements, crops, and hundreds of lives in the Wyoming Valley and Cherry Valley massacres. In response to pleas from New York’s governor and others, Washington sent a contingent of Continentals and Oneida to scorch the principal villages and food supplies of the Cayuga and Seneca, hoping to force the Iroquois Confederation to appeal for peace or remain on the sidelines. A large number were to be taken hostage as ransom and warning to others. But the “Sullivan Expedition” destroyed at least forty villages and winter crop stores, and no prisoners were taken. It is likely thousands died from the attacks, and thousands more from starvation and the record-cold winter of 1779, prompting some historians to label it a war crime or “close to ethnic cleansing." For the rest of the war, the Haudenosaunee remained almost entirely dependent on the British for resources, prompting the latter to eventually abandon them. The “Winter of Tears” forced them into exile, mostly to Canada, and remains one of the biggest and least-known campaigns of the war.
William Butler led 1,000 Loyalists, with support from the Cayuga, Seneca, Mohawk, and other forces, in raids on frontier settlements in New York and Pennsylvania in 1778. The goal was to depress support for the rebellion and to fill supplies. But in Wyoming Valley, the group killed over 300 men and boys defending women and children in the fort, with many others dying in the forests of starvation or exposure thereafter. Washington responded by ordering the Sullivan campaign. (Alonzo Chappell, Massacre of Wyoming Valley, Chicago History Museum)
A Revolution for Women?
Scholars have long debated whether the Revolution expanded the political, economic, and cultural freedom of women, or restricted it. Participation in the rebellion, through boycotts, street protests, and occasionally even military action, definitely challenged standard gender norms and permitted women membership in the body politic. But most women followed the political directions of husbands and fathers, falling across the ideological spectrum, like men.
With rebel governments naming Loyalists as traitors and confiscating their property, wives of even the prominent found themselves guilty by association, such as “Mrs. Charles Inglis.” In other states, many became refugees, joining the British as camp followers, struggling to keep their lives together, and often fleeing to New York, because it was the only uncontested haven. Many hundreds petitioned or were recommended for public relief.
But thousands also found liberation and reinvention under British military rule, particularly among the elite. These women became much-desired partners for British soldiers and sailors, with many inevitably falling in love, getting married, or eloping. Even critics like the Quaker poet Hannah Lawrence fell into the popular entertainments, like Shakespeare and the bawdy plays at John St. Theater, which had been unknown to New York.
Women of a middling sort enjoyed more autonomy, with men often gone or unable to work. But women that managed farms, estates, or businesses also fell under suspicion for the politics of the men who held those titles. And there was no single experience. For the many poor and working-class, there was little change. For Indigenous women, the Revolution was almost entirely devastating. For many Black women, it was harrowing but in some cases ultimately liberating.
The experience of war also brought the usual sexual violence. With so many idle soldiers and so many impoverished refugees in New York, the burnt-out Holy Ground became an open-air market of insatiable demand, the number of prostitutes sextupling. Yet, for all the “supply,” Redcoats and Hessians constantly engaged in rape or assault. In one particularly grisly case, three soldiers returning from an oyster-forage on Long Island stopped at the home of a widow, demanding food and drink, and then proceeded to violate the woman’s mentally disabled, bed-ridden daughter, and her mother. Such cases rarely made it to public notice, and in the few cases of trial victims were often forced to forgive their assailants. But the stories circulated via rumor (in some examples, the girls teen-aged or younger). By the spring of 1779, even militant Loyalists had grown exasperated, the prominent Joseph Galloway attacking Howe in a bold series of writing that forced the general to respond in print.
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On the 1776 fire in New York, see Benjamin Carp, “The Night the Yankees Burned Broadway: The New York City Fire of 1776,” Early American Studies 4, no. 2 (2006): 471–511; and Benjamin L. Carp, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2023).
On British military occupation, see Stephen Conway, ‘‘To Subdue America: British Army Officers and the Conduct of the Revolutionary War,’’ William and Mary Quarterly 43, 3 (July 1986): 381–82; and Oscar Theodore Barck, New York City During the War for Independence (Columbia University Press, 1931).
On the Loyalist experience, see Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011); Philip Papas, That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (New York University Press, 2007); Thomas Allen, Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War (Harpers Collins, 2010).
On the Black experience, see Karen Cook Bell, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press, 2021); James J. Gigantino, ed., The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front (Rutgers University Press, 2015); Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665-1865 (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997); Woody Holton, Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History With Documents (Bedford/St. Martins, 2009); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (Oxford University Press, 2011); Judith L. Van Buskirk, "Crossing the Lines: African-Americans in the New York City Region During the British Occupation, 1776-1783." Pennsylvania History 65 (1998): 74-100; Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan The Black Presence in the American Revolution, rev. ed. (University of Massachusetts Press, 1989); and Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1961).
On Black Patriots, see Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, eds., “African Americans: Extending the Bounds of Republicanism,” in Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic (Cornell University Press, 1992), 208–43; and Judith L. Van Buskirk, Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).
On the Haudenosaunee experience, see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Knopf, 2006); Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse University Press, 1972); William T. Hagan, Longhouse Diplomacy and Frontier Warfare: the Iroquois Confederacy in the American Revolution (New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission); Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: the Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (Hill and Wang, 2006).
On women and the Revolution, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Norton, 1986); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Little, Brown, 1980); Emily J. Arendt, “‘Ladies Going about for Money’: Female Voluntary Associations and Civic Consciousness in the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early Republic 34, no. 2 (2014): 157–86; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Jan Ellen Lewis, “Rethinking Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807,” Rutgers University Law Review 63, no. 3 (2011): 1017–35; and Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (Knopf, 2005); Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution (United States Captiol Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1989); Barbara B. Oberg, ed. Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World (University of Virginia Press, 2019).