The Almshouse

All the Four Horsemen

Before the invasion, New York struggled to house and feed a relatively small number of British soldiers, then a far larger rebel army. Those same problems faced upon the occupation government many times over as generals struggled to carry out London’s hard military objective and its soft, contradictory directive to recapture colonial hearts and minds. The leadership made great efforts to enlist and woo the public. But the logistics were impossible. New York shrank from 25,000 to 5,000 in 1776. Refugees pushed the number to 11,000 six months after the city fell. By 1780, it had ballooned to 33,000. Before the end, it would pass 50,000. With the massive loss of housing in the Great Fire, and the even more plague-like depletion of wood and food in the region, squatting, quartering, and overcrowding again became rampant, alongside massive homelessness. Dissenting churches and rebel taverns were converted into barracks, stables, prisons, and warehouses. The cost of food jumped 800 percent — Washington complaining in 1778, “A rat in the shape of a horse is not to be bought at this time for less than 200 pounds.” Where local produce had once been plentiful, suddenly it had to be imported. The black market thrived, and the harbor once again became a nest of privateers. Talk of famine recurred, as epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, smallpox, and more wiped out the poor. Each morning, carts wheeled the frozen, starved, or pestilent dead. Most of their bodies likely ended up in the various burial grounds that lay beyond city limits, encircling the debtor prison, jail, barracks, and the public almshouse.

Cities like Boston and Philadelphia endured military occupation, along with territory in all thirteen colonies. But no place suffered longer than New York. Washington’s army never left the vicinity, 13,000 Continentals encamped at Morristown, eating thousands of pounds of meat each day, plus similar numbers of bread, rice, peas or beans when available, and beer or cider. With another 25,000 Hessian and British soldiers entrenched around the region, local farmers and merchants were picked clean or left to fend for themselves — regardless of their politics. But only one of these armies would lose in the court of public opinion as the military standoff dragged on. Faced with real Englishmen, the pro-British horde in the city gradually identified as such less and less.

The press fanned the flames of partisanship, each side characterizing the other side as purely villainous, driven by cruelty if not savagery. Rebels described the British as “slavemasters” bent on rape and devastation. Loyalists described the rebels as waging “unnatural” and unholy war. No claim was too extravagant. But Patriots, Loyalists, and those in-between were victimized by friend and foe, with crimes and atrocities on both sides, an historic norm in war and revolution.

Alms for the Poor?

The public Almshouse was immediately overrun. Even in normal times, it serviced just a fraction of the poor. A self-described “house of correction for vagrants and paupers,” it was built in 1736 for “disorderly persons, parents of Bastard children, Beggars, Servants running away or otherwise misbehaving themselves, Tresspassers, Rogues, Vagabounds, [and] poor persons refusing to work.” Flanked by the enormous Bridewell and old New Gaol, it was modeled on the proliferating “workhouses” in England, later described by Charles Dickens. Philosophers alike held the opinion later voiced by Alexis de Tocqueville that “we must… make the workhouse a prison and render our charity repugnant.” No more than 300 found refuge in the public facility. They had to be “Orphans of the Refugees and Military” or “Aged and infirm.” And they had to wear red letters on their clothing, to signal their status to everyone.

These “deserving few” were a drop in the ocean. James Pattison, who governed the city for a year, was typical in complaining that New York was “Crowded with many idle persons.” Most came from the hinterlands and upstate, followed by New England, with smaller numbers from the southern colonies. But large “foreign invasions of beggary,” as William Livingston put it, came with each defeat, such as when the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778 or with the rebel victory at Yorktown in 1781-82. Pattison was particularly startled by the number of “Female Negroes with children” seeking protection; for a time, directing Hudson ferryboats to cease transporting such runaways. The military displayed extreme ambivalence over White women, too, a few suspecting that many were spies.

Many hundreds more received aid in the form of subsidized housing, though, and thousands got rations and contracts for street cleaning, building repair, and other public works. Andrew Elliott, a Scottish-born tax collector, was placed in charge of imports and exports, policing, tavern regulations, fire-fighting, and other major responsibilities with time. He empowered forty leaders in the Anglican church to handle social welfare. This “vestry” rented abandoned homes, 260 of the remaining 2,000 or so, collecting £64,862 between 1778 and 1780.

But the largest aid came from the military, even though civilians always remained its second priority. The British had intense labor needs, which required the support of local carpenters, wagon-makers, blacksmiths, stablemen, wheelwrights, and shipbuilders. The quartermaster general employed 1,100 and the barrackmaster general 750. The commissary department hired 500, providing food to 35,000 on average. Nearly 1,000 helped strengthen the fortifications that rebels had made around New York in 1776. Others worked for the Army as cartmen, woodcutters, and servants. Women served as cooks, launderers, and prostitutes. As increasing numbers found support in the military, they succeeded in demanding fair wages, because of labor shortages. But this also strained a threadbare supply chain. Pattison and other commandants rarely mentioned the refugee problem without considering these implications. He later called the “Legions of Women” fleeing rebel lines in eastern New Jersey “a swarm of Locusts who will help devour the fair Crops of Long Island, if they are permitted to pass over here.” Parliament continued to shoulder most of the military’s costs. But it would not tax its own nobles and merchants to help their colonial supporters.

Holy Ground & Canvas Town

The Almshouse stood above the Common. Just southwest lay the Holy Ground, which before the invasion had been New York’s red-light district. Just a steps away from King’s College (later Columbia University), it was once the site of the most expensive gambling dens and brothels, though also frequented by mariners and laborers on the King’s Wharf. Rebels denounced these “nests of villainy,” a printer in Boston writing, “Look at New York, where even the church makes money from the whores!” But Washington struggled to keep his own troops from it, too, unable to shut them down.

This area was destroyed by the Great Fire, along with south of King’s College everything and west of Broad Way on down to Fraunces Tavern. But in its place was now “Canvas Town,” the pejorative name given to a camp set up nearly overnight, where refugees hung sail-cloth on the remaining walls and chimneys of the scorched area. In the words of a late 1800s historian, it was a “place of… drunkenness, prostitution, and violence… the resort of the sailors from the ships-of-war in the harbour, of Negroes who fled from the neighbouring provinces, and others brought from the south by the troops...” William Dunlap, manager of the John St. Theater, was even less charitable and more typical of the contemporary view, dubbing it a receptacle “for the vilest dregs brought by the army and navy of Britain, [and] the filthiest of those who fled to them for refuge.” But it was also the home of many British soldiers and camp followers, who had to live among the refugees for want of housing, between the overflowing privies and pools of human waste that spread disease and odor even in winter.

The post-war government made periodic sweeps of the “criminals” in Canvas Town, hoping to clear it out. But it was not rebuilt until the late 1790s. The few descriptions that survive all emphasize that it became a place for “industries of vice,” and the violence for which the old red-light district was so ill-reputed. Prostitution especially returned, growing six-fold with the influx of soldiers and refugees. While 500 “ladies of pleasures” are said to have worked in the Holy Ground before the invasion, roughly 3,000 women are believed to have fallen into sex work during the occupation, a number of them paupers whisked off British streets and imported by the military. Visiting St. Paul’s Chapel, which replaced Trinity as the main house of worship for elite and loyal New Yorkers, and standing before the huge Canvas Town, one Englishman commented: “This is a very neat church and some of the handsomest and best-dressed ladies I have ever seen in America. I believe most of them are whores.”

A Pox on All

Lack of funds meant discontinuation of sanitation and water distribution, too, not just charity. Residents dumped organic matter, along with tub-water and broken glass on the street. And with garbage removal suspended, officials deemed the marshlands and swamps outside the city satisfactory dumping grounds. But New York’s wetlands served as the foundation of its estuary system, and waste disposal infected the city’s drinking water. The military’s inability to provide these services was flanked by its failure to procure food. The British could not rely on vegetables or meat from rebel-controlled hinterlands. And bringing cattle into New York increased the likelihood of attack.

The combination — bad sanitation, weak nutrition, lack of clean water — meant typhoid, dysentery, and other diseases spread. New Yorkers suffered repeated outbreaks, the Englishman Nicholas Cresswell writing in May 1777 that its residents were crammed together “like herrings in a barrel, most of them very dirty and not a small number sick of some disease, the Itch, Pox, Fever, or Flux.” Smallpox was a particular scourge. An epidemic coincided almost perfectly with the Revolution (1775–82), taking many more lives than the war itself. Washington’s inoculation of troops represented the first large-scale, government-directed immunization campaign in US history, helping to win the nation’s independence.

Record Cold & No Wood

Perhaps no resource occupied more of everyone’s time than gathering timber. In winter, 600 cords were required to sustain the civilians and soldiers of New York — each week. Manhattan, Staten, and Long Island together required 70,000 cords, nearly four square miles of woodland — which did not include the firewood needed for washing, cooking, baking, or stoking forges to, for example, shoe thousands of horses. This need forced British soldiers to repeatedly venture into rebel territory upstate and in New Jersey on foraging expeditions, risking armed confrontation. They met with limited success, but continued throughout the war.

The British had little choice. Fortifications had to be erected across the region, on the roads and the shoreline. And the winter of 1779-80 was one of the coldest in the century. New York’s harbor froze solid, the British dragging heavy artillery from the Battery to Staten Island. The Continentals likewise built hundreds of earth and wooden entrenchments, and nearly a dozen major forts outside the city.

Both forces thus destroyed woodlots and forests across the region. Surveying from the Bronx in 1781, Washington reported, it “is totally stripped of Trees, & wood of every kind,” where it had been “covered” just five years earlier. The British ventured further and further out. But as supply crashed, wood became easily the most expensive staple in the region. The poor burned animal fat to survive, and the occupied government never truly recovered. As historian Ruma Chopra explains, “the cost and scarcity of wood in the city led New Yorkers to regard British regulars with hostility. Unlike flour, oats, candles, bedding, axes, and stoves that arrived from England,” the Army competed directly with New Yorkers for wood. And wood had to be harvested within a specific zone, on dedicated land, taking years to grow. When it was gone, it was gone.

The crisis intensified the housing shortage, with far greater overcrowding than New York had faced during the protests over British quartering. And the shortage of materials and energy reached far beyond New York. As the historian Todd Braisted writes: “The farmer who tilled his two hundred acres in Paramus, New Jersey or Tarrytown, New York” knew that his status as a Tory would not save his property if desperate military leaders came foraging. British or Rebel, “any army would soon devour his crops and livestock” if they were in short supply, or “hundreds of fence rails… for firewood” or both. If he owned woodlands, not even wealth of rank would save his property. Even the Morris family, among the richest and most powerful British subjects in all of North America, saw 450 acres of the prime timber on their estate in Morrisania felled by British axes between 1778 and 1780 — and all their livestock slaughtered.

War & Nature

The loss of nearby woodlands also complicated one of Washington’s key aims: the recapture of New York. Twice, in 1780 and 1782, Washington considered a full-frontal assault on the city. Both in the winter of 1780 and throughout spring and summer of 1782, he had his army close to the city, in New Jersey and in Westchester, NY, and he had superior numbers and artillery. The taking of New York would have been a significant coup, and might have accelerated an armistice with Britain. However, Washington demurred. A 1782 internal staff memo on the potential invasion shared with the Continental Congress suggests Washington felt limited in his strategic mobility due to the state of woodlands on the island. The memo recommends an invasion “ought not to be delay’d beyond the first of September — as the difficulty, preceding from the want of wood alone will be found almost, if not quite insurmountable, especially upon [New] York Island (where there is not a stick).”

By the end of the war, observers marveled at New York’s environmental transformation:dug-up tree-less streets, ruined gardens, polluted wells, ghostly woodlots, burnt-out structures, and homes fit to collapse. But outside the city, where dense hardwood forests, rich oyster and clam beds, and teeming fisheries had been not long ago, the region looked similarly exhausted.

How the British Lost America?

The military historian George Daughan argues that British strategy — cutting New England off by controlling New York and the Hudson River Valley — was seriously flawed, because they could never possibly dominated all the riverine hinterlands. At the very least, it would have required far more New Yorkers joining the effort. Instead the war quickly turned into a Vietnam-style “quagmire,” as historian Stanley Weintraub described it.

Britain had to win colonial hearts and minds, not just battles. Yet most suffered. By the end of the war, New Yorkers’ cost-of-living had tripled. The government attempted sincerely but proved unable to provide adequate food, water, shelter, and medical care.

Loyalists were optimistic the early capture of the lower Hudson River Valley promised a regular, abundant supply of provisions. But despite their military superiority, the British could not maintain a secure presence in any of the thirteen colonies, other than New York. And while authorities boasted of the resources on Long Island and in Eastern Jersey, even there their hold remained tenuous. Rebels regularly raided British suppliers. As a result, timber, water, and crop reserves depleted rapidly, inviting disaster as battlefield fortunes changed. One rebel wrote in 1778, “a famine must, I think (and very soon) ensue in the enemy's army... Nothing but rice, instead of bread or flour, has been dealt out to the soldiery since their arrival in New York.” Children went “barefoot” even on Livingston Manor, an upstate sanctuary for rich Loyalists. William Smith Jr. likened the daily cost of loving to paying for the most lavish castle in Yorkshire. And in 1779, the new state legislature confiscated the property of fifty-night of the city’s wealthiest men, standardizing a process that local committees and militias had begun for depriving “enemies of the state” of their holdings.

Trained for war, military officials administrated civil services hastily and chaotically, rarely prioritizing general welfare. As British victory grew more uncertain, imperial forces leaned on harsher policies. And when the supply chain broke down, rank-and-file soldiers exploited the situation, at the expense of locals. When the government failed to satisfy their needs, residents met them outside the law, raiding farms for food, seizing private homes for shelter, and illegally chopping trees for heat and fuel. As in countless other historical examples, “soft power” was more important than “hard power” in securing popular support. But material circumstances often determined victory.

  • On the British military occupation and the struggle to win colonial allegiance, see Donald F. Johnson, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

    Studies on the environmental dimensions of the military conflict include, Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill and Wang, 2002); David C. Hsiung, “Food, Fuel, and the New England Environment in the War for Independence, 1775–1776,” New England Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2007): 614–54; Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams Books, 2009), 156-57; Todd W. Braisted, Grand Forage 1778: The Battleground Around New York City (Westholme Publishing, 2016); Rachel B. Herrmann, No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2020).

    For more detailed information about New York under British military rule, Thomas Jones, History of New York during the Revolutionary War: And of the Leading Events in the Other Colonies at That Period, ed. Edward F. De Lancey, 2 vols. (Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1879), Oscar Theodore Barck, New York City during the War for Independence, with Special Reference to the Period of British Occupation (Columbia University Press, 1931).

    For studies of sexual violence during the American Revolution see, Sharon Block, “Rape in the American Revolution: Process, Reaction, and Public Re-Creation,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, ed. Elizabeth D. Heineman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 25–38; Sharon Block, “Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765-1815,” Journal of American History 89, no. 3 (2002): 849–68; Holger Hoock, “Jus in Bello, Rape and the British Army in the American Revolutionary War,” Journal of Military Ethics 14, no. 1 (2015): 74–97.

    For the revolution’s impact on ideas about sex and gender, see Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (W.W. Norton, 1992); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (University of Illinois Press, 1987); Lauren Duval, "Landscapes of Allegiance: Space, Gender, and Military Occupation in the American Revolution." PhD Dissertation, American University, 2018.

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