The Battery

Part I: Imperial Crisis

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The story of New York’s unexpected lurch into the Revolution begins here at “the Battery,” where the cannon outside Fort George once stood guard over the city’s harbor. Until the mid-1700s, New York was just a fledgling outpost in the British empire, containing no more than 12,000 settlers. But a series of pivotal, long-forgotten wars radically transformed it. New York, because of its location at the mouth of the Hudson, emerged as the headquarters of the British military in North America. Merchants in the southern tip of Manhattan provisioned the king’s army and navy, tailoring clothing and repairing weapons for tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and militia-members, while farmers in the larger metropolitan region provided food and drink.

The Battery / Fort George

  • Ruling political families like the DeLanceys and Livingstons made fortunes in these wartime trades and expanded into high-end markets such as real estate, slavery, and privateering. Shipbuilders, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tanners, and other skilled tradesmen benefited enormously from England’s military spending, too. As did stonemasons, bricklayers, plasterers, and ordinary laborers. Plus shopkeepers, lodgers, tavern-owners… anyone servicing the constant mill of sailors and soldiers. Over a few decades, New York doubled in population and became in effect the unofficial capital of British North America.

    Prospering from the creation of England’s first global empire, New Yorkers of all kinds proudly identified as “Englishmen,” celebrating the “liberties” they enjoyed under the “constitution” of the modern world’s first economically and politically liberal nation. And British officials increasingly valued the city, building up its seaward defenses and choosing to station their only permanent North American garrison in New York, at Fort George and the upper Barracks. The Battery protected the imperial outpost from rival empires, its impressive firepower a symbol of New York’s status as the economic and political headquarters of the largest and fastest-growing part of the British empire, the thirteen colonies.

Joseph Brant / Thayendenega

Some Indigenous people also gained from the British empire. The Mohawk leader Thayendenega (a.k.a., Joseph Brant) was one among several Natives in the northern and western part of New York able to exchange goods and demand concessions.

Brant grew up among Irish, Scots, and German Palatines on a farm between the Adirondack and Catskill mountains. His mother was a prominent trader of ginseng to merchants and doctors in New York City. His sister Molly was unofficially married to William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies during the Seven Years War, in which Brant led several campaigns. Afterward, he served the British again, fighting the coalition of Indigenous groups opposing colonization in the Great Lakes region during Pontiac’s Rebellion. With Johnson’s patronage, Brant developed many connections in government, voyaging to England to negotiate in defense of Mohawk land, where he became a celebrity.

  • The Mohawk were among the six Haudenosaunee nations of the “Iroquois” Confederation. The most powerful Indigenous alliance in North America, the league effectively prevented colonists from exploiting the western and northern swath of New York. Alongside others, they also managed to gain protection from Britain in 1763 because of their aid in ousting the French from North America in the Seven Years War.

    But this put them at fearsome odds with colonists. By the start of the Seven Years War, just a dozen families owned 1.75 million acres in the Lower Hudson Valley. Speculators as well as ordinary colonials were outraged when Britain declared their land off-limits to settlement at the end of the conflict: the first act of the Imperial Crisis.

    In 1775, on the eve of the Revolution, the Six Nations met to discuss what to do. Most advocated neutrality. Brant, who became the most famous “loyalist Indian” in North America, prophesied that colonial victory would mean the despoliation of Native land across the continent.

Across the street from the US Custom House, in front of the Bowling Green subway entrance, you will find a block of marble on a pedestal. This is the only historic marker for the giant fort that once guarded New York’s harbor. You’ll notice an etched map on the sidewalk before it, delineating the fort’s scale, but the faded text next to it says nothing about this critical period of New York’s history, when the city grew enormously as the military headquarters of British North America. The sprawling facility was the largest physical structure in town, mirrored by the huge barracks that used to surround today’s City Hall, defining the city’s northern edge. As the main symbol of English rule, Fort George was a repeated site of rebel protest during the Imperial Crisis, beginning with the Great Riot of 1765 — the largest and most violent reaction in the colonies to Parliament’s first wave of taxes and regulation. A decade later, New York’s rebels made good on their promise that year and stormed the fort, driving the royal government onto warships in the harbor (again).

If you walk south and enter the South Ferry station, you can also run your hands along the “battery,” or cannon-mounted walls that protected New York, the most heavily protected colony in the largest part of the British empire.