The Battery

Part I: Imperial Crisis

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The story of New York’s unexpected lurch into the Revolution begins here, where the cannon batteries of 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. By 1763, a newly consolidated Great Britain managed to gain all of France’s claims in North America, plus key swaths of the Spanish empire, enabling it to surge ahead of Europe’s major imperial powers and gain near-control of the continent. New York, because of its location, emerged as the hub of British power in the western hemisphere.

  • Merchants in the southern tip of Manhattan provisioned the king’s army, producing clothing and weapons, while farmers in the larger metropolitan region provided food and drink — for tens of thousands. Ruling families like the DeLanceys and Livingstons became unimaginably wealthy, expanding into high-end markets such as real estate, slavery, and privateering. Shipbuilders, ropemakers, blacksmiths, tanners, and other skilled tradesmen benefited enormously, 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 quadrupled its built footprint, emerging as the unofficial capital of British North America.

    Prospering from the creation of England’s first real 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 lining the harbor protected the imperial outpost from the ships of 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.

Battery Park stands on landfill. It contains no historic marker for the giant fort that once stood at its northeast corner, in the footprint of today’s US Custom House, or the cannon batteries that lined the old southern coast of Manhattan, today’s Water St. But you can touch a piece of Fort George and see its design on the etched sidewalk map in front the Bowling Green subway entrance, and run your hands over some of the Battery in the South Ferry station.

Joseph Brant (Thayendenega)

Some Indigenous peoples also gained from the British empire. Joseph Brant was one among several Native leaders in the western and northern part of the state able to exchange goods and demand concessions.

The Mohawk grew up among Irish, Scots, and “Germans” (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, and his sister Molly unofficially married to William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies during the Seven Years War (1754-63), in which the young 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 nations of the “Iroquois” Confederation, the most powerful Indigenous alliance in North America, which effectively prevented colonists in New York and the Lower Hudson Valley from exploiting the west and north of the state. Alongside other groups west of the Appalachian mountains, they managed to preserve tribute and gain protection from Britain in 1763 because of their crucial aid in ousting the French and Spanish from North America.

    But this put them at fearsome odds with speculators and ordinary colonists. By then, just a dozen families owned 1.75 million acres in the Lower Hudson Valley, most of the land between New York and Haudenosaunee territory in the rest of the state.

    In 1775, when the Six Nations met to discuss the burgeoning War for Independence, 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.