Bowling Green

Part III: The Critical Period

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Throughout the Revolution, New Yorkers came to Bowling Green, the city’s first park, just north of the Fort, to protest and make their voices heard. Over 300 burned the governor in effigy here during the Great Riot, over the Stamp Act. When Parliament repealed the law, grateful New Yorkers raised an enormous gold-leaf statue of King George in this same place. After hearing the Declaration of Independence six years later, rebels came back to melt the hulking lead into 42,000 rounds of ammunition. So when victory finally came, it was only natural that residents gathered at this square once more to celebrate the end of British occupation.

Bowling Green / Evacuation Day Plaza

  • By spring 1783, more than 20,000 British and Germanic soldiers had already disembarked from the port, as well as 29,000 civilians. But thousands of New Yorkers lined Broadway on November 25th to watch Gen. Washington formally reclaim the city, reveling in the end of a brutal war and the establishment of a new republic. Few would forget how that day made them feel.

    But creating a nation had only just begun. And who would belong to it, and on what terms, quickly became hotly contested questions. For a short while, most of the Loyalists believed they would have to go into exile. That soon changed. But there was far less debate over people of African or Native descent, who had served on both sides in the conflict, and in this critical theater of the war. Americans were now far more divided on the question of slavery than ever before. But among the things that united them most was a desire for Indigenous land.

    During the war, rebels used real and imagined threats to persuade colonists to join or maintain the rebellion. Here, in the shadows of the National Museum of the American Indian, we explore how these stories fueled the rebels’ cause, looking at the examples of New York’s public funeral of Michael Cresap, the famous Indian killer buried in Trinity, and of Jane McCrea, whose death printers circulated widely and exaggerated wildly during the rebellion to keep the unsteady alliance together.

    We also consider some of the many other famous acts of symbolism at Bowling Green, from the sawed-off crowns you can still touch on the fence to Evacuation Day, the holiday New Yorkers celebrated for more than a century (here at the recently co-named Evacuation Day Plaza). This stop begins the final leg in our tour, The Critical Period (1783-89).

Joseph Louis Cook (Akiatonharónkwen)

The peace accords did not recognize the sovereignty of Indigenous people, which meant the end of the Haudenosaunee in New York.

Joseph Louis Cook was the highest-ranking Continental officer of Black and Indian descent, born to an African father and Abenaki mother. Taken captive by the French and Mohawk as a child, he was raised by the latter and helped convince the Oneida and Tuscarora to join the Revolution. Cook fought under Montgomery and Arnold in the invasion of Canada, served Washington at Valley Forge, and participated in the Saratoga, Niagara, and Johnstown campaigns. He became a personal enemy of his fellow tribesman Joseph Brant, who led the Mohawk in support of the British.

  • The other four Haudenosaunee nations met the same fate. The Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca had led a series of raids in 1778 that crippled the Continental Army. With Loyalists in command, they also helped spread terror on the New York and Pennsylvania frontier in two massacres that resulted in the deaths of hundreds.

    In response, Washington sent a large contingent of rebels and Oneida to burn the main villages of the Cayuga and Seneca, hoping to force the other nations to surrender or remain on the sidelines. The Sullivan Expedition destroyed at least 40 villages and winter crop stores, killed thousands, and forced the rest of the populations into exile.

    After this decimating campaign, Brant tried desperately to rally western Native peoples into another Confederation and to negotiate new treaties, even meeting with US officials. He also tried claiming new land in western New York. All those efforts failed.

    For the rest of the war, they remained almost entirely dependent on the British, displaced after the war onto a small reservation in Ontario, where all six nations were granted 200,000 acres near Toronto and Buffalo.

Notice something missing?

Here at Bowling Green, rebels toppled the gilded statue of King George III after first hearing the Declaration of Independence read in 1776, sawing the crowns off of the fence around the monument New Yorkers put up six years earlier. They gathered outside it to celebrate the end of British occupation, in today’s Evacuation Day Plaza.

Behind the park lies the American Indian Museum. Legend has it, Peter Minuit “bought” the colony for Dutch merchants here in 1626, for $24.