South St. Seaport

Part I: Imperial Crisis

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Parliament repealed the Townshend Act, which cost England an enormous sum of revenue and wore New York’s merchants down, too. But they kept the import duty on tea, which became a royal monopoly in 1773 — the first of many, rebels feared. New York was the first to respond, preventing agents from distributing the highly demanded good here at the waterfront, until Boston orchestrated its famous Tea Party in December. Five months later, when the next British ships arrived, New York’s rebels did the same. England responded with the Intolerable Acts, shutting down Boston’s harbor and dissolving its legislature. At Fraunces Tavern, Isaac Sears and Alexander McDougall urged merchants to implement a third boycott — and to propose the establishment of a Congress to other rebels, who had set up committees of correspondence in case their legislatures were also dissolved. But the merchants in the DeLancey faction, once again facing open rebellion, censured the radicals. The colony sent delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. But, with many of the city’s elite still urging moderation, rebels began to refer to New York as “Torytown.” 

  • Indeed, after ten years of intense debate, New York had reached a dangerous stalemate. On the same day George Washington stopped in New York on his way to lead revolutionary forces in Massachusetts, the royal governor William Tryon returned from a visit to England. Both received a warm public reception. Tryon was forced to move onto a ship in the harbor for protection against the mob. But his “floating City Hall” persisted — a “Tory underground” which began plotting to kill or kidnap Washington that afternoon.

    New York had far more Loyalists than any other city — elite merchants and landowners deeply entrenched in the British system, as well as high-ranking military officials and Church of Englanders. Only the agricultural perimeter was a greater hotbed of loyalism: Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, where much smaller populations benefited from the rising land prices and depended heavily on slavery and imperial trade. Maybe half of the entire colony supported the crown.

    But that was probably not much larger than the neutral population in the colonies at large. And while greater New York was the unrivaled capital of Loyalism, most in the city supported rebellion. After the opening battles of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord, New Yorkers joined more than 28,000 “Patriots” from across the colonies, gathered in a Continental Army to stop the British from invading their city. Hearing the news, Sears and other rebels seized control of government, drove out the Loyalists, and began rapidly mounting defenses, as England slowly began preparing for the assault. Hearing the Declaration of Independence read on July 9th, 1776, a large crowd marched down Broad Way from the Common and toppled the 4,000-lb. statue of the King at Bowling Green, which they had proudly raised just six years earlier. They shipped its pieces to a foundry in Connecticut, where rebels made 40,000 bullets to fire on George’s army.

    The Battle for New York in the summer of 1776 would be the largest of the Revolution. The city was a “post of infinite importance” in the view of Gen. William Howe and the British, who saw the Hudson as their way to sever rebellious New England from the southern colonies. John Adams spoke likewise for the rebels, judging New York the “key to the whole continent.” In powerful testament of that fact, Britain sent dozens of warships to its harbor in late June, to crush the insurgency before it went any further.

    By the end of July, the number passed 100. By late August, it had reached 427, carrying 30,000 British and “Hessian” soldiers. It was the largest amphibious force gathered since the invasion of ancient Troy, and would remain so until D-Day in World War II. Looking out from the military hospital, one rebel said: “I thought all London was afloat.”

    With this conflagration looming, all but 5,000 of the 25,000 in New York fled that year, although many remained nearby to stay in contact with trading partners, friends, and family. The Battle that August was very nearly the rebels’ last stand, a dismal military failure. But Washington’s miraculous escape over the East River allowed the Revolution to survive.

    And it was perhaps not a victory for the British in the long run. The fall of New York brought seven long years of misery, corruption, and brutality, all of which steadily undermined the majority support they may have enjoyed between the neutral and the loyal in the colonies. This struggle for hearts and minds on the home front was perhaps just as decisive as consequences on the battlefield. At the same time, the war also had both wildly devastating and unexpectedly liberating effects on the Indigenous and the enslaved. This soon became very clear, nowhere more than in New York.

From South St. Seaport you can see where New York’s rebels staged their own tea party at Murray’s Wharf (foot of Wall St.) and over the East River to Brooklyn Heights, where the Marblehead sailors rescued Washington’s troops — and the Revolution — from an early death in 1776. An historic marker notes their contribution in DUMBO. You can learn more about the waterfront, and get live demonstrations of an 18th century print-shop, in the South St. Seaport Museum.

You can hear Brooklyn native and famed actor John Turturro provide a play-by-play account of the Battle here, courtesy of The Old Stone House & Washington Park. You can also find several monuments along the Revolutionary War Heritage Trail in Brooklyn.

Caesar Glover

Caesar was one of hundreds of sailors, White and Black, who helped the Continental Army escape from Brooklyn in 1776, enabling the rebellion to survive. Born in Africa, he was enslaved as a child and brought to North America.

Somehow, he earned his freedom, and in 1775 he joined the Revolution as part of the Marblehead regiment. This group of seamen manned the boats in the New Jersey and New York campaigns, including the famous crossing of the Delaware river. And Black New Englanders like Caesar were among the Continental Army’s first recruits — 150 carried Washington’s troops from Brooklyn Heights to Peck Slip in August 1776. The amateur military, greatly outnumbered, was badly defeated in Long Island. But they were saved by a thick fog, an early historian writing that no one in the region could remember any such weather “within the space of twenty or thirty years.” If not for the skill of mariners like Caesar, military historians agree, no more than half of the decimated rebel army would have escaped.

  • Upon enlistment at 33 years old, Caesar adopted the surname of his master, John, a Massachusetts ship captain who later became a prominent general. Caesar served with mixed infantry for another three years, fighting at the battles of Trenton and Princeton. He worked as a poor laborer until his death in 1822, but received a pension from the US government. Newspapers printed a rare obituary for the Black veteran when he died, noting his contribution to the founding of the nation.