WALKING TOUR
Take a journey through lower Manhattan and experience the “city at the heart of the Revolution.” Each stop provides audio narration with site information, character profiles, select video, and links to our Library for a scalable, “choose your own adventure” model of tourism. Here you’ll learn about some of the period’s most famous characters and events — and others far less known — for a trip that will challenge the knowledge of even the most ardent buff.
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Know Before You Go
Walk Length: 90 minutes
Audio Narration: 75 minutes
Distance: 3 mi / 5 km
Start: The Battery
End: Federal Hall
Imperial Crisis
(1763-1775)
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During the late colonial era and until the end of the Revolution, New York served as the military headquarters of the British in North America. During the French and Indian War (1754-63), it also grew fantastically wealthy, providing the military with textiles, weapons, horses, food, and drink for nearly a decade in what many consider the first global war. That conflict all but removed the other empires from North America, while leaving Britain with a staggering debt, setting in motion the Imperial Crisis.
Long rumored to be the king’s favorite colony, George II described New York as “exceedingly necessary… to our kingdom” by 1730 already. Its proximity to Britain’s “sugar islands,” the most lucrative part of the empire, gave it heavy economy value, too. As the port grew, so did its fortification. Officials steadily built up the city’s defenses, bolstering the old Dutch barricades on the rivers around Manhattan and upgrading the giant stone fortress at its southern tip. Fort George was easily New York’s biggest physical structure (the footprint surrounding today’s Museum of the American Indian). The battery, or cannon-mounted walls around it, guarded the colony from imperial rivals, and 315 miles of the Hudson River, viewed as critical to protecting the largest part of the empire, British North America.
This military icon was the epitome of British rule and New York’s unique place in the empire. It was mirrored at the northern end of the city by New York’s largest building complex, a set of barracks housing the only large permanent garrison in North America. But when Parliament began taxing and regulating, to service its deficit and preempt colonial desire for independence, New York was thrown into perhaps the greatest depression of any city. It produced the fiercest reaction, leveled at Fort George in “the Great Riot” of 1765. It would remain, along with the barracks, the most frequent site of protest over the next decade.
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By the mid-1700s, New York was second only to Philadelphia and London itself as a center of trade within the empire. It gradually outpaced Boston, eventually carrying more freight than all New England combined. By 1755, it had 477 ships in port — a sevenfold increase on the Dutch era. By 1763, there were almost 700.
No one consumed more British wares, hundreds of imports from around the world. Visitors from Europe and the other colonies routinely described it as “London in miniature,” the unofficial capital of British North America.
Extraordinarily cosmopolitan, New York was also unrivaled for its diversity. Strolling along the waterfront, memorialized here at Coenties Slip, one could hear dozens of languages, including traders and diplomats from the Alongkian-speaking nations and slaves from the Akan region of Africa. The state was home to the most powerful Indigenous military alliance on the continent. And no city had a greater number of slaves, outside the south.
New York was still a colony, however, and especially vulnerable to Parliament’s regulations and taxes, after the end of the French and Indian War caused prices to double and trebled unemployment. A quarter of the city’s workforce belonged to maritime trades, and the poorest lived here in the East Ward. The city’s most notorious slum, it was home to maybe 5,000 maritime workers, crowded into shacks, flophouses, and lean-tos, in between hundreds of taverns, as well as dance halls, brothels, gambling dens, and blood-sport arenas.
Made dependent on England via mercantilism, colonial ports weree the first to rebel, and no city put up stronger resistance during the first wave of the Imperial Crisis than New York. Perhaps a fifth of the city’s 25,000 people demonstrated in the Great Riot. And the most “radical” sentiment in the months and years protest that followed came from the East Ward. it was these forgotten “Sons of Neptune” who threatened to seize Fort George a decade before rebels took over the government. The merchants who composed the more famous “Sons of Liberty,” often had to follow this more democratic group.
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With ships arriving directly from London by 1755, New York was often the first to receive and publish news from England. It then circulated up to New England via Boston and down to the southern colonies via Philadelphia. Although those cities had a greater number of printers, New York was thus arguably the leading communications hub in late colonial North America.
Most operated here at “printers corner,” or Hanover Square, near the East River waterfront, the merchant district, the legislature, and the fort. Most printers struggled for business, news the smallest part of any paper. Hit severely by Parliament’s taxes and regulations, they became a third major part of the rebel coalition. Like the Sons of Liberty, they established lines of communication with other colonies that had never existed. Although generally moderate, they also voiced more radical opinions, like those associated with the Sons of Neptune, publishing anonymous broadsides which broke new ground in freedom of expression and political debate.
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If New York produced the fiercest reaction to the first wave of Parliament’s regulations and taxes, it was also the victim of the most draconian part of the second wave. Not two years after the Great Riot, Britain suspended its legislature, until the big merchants and giant landowners who dominated the assembly consented to pay for the city’s soldiers. It would be another seven years before Parliament took such action, dissolving the Massachusetts legislature after the Boston Tea Party in the final wave of the Imperial Crisis — transforming what had been a generally united protest movement into a far more divisive bid for independence.
Because New York was the military headquarters of British North America, it had an unrivaled number of “Redcoats.” As the living symbols of foreign rule, they were an everyday reminder of the manufactured depression filling the streets with beggars and the city’s large new debtors’ prison. Tensions now boiled over in the streets, particularly near the barracks, where rebels held giant meetings regularly under what New York’s printers dubbed the “liberty pole.” Five of these pine trees, legally reserved for navy vessels, were hoisted at the common, and then destroyed by soldiers at the nearby barracks, in a dangerous tit-for-tat. The escalation culminated in the Battle of Golden Hill, the “first blood shed in the American Revolution,” a bloody two-day skirmish, now largely forgotten, which instigated the Boston Massacre.
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Here at the Seaport, we discuss the first major battle of the Revolution, the struggle for New York City. Because the Hudson divided the middle and southern colonies, New York was the focus of military strategy for both sides in the war — a “post of infinite importance” (Gen. Howe) as the geographic “key to the whole continent” (John Adams). Expecting a massive invasion after the events at Lexington and Concord, all but 5,000 evacuated New York in late 1775 and early 1776. That summer, residents watched 421 vessels appear in the harbor, carrying over 32,000 soldiers and 13,000 marines.
The battle which followed over the next six weeks remained the largest and deadliest of the Revolution. It would also remain the most important, enabling the rebellion to survive. Here at the waterfront, you can view several locations in this fight — including the spot where a group of Black, Indigenous, and White sailors led the remnants of Gen. Washington’s decimated army over the perilous currents of the East River in a miraculous escape, under the cover of a freak fog.
War & Occupation (1776-1783)
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After the rebel defeat, New York once again became the military headquarters of British North America. Yet this short-term victory would undermine long-term success in ways that are still very unappreciated. Britain won most of the Revolution’s 772 battles and skirmishes. But it steadily lost the ongoing battle for hearts and minds. With an estimated 40 percent of colonials neutral at the start of the war, New York became the key flashpoint in this struggle, as the only region the British managed to hold consistently. The military struggled to uphold law and order and provide for the general welfare, while simultaneously pursuing its main objective, defeating the rebels in a guerrilla-style war over an enormous territory, 3,000 miles from home.
New York also provides an ideal spotlight on the neglected home front experience. With nearly a third of the Revolution fought in New York State alone, the city became a giant refugee camp. And despite British strength, it had many of the same qualities that have led so many scholars to frame this period as the “nation’s first civil war.” These are the darkest and least known years of New York’s history.
Here at Peck Slip, the ferry landing where people gathered for centuries to exchange information from across the region, we consider what the occupation and the war meant for all of the city’s diverse groups.
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Nathan Hale’s statue in City Hall Park honors perhaps the Revolution’s most famous spy and one of its earliest martyrs. The 21-year-old Patriot, hung in today’s Midtown after the Great Fire, underscores the importance of espionage in New York during the Revolution, with the rebel army staged permanently outside the British military headquarters. The region became the intelligence-gathering hub for Washington’s famous spy ring in lower Manhattan and north-central Long Island. But here we also discuss the many other figures, yet unrecognized, who provided far more common forms of espionage — on both sides of the conflict.
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With rebels mostly on the run, the British captured upwards of 30,000 soldiers during the war and New York became a city of British prisons. In fact, most of the rebels who lost their lives died here, “America’s first P.O.W.s.” As many as 18,000 perished from malign neglect, torture, and summary execution — three to four times as many as on the battlefield. Their bones washed up on New York’s beaches for many years after the war, the skulls strewn across Wallabout Bay like “pumpkins in [] autumn.”
As printers spread news of this mistreatment, British authority declined across the colonies, winning over neutral and even loyal colonists. Here at the Sugarhouse Prison, we discuss this largely forgotten, grisly part of the Revolution, as well as the wider impact that martial law had on the seldom-considered home front and the battle for hearts and minds.
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Before the invasion, New York struggled to house, feed, clothe, and warm the rebel army. But all those problems trebled during the occupation, as the city’s population exploded from 5,000 to 50,000.
Even in normal times, the almshouse serviced just a fraction of the poor. But now even some of the wealthy experienced hardship. Many loyal, neutral, and even rebel refugees had to find shelter in “Canvas Town,” the ruins of 800-900 buildings destroyed in the Great Fire, most likely ignited by rebels after the defeat in 1776. “Holy Ground,” the old elite red-light district, became a squalid den for six times as many “ladies of pleasure.” And the growing demands on food and energy, a record-cold winter, and epidemics of cholera and smallpox devastated the already vulnerable population. Every morning, cartmen wheeled piles of the frozen, starved, pestilent dead, many of those bodies in the largely unnoticed graves here at colonial New York’s burial grounds.
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During the occupation, New York often no less than 10,000 British soldiers. Here at the main barracks 300 to 500 soldiers were housed — including wives and children — 20 apiece in 21 sq. ft. rooms. The rest lodged in earthen huts, bivouacs, tents, and civilian homes across the region. With these numbers and the hardships of an often brutal, corrupt military government, hatred of the foreign army only grew, even among the loyal.
But the ill-paid and diverse corps of “British” soldiers has often been unfairly portrayed, too, along with the officer corps. Here at the barracks, we look at the Revolution as it so rarely has been, from the view of the enemy.
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The history of the Revolution is something that has been created and recreated many times, and the struggle to control the past began during the war itself. At St. Paul’s Chapel, you can see the first national memorial, honoring the general Richard Montgomery, who partnered with Benedict Arnold on the failed rebel invasion of Canada in 1775-76. Here we explore their unexpected, divergent paths to heroism and villainy, and the eternal drive to construct simplistic narratives from more complex historic events.
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During the occupation, St. Paul’s became the center of Anglicanism, as the only remaining parish. But Trinity was perhaps the most elite Church of England, a high-profile mouthpiece during the Imperial Crisis, rallying New York’s Anglican minority and the majority of loyal and neutral colonials outside the city.
Here at the end of the Part II, we discuss the role of faith in the Revolution, and consider what the US victory, cobbled out in 1781-83, meant for the Loyalists who belonged to New York’s famous parish and their infamous rector Charles Inglis.
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Critical Period
(1784-1789)
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Bowling Green was New York’s most elite park, where “gentlemen” and “ladies” came to relax, play cricket, and (yes) bowl, to escape the stress of business, government, and military life. But the park’s location, in “crown town,” just outside the Fort, made it an ideal spot to protest British policies, across the Imperial Crisis.
Residents thus naturally came back here for Gen. Washington’s triumphal return to New York on November 25th, 1783 — after 50,000 Redcoats and Loyalists left America from this city.
Evacuation Day would mark the start of what became a New York holiday for more than a century. But the artwork memorializing other famous events at Bowling Green, in particular the toppling of the statue of King George III, have also masked the darker side of the US victory, especially Natives like the upstate Haudenosaunee. Here, in the shadow of the American Indian Museum, we explore both these stories.
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Fraunces Tavern hosted a slew of landmark events during this period, most famously as the site of Gen. Washington’s farewell. It was also the place where the British determined the fate of roughly 3,000 Black men, women, and children in the Birch Trials — the largest emancipation until the Civil War. This group was just a fraction of the 20,000 “runaways” in the Revolution, half of whom escaped to metropolitan New York. Here we explore this far less known story, as well as the new colonies that Loyalists established in Nova Scotia, and the the start of New York’s role as the US capital during the Critical Period.
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Alexander Hamilton played many roles across this era. But after serving as Washington’s unofficial chief of staff during the war, he returned to New York, where he established a thriving legal practice and national reputation for a seldom-remembered chapter of his life, fighting to reintegrate the Loyalists. While 60,000 fled, as many as 450,000 remained, a sixth of the founding generation. This little-known part of the Critical Period accompanied the incredibly severe economic downturn that US victory brought, a depression rivaling the 1930s, which quickly reordered political dividing lines. Hamilton shifted the course of national events here, too, with a series of op-eds urging New York to support a new constitution during the close struggle over ratification. Those “Federalist Papers” were circulated by printers who operated steps from Hamilton’s office, in the nation’s first media capital (Hanover Square) down the street from its new congress (Federal Hall).
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Unlike Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell or Boston’s Old North Church, there are few iconic symbols of the Revolution in New York, and little celebration of this history — even though the city remained at the center of events from 1763 to 1789. Here at Federal Hall, where America’s first president swore the oath and some of the nation’s most consequential laws were passed during the founding, we end our tour by considering the many factors that pushed New York from its place as “the city at the heart of the Revolution,” and the its legacy for all the groups discussed in NYC Revolutionary Trail.
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Meet the CHARACTERS of
NYC REVOLUTIONARY TRAIL
