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. It was the only city to get ships direct from England; its deep harbor made it ideal for naval staging; and it lay at the mouth of the Hudson, which extended 315 miles north, providing the greatest continental access on the seaboard below Nova Scotia — including the Albany-Montreal corridor, which Britain viewed as strategically critical in the French and Indian War (1954-63). During that conflict, New York also grew fantastically wealthy, serving as the “general Magazine” of His Majesty’s Forces. The large merchants and farmers who dominated the colonial assembly provided 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. Until then, New Yorkers from many different backgrounds had proudly identified as “Englishmen.” Long rumored to be the king’s favorite colony, George II described New York as “exceedingly necessary… to our kingdom” by 1730 already.
Consequently, royal officials had steadily built up the city’s defenses, bolstering the old Dutch barricades on the East and Harlem rivers, and upgrading Fort George. This giant stone compound, which once lay at the southern tip of Manhattan (surrounding today’s Museum of the American Indian) was imposing, easily New York’s biggest physical structure. It was mirrored at the northern end of the city by New York’s largest complex, a set of barracks housing the only large permanent garrison in North America. These buildings symbolized New York’s role as British military headquarters, with the battery, or cannon-mounted walls around the fort, guarding the colony from imperial rivals that might enter the harbor. But when Parliament began taxing and regulating the colonies, to service its debt and preempt any desire for independence, New York was thrown into depression. And Fort George became the fiercest site of protest in North America, in the Great Riot of 1765.
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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. Because it was closer to the West Indies, the most lucrative part of Britain’s empire, it gradually outpaced Boston, eventually carrying more freight than all New England combined. By 1755, it was the only city in North America to get ships directly from England and had 477 in port. By 1763, there were over 700.
That made it extraordinarily cosmopolitan for a small imperial outpost. No one consumed more British wares, hundreds of imports from around the world. 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 west Africa. Visitors from Europe and the other colonies routinely described it as “London in miniature,” the unofficial capital of British North America.
But it was dependent on England within the mercantilist order, like all ports, which felt Parliament’s regulations and taxes most heavily. They became the first to rebel. And no city put up stronger resistance during the first wave of the Imperial Crisis, when perhaps a fifth of New York stormed Fort George, threatening revolution. The most radical sentiment came from the East Ward, the city’s most notorious slum, home to maybe 5,000 maritime workers, crowded into shacks, flophouses, and lean-tos along the waterfront. Unemployed and facing skyrocketing costs of living, it was these “Sons of Neptune” who marched on the fort, days before merchants and sea captains formed the more famous “Sons of Liberty.”
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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 opened shop here at “printers corner,” Hanover Square, near the waterfront and the merchants in the Dock Ward, as well as elite near the legislature and the fort in “crown town.” Most printers struggled for business and, hit severely by Parliament’s taxes and regulations, they became major political figures during the Imperial Crisis. Like the merchants in the Sons of Liberty, they established lines of communication that had never existed, reporting on news from the other colonies. Although generally moderate, they also voiced more radical opinions, like those associated with the Sons of Neptune, publishing anonymous broadsides which then circulated in New York’s unrivaled number of taverns.
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In 1765, New York staged the fiercest mass protest in North America, and hosted the first meeting of colonial leaders, over the Stamp Act — the final piece in a wave that legislation which set off a depression in the ports in 1763. But New York was also the victim of the most draconian part of the second wave of taxes and regulation, when Parliament suspended its legislature in 1767. Not until 1774 would Britain do the same, dissolving the Massachusetts legislature after the Boston Tea Party and transforming what had been united protest into a far more divisive bid for independence. Because New York was the military headquarters of the British in North America, it had an unrivaled number of soldiers. England refused to seat its legislature until the colony agreed house and feed them. Tensions with “Redcoats” now boiled over in the streets, particularly at the Fields or Common, where rebels from the waterfront met regularly and continually raised the stakes, hoisting “liberty poles” near the barracks, which soldiers then destroyed. 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 in 1776. 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,” said Gen. Howe; the “key to the whole continent,” echoed John Adams. Expecting a massive invasion, all but 5,000 evacuated lower Manhattan in late 1775 and early 1776. That summer, residents watched 421 vessels appear in the harbor, carrying over 32,000 soldiers. 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 the remnants of the Continental Army made its daring escape over the perilous currents of the East River, using the cover of a random, heavy fog.
War & Occupation (1776-1783)
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New York once again became the military headquarters of the British in 1776. Yet this short-term victory undermined long-term success in still-unappreciated ways. The war radically changed life on the home front, especially in New York, which experienced the longest military occupation by far — seven, long, miserable years. Here at Peck Slip, the ancient ferry landing, where people gathered to exchange goods and information from across the region, we consider what the occupation and the war meant for all of the colony’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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The rebels spent most of the war on the run, the British capturing upwards of 30,000 soldiers. As a result, New York quickly morphed from a “compleat garrison” under the rebels into a city of British prisons. Upwards of 18,000 prisoners-of-war died from malign neglect, torture, and summary execution. Three to four times as many Continental soldiers perished under these conditions, here in New York, as on the battlefield — their bones washing up on beaches and skulls littering Brooklyn’s northwestern harbor like “pumpkins in [] autumn” for many years after the war. But 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,” amid the ruins of 800-900 buildings destroyed in the Great Fire. “Holy Ground,” the old northern red-light district, grew from 500 to 3,000 “ladies of pleasure.” But the growing demands on food and energy, a record-cold winter, and epidemics of cholera and smallpox devastated the entire city. Every morning, cartmen wheeled piles of the frozen, starved, pestilent dead, their bodies now in largely unnoticed graves here at colonial New York’s burial grounds.
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Often no less than 10,000 British soldiers were lodged or staged in New York during the war. Here at the main Barracks just 300 to 500 soldiers were housed — including wives, children, and other camp followers, 20 apiece in 21 sq. ft. rooms. The rest were put in earthen huts, bivouacs, tents, and civilian homes across the city and region. With these numbers and the hardships of an often brutal and corrupt military dictatorship, hatred of the foreign occupying army only grew, now increasingly among the loyal and neutral. But the ill-paid and diverse corps of Redcoats has often been unfairly portrayed, too, as has its officer core. Here at this most British location, 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 even as the cannon fell. 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 historical narratives of good and evil.
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During the occupation, St. Paul’s became the center of Anglicanism, as the only remaining parish. But Trinity had been the most elite church of state, an important, high-profile mouthpiece for the British cause during the Imperial Crisis, rallying the Anglican minority and the much larger numbers of loyal or fluidly neutral across the colonies. Here at the end of the Part II, we discuss the role of religion 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, bowl, or play cricket, to escape the bustle of the waterfront and the stress of government and military life. But the space’s location, just outside the Fort, had made it an ideal spot to protest British policies, from the beginning to the end of the Imperial Crisis. Residents thus naturally came back here for Gen. Washington’s triumphal return on November 25th, 1783 — after 50,000 soldiers and Loyalists had already disembarked from the city. Evacuation Day would mark the start of what became a local holiday for more than a century. But the artwork memorializing the other famous events at Bowling Green have also masked the darker side of the US victory, particularly for Natives like the Haudenosaunee of New York. Here, in the shadow of the American Indian Museum, we explore both stories.
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Fraunces Tavern (or, the Queen’s Head) hosted a slew of landmark events during the Imperial Crisis and the Critical Period, most famously as the site of Gen. Washington’s farewell. But 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 much larger group of runaways in the Revolution, half of whom escaped to metropolitan New York. Here we explore this mostly unknown story, as well as the new colonies White and Black Loyalists established in Canada, and the the start of New York’s role as the US capital during the Critical Period (1784-89).
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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, the young man 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 450,000 Loyalists who remained in the US, a sixth of the population. This little-known part of the Critical Period accompanied the incredibly severe economic downturn that came with US victory, a depression perhaps larger than that of the 1930s, which quickly reordered political dividing lines. Hamilton shifted the course of national events with the culminating act of this redirection, too, organizing and writing 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 the even larger and more influential set of printers in the city, who operated steps from Hamilton’s office, down the street from the new congress building, 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 its time as the first US capital, we end our tour by considering the many factors that pushed New York from its place in national memory as “the city at the heart of the Revolution,” as well as the era’s legacy for all the groups discussed in NYC Revolutionary Trail.
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Meet the CHARACTERS of
NYC REVOLUTIONARY TRAIL
