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Later that same day, Governor Tryon returned to resume his duties after a fourteen-month absence. A smaller and much more restrained crowd greeted the governor at the foot of Broad Street and walked with him over to Hugh Wallace’s town house on Bowling Green, where he had lodgings for the night. It was the first of many hard lessons, he said, in the “impotence of His Matys Officers and Ministers of Justice in this Province,” and it now seemed “very probable I may be taken Prisoner, as a state Hostage, or obliged to retire on board one of His Majestys Ships of War to avoid the insolence of an inflamed Mob.”

It came to that more quickly than the governor might have imagined. Only a week before he and Washington reached New York, a second clash between colonial forces and Gage’s redcoats took place at Bunker Hill. Then, over the summer of 1775, Congress rejected a conciliatory plan proposed by Lord North. It offered instead the socalled Olive Branch Petition, pleading with the king to cease hostilities. It also drew up a “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” explaining that the colonists had acted only in self-defense and were “with one mind resolved to die freemen, rather than to live slaves.” In August Congress launched an invasion of Canada to prevent its use as a base of operations against the colonies. “The Americans from Politicians are now becoming Soldiers,” Tryon reported to the home government.

YANKEE DOODLE COMES TO TOWN

On the night of August 23 John Lamb’s artillery company undertook to remove two dozen cannon from the Grand Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan. While they were at it, they exchanged fire with a boatload of soldiers from the Asia, lying in the East River just off the foot of Wall Street. In retaliation, the commander of the Asia ordered a full thirty-two-gun broadside of solid shot into the sleeping town. Apart from a hole in the roof of Fraunces Tavern, no great damage was done. But for the thousands of halfdressed, panic-stricken residents who tumbled out of their beds into the streets, it was an effective reminder of the city’s vulnerability to naval bombardment. Many made plans to leave.

Isaac Sears soon left town too, albeit for reasons of another kind. In October 1775 the Continental Congress recommended the arrest of all royal officials remaining in the colonies; not only did the New York Provincial Congress seem reluctant to take so decisive a step, but when soldiers pilfered a royal store, the Congress ordered everything returned rather than risk another bombardment from the Asia. Incensed by this timidity, Sears sold his house, moved to Connecticut, and proceeded to organize an armed troop made of sterner stuff. “There are many Enemies to the cause of Freedom” in New York, he declared. Governor Tryon, suspecting that Sears had set his sights on him in particular, slipped off to William Axtell’s Flatbush estate; from there he made his way to a merchant ship, the Duchess of Gordon, anchored safely under the guns of the fleet in the harbor.

The winter of 1775-76 brought a steady stream of news confirming that Tryon would never again set foot in the city without a fight. Parliament rejected the Olive Branch Petition. The king formally proclaimed the colonies to be in a state of rebellion and closed them to all trade. General Gage had been replaced by General Sir William Howe, and a punitive expedition force under General Henry Clinton, General Charles Cornwallis, and Admiral Peter Parker was expected to descend on North Carolina sometime in January.

Throughout the colonies, the reaction to these developments was an eruption of popular resentment against the monarchy that killed the chances of a reconciliation with the mother country. Americans now began to talk openly of independence; the case for it was clinched in January 1776 by Tom Paine’s Common Sense, which denounced “the Royal Brute of Great-Britain” and catalogued all the reasons why the colonies would be better off on their own.

Tryon’s departure left New