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By Root 8150 0

York’s Tories both demoralized and defenseless. During the late summer of 1775 the pressure on them became intolerable. A series of resolves by the Provincial Congress provided that anyone aiding the enemies of America, or even denying the authority of congresses and committees, could be disarmed, fined, imprisoned, and banished. To Isaac Sears, this was the long-overdue summons to action. He galloped down from Connecticut with one hundred men and smashed up James Rivington’s printshop. After announcing that they acted independently of all congresses and committees, Sears and his band galloped away again singing “Yankee Doodle.” (Who, it will be recalled, stuck a feather in his cap and called it “macaroni”—a deft little dig at the flamboyant style of the same name associated with the upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic.)

Printer Samuel Loudon came in for similar treatment the following March when he printed The Deceiver Unmasked, an attack on Paine from the pen of the Rev. Charles Inglis. Led by Sears, Lamb, and McDougall, a band of Liberty Boys raided Loudon’s shop, destroyed his press, and burned every one of Inglis’s pamphlets.

Lukewarm patriots as well as Tories fled New York in droves. By the end of 1775 more than ten thousand of the city’s twenty-five thousand inhabitants had gone; thousands more would go in the months that followed. By July 1776 only five thousand or so remained. “To see the vast number of houses shut up, one would think the city almost evacuated,” wrote one departing Tory. “Women and children are scarcely to be seen in the streets. Troops are daily coming in; they break open and quarter themselves in the houses they find shut up. Necessity knows no law.”

Outside the city, however, the Tory problem proved harder to resolve. Opposition to the Association ran so high in Kings County that in August 1775 the Provincial Congress dispatched a committee to rally the fainthearted and disarm enemies to the cause. General Nathaniel Woodhull was likewise ordered to secure Queens County, but the task there was so difficult that the Provincial Congress finally appealed to the Continental Congress for help. Congress answered by sending Colonel Nathaniel Heard of New Jersey. Heard marched through Queens in January 1776 with twelve hundred militia and a list of “inimicals” who had refused to sign the Association. Nearly a thousand Tories or suspected Tories were rounded up and disarmed; nineteen were taken away to Philadelphia for questioning. Heard made a similar sweep of Staten Island a month later.

No sooner had Colonel Heard departed than General Charles Lee arrived in New York with two regiments of New England militia. A strange and moody man who surrounded himself with dogs, Lee was already something of a sensation among the patriots. His soldiers adored him, Washington depended on him, and the Continental Congress seemed to think he could do no wrong. For one thing, Lee was a retired British officer with more impressive military experience than anyone else on the American side, experience that had proved vital during the siege of Boston in the summer and fall of 1775. He was also an out-and-out radical who detested monarchy, spoke admiringly of democracy, and advocated immediate independence for the colonies.

To Lee’s way of thinking, the struggle against Great Britain was an authentic popular uprising, which required the kind of grass-roots mobilization that French revolutionaries would later call a levée en masse. If the war continued, he argued, it could be won only by citizen-soldiers who made up the rules as they went along, not by professional troops employing the aristocratic “Hyde Park” tactics of conventional European armies. True to his principles, he made his headquarters at Montayne’s tavern on Broadway, just across from the Fields and once the principal meeting place for radical patriots. It isn’t hard to see why the New England troops and the city’s mechanics loved him—or why he made the Provincial Congress extremely nervous. Paine thought him a marvel well before they met.

Congress