Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [190]
The British fleet anchored off Staten Island, 1776. Sketch by Archibald Robertson. (Spenser Collection. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
On July 2, 1776, Congress voted in favor of independence; two days later it adopted Jefferson’s Declaration. New York’s Provincial Congress gave its assent on July 9. At six P.M. that same day, the Declaration was read to Washington’s troops mustered in the Common. A rowdy crowd of soldiers and civilians (“no decent people” were present, one witness said later) then marched down Broadway to Bowling Green, where they toppled the statue of George III erected in 1770. The head was put on a spike at the Blue Bell Tavern near Fort Washington at present-day Broadway and 181st Street; the rest of the statue, some four thousand pounds of lead, was hauled off to Connecticut. There it will “be run up into musket balls for the use of the Yankees,” declared one soldier, “It is hoped that the emanations from the leaden George will make . . . deep impressions in the bodies of some of his red-coated and Tory subjects.”
Within a week the King’s Arms on City Hall had likewise come down, along with other trappings of monarchy adorning Trinity and St. Paul’s. “Every Vistage of Royalty, as far as been in the power of the Rebels, [is] done away,” said Tryon glumly. Reported another observer: “The Episcopal Churches in New York are all shut up, the prayer books burned, and the Ministers scattered abroad. . . . It is now the Puritan’s high holiday season and they enjoy it with rapture.”
SUCH UNSOLDIERLY CONDUCT
His Majesty’s army was ready for a fight too, convinced it would make short work of the rebels defending New York. Despite the recent unpleasantness in Boston, its officers still believed that Washington’s so-called army was a mere republican rabble, without the training or leadership necessary to hold off seasoned veterans. This unshakable class contempt was reinforced by the knowledge that large numbers of recent immigrants had thrown in with the patriots. “The chief strength of the Rebel Army at present consists of Natives of Europe, particularly Irishmen,” observed Captain Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
Symbolic regicide in New York, a nineteenth-century interpretation, painted by John C. McRae, of New York patriots pulling down the statue of George III. Legend has it that the head was later rescued by a British officer and shipped back to England. (© Museum of the City of New York)
General Howe, though, didn’t want an all-out fight for New York. It wasn’t a question of winning but of how much it would cost to win. He couldn’t forget the carnage at Bunker Hill, where a frontal assault against entrenched American positions had cost him 40 percent of the men under his command in a single afternoon, and it was clear that Washington expected him to try the same thing again. Howe knew, too, that if Washington fought well the city could easily be left unfit as a base for further military operations.
As always, there were also political considerations. Sympathy for the American cause had widened steadily among the British middle and laboring classes, who linked it to demands for domestic political reform. London voters chose two Americans as sheriffs in 1773. John Wilkes, installed as mayor of London in 1775, was pressuring the crown to remove ministers hostile to American rights. A new generation of radical Whig pamphleteers—Catharine Macaulay, Major John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, James Burgh, Richard Price, Joseph Priestly—were all the while bombarding the reading public with warnings that liberty was in mortal peril on both sides of the Atlantic. New York readers paid careful attention. Local papers reprinted long extracts from parliamentary debates, British journals, and private correspondence.