Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [196]
In the meantime, Howe arrived at the Murray farm and stopped to wait for reinforcements—or perhaps, according to legend, to have some cake and wine with Mrs. Murray, who saw a chance to distract him from the business at hand. Howe’s dallying gave Putnam and the rest of the army, guided by Lieutenant Aaron Burr, time to slip out of New York along the Greenwich Road and reach Harlem Heights before the redcoats crossed Manhattan to cut them off. They left behind about half of the army’s heavy guns and what Greene called “a prodigious deal of baggage and stores.”
The city itself was in a state of utter chaos as thousands of civilians, including the last remaining members of the Mechanics Committee, scrambled to get out as well. Only a few thousand remained when some officers from the fleet rowed ashore that evening to announce that New York was again in British hands. A small but delirious crowd of Tories paraded them “upon their shoulders about the streets and behaved in all respects, women as well as men, like overjoyed Bedlamites,” Ambrose Serle reported. “One thing is worth remarking,” he added: “A woman pulled down the rebel standard upon the fort, and a woman hoisted up in its stead His Majesty’s flag after trampling the other under foot with the most contemptuous indignation.”
The next day, September 16, a reconnaissance party of Connecticut rangers tangled with an advance column of several hundred redcoats on a farm near present-day 106th Street and West End Avenue. As the rangers pulled back toward the Hollow Way, a ravine where West 125th Street now meets the Hudson River, enemy buglers taunted them with the same call that traditionally ended a successful fox-hunt. “I never felt such a sensation before,” wrote Washington’s adjutant, Joseph Reed, who witnessed the retreat. “It seemed to crown our disgrace.” Perhaps even more sharply stung—no one appreciated better than Virginians the upper-class associations of fox-hunting—Washington ordered up reinforcements and counterattacked, driving the redcoats back through a buckwheat field in the vicinity of 120th Street and Broadway before breaking off the engagement two hours later. About thirty Americans and fourteen British had been killed. This “brisk little skirmish,” as Washington called it, was the first time soldiers under his command had bested the British in a stand-up fight; it did much to lift their flagging spirits.
HEAVEN IN FLAMES
Patriot morale got another boost from the conflagration that engulfed the now-occupied city soon after midnight on the twenty-first. It began, apparently, in a tavern called the Fighting Cocks that stood on a wharf near Whitehall Slip. From there, driven by a brisk wind from the southwest, the flames raced uptown across Bridge, Stone, Marketfield, and Beaver streets, sweeping through whole blocks of houses and shops at a time. According to one newspaper account, the confused shouting of men and the terrified shrieks of women and children, “joined to the roaring of the flames, the crash of falling houses and the widespread ruin. . . formed a scene of horror great beyond description.” Clutching what few possessions they had managed to gather up, hundreds of people plunged through the heat and choking smoke toward the relative safety of the Common, “where in despair they fell cowering on the grass.” Far to the north, on Harlem Heights, Alexander Graydon watched the blaze grow until “the heavens appeared in flames.”
At two A.M. the wind shifted to the southeast, driving the flames across Broadway, then up toward Trinity Church, which was consumed in minutes. A contingent of rebels watching from Paulus Hook, across the river in New Jersey, cheered as its steeple collapsed in “a lofty pyramid of fire.” St. Paul’s, half a dozen blocks to the north, escaped a similar fate thanks to the efforts of a hastily organized bucket brigade.