Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [197]
Many jumped to the conclusion that the fire was the work of rebel arsonists. Furious mobs killed several suspicious characters during the night—one or two for carrying “matches and combustibles under their clothes,” another for “cutting the handles of fire buckets,” a couple of others for being “in houses with fire-brands in their hands.” Various eyewitnesses remembered other things as well: missing fire-alarm bells, broken fire engines and pumps, empty cisterns, and wagonloads of combustible materials concealed in cellars and basements.
Military authorities rounded up about two hundred men and women for questioning, among them a young captain in the American forces named Nathan Hale. Hale confessed that he had come to New York to spy on the British, and because he was out of uniform, General Howe had no choice under the rules of war but to have him hanged the next morning. Hale’s final words from the gallows (most likely located in an artillery park at today’s Third Avenue and 66th Street)—“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” paraphrased from Addison’s play, Cato—made him famous but didn’t settle the question of whether he, or anyone else, had attempted to burn the city. Although no credible evidence of deliberate arson ever came to light, it was Washington who delivered the final verdict while studying the red glow on the horizon from the balcony of the Roger Morris house on Harlem Heights: “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
FINALE
The clash on Harlem Heights convinced the ever cautious Howe to encircle the American army rather than attack head-on. On October 12, three weeks after the fire, he took four thousand redcoats up the East River to Long Island Sound and landed on a peninsula called Throg’s Neck (Fort Schuyler Park in the Bronx). Their task was to seize King’s Bridge, a few miles to the west and Washington’s only means of escape across the Harlem River to the mainland. A small party of riflemen gave the redcoats some trouble at Westchester Creek, however, and Howe decided to wait for reinforcements. He waited for six days, then put everybody back on the boats and shifted the attack three miles north to Pell’s Point (Pelham Bay Park), where a much smaller force of Americans held him up again on the road to the little hamlet of Eastchester. Washington, meanwhile, moved his army off Manhattan up to White Plains, leaving only a twelve-hundred-man garrison at Fort Washington.
Howe finally worked his way up through Eastchester and New Rochelle to White Plains, which he attacked and drove Washington out of on the twenty-seventh. Again he didn’t pursue the Americans, this time because he needed to return to Manhattan and deal with Fort Washington, which continued to threaten his communications with New York. On November fifteenth, following a heavy bombardment from British batteries on the east side of the Harlem River and a frigate anchored in the Hudson, about twenty thousand Hessians and redcoats converged on Washington Heights. After a brief struggle, the fort’s bedraggled and vastly outnumbered defenders surrendered. “A great many of them were lads under fifteen and old men, and few had the appearance of soldiers,” observed one British officer. “Their odd figures frequently excited the laughter of our soldiers.” Washington, who had meanwhile divided his army and taken part of it across the Hudson to New Jersey, watched in horror from Fort Lee as the last American forces on Manhattan were marched off into captivity. He wouldn’t set foot on Manhattan again for seven years.
The fall of New York didn’t doom the Revolution, as many on both sides had initially expected, but it did change