Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [199]
By early 1777 the Tory flood tide had lifted New York’s population to some twelve thousand; two years later, swollen by successive waves of Tory refugees from elsewhere in the colonies, the city had a record thirty-three thousand inhabitants. Conspicuous among the returnees was James Rivington, who won an appointment as “Printer to His Majesty the King” and resumed publication of his New-York Gazetteer (later the Royal Gazette). The Gazetteer’s reappearance, along with Hugh Gaine’s Weekly Mercury and James Robertson’s Royal American Gazette, would make New York the headquarters of Tory opinion for the remainder of the war. Also back in town, having been run out of Virginia by the rebels, was former governor Dunmore; joining him, at one point, were four other colonial governors and swarms of lesser imperial functionaries with similar stories to tell. All told, an estimated fifty thousand Tories had gathered behind British lines in and around New York City by 1782.
Those were the civilians. As the war waxed and waned in distant theaters, tens of thousands of troops also shifted in and out of the city—Waldeckers in their gaudy yellow-trimmed cocked hats, huge mustachioed Hessians, kilted and tartaned Highlanders, black-capped Anspach grenadiers—all trailed by numerous dependents and camp followers. Between November 1777 and July 1778 their numbers leaped from five thousand to nearly twenty thousand. By December 1779 they had fallen to four thousand, only to rise again to ten thousand by August 1781 and seventeen thousand by December 1782.
Organized rebel activity on Long Island and in much of Westchester County came to an abrupt end. Soon after Washington’s retreat from Brooklyn Heights, perhaps as many as five thousand patriots from Kings, Queens, and Suffolk counties fled across the Sound to Connecticut. In their absence one town after another disbanded its committees, repudiated the authority of Congress, and drafted congratulatory addresses to General Howe and Governor Tryon. Tryon toured the island in October 1776, handing out thousands of certificates of loyalty and administering an oath of allegiance to the militia in his capacity as head of the provincial forces. In Kings County, 593 out of the 630 militiamen took the oath; in Queens, roughly twelve hundred of a possible fifteen hundred did likewise, while some thirteen hundred “freeholders and inhabitants” put their names on a declaration denouncing the “infatuated conduct of the Congress” and describing how they had “steadfastly maintained their royal principles.” The army obligingly sent eight hundred stands of arms to Queens, where they were received “with demonstrations of joy.”
Military recruiters had an easy time of it for the next few years. Long Island men flocked to Tory militia regiments under the command of Oliver De Lancey, brother of the late governor. In Westchester County, Oliver’s nephew James De Lancey (not to be confused with James De Lancey Jr., the late governor’s son) raised a troop of some five hundred light horse to hunt for deserters and patrol the regular army’s supply routes through the Neutral Ground—a thirty-mile-wide no-man’s-land that ran north of Morrisania to the mouth of the Croton River, marking the unofficial boundary between British- and American-held territory.
Thousands of other New Yorkers joined a parade of colorfully named Tory units—the King’s American Regiment, the King’s Orange Rangers, the Loyal American Regiment, the British Legion, and the Volunteers of Ireland, among others—some of which would see action as far away as Georgia, Canada, and Jamaica. In all, around sixteen thousand New York men bore arms for the king as against thirty-six thousand for Congress. Over the winter of 1779-80, when Washington was rumored to be preparing an attack on New York, it took only