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when “a transparent painting of their majesties at full length, in their royal robes” was suspended over the gate of the fort and “illuminated with a beautiful variety of different colored lamps.” The presentation of this tribute was followed by an elegant ball and formal supper. “It is said that the ball cost above 2000 Guineas, and they had over 300 dishes,” the Rev. Schaukirk noted sourly in his diary. When Prince William Henry (later King William IV) visited New York in September 1781, the social whirl became positively frantic. The prince especially liked the informal skating parties on the Fresh Water Pond, during which an attendant pushed him around in a chair mounted with runners.

Eating and drinking societies like the Old Church and King Club again crowded into the private rooms of Hull’s Tavern or the King’s Head, roaring out their loyalty to the crown in song and endless toasts. The St. Andrew’s Society, the St. George Society, and other fraternal organizations resumed their annual rites with gusto and aggressively loyalist overtones. In March 1779 the Volunteers of Ireland, a British regiment organized in Ireland that had arrived in New York the previous June, sought to win Irish recruits to the British cause by staging one of the first St. Patrick’s Day parades in the city’s history. According to the Weekly Mercury, “the Volunteers of Ireland, preceded by their band of music,” marched out to the Bowery, where a dinner was provided for five hundred people.

“EVERY NEGRO WHO SHALL DESERT THE REBELL STANDDARD”

If anyone had reason to rejoice at the British occupation, it was New York’s suddenly flourishing population of runaway slaves and freedmen. Many rebel slaveowners in the city had manumitted their slaves after 1775—partly in response to increasing immigration (which according to one traveler had already produced a surplus of cheap free labor in the city), partly in recognition that human bondage violated their professed attachment to liberty and natural rights, and partly because, fleeing the British invasion, they didn’t want the continued trouble and expense of extra dependents.

Besides, in December 1775 Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation freeing all of that colony’s indentured servants and slaves who were willing to support the crown. As word of Dunmore’s proclamation spread north in 1776, nervous masters everywhere noted the rising numbers of runaways and fretted about the growing likelihood of a black insurgency. Within months, hundreds of slaves from the New York-New Jersey area ran off to seek refuge within the British lines. Some reportedly joined regular British units in preparation for the August invasion of Long Island. General Nathanael Greene warned Washington that eight hundred blacks were drilling on Staten Island, and the Provincial Congress provided a detachment of militia to “guard against the insurrection of slaves.” Once His Majesty’s forces moved in, moreover, they found area slaves ready and willing to help them plunder the property of their masters. As one patriot recalled many years later, “The negroes of [Long] Island were all Tories, and pointed out to the enemy the places where goods and plate had been concealed.”

During the next half-dozen years, additional thousands of slaves from Long Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and Westchester County ran off—a revolution-within-a-revolution that dwarfed the events of 1712 and 1741. (Fully two-thirds of the slaves in Westchester, nearly twenty-two hundred people in all, were said to have fled their masters in the course of the war.) At one point, the volume of fugitives from New Jersey became so great that city officials ordered Hudson River ferryboat operators to stop transporting blacks until further notice. New Jersey’s rebel government underscored the magnitude of the problem by advising masters to transport their slaves into the interior of the state, from where it would be more difficult to reach British lines.

The movement of runaways and freedmen into the city quickened after June 1779 when General Clinton,