Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [203]
Conflicts with poorly paid, poorly provisioned, often poorly disciplined troops sharpened civilian discontent. The first redcoats to enter town in September 1776 went on a rampage, looting private houses and vandalizing City Hall, where they smashed equipment belonging to King’s College, mutilated paintings, and destroyed books. On New Year’s Eve 1777, after performing in a play entitled The Devil to Pay in the West Indies, a party of drunken officers—one dressed up like Old Nick himself, complete with horns and tail—disrupted services at the John Street Methodist Church. Nor was that the worst of it. “I could narrate many and very frightful occurrences of theft, fraud, robbery, and murder by the English soldiers which their love of drink excited,” said one dismayed German officer.
Elliot’s police proved next to useless in dealing with the problem, and the police court was thought unreliable because it functioned without the juries that had always been considered a bulwark of English liberty. Civilian complaints against military personnel rarely got anywhere. Courts-martial tended to sympathize with the men in His Majesty’s services and were notoriously lenient on officers accused of wrongdoing; everyone indeed knew of cases in which officers charged with robbing, assaulting, raping, and even murdering civilians had gone free.
Military officials appeared equally unwilling or unable to remedy the city’s desperate shortage of adequate shelter. One-quarter to one-third of its housing stock had been destroyed by the great fire of September 1776 (which drove three hundred persons to seek admission to the almshouse) and by a second conflagration in August 1778. Agents of the Barracks Board marked rebel-owned buildings with the initials G. R. (for George Rex) and confiscated them for the use of refugees and troops. The Baptist Church, the Brick Presbyterian Church, the First Presbyterian Church, the South Dutch Church, the Middle Dutch Church, the North Dutch Church, the French Church, the Scotch Presbyterian Church, and the Quaker Meeting House—tangible symbols of the dissenting principles to which many loyalists traced the Revolution—were commandeered for barracks, stables, prisons, or storehouses. (Presbyterian churches everywhere on Long Island were also routinely vandalized after 1776.) The two chapels of Trinity Church, St. Paul’s and St. George’s, escaped such ill treatment, although King’s College was used as a military hospital. The Mill Street synagogue, occupied by a loyalist remnant of the Shearith Israel congregation, suffered no appreciable damage either.
Sporadic efforts were made to ease the crisis by regulating the influx of refugees and shifting troops to camps outside the city; at the end of 1777 Commandant General James Robertson also authorized the city vestry to employ rents from Whig-owned property for the relief of the poor and municipal improvements. No steps were taken, however, to rebuild or enlarge the city’s supply of housing. With blocks of scorched and crumbling ruins at their backs, civilians and military personnel waged prolonged, sometimes violent struggles for the possession of anything with four walls and a roof. Rents rose 400 percent in the first year of the occupation alone. Few households got through the war without a redcoat or two quartered in a spare room or seated at the dinner table, many with wives and children in tow.
Hundreds, perhaps