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By Root 7658 0

thousands, of destitute refugees had nowhere to go but “Canvas Town,” a pestiferous camp of makeshift tents that sprawled west from the foot of Broad Street through the ruins left by the 1776 fire. The results of so many people jammed together “like herrings in a barrel, most of them very dirty,” as the Englishman Nicholas Cresswell observed, were the foul odors that often left city residents gasping for air. “If any author had an inclination to write a treatise upon stinks,” Cresswell sniffed, “he never could meet with more subject matter than in New York.”

Food and fuel were as hard to come by as fresh air. Within one year of the British takeover, driven by the combination of military and civilian demand, the cost of food in the city jumped 800 percent. Higher prices didn’t, however, generate increased supplies. International law at the time allowed armies a right to the “contribution” of food and other essential material—at a fair rate of compensation—from populations under their protection. For farmers in the hinterland of occupied New York, this meant surrendering crops, animals, and equipment, on demand, to army foragers, who paid them with certificates drawn on the Office of Forage in New York City. Inasmuch as the army never matched the going rate for what it took—and from time to time actually froze prices at absurdly low levels—growers and stockmen quickly learned to divert what they produced into the city’s flourishing black market or else to restrict production to the bare minimum.

Hard-pressed quartermasters took to importing food, at great expense, from elsewhere in the Empire. Between 1776 and 1778 victualing fleets arrived from Ireland and England with twenty-eight hundred tons of beef, ten thousand tons of pork, twenty thousand tons of bread and flour, a thousand tons of butter, and twenty-four hundred tons of oatmeal and rice. There was never enough to go around, however. Prices continued to go up, not down, and poorer New Yorkers found themselves trying to keep body and soul together on a diet of rice or baked beans. When a French fleet briefly blockaded the city in the summer of 1778, food supplies dwindled so quickly that officials talked of evacuating everyone to avert massive famine. It was the same story in 1779, when mountains of Iroquois corn destined for the army were seized by patriot forces. Periodic epidemics of yellow fever, cholera, and smallpox only underscored the appalling circumstances to which many residents of the city had been reduced.

“BLOOD-SUCKING HARPIES”

The ultimate insult to the patience and principles of loyal New Yorkers wasn’t red tape, crime, overcrowding, or chronic shortages—all of which might have been bearable, somehow—but the miasma of decadence and corruption that gradually enveloped the city. Pastor Schaukirk never quite comprehended how the city’s most privileged and powerful residents could live so extravagantly at a time of widespread privation. One day he noticed that “the walk by the ruins of Trinity Church and its grave-yard has been railed in and painted green; benches placed there and many lamps fixed in the trees, for gentlemen and ladies to walk and sit there in the evening. A band plays while the commander is present, and a sentry is placed there, that none of the common people may intrude.” As if this weren’t bad enough, Schaukirk continued, “a house opposite is adapted to accommodate the ladies or officer’s women, while many honest people. . . cannot get a house or lodging to live in or get their living.”

Respectable New Yorkers, according to Judge Jones, took particular exception to the vices of sixty-year-old Commandant Robertson. These included openly keeping a mistress, “smelling after every giddy girl” who caught his eye, and “waddling about town with a couple of young tits about twelve years of age under each arm.” Visitors gaped at the numbers and brazenness of the city’s prostitutes. Said one after attending services at St. Paul’s Chapel: “This is a very neat church and some of the handsomest and best-dressed ladies I have ever seen in America.