Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [207]
Always a sore point with loyal civilians was the obligation to quarter troops and prisoners, and the system of “contribution,” pitting military foragers against local farmers and householders, ensured that His Majesty’s forces would never be really welcome, even among their most patient friends. A more and more frequent source of friction, as time went on, was competition for rapidly dwindling stocks of firewood. After making fast work of city fences and shade trees, scavengers and foraging parties turned their attention to the orchards, woodlots, and forests of upper Manhattan and western Long Island. Not even loyalist estates escaped the ax: a Tory regiment stripped Morrisania of livestock and leveled 450 acres of timberland.
The heaviest cutting occurred during the terrible winter of 1779-80, when snow fell almost every day from early November to March and the East River, Hudson River, Long Island Sound, and the Upper Bay became a solid mass of ice. Military authorities couldn’t, or wouldn’t, distribute firewood to civilians, and it became so expensive that some of the city’s poorest inhabitants quietly froze to death. A year or so later, while studying the enemy’s positions on Manhattan from the New Jersey palisades, Washington was astonished to see that “the island is totally stripped of trees; low bushes . . . appear in places which were covered with wood in the year 1776.”
“CURSES UPON THEIR KING”
Only a few years after deliriously celebrating General Howe’s seizure of the city, New York’s Tories were thus a good deal sadder and wiser. Pastor Schaukirk began to hear it said around town that corruption among “great men” had needlessly prolonged the war, perhaps lost it altogether. Recruiters for Tory units found their work increasingly difficult and started to look elsewhere for men. As General Robertson explained to Lord Jeffrey Amherst: “Those who formerly wishd our approach, and would with Joy have seen Us triumph Over the rebels, will now Arm to defend their All from Undistinguished Plunder.” By 1780 or so De Lancey’s battalions depended heavily on Connecticut refugees, while the Queen’s Rangers, initially made up of New York Tories, consisted chiefly of newly arrived Irish and Scots volunteers.
A few New Yorkers even began working covertly for the Americans. James Rivington, printer of the Gazette, became one of Washington’s most valuable spies (among other things, he helped obtain the code signals of the British fleet). The well-organized Culper Ring sent female spies into the occupied city, under the pretext of taking baskets of fruit and food to relatives; they relayed information on the disposition of British patrols by hanging a black petticoat and an agreed-upon number of white handkerchiefs from a clothesline behind Mary Underbill’s boardinghouse on Queen Street. One of the ring’s agents, a woman known only by the code number 355, was captured in 1779 and later perished on board the prison ship Jersey. That same year, Elizabeth Burgin eluded arrest after helping over two hundred American prisoners of war escape from the city. “The British offered a bounty of two hundred pounds for taking me,” she reported to General Washington. Smuggled down to Philadelphia by friends, she later returned to New York under a flag of truce to retrieve her children.
Toward the end of October 1781, New York Tories received the almost