Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [210]
After 1781, with American independence and the liberation of New York City now a virtual certainty, the Clintonian legislature adopted a pair of measures designed to make life difficult, if not impossible, for Tories who chose to remain in the city once the war ended. The Citation Act of 1782 protected patriots from suits by Tory creditors, while the Trespass Act of 1783 permitted patriots to sue loyalists for damages to property in occupied areas of the state, even when ordered by British authorities.
Over the winter of 1782-83, encouraged by this legislation, patriots began heading for New York to recover houses, land, and other possessions left behind six or seven years earlier. By mid-April, one report said, upwards of two thousand former residents had already returned to the city. Their insistence on the immediate restoration of abandoned property, often coupled with demands for the payment of damages and back rent, produced frayed tempers and tense confrontations. When the merchant John Broome came down from Connecticut to inspect his house on Hanover Square, he found it occupied by British officers. “I am the owner and I should like to make some arrangements respecting the rent,” he announced. The officers laughed in his face.
A joint Board of Claims, consisting of officers of both the British and American armies, struggled to resolve such disputes peacefully. Brawls and even organized attacks on Tories nonetheless became common during the summer and fall of 1783. Some of these “violent and interested associations,” General Carleton said, were actually planning the outright seizure and redistribution of Tory property once His Majesty’s forces withdrew from the city (one group openly described themselves as “levellers”). Pamphlets and newspaper letters warned of more severe measures to come, and mass meetings around the state clamored for immediate action.
Little wonder, under the circumstances, that many Tories decided to get out of New York as quickly as possible. By the end of June 1783 an estimated ten thousand of them had already accepted the government’s offer of free passage with the fleet and left town. Another eight thousand departed in September, followed by eleven thousand more in December.
Of the forty thousand or so Tories who thus abandoned New York between 1782 and 1783—the bulk of whom originally came from Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other colonies—few returned to their homes or found refuge elsewhere in the United States. Most, perhaps three out of four, made their way to Canada. Many settled in New Brunswick (St. John was incorporated in 1785 with a constitution modeled after the charter of New York City; Hempstead, in Queens County, was founded by former residents of Long Island). Others joined the eight-thousand-odd Tories who established a settlement called Shelburne on the coast of Nova Scotia below Halifax; the Rev. Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church since 1777, won appointment as the bishop of Nova Scotia. Adherents to the crown wound up in Ontario, Cape Breton Island, the Bahamas, and elsewhere. Former mayor David Mathews became president of the Cape Breton council. William Smith accepted Carleton’s offer to become chief justice of Quebec.
And what of the thousands of slaves and free blacks who had gravitated to New York during the British occupation? All summer long, slaveowners from other colonies turned up in the city looking for their property; Boston King of South Carolina remembered how he and other runaways were filled “with inexpressible anguish and terror. . . when we saw our old masters coming from Virginia,