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By Root 7614 0

North Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them from their beds.” Washington (ever the slavemaster, no matter his exertions on behalf of American liberty) told Carleton that he wanted the British to return all runaways to their rightful owners. Carleton honorably refused on the grounds that those with the British on or before the signing of the provisional peace treaty in November 1782 had been liberated by Clinton’s proclamation of 1779. Perhaps four thousand blacks from all over America thus managed to escape the city while it was still in British hands, most of them, too, destined for Canada or Nova Scotia.

The subsequent history of these black refugees wasn’t a happy one. Most settled at Shelburne, Nova Scotia, or St. John, New Brunswick, where trouble with white veterans erupted into race riots in 1784, forcing many to run for their lives yet again. Former members of the Black Pioneers and Guides regiment who founded Birchtown, Nova Scotia (named after the British commander who signed their passports to freedom), stuck it out for a few years longer, but in 1790 over one thousand of them decamped for Sierra Leone. Some individuals made out comparatively well. Bill Richmond, who escaped his Staten Island master in 1776, sailed to England with General Percy and became a celebrated pugilist.

EVACUATION DAY

Protesting “the violence in the Americans which broke out soon after the cessation of hostilities,” General Carleton held on to New York until every Tory who wanted to get out had left. On November 21, 1783, satisfied that he had done his duty, Carleton ordered all British forces to begin withdrawing from Long Island and upper Manhattan. Governor Clinton and General Washington met at Tarrytown and rode down through Yonkers to Harlem, where they waited at a tavern (near the present intersection of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 126th Street) for word of the final British departure.

Three days later, on the morning of November 25—long celebrated in the city as Evacuation Day—the last redcoats in New York paraded glumly down the Bowery to the East River wharves, from where they were rowed out to the fleet in the harbor. When a certain Mrs. Day prematurely ran up the American flag over her boardinghouse on Murray Street, Provost Marshal Cunningham, resplendent in his scarlet coat and wig, ordered her to take it down. She bloodied his nose with her broom, however, and drove him off. Delirious patriots now thronged the streets, many sporting a special “Badge of Distinction” that consisted of “a Union Cockade, of black and white Ribband, worn on the left Breast, and a Laurel in the Hat.” High-spirited seamen pulled down the signs of taverns that had welcomed the trade of Tories and British soldiers.

A contingent of Continental officers, including General Alexander McDougall, Colonel John Lamb, and numerous other old Sons of Liberty meanwhile assembled at the Bull’s Head Tavern on the Bowery to escort Washington and Clinton into town. Joining them there were some eight hundred Continental troops from Massachusetts and New York and a party of mounted townsfolk. Careful to keep a discreet distance behind the British, the Americans marched in formation down the Bowery to Pearl Street, turned west along Wall Street, then stopped opposite Cape’s Tavern on Broadway. “The troops just leaving us were as if equipped for show,” one eyewitness recalled, “and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms, made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weather-beaten, and made a forlorn appearance. But then they were our troops, and as I looked at them, and thought upon all they had done for us, my heart and my eyes were full, and I admired and gloried in them the more because they were weather-beaten and forlorn.”

At Cape’s, a group of patriot citizens formally welcomed Washington. “In this place, and at this moment of exultation and triumph,” they declared, “while the Ensigns of Slavery still linger in our sight, we look up