Washington [312]
For one woman in the crowd, the contrast between the splendidly uniformed British troops who had just left and the unkempt American troops in homespun dress who now straggled in conveyed a telling message:
We had been accustomed for a long time to military display in all the finish and finery of garrison life; the troops just leaving us were as if equipped for show, and, with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms, made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weatherbeaten and made a forlorn appearance. But then they were our troops, and as I looked at them and thought upon all they had done and suffered for us, my heart and my eyes were full and I admired and gloried in them the more, because they were weatherbeaten and forlorn.8
For seven years, the British had flattered themselves that only they could maintain order in this raucous city. In a self-congratulatory spirit, they had insisted that anarchy would descend without them. But when one British officer returned briefly from his ship to retrieve some forgotten personal items, he was struck dumb by the law-abiding crowds. “This is a strange scene indeed!” he commented. “Here, in this city, we have had an army for more than seven years, and yet could not keep the peace of it . . . Now [that] we are gone, everything is in quietness and safety. The Americans are a curious, original people. They know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”9
Casting his eyes beyond the jubilant onlookers, Washington could discern a desolate city of empty lots, burned-out buildings, and churches despoiled of pews to house British troops. Animals roamed the streets freely. The British surrendered only five hundred American prisoners at the end, which attested both to the large number already freed in exchanges and the appalling number who died in captivity. Most had been kept aboard British prison ships anchored in the East River, where they languished in infernal conditions. Stuffed in airless spaces belowdecks, they had been wedged together in vermin-infested holds slick with human excrement and forced to eat worm-infested rations or devour their own body lice. Typhus, dysentery, and scurvy were common scourges. For years afterward the bones of dead prisoners washed up on East River shores. The American Revolution was never a bloodless affair, as is sometimes imagined. Of 200,000 Americans who served in the war, about 25,000 died, or approximately 1 percent of the population, making it the bloodiest American war except for the Civil War.
During eight hectic days in New York, Washington’s calendar was crowded with dinners, receptions, and fireworks galore. Suddenly an avid consumer again, he went shopping for teapots, coffee urns, and other silverware for entertaining guests at Mount Vernon. Earlier that fall, when inquiring of his nephew Bushrod about silverware purchases, he had asked “whether French plate is fashionable and much used in genteel houses in France and England,” showing that the great American liberator was still enslaved to European styles. On Saturday night, November 29, a rare earthquake struck New York—three quick tremors rumbled through town after midnight—and people started from their sleep, darting into the streets for safety. Asleep at the former Queen’s Head Tavern, a three-story brick building at the corner of Broad and Pearl streets better known to history as Fraunces Tavern, Washington scarcely stirred: a man accustomed to the alarums of war wasn’t about to be unsettled by the earth’s minor trembles.
On December 1 Sir Guy Carleton wrote to Washington that, if wind and weather permitted,