5

Revolution

THE PEACE AND PROSPERITY of the early 1770s brought a flood of immigrants into Britain’s North American colonies. With the English and the Americans no longer on the brink of war, Europeans whose plans to relocate to New York had been put on hold during the Stamp Act crisis rushed to take advantage of the job opportunities and upward mobility for which America had become famous. But the goodwill between Americans and the British government came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1773 with Parliament’s passage of the Tea Act, an attempt to get Americans to accept a tax on British tea if the price of the tea itself was drastically reduced. The bill’s sponsor, Lord North, predicted that Americans would cheerfully pay the tax on legally imported tea now that it would be so cheap, but his forecast was one of the worst in all of British history.

“A new flame is apparently kindling in America,” wrote one New Yorker prophetically after word of the Tea Act reached New York. “We shall repeat all the confusions of 1765 & 1766.” As the textbooks tell it, the Revolution originated in Boston with its Tea Party. But New York’s Sons of Liberty, revived again under immigrant Alexander McDougall, might easily have become the more famous firebrands if not for the fickle hand of fate. North Atlantic squalls battered the Nancy, the tea ship bound for New York, blowing it so far off course that the captain decided to land in Antigua to take on additional supplies before continuing the journey to Manhattan. When the Nancy finally departed for New York with six hundred cases of tea, it was engulfed by an even more violent storm. The mizzenmast was torn clear off, the mainmast was severely damaged, and the ship was thrown completely over on its side.¹

The governor of New York, William Tryon, initially vowed to land the tea, even if it had to be done at bayonet point, though he promised not to allow it to be sold until the colonists had a chance to air their grievances in London. McDougall and the other Sons of Liberty pledged that under no circumstances would they allow the tea to come ashore, even if New York’s streets had to run red with blood. But as day after nervous day went by without the arrival of the Nancy, Tryon literally worried himself sick over the impending clash. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, the governor announced in March 1774 that he was going back to London for rest and recuperation, handing responsibility for whatever might occur to his lieutenant governor, Cadwallader Colden.²

The Nancy, meanwhile, had been repaired and resumed its star-crossed voyage in late March. When it arrived off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on April 18, 1774, Captain Benjamin Lockyer dropped anchor in order to pick up a pilot to guide it into New York Harbor. But the pilots, having heard the threats of the Sons of Liberty, refused to take the ship to Manhattan. Learning of its arrival, the Sons sent a delegation, including McDougall, to warn Lockyer that harm would come to both him and his beleaguered vessel should he try to land his cargo of tea. While Lockyer considered his options, New Yorkers proved that their threats were more than idle bluster. A ship captain named James Chambers, believing that he could make a windfall profit if he could smuggle some tea into the city, tried to slip into the port with eighteen crates hidden among other cargo. On April 22, when New Yorkers discovered Chambers’s deceit, they stormed his ship and dumped his tea into the East River, more than five months after Boston’s better-known “Tea Party.” So had it not been for the storms and the extended stay in Antigua, this New York tea party might have come first. Colden, having learned that sticking his neck out to defend British authority got him nothing but burnt effigies and official rebuke, did nothing to stop the mob. The crowd next tried to hunt down Chambers to punish him for his duplicity, but he had escaped to the Nancy, which Lockyer wisely sailed back to England with both Chambers and the tea.³

 

It is amazing that even after the Tea Act crisis began, with the American colonies in political chaos and their continued place in the British Empire highly uncertain, immigrants nonetheless continued pouring into New York. Immigration from Ireland and Scotland peaked, in fact, in the very years that led to the Revolutionary War. The opportunities for upward mobility and religious freedom in America were so alluring that even the prospect of war with Great Britain did not deter these emigrants. Americans’ household income was, on average, 56 percent higher than in England, and the gap was even greater with Scotland and Ireland. Sensing that the chance to immigrate to America might be cut off by the Revolutionary crisis, Britons did everything possible to make their way to the colonies before it was too late. Sailors on the Nancy, for example, built themselves a raft so they could jump ship and remain in New York. Even after redcoats and Minutemen had begun shooting at each other in Massachusetts at the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, Scottish Highlanders packed onto ships, trying to make it to America before they lost the opportunity. Having often risked everything to relocate, these new arrivals were especially determined to protect American independence, which they saw as a key to their future economic prosperity. As a result, New York City filled with new immigrants in the two decades before the war, and the town’s population nearly doubled, from 13,000 in 1756 to about 25,000 in 1776.⁴

One such immigrant was an eighteen-year-old orphan from St. Croix named Alexander who arrived in New York in 1773. That young Alex had made it to New York at all was something of a miracle, for his childhood story was one that even Dickens and Alger would have dismissed as too far-fetched to be believed. It began even before Alex’s birth, when Rachel, his mother, abandoned her husband and their child, Peter. This act of audacity and independence made her persona non grata wherever she went. Yet Rachel was a resilient woman. She soon took up with the ne’er-do-well fourth son of a minor Scottish nobleman, but because of the way her marriage had ended, this later relationship did not elevate her status. Quite the contrary, she was now branded “indecent,” “shameless,” a “whore.”

The Scotsman’s reputation was hardly better. Having failed to distinguish himself in Scotland, he fled to the West Indies, hoping to strike it rich in the Caribbean as a sugar planter. He failed in this pursuit as well, though in the meantime he and Rachel had two sons, James junior and then Alex. James senior had to support his family working as a clerk and debt collector for his brothers and their associates, successful Glasgow merchants with financial interests in the Caribbean. But sometime around Alex’s tenth birthday in 1765, James abandoned Rachel and their boys and left St. Croix, never to see them again. Looking for the easy way out one more time, he moved to the tiny Caribbean island of Bequia, a place so inhospitable that the British government, desperate to get any white men to settle there, awarded him twenty-five acres of mountainous jungle in return for his promise to live on the island for a year. It was an ideal place to hide from life’s disappointments.⁵

Now the boys’ prospects seemed truly bleak. Even before their father abandoned them, the youngsters, as the bastard children of a woman of questionable morals, had been precluded from attending school or church with the offspring of respectable couples, foreclosing to them the usual avenues of upward mobility in the exceedingly proper society of the British West Indies. Determined nonetheless that her sons should succeed, Rachel hired an elderly widowed “Jewess” to tutor them. Two years later, Rachel suddenly fell ill with a high fever. She spent days writhing in bed, sweat drenching her sheets, and soon passed away.

The boys were now essentially orphans, for the news that their mother had died inexplicably failed to induce James senior to return for them. They at least seemed to be on somewhat secure financial footing. Rachel had inherited three slaves after James senior left her, and she rented the bondsmen out to local planters, using the income to supplement the meager profits from the grocery she had opened after James disappeared. Now Alex and his brother could use that rental income to support themselves.

Or so they thought. As soon as Rachel died, in swooped the husband she had abandoned. He argued in court that Rachel’s slaves were now rightfully the property of their son, Peter, rather than of her illegitimate “whore-children.” The court agreed, awarding the slaves to Peter and leaving Alex and James jun­ior homeless and destitute. The judge ordered the brothers to join the household of their first cousin, also named Peter.

Moving in with cousin Peter in no way improved the boys’ status. Not only did their cousin live openly and scandalously with an African American woman (a major transgression in a slave society), but also his emotional instability was such that his own brother considered him insane. This living arrangement cemented the boys’ status as social pariahs. Perhaps it was a blessing for the boys that eighteen months after James junior and Alex moved in with him, Peter committed suicide (supposedly stabbing himself to death in his own bed). An uncle then took custody of the boys, but less than a month later, he died as well.

At this point the brothers parted ways. Since his mother’s death, Alex had been working as a clerk in the St. Croix offices of a prominent New York import-export house, Beekman and Cruger. When Alex’s uncle died, the fourteen-year-old went to live with the family of another merchant, Thomas Stevens, whose fifteen-year-old son, Edward, looked remarkably like Alex. This set tongues in Christiansted wagging yet again. Perhaps Alex’s mother had been even more licentious than people had realized. Perhaps this was why James sen­ior had abandoned the boys and refused to care for them even after Rachel died.⁶

In any event, Beekman and Cruger did not seem bothered by Alex’s checkered past, perhaps because he came highly recommended by Stevens. Besides, the boy proved that he had a knack for business. When Cruger and his partner left St. Croix for months at a time, they put young Alex in charge of the company’s entire island operation, which included running a wharf and a warehouse, negotiating the sale of imported goods with merchants, and collecting debts. Alex proved himself worthy of that trust. When flour that the company had imported from Philadelphia turned out to be spoiled, Alex sold it at a deep discount rather than discard it altogether. When a shipment of superior flour arrived and bakers besieged Alex with orders, the sixteen-year-old on his own authority raised the price above the usual rate. “Believe me Sir,” he reported proudly to Nicholas Cruger of this decision, “I dun as hard as is proper.”⁷

Young Alex had interests other than debits and credits in the company ledger books. He had literary ambitions, too, and persuaded the island’s main newspaper, the Royal Danish-American Gazette, to publish his poetry occasionally. Several of his poems had already appeared in its columns by August 1772, when a terrible hurricane, the worst in local memory, devastated St. Croix. The storm reached its peak on Monday evening the thirty-first, with gale-force winds howling almost all night. When the sun rose the next morning, the residents of Christiansted were astounded by the extent of the destruction. The ships in the harbor had been torn from their moorings and strewn across the city’s streets as haphazardly as toys a child might leave after losing interest in them. At least thirty people had been killed. (The Gazette listed only the thirty white victims, but given that slaves outnumbered whites by ten to one on St. Croix, the death toll must have been in the hundreds.)

Once the storm had passed, Alex’s thoughts turned to his father, with whom he still occasionally corresponded. Feeling compelled to let him know that he had survived the storm unscathed, Alex wrote him a long, effusive letter describing the devastation and the emotions that it aroused in him. According to the editors of the Gazette, a copy of Alex’s letter “fell by accident into the hands of a gentleman, who, being pleased with it himself, shewed it to others to whom it gave equal satisfaction, and who all agreed that it might not prove unentertaining to the publick.” On October 3 the letter appeared in the columns of the Gazette, credited to “a youth of this island”:

 

Good God! What horror and destruction . . . It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. The roaring of the sea and wind—fiery meteors flying about in the air—the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning—the crash of falling houses—and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into angels . . .

Where now, oh! vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and resolution? What is become of thy arrogance and self-sufficiency?—Why dost thou tremble and stand aghast? How humble—how helpless—how contemptible you now appear . . . Oh, impotent presumptuous fool! how darest thou offend that omnipotence, whose nod alone were sufficient to quell the destruction that hovers over thee, or crush thee into atoms? . . . Death comes rushing on in triumph veiled in a mantle of ten-fold darkness. His unrelenting scythe, pointed and ready for the stroke.⁸

 

Despite the purple prose, St. Croix’s governor and other prominent residents considered the epistle a literary masterpiece and demanded to know what “youth” could write so movingly. When the island’s leaders learned that the author was a seventeen-year-old orphaned clerk, without a day of organized schooling to his name, they immediately began soliciting funds to send him to the mainland to attend college so that his raw intellectual talents could be properly cultivated. Alex jumped at the opportunity to leave Christiansted. In the spring of 1773, he boarded a ship bound for Boston. Yet fate tossed one last obstacle in Alex’s path. During his voyage northward, his ship caught fire. The crew and passengers probably worked together bailing seawater to extinguish the smoky blaze. They successfully doused the flames, and the ship eventually limped into Boston Harbor.⁹

At first, Alex considered attending the College of New Jersey at Princeton, where, in an interview with the president, he asked if he could graduate ahead of schedule by working at his own pace rather than being tied to a particular graduating class. Informed that he would need four full years to graduate, Alex instead chose to settle in New York and attend King’s College (soon renamed Columbia), a less prestigious school, but one willing to accommodate a “chronically impatient” and unabashedly ambitious young man like Alexander Hamilton.¹⁰

According to his friends’ later accounts, Hamilton had sympathized with the American cause even before moving to New York City, and it did not take him long to find other Manhattanites who shared his point of view. He joined the Sons of Liberty and befriended McDougall, who took an immediate liking to Hamilton and lent him books necessary for his studies. When it appeared that New Yorkers might send moderates to the Continental Congress, McDougall organized and chaired a meeting in the Fields on July 6, 1774, to demand that the colonists take a more belligerent stance toward the British Parliament. It was here that the nineteen-year-old Hamilton gave his first public political speech. He urged that Americans unite against the Coercive Acts (which closed Boston Harbor in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party) with a renewed boycott of British goods. Otherwise, he predicted, “fraud, power, and the most odious oppression will rise triumphant over right, justice, social happiness, and freedom.”¹¹

No one knew who Hamilton was when he gave this speech, nor did he get public credit five months later, when he anonymously published a thirty-five-page pamphlet defending the Continental Congress. Two months later, in February 1775, he came out with an eighty-page tract espousing the American cause, in which he argued that Parliament had overstepped its authority both in taxing the American colonies and in punishing the colonists when they refused to pay those taxes. When one of Hamilton’s pro-British critics cited legal precedent for Parliament’s policy, Hamilton replied that “the sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty rec­ords. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”¹²

While the Continental Congress tried to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the crisis with the British government, redcoats in Massachusetts marched west from Boston to confiscate the Americans’ caches of weapons and ammunition. The colonists’ attempt to stop the British raid resulted in the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. When news of these skirmishes reached New York four days later, all hopes of reconciliation evaporated. “The most violent proposals,” unthinkable just a few months earlier, wrote a correspondent for the London Chronicle, are “meeting with universal approbation! The whole city is arming.” The Sons of Liberty took control of the Custom House, seized the city’s supply of guns, and closed the port to prevent it from being used to supply the British army in Massachusetts. The American Revolution in New York had begun.¹³

New York’s patriots initially thought they could retain control of the city against an anticipated British invasion. In the summer of 1775, the Continental Congress put McDougall, who had no military experience but was a proven leader of men, in charge of the city’s military forces. McDougall used his new authority to help his favorite patriots gain the most prestigious assignments. Hamilton, for example, turned down a position most college students would have coveted, aide-de-camp to a brigadier general, in order to become captain of an artillery company. This position gave him both an independent command and the chance he sought to lead men into battle.¹⁴

Realizing that the British would attempt to capture New York, General George Washington in early 1776 sent his most experienced subordinate, Major General Charles Lee, to assess New York’s preparedness for the inevitable invasion. Lee, born in Cheshire, England, in 1732, had first come to America as a British officer in the French and Indian War, during which he earned a reputation for eccentricity by marrying the daughter of a Mohawk Indian chief. Another manifestation of what Lee himself called his “distemper of . . . mind” was his fanatical devotion to his dogs. He never went anywhere without six or more of his faithful hounds. Lee also loved war. Rather than take the usual colonial assignments in Ireland or North America, he traversed Europe in the 1760s as a mercenary, commanding units for the Portuguese against Spain and for Poland and Russia against the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps sensing that the American clash with Parliament might lead to military conflict, Lee immigrated to North America in 1773, expressing sympathy for the American cause and calling King George III “despicable,” “stupid,” and a “dolt.” Lee had expected the Continental Congress to make him the head of the American armies, and resented that the post was offered to Washington, who had far less military experience.¹⁵

After several months in Manhattan, Lee decided that his motley crew of untested citizen soldiers could not prevent Britain’s well-trained and experienced military from capturing the city, especially if the British devoted significant naval resources to such an attack. The Americans could not allow the British to take New York without a fight, but the best outcome they could hope for, Lee argued, would be to inflict heavy casualties on the British forces before conceding the city. When the British began amassing troops and ships in the lower harbor in the summer of 1776 in an attempt to awe the Americans into submission, the accuracy of Lee’s prediction soon became evident. “I could not believe my eyes,” wrote one New Yorker when first gazing upon the hundreds of British ships and tens of thousands of troops amassed in the harbor. “I do declare that I thought all London was in afloat.”¹⁶

New Yorkers began to flee the city en masse. “New York is deserted by its old inhabitants,” wrote one of the remaining New Yorkers in April to another who had returned to England, “and filled [instead] with soldiers from New England, Philadelphia, Jersey, &c.” By the time the British launched their invasion, which began with an assault on Brooklyn on August 22, Manhattan contained only 5,000 inhabitants, down from 25,000 a year earlier. The Revolution also brought immigration to a halt. Any ship bound for America was likely to be boarded by British troops and its able-bodied male passengers forced into the British army or Royal Navy.¹⁷

Hamilton, McDougall, and Washington fought bravely to hinder the invaders, but over the course of the next several weeks they wisely retreated, first to Manhattan, then north to Westchester, and finally west to New Jersey, rather than risk losing Washington’s entire army at the very onset of the Revolutionary struggle. Washington, told that Hamilton was too brilliant to be left in an artillery regiment, made him one of his key staff members, treating him like the son he never had. For much of the war, Washington’s army would control the portion of New Jersey just across the Hudson from Manhattan and Westchester County, but it would take seven years to rid New York City of its British occupiers. Colden, who must have been pleased to hear that his radical enemies had beaten a hasty retreat, passed away in Flushing at age eighty-seven on September 20, 1776, just five days after the British began to occupy Manhattan.¹⁸

To what extent did New York’s immigrants follow McDougall and Hamilton into the Continental Army? It is impossible to say with any certainty. Unlike in later wars, in which Americans would carefully document the birthplaces of their citizen soldiers, record keeping was poor in the Revolutionary military, and even when such muster rolls were kept, birthplace was considered irrelevant. But we do know that immigrants played a key role on the American side. A loyalist (as those who remained loyal to Great Britain were called) appearing before Parliament in 1779 testified that three-quarters of the American soldiers were immigrants. A British officer who helped invade New York agreed, asserting that “the chief strength of the rebel army at present consists of natives of Europe, particularly Irishmen:—many of their regiments are composed principally of these men.” Another British official in New York reported that “great numbers of emigrants, particularly Irish, are in the rebel army, some by choice and many for mere subsistence.” Scotch Presbyterians like Mc­Dougall and Hamilton also made up a significant portion of the Continental Army. Most of the Irish who enlisted on the American side were also Protestants. Noting the preponderance of Dissenters among the American troops, especially among their officers, a Hessian officer fighting for the British insisted that the conflict should not be called “an American rebellion,” because it was really “nothing more nor less than an Irish-Scotch Presbyterian rebellion.” The rebel army, he observed, also contained Germans as well as “many Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, Frenchmen and others.”¹⁹

With the British occupation of New York City complete, “Tories,” or loyalists, began to return to the city. In November they issued a “Declaration of Dependence,” pledging their allegiance to Great Britain and asking in return that the city not be punished for the indiscretions of the departed Revolutionaries. Although some loyalists were immigrants (the first signer of the Declaration of Dependence was Irish-born merchant Hugh Wallace), newcomers were not particularly prominent within their ranks. The best-known New York City Tories were second-, third-, or fourth-generation Americans—members of what one might call the city’s ruling class. These included the Crugers, for whom Hamilton had worked in St. Croix, as well as the Phillipses, the De Lanceys, the Coldens, the Bayards, and the Van Schaacks. Members of the Church of England also disproportionately dominated the Tory ranks. These loyalist leaders imagined themselves to be members of the British aristocracy, and could not easily give up that exalted status. Other New York City Tories felt a strong devotion to England, while still others were businessmen who perceived that the war presented them with unique opportunities to turn a quick profit if they swore loyalty to the crown and remained in the city, especially if their pro-Revolutionary competitors had fled. Some, like the printer and newspaper publisher Hugh Gaine (an Irish immigrant), had businesses they could not easily move.²⁰

 

The New York City fire that began on September 21, 1776, rendered a quarter of the city’s buildings uninhabitable. The area between Broadway and the Hudson River south of what is now Chambers Street suffered the most damage.

 

On September 21, just days after the British took New York, a horrific fire consumed a huge swath of the city, reducing the southwest quarter of the town to a smoldering ash heap. It would take several decades for the city to fully rebuild. The British suspected that saboteurs had set the blaze, and immediately arrested dozens of alleged spies. One of those taken into custody was Haym Sal­omon. Born in Poland in about 1740, Salomon was one of those immigrants who made it to New York just before the American Revolution began. He left the city in the patriot exodus during the summer of 1776, and may have worked provisioning Washington’s army for several months, but returned to the city at about the time the British occupied Manhattan. The British put him in the same jail where McDougall had been imprisoned.²¹

Some of those arrested at this time were shown very little mercy. Nathan Hale, lamenting that he had but one life to give for his country, was one of several prisoners executed in New York immediately after the fire. Others rotted for months or years in the city’s many makeshift prisons, first on land (nearly every Dissenting church in the city was seized by the British and made into a detention center), and when those were filled, on water as well, in Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn. That was where the British anchored their infamous prison ships, “floating hells” on which thousands died of malnutrition or contagious disease. The British often dumped the dead prisoners, sewn into blankets, into the harbor; hundreds, perhaps thousands of others were buried in shallow mass graves on the Brooklyn shoreline. For years after the Revolution, after particularly violent storms, Brooklynites would find their beaches, as one resident recalled, “covered as thick with skulls as a cornfield ordinarily appears to be in Autumn with pumpkins.”²²

Salomon was lucky not to suffer that fate. Hearing that his prisoners included a Jew who spoke German and had experience provisioning troops, a Hessian general paroled Salomon on the condition that he take an oath of loyalty to Great Britain and become a sutler for the German mercenaries. Salomon agreed and was allowed to trade on his own account as well, turning a tidy profit. He even bought a slave. Salomon became a model loyalist, and in July 1777 he laid down additional roots in the community by marrying fifteen-year-old Rachel Franks. A year later they had their first child, a son named Ezekiel.²³

At just about the time Salomon got married, printer James Rivington returned to New York. Rivington, an English immigrant and editor of Rivington’s New York Gazetteer, was the city’s best-known publisher and bookseller on the eve of the war. He had come to New York in about 1760 to escape huge debts he had run up in England gambling on horse racing. He had printed Hamilton’s two anti-British pamphlets in 1775 but had angered the Sons of Liberty by also publishing British propaganda. Pro-American mobs twice attacked his offices on the eve of the Revolution. A Massachusetts newspaper called Rivington a “Judas,” and even Hamilton, who deplored the attack on Rivington’s press, admitted that he found the editor “detestable . . . in every respect.” Rivington fled the city after a second attack on his press but reappeared in September 1777, having secured an appointment as the king’s official New York printer. He resumed publication of his newspaper, now called the Royal Gazette, filling it with anti-Revolutionary vitriol. To those who supported the Revolution, he was one of the most hated men in New York.²⁴

But appearances could sometimes be deceiving. Salomon, for example, continued to promote the American cause while working for the Hessians, recruiting defectors among the German soldiers and helping American prisoners escape, sometimes slipping them money so they could bribe their jailers. When he came to believe that the British had finally discovered his treachery, he fled to Philadelphia. There he managed to become a specialist in brokering “bills of exchange,” the monetary instruments governments used to buy goods and services when they had no cash on hand. Salomon’s job was to find Americans willing to trade gold, silver, or American currency for French and Spanish bills of exchange. The more bills he sold, the more he made in commissions. Salomon’s renown for brokering foreign bills of exchange became so widespread that Robert Morris, the man assigned by the Continental Congress to finance the fledgling American government and military, hired Salomon in June 1781 to broker the American government’s own bills of exchange. Salomon’s ability to market the government’s debt that summer, even as the Americans teetered on the brink of insolvency, played a key role in keeping the American army in the field long enough to defeat the British. That fall, Washington earned a decisive victory over Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. It was there that Hamilton, after five years on Washington’s staff, was granted his oft-expressed wish to return to a field command, leading three infantry battalions in an assault on Yorktown that captured a key British defensive position and helped precipitate the British surrender.²⁵

After Yorktown, it appeared that an American victory was inevitable, as the patriots had pushed the British out of almost every part of the thirteen colonies except New York City. Tories fled the city by the thousands over the course of 1782 and 1783. The city’s population, which had swelled to 33,000 during the war, now plummeted, just as it had in 1776. Many of the loyalists hated to go and accused the British government of abandoning them. Members of the city’s first families, whose wealth consisted mostly of real estate they could not take with them, were especially bitter. “God d—m them, I thought it would come to this,” raged loyalist William Bayard. “What is to become of me, sir. I am totally ruined.” On November 25, 1783, British troops finally evacuated New York City, having over the preceding months taken about thirty thousand inhabitants of the city and vicinity to England or Canada. As soon as the British lowered their flags and departed, George Washington and the American army, which had already taken upper Manhattan weeks earlier, came marching into town.²⁶

When supporters of the Revolution returned to New York, they were shocked to find that Rivington had not fled with the other loyalists. In fact, soon after Washington arrived in the city, he paid a visit to Rivington’s offices accompanied by two of his officers, who were amazed that the general wanted to see such an infamous Tory. The officers were even more astonished when Washington, on the pretext of examining a list of agricultural treatises, went into a back room with Rivington. The curious soldiers listened closely through the slightly open door and, as Martha Washington’s grandson later retold the story, “heard the chinking of two heavy purses of gold” being placed upon Rivington’s table by the general. It turned out that Rivington had also been a spy for the American side, smuggling out intelligence to Washington by sewing documents into the bindings of books. Rivington had even helped the Americans obtain the British fleet’s signals, which were passed on to the French navy in time for the decisive engagement at Yorktown. But the public either did not know about Rivington’s work for the Americans or believed that he had engaged in espionage out of opportunism rather than devotion to the American cause. A month after Washington’s visit, Rivington was beaten by a mob and forced to shutter his newspaper for good. A gambler to the end, Rivington tried to recoup his losses through risky investments in the India trade. He lost £20,000 that he did not have and spent the last five years of his life in a New York debtor’s prison, where he died in 1802.²⁷

Some loyalists, who either stayed in New York or, more often, returned after initially fleeing, did not suffer such a dire fate. Rivington’s fellow printer and publisher Hugh Gaine, initially arrested for supporting the enemy, eventually reestablished his business and was awarded many printing contracts by the state; he even produced the state’s first paper money. But few regained their former status and wealth. Colden’s sons and daughters fought a losing battle to have some of their property restored. One of his sons, David, managed to regain permission to live in the United States and settled on his father’s old farm in Ulster County. David’s son eventually became a well-regarded American politician and lawyer. But David’s brother Cadwallader junior, a more active Tory, was banished for life.²⁸

Those who had supported the Revolution, of course, did much better. Salomon became a wealthy financier and philanthropist in Philadelphia before his death in 1785. McDougall was elected to the New York State Senate after the war, an office he held until his death in 1786. He also served from 1784 until his death as the first president of the Bank of New York, the first bank founded in the newly established United States.

The moving force behind the Bank of New York was Hamilton, who had continued his meteoric rise from immigrant orphan to wunderkind of the new nation. After Yorktown, with the war clearly over and only the treaty negotiations remaining, Hamilton resigned from the army and, with New York City still occupied, went to Albany to become a lawyer. The established route into that profession involved reading law for two or three years under the tutelage of an established attorney and working uncompensated in that lawyer’s office in exchange for the legal education one received. Hamilton, far too impatient to follow that path, began in January 1782 to read the necessary legal tomes on his own; nine months later he was admitted to the bar. That same year, New Yorkers chose Hamilton to represent them in the congress set up under the Articles of Confederation. When the government established under the Articles proved unworkable, the Constitution written to replace it was ratified thanks in no small part to Hamilton’s eloquent defense of its principles in The Federalist Papers. In the first federal election held under the Constitution, George Washington was elected president, and he reserved the post of secretary of the treasury for his young, ambitious protégé.²⁹

 

This portrait miniature of Alexander Hamilton, painted by Charles Willson Peale ca. 1780, is the earliest surviving likeness of New York’s most famous Founding Father.

 

With the end of the Revolution and the establishment of a new government, immigration to New York would now resume. Initially, the newcomers trickled in at only a fraction of the former pace. Great Britain was still at war with France and Spain, and wages and crop prices in the British Isles rose dramatically as a result, persuading many to stay at home rather than assume the risks associated with relocation to the fledgling republic. The British considered it a crime to desert one’s country in wartime and made every effort to prevent their citizens from emigrating. Even if one managed to slip aboard a vessel headed for America, British sailors continued to board such ships and force any suspected British citizens found on board to join the Royal Navy. In such circumstances, few residents of Great Britain (still the primary source of potential American immigrants) chose to venture to the new United States. Only with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 at Waterloo in present-day Belgium would that warfare come to an end and immigrants once again stream unimpeded into New York, beginning the “century of immigration” that would dramatically reshape New York City and the flow of migrants around the world.