The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (119 page)

But though the city provided the center for much British activity, it did not really flourish during the war. To be sure, trade resumed shortly after the occupation began. One estimate held that there were at least five hundred ships crowded into its harbor by October 1776. Several newspapers began to appear about this time, and their columns carried advertisements of a variety of goods for sale. And as business revived and the British army settled in, many inhabitants who had fled returned, their numbers swelled by loyalists seeking a haven from patriot persecution. By 1781 New York City may have housed as many as 25,000 civilians. The number of British soldiers fluctuated from around 31,000 when the city was captured to as few as 3300 early in 1777 when Howe still pursued Washington. Through much of the war there were at least 10,000 troops in the city, most in camp on Staten Island and northern Manhattan.
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As in Philadelphia, many army officers and wealthy loyalists seem to have led active social lives. The theater revived, concerts were given, along with the usual round of dinners, balls, and parties. Army and navy officers in need of diversion furnished most of the actors in the plays. John Andre, now a major in the Guards and on Clinton's staff, took leading parts until his capture by the Americans at the time of Benedict Arnold's treason. In 1783, a few months before the war's official end, a professional troupe arrived and began giving performances. All these productions stopped at the end of the year with the close of the war and the evacuation of the city by the army and several thousand loyalists.

The amusements of the army and the loyalists have the flavor of quiet desperation. The city may not often have felt the constrictions of occupied Boston, but its inhabitants knew that an enemy lay not far away. Clinton, who certainly worried much, feared an attack several times in his years of command. And when victualing ships failed to arrive when expected, he had reason to fear that the city might starve.

For many inhabitants life was hard and depressing. Physical conditions became difficult just as the occupation began in September 1776. On the night of September 20, a fire began which burned 500 houses, about one-fourth of the city's dwellings. Trinity Church, the Lutheran church, warehouses, and stores were also destroyed. This destruction produced no immediate housing shortage, for most residents had left just as the city fell. Perhaps five thousand inhabitants remained. But as many returned in the next few months, and as loyalists from the middle Atlantic states poured in, a genuine housing shortage developed. The presence of British troops made it worse. A second great fire in August 1778, which destroyed sixty-four houses, deepened the shortage.

No strong effort was made during the occupation to rebuild the houses. The poor and the floaters who followed the army took over much of the burned area -- it lay on both sides of Broadway -- and put up makeshift shelters. Many of these structures were little more than tents made from sailcloth stretched over and around the fragments of walls and chimneys that remained after the fire. Locally this tent city was called "Canvas Town."

Harsh winters, especially the winter of 1779-80, caused the worst suffering. Before the war the Hudson Valley and nearby New Jersey supplied most of the city's food and fuel. Closer by, the farms on upper Manhattan furnished some vegetables and meats; Long Island sent hay, grain, meat, and wood for fires. These nearby areas remained fairly steady suppliers during the war, but they could not meet the city's needs as

its population expanded. Heavy snowfalls in 1779-80 made transporting food and wood almost impossible for weeks at a time. Early in the winter the ice clogged the rivers and cut off Long Island for part of the time. By the middle of January, the Sound froze solid and sleds could be used to carry provisions to the city. But though the freezing helped in one way, it hindered transport in another, for ships were blocked out.

To govern the city, the army relied principally on itself. Howe reinstalled Governor Tryon shortly after capturing the city, but General James Robertson, named commandant of the city in September, really ran it. Robertson relied on army officers to do much of the ordinary work of the occupation, but he also looked to a group of civilians which he chose, called the City Vestry, to provide relief to the poor. Such a body existed before the war. It had collected poor rates and tried to dispense aid to paupers. Robertson's group could not collect rates, but it did have the rents from abandoned rebel houses which were leased to loyalists, and it received fines collected from offenders against various regulations made by the commandant. Altogether the vestry dispensed about £45,000 during the occupation. But neither the vestry nor any other public authority could relieve the occupied city of all its misery.

In a sense no one in America escaped the war, even those in areas remote from it. To be sure much went on as usual -- farmers put in their crops in the spring and harvested them in the fall. Craftsmen made goods, and retailers sold them. Congregations gathered in churches, and children went to school. In these events the rhythms of conventional existence are clear.

Yet the war could not be forgotten. The ten years of agitation before it began had taught most Americans that they had a stake in its issues. There is considerable evidence that wherever they were, they followed the course of the fighting as best they could.

For most, perhaps, the times somehow seemed askew. Months after British troops evacuated Philadelphia, Elizabeth Drinker detected disorder in social arrangements. A new maid, hired in late 1778, entertained a visitor all day in the Drinkers' house and then invited her to spend the night -- "without asking leave." Mrs. Drinker found something ominous in this behavior -- "times are much changed," she said, "and Maids have become Mistresses."
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Soldiers and their families, the Hodgkinses of the Revolution, experi-

enced a pain denied to the Elizabeth Drinkers. Their sense of danger was much more oppressive. It was indeed of a different sort. The question "would Joseph survive?" tormented Sarah Hodgkins until he was finally mustered out. Nothing in ordinary daily life could suppress Sarah Hodgkins's concern.

The length of the war and its demands on men made such experiences common in America. In the eight years between Lexington and peace some 200,000 men carried arms in the Continental army and state militias. And though some areas avoided the destruction fighting inevitably brought, none escaped the war altogether, for the British spread their armies and their efforts from one end of the new nation to the other. Men from every part of America died in opposing them.

If the lives of most Americans were touched by the war, the structure of society remained essentially what it had been before the Revolution. Social classes did not change in important ways, though the upper stratum in the cities lost significant numbers of merchants who, as loyalists, went into exile. Most merchants, of course, supported resistance and eventually war.

The major institutions survived the war as well. War disrupted families, it destroyed schools and churches, and it damaged communities, but the ways such institutions organized themselves remained intact. Not that changes were not made -- the Church of England, for example, no longer received support from taxes. Disestablishing it proved difficult, especially in Virginia, where James Madison and Thomas Jefferson persuaded the legislature to act. But the character of the religion of the church did not alter drastically.
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Yet, though the structure of society remained about what it had always been, society in an important sense was deeply affected by the experience of revolution and war. The eight-year struggle to separate themselves from Britain could not help but transform the American people even as they held on to much in their past.

For one thing the means by which they governed themselves -- the institutions of the state -- were changed in important ways. To be sure government continued to be representative, but, in structure and in the disposition of its powers, it departed from colonial practice.
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governor, formerly the agent of the Crown or a proprietor, now existed as the agent of the legislature, where real power resided. Within the legislature, the lower house dominated. For the most part white males with real property elected the lower house just as they had always done. Pennsylvania and Georgia reduced requirements to something approaching manhood suffrage; in Massachusetts the constitution of 1780 increased the amount of property for the vote to £60. But regardless of whether suffrage requirements remained the same or became stiffer, power now shifted closer to popular desires. The state constitutions did not establish "democracy," and yet the "people" had more power than ever before.
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A change in the tone, or texture, of society reflected and perhaps helped produce the shift in power. If society was not exactly "democratic" or even completely "American," it was more egalitarian than before and had an awareness of itself as the society of a new nation. The Revolution after all had been made in the name of the American people. The Declaration of Independence had declared that they were separating themselves from another people. Their representatives had created a Congress that sat for the continent, and the Congress had called into being a Continental army. The great events which had led Americans to call their cause "glorious" had also led them to love their country and its independence. Thousands of men and women who shared this passion but who had never acted "politically" did so in the twenty years after 1763. Thousands who had never fought in war now did, and thousands of others worked in its service and paid taxes to keep it going.

The usual way of demonstrating the changes that these years of conflict and sacrifice wrought is to cite the evidences of an American nationalism. What has been called high culture -- literature and painting most notably -- gives evidence of the appearance of American nationalism in the Revolution, just as the great public documents and, perhaps more importantly, the actions of Americans do.
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But the experience that created national feeling is what set the society of the revolutionary generation off from all those generations which preceded -- and followed -- it. Those who defended American rights before 1775, those who led the way into revolution and war, those who

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fought, those who contributed possessions and service, and those who merely urged others on were marked by their actions. They were a part of the glorious cause, a cause which from 1776 on assumed the shape of an experiment in republican government. The precise nature of that experiment did not become immediately clear, though the five years following peace in 1783 would do much to define its meaning. In the meantime the Americans engaged in the struggle sensed that what they were doing distinguished them from other men.