[It’s impossible to think about our ongoing 250th anniversary without engaging with the frustratingly Trumptastic American250 Commission, and I’ll write about such current events in my weekend post. But at the same time, I refuse to let that nonsense overshadow the complex and crucial histories themselves, so this week I’ll first AmericanStudy a handful of them!]
On five telling events that all took place in the Big Apple in the summer of 1776.
- The Hessians are coming: On August 12th, the first Hessian mercenaries arrived on Staten Island, supplementing the British troops stationed there and starting the process of becoming the integral part of the war that they remained for years thereafter. I would also argue that the arrival of the first troops who were not in one way or another part of the war’s two adversaries (or rather, were paid by one of those adversaries to join their cause) was a clear indication that the Revolution had become a very real and increasingly global conflict.
- The Battle of Long Island: Two weeks after that moment, the Hessians took part in the Revolution’s first major battle to be fought outside of Massachusetts, the August 27th Battle of Long Island. George Washington had anticipated the attack months before and moved the bulk of his Continental Army to Lower Manhattan, but due to both superior numbers and some tactical errors from Washington the British troops nonetheless routed the Patriots, forcing a retreat and leaving much of the city in British hands.
- A submarine attack!: I’m not even gonna pretend that prior to researching this post I knew that the first use of a submersible in combat was in New York Harbor in the summer of 1776. But it was—the young Yale graduate David Bushnell convinced George Washington let him transport a homemade bomb aboard his equally homemade submarine the American Turtle, in an effort to sink the British flagship HMS Eagle. Unfortunately neither that nor two subsequent attempts resulted in success, but still, the world’s first submarine attack took place in New York in the summer of 1776, and that’s well worth including in this post.
- The Battle of Harlem Heights: When I said that much of the city was in British hands after the Battle of Long Island, I was being precise—Washington and his troops had retreated to the northern portion of Manhattan, where they remained encamped in the neighborhood known as Harlem (previously Nieuw Haarlem in New Amsterdam). On September 16th, reinforced by additional troops who had landed at Kips Bay the day before, the British forces launched a surprise attack, seeking to drive the Continental Army out of the city for good. But Washington counterattacked and won his first battlefield victory of the war, a victory after which, as Adjutant General Joseph Reed wrote to his wife, “You can hardly conceive the change it has made in our Army.”
- Nathan Hale’s execution: If that long-awaited first battlefield victory offered one form of inspiration for the Continental Army and Revolutionaries everywhere, a quite distinct and much darker but equally inspiring event took place less than a week later. After the Great New York Fire of 1776 burned through the city on September 21st, the British authorities rounded up hundreds of Americans, and one of them was a young schoolteacher turned spy named Nathan Hale. The next day, September 22nd, Hale was executed; he likely did not actually say the famous line about “one life to lose for my country,” but a witness did note that he “walked with the grace and stateliness of a man carrying out the will of his people, the will of his God.” Such losses are a tragic part of war to be sure, but they also can bring a people together in the continued fight, and that’s where things stood by the end of the summer of 1776.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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