250 and Counting

Category: New York History

  • Howe Checks In–July 7, 1776

    Cover art for July 7, 1776: color mezzotint print portrait of WIlliam Howe by John Morris, published in 1777.

    William Howe had already been in New York for a little over a week when he wrote to George Germain from his Staten Island headquarters.

    Not everyone had yet arrived from Halifax, of course; it was a long trip and the ships moved at different speeds. Howe took the time to detail what troops and ships had already arrived in New York, and what was still enroute, and that he was awaiting some more reinforcements before acting in full.

    I presume that he was as detailed as he was because he was dispatching the letter to George Germain immediately via a packet ship, and the American Navy wasn’t really in a position at that point to intercept anything; otherwise they would have had a lot of actionable information about troop movements and their plans.

    On the other hand, George Washington (and a few others) had already figured out what the British were up to, but at this point they were at a little bit of a loss regarding how they were going to counter it.

    Part of the problem was that the troops were still fighting more or less defensively. They didn’t have a specific cause to fight for. But in another couple of days, they would have that. It wouldn’t really help in the short run here, but it worked wonders in the end.

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  • Why New York Abstained–July 3, 1776

    Cover art for July 3, 1776: "The Birth of the State of New York" by George A. Harker, ca. 1915. Print via Westchester County Historical Society; the original is in a private collection.

    In the play/film 1776, with nearly every vote cast throughout the show, a delegate from New York (Lewis Morris) steps up to announce New York’s abstention from the vote, “courteously.”

    It’s played for comedy, and at one point even the explanation is rendered comedic, when Morris tells the assembled delegates that the members of the legislature in New York “speak very fast and very loud, and nobody listens to anybody else with the result that nothing ever gets done.” He also says that the New York legislature has never given him explicit instructions. Now, the first thing may or may not be true (I’m from New York, so it’s possible), but the second item is not, as you learn in today’s episode.

    When it came to the question of Independence, New York did, in fact, abstain. And they were probably courteous about it besides. But New York’s abstention from the votes, over and over, were derived from explicit instructions, not their absence.

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  • Hickey Leaves A Bad Mark–June 26, 1776

    Cover art for June 26, 1776: "Washington and the Green Peas". Engraving by Albert Bobbett, ca. 1876-77.

    That New York had a strong contingent of Loyalists was never a secret in 1776, but chances are that George Washington never thought one of his bodyguards, Thomas Hickey, was one of them.

    Hickey was a private in the Continental Army, which meant that he was part of a group that not only protected George Washington, but the Army’s local cache of money. At one point he was arrested for passing counterfeit money and it was while he was in jail that word got back to Washington that Hickey was planning to switch sides as soon as the British got there. So Hickey betrayed both the General and the currency he’d been assigned to protect.

    About the cover art: many years later, a story came out that was written by Washington’s grandson (more accurately, Martha Washington’s grandson) George Washington Parke Custis, that Washington was in danger of being killed by an insider via poisoning. After Custis died, his memoirs were published by his daughter Mary Anna Custis Lee, with extensive notes added by an antiquarian. According to this account:

    When Washington and his army occupied the city, in the summer of 1776, the chief resided at Richmond Hill, a little out of town, afterward the seat of Aaron Burr. [Samuel] Fraunces’s daughter was Washington’s housekeeper, and she saved his life on one occasion, by exposing the intentions of Hickey, one of the Life-Guard (already mentioned), who was about to murder the general, by putting poison in a dish of peas prepared for his table.

    Who alerted Washington to the poisoned peas varies from one account to another, and given a bunch of the details (which I’ve largely omitted here), it’s very likely that the story is apocryphal.

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  • News From All Over–June 9, 1776

    Cover art for June 9, 1776: Map of New York which the British published shortly after the Battle of Long Island.

    It was a busy day for corresponding with George Washington on this day, as three letters to Washington were sent.

    Each one had a bit of information that was negative at its worst and neutral at its best. But these letters were a bit of a problem, in that information took so long to get from one place to another: by the time Washington received warning that British troops were enroute, they were thisclose to actually being there.

    On the other hand, both sides are equally disadvantaged by the time lag, and Washington was shrewd enough to find a way to take advantage of that, as we’ll discover.

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  • Isaac Van Houten–June 4, 1776

    Cover art for June 4, 1776: aerial view of Clarkstown in 2010, looking south. via Wikimedia Commons.

    The Rockland County area of New York State is some lovely country. It’s just north of New York City and, along with adjacent Duchess and Westchester Counties, could be considered the heart of the area where the Dutch settlers came and stayed.

    As a result you’ll find many place names that have Dutch origins. This is why so many places in the downstate New York area (the triangle above NYC) end in “-kill”, because “kill” is dutch for “creek.” Thus, “Fishkill” means “fish creek”.

    At any rate, while not a lot is known about Isaac Van Houten, it’s clear that he almost certainly has Dutch ancestry, given both his name and his hometown along the lower Hudson River.

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  • Delegates Start Getting Their Orders–May 23, 1776

    Cover art for May 23, 1776: portrait of James Duane by John Trumbull, 1805.

    Once the preamble to Congress’ resolution had been written and unanimously approved back on May 15, it really was just a matter of when, rather than whether, America was going to formally declare itself as a separate state from England.

    The hardest part was getting all the ducks in a row, as the expression goes. The biggest reason that independence hadn’t already been declared is that anything that came out of the Continental Congress had to pass unanimously, so they could speak with a single voice. Now, at the delegate level, they didn’t all have to vote the same way, but once a majority of the delegates from a given colony voted a certain way, then the colony voted that way as part of the larger body.

    Some colonies had the green light to vote in the affirmative, as long as a different colony brought up the question. Georgia was rather split within the state, and was also more concerned with the skirmishes they were having at the border with Florida. So they mostly didn’t care. New York delegates, as we mentioned yesterday, arrived with instructions not to vote on Independence at all. Even when they finally did vote, it was technically against their orders.

    But one of the more passionate sets of orders came from a group in Boston. Put your earbuds in and learn about how florid writing can really get your point across.

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  • The Third NY Provincial Congress–May 22, 1776

    Cover art for May 22, 1776: portrait of Major-General Charles Lee. Engraving created in 1860 by H.B. Hall & Sons of New York.

    When the Third NY Provincial Congress convened on this day, chances are that nobody really got their hopes up.

    By this point, that body had already met a few times, so it was generally known where they stood when it came to the Independence Question. And sure enough, when they sent delegates to the Continental Congress, they sent those delegates with instructions to oppose Independence. Rather than do that, however, the New York delegation typically just remained on the sidelines, appearing to neither favor nor oppose the notion. This went on for several weeks, and while it didn’t necessarily hinder the cause, neither did it really help matters.

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  • Simon Fraser–May 20, 1776

    Cover art for May 20, 1776: Pre-1826 painting of Simon Fraser by unknown artist in Bennington Museum, Vermont. uploaded to Wikipedia by user Objectivesea (Erik Bjørn Pedersen).

    Simon Fraser was born in Hoosick, New York, which is close to where New York’s border meets with those of Vermont and Massachusetts. He was the youngest of eight children.

    He moved to Montreal when he was 14 and worked with his uncles in the fur trade, apprenticing to the North West Company the following year. Now, the North West Company had already commissioned someone to find a river route to the Pacific Ocean. That may did find a route that worked for fur sources but wasn’t especially good as a trade route. Fraser was given the responsibility for extending operations to the west, and he did it by establishing trading posts along the way, essentially taking possession of that part of the continent. This led to further exploration and either establishing or expanding fur trade along the way.

    In 1814 he got caught up in a dispute in the Red River Valley area, between the North West Company and Thomas Douglas, a controlling shareholder of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had established the Red River Colony. By 1816 this dispute ballooned into the Battle of Seven Oaks, in which twenty people were killed. Fraser wasn’t involved in the battle but he was arrested anyway by Douglas. He was eventually acquitted of any charges, but that was pretty much the end of his involvement in the fur trade industry, though he remained an active menber of the North West Company until his death in 1862. Because his wife died the next day, the pair were buried in a single grave in a cemetery near their home in Cornwall, Ontario.

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  • Valentine Efner–May 5, 1776

    Cover art for May 5, 1776: a cropped photo of the old Blenheim Covered Bridge, spanning Schoharie Creek, River Road. Photo by Jet Lowe and available via the Library of Congress.

    Given the fact that Valentine Efner (sometimes spelled “Effner”) skipped so many roll call votes in Congress, it’s a wonder he ran for Representative in the first place.

    We have to think that Efner was an informal kind of representative, and being in the rarefied air of Congress had him missing the farm life, to which he returned immediately after his term of office had ended.

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    PS Pardon the brief notes, we had a veterinary emergency here that ate up most of my night. Fortunately our dog is well.

  • Washington Cracks Down–May 3, 1776

    George Washington was good at what he did because he’d studied military discipline, among other things. He read a lot about tactics and famous battles, and the importance of a well-trained army, and then he would meet with veterans and engage with them to learn what they thought.

    During the Seven Years’ War he asked to use some of those techniques with the men under his command. Sometimes, but by no means all the time, was he able to enact some of his ideas.

    So when Washington took over the Continental Army in July of 1775, he had some ideas about what that army should look like. And he had generally good counsel coming from other people who’d been through much of the same things as him.

    But the problem was that the recruits of the early days of the Revolution weren’t committed to anything more than a single year. They didn’t get much time to learn the things they should have, and as a result they left before they could learn everything they should have, or they did learn what was needed and left anyway. And those who were left behind were still pretty new, and had little sense of military discipline.

    So Washington decided he needed to get a little tougher.

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