Chapter One
America
Soldiers marched that day in Manhattan. For almost as
long as anyone could remember, the sight of soldiers had
invariably meant the same thing, whether they were
French or Russian, Austrian or English, whether they
belonged to kings or were battle-hardened mercenaries,
whether they moved in great formations or galloped along
on horseback. Too often their presence was ominous,
signaling that the campaign was beginning and the war
was deepening, that the dead would increase and the
bloodshed would continue, and the suffering would go on.
But today their footsteps were unique, booming out the
rites of nationhood. They called out a celebration of
victory and the raising of the flag-the American flag.
It was November 25, 1783. Evacuation Day in New York
City.
As morning broke, the crowds converged and the
collective pulse quickened, murmuring with exhilaration.
A hundred years later, the city would still remember and
celebrate this day. By Manhattan’s shores, the last
British troops, heads bowed, dour and defeated, were
ferried out to transport ships waiting for them in the
harbor, then, sails aloft, their gleaming masts
disappearing into the distance. For the British there
was indescribable sorrow at the loss of their “thirteen
beautiful provinces.” And there was then, as one man
remembered, “a deep stillness.” And then pandemonium.
This final corner of occupied territory was now free.
It was precisely one o’clock. The bells of New York, all
but silent since the Stamp Act’s repeal and languishing
for years in storage, now rang, while at the southern
tip of the island, the flag, torn down in September
1776, was soon hoisted anew to flutter in the wind. All
across the city, young and old alike collected in
anticipation, by the corner of Broad and Pearl streets,
where a roar of applause would ebb and mount, and over
to Bowling Green, where in 1776 the Declaration of
Independence was read and patriots had toppled the
king’s equestrian statue and hacked the gilded crown off
his head. Handkerchiefs flapped and gawkers hung out
their windows, down past Trinity Church, where desperate
Americans had once quietly prayed for deliverance. And
now, before a thicket of patriots, scores of
battle-tested American troops entered to reclaim the
city. Led by General Henry Knox and flanked on one side
by a hatless George Washington, mounted upon a brilliant
white steed, and by Governor George Clinton on the
other, here they came. These were the survivors of
Bunker Hill, the heroes who crossed the Delaware, the
men who had shivered at Valley Forge, and the victors at
Yorktown. They were “ill-clad and weather-beaten,” but
the people loved them just the same. Marching southward
in formation under a velvety sky, the triumphant
procession wound past Blue Bells Tavern, where
Washington reviewed the pageantry, past half-ruined
mansions where errant British flags still flew, and past
the moldering earthworks and trenches that dotted the
roads, down to the island’s edge and the streets to the
Battery. Crowds gasped and erupted into shouts of
“Hurrah.” A thirteen-gun salute exploded into the air,
while artists and scribblers converged, ready to record
the event for posterity.
At Fort Washington, the password of the day was “peace.”
The eight-year war was over.
The dawn of a new era had begun.
From a distance, one British officer marveled, “The
Americans are a curious … people; they know how to
govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.” Yet
the Revolution had been hard on the country. At least
25,000 Americans had died in the conflict-a staggering
one percent of the population, a number surpassed only
by the ruthless carnage of the Civil War-indeed, one
estimate held that as many as 70,000 had perished. And
there were the memories. Legions of American soldiers
had been held captive aboard British prison ships
anchored in the East River, ships that were damp, cold,
and reeking from inadequate sanitation. The filth and
the lice, the disease and malnutrition, not to mention
the gross mistreatment, had carried off an astounding
eleven thousand continentals-nearly half of all the
deaths in the war itself. And with grim regularity, the
bleached skulls and skeletons of the dead would lap up
on the shore, bearing silent witness to British
atrocities.
In New York, after seven years of British rule and
martial law, the city was a shambles, a legacy of the
transforming burdens of war. The day’s delirium aside,
as the sun rose that morning, the vistas were chilling.
The city was a patchwork of shanty huts and brick
skeletons, remnants of the devastating fire of 1776. The
enormity of the reconstruction challenge was
overwhelming: In every direction spread weed-choked
ruins, rotted-out homes, and vacant lots; and everywhere
stood the debris of war. The streets overflowed with
trash, squalor, and excrement, and block upon block lay
bare and decrepit; New York had even been stripped of
its fences and trees-the British troops used them for
firewood-while its wharves had been left to rot and sink
into the river. No less than Trinity Church was reduced
to a blackened hull. Bony cows and pigs scavenged
freely, and the people themselves were crammed into a
haphazard mass of pitched tents and cramped hovels.
Pale-faced and unwashed-disease-ridden too-they existed,
in the words of one visitor, “like herrings in a
barrel.” No wonder New York’s future mayor, John Duane,
ruefully noted that the city looked as if it “had been
inhabited by savages or wild beasts.”
And what now? In these early days-or the final ones, it
depended upon your perspective of the British crown-the
signs were hardly encouraging. For the Tory supporters
of the king, the hallowed era of British rule had come
to an inglorious end: Powerful businessmen and overseas
merchants were without homes; prosperous shipbuilders
had been reduced to nothing short of beggars; great
politicians appointed by the crown saw their houses
rummaged through and their family dynasties abruptly
undone. And hordes of English-American children were
cast aside by the only world they had ever known.
Already, some 60,000 to 80,000 Tories had fled to
England or to the safer outposts of Bermuda, the West
Indies, and Canada. They knew that for thousands of
American “patriots,” Tories were little more than hated
traitors; they also knew that vengeance, greed, and
jingoism made for a lethal cocktail. Sunk in grief, many
thus became permanent refugees in foreign lands,
clinging vainly to the faint dream of return.
Tragically, when the exiles made their way to Britain,
more often than not they were viewed as public burdens
or social embarrassments, or, in the end, as simply mere
bores. “We Americans,” one loyalist said gloomily, “are
plenty here, and cheap.”
For those who remained, the dreaded Armageddon had
finally arrived. Gone were the customary sights that had
for so long been an integral part of their British
lives-the elegant redcoats with their scarlet uniforms
and burnished arms who were their defenders, the glory
of the king and the glamour of their empire, the clatter
of official carriages and the pitched whistles of
British naval vessels that were the great empire’s
protector, and, of course, the long skyline adorned by
the Union Jacks fluttering aloft; all had changed,
absolutely and inexorably forever.
At the moment of the British exodus, one anxious
loyalist said tearfully, “The town now swarms with
Americans.” And the last loyalists themselves? The
wreckage of their lives was soon to be revealed in vivid
detail: homes seized and sold at auction; family
furniture and precious heirlooms abandoned or outright
ransacked; thieves callously picking over their personal
effects; and shattered dishes littering the floors of
once elegant abodes, everywhere the dishes. Most
humiliating were the public notices, formally banning
the exiles from ever returning to America-or the laws
curtailing their civil and financial rights. And soon
would come frightening incidents of revenge: One
loyalist, seized by a mob in New London, was strung up
by the neck aboard a dockside ship, whipped with a
cat-o’-nine-tails, tarred and feathered, and thrown on a
boat to New York. In South Carolina, another was hanged
by embittered ex-neighbors.
So on that morning the remaining loyalists numbly
waited, listening to the haunting sound of American
military men marching their way, the thud of enemy feet
in the streets, the sharp commands ringing in the
air-and the terrible echo of celebratory cannons off in
the distance. One New Yorker even observed that the
loyalists were now in “a perfect state of madness,
drowning, shooting and hanging themselves.”
But euphoric Americans took little heed. As the
loyalists escaped New York, packing the roads and
crowding the wharves, a surge of new residents arrived,
doubling the city’s population in just two years and
quickly turning this restless little seaport into the
most vivacious and cosmopolitan society on America’s
shores.
New Yorkers, indeed all Americans, were already looking
ahead.
Two days after Evacuation Day, George Washington,
hugging his artillery commander, gave a tearful farewell
to his officers at Fraunces Tavern. “With a heart full
of love and gratitude,” he told his officers, fighting
back his emotions, “I now take leave of you.” One of his
men who witnessed the scene would recall that he had
never seen such a moment “of sorrow and weeping.” But
more than that, they saw something else quite startling.
Washington was sending out a powerful signal: To a man,
they were all mere servants of the nation, even as he
resisted calls to become a king.
After crossing the Hudson, Washington then rode south
through the gathering chill to Annapolis, Maryland,
where the Congress was now meeting. Around noon on
December 23, 1783, Washington was escorted into the
State House, where he met the assembled delegates. He
rose and bowed, and with a faint quiver in his hands,
proceeded to read his carefully chosen words. “Having
now finished the work assigned me …” His voice
dwindled. He continued: “… I retire from the great
theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell
to this august body … I here offer my commission and
take my leave.” Now his eyes filled. Neither the
heartbreaking loss of New York, or the brazen victory at
Trenton, nor the winter nightmares of Valley Forge and
Morristown, or the decisive liberation at Yorktown,
could have prepared him for this moment inside these
hushed chambers. The spectators, fighting back their own
tears, also grasped the importance of the day, itself
replete with symbolism: For once more, Washington was
relinquishing his military power, underscoring civilian
control in the new republic.
In London, King George III was soberly informed that
Washington would resign and turn to private life. His
reply is legendary. “If he does that, sir,” the king
exclaimed, no doubt with a slight tremble to his voice,
“he will be the greatest man in the world.” From a king
who could barely hear the words “United States” uttered
in his presence and who would turn his back on Thomas
Jefferson, this was a subtle admission packed with
historic meaning. American liberty was now not simply a
rhetorical chant mouthed to stay the hands of a
prevaricating despot or a corrupted parliament, but a
reality. And this incipient revolution was, it seemed,
not destined solely for Americans, but for peoples the
world over, and, at long last, it was coming into full
reveal.
In the epicenter of Europe in 1783, France, now the
globe’s mightiest empire, felt it too.
It was a paradox, to be sure. Even if France’s support
for the young rebels had far less to do with idealism
than with a cynical settling of scores with England, and
even if the young country to which the monarchy had
helped give birth remained a footnote in its attentions,
France’s fashionable society felt quite differently.
Heroic poems with thirteen stanzas became the rage. So
were picnics on the thirteenth of the month, in which
thirteen toasts to the Americans were drunk. And so were
the hundreds of French nobles who had rushed abroad and
risked death so that a young republic might live: the
Marquis de Lafayette, who would achieve immortality as
George Washington’s protégé and nearly lose his life at
the battle of Brandy-wine; Admiral d’Estaing, who would
take Newport and almost die in the struggles to take
Savannah; and Admiral Rochambeau, who would eschew the
lavish comfort of the French court for one last glorious
crusade to fight side by side with the Americans.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Great Upheaval
by Jay Winik
Copyright © 2007 by Jay Winik .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2007
Jay Winik
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-008313-7
