Love & War (Alex & Eliza #2)(43)
After six years of British occupation, the great city of New York was a shell of its former self. Before the war, it had been the third-largest city in the northern colonies, with more than twenty-five thousand residents. It trailed only Philadelphia and Boston in size, and was on course to overtake both. But after the British conquered Manhattan in 1777, that number dropped by half as thousands of patriots fled the invaders. During the six years of British rule, the city’s population gradually recovered as loyalists from all over the colonies left the island for safe haven. Their numbers were swelled by thousands of redcoats shipped over from England, who used the city as their base of operations for the war. The once-vibrant metropolis was transformed into a massive army base, replete with all the vices one expects when large numbers of pent-up young men cluster together for months at a time. It seemed that every other storefront had been transformed into a drinking house—or a house of ill repute.
After Cornwallis’s defeat, however, both the British troops and the loyalists who depended on them for protection departed in huge numbers, some for England, others for Canada or the Caribbean. When General Washington officially entered the city on November 25, 1783, he found a ghost town of just over ten thousand people. Washington entered Manhattan this time at its northern tip, crossing over the Harlem River into Harlem Heights, reversing his journey of seven years earlier, when he had been chased from New York City all the way up Manhattan by the British commander, William Howe, and narrowly escaped onto the mainland. It was important to General Washington to ride the entire length of Manhattan to show that the whole island—all twelve miles of it, and not just the city clustered on its southern tip—was once again an American province.
For the first ten miles or so, Washington encountered nothing but forest and farmland. The farms were fallow for the winter, but even so, one could see the desolation. The sheaves still stood in many fields from last fall’s harvest, half rotted from rain and freeze and thaw, while herds of cows clustered forlornly before the closed doors of abandoned barns, waiting in vain for someone to drain their swollen udders, and brown chickens scratched for stray grains in the frozen soil, with nothing hunting their eggs besides foxes and skunks. After mile after mile of this, the neat white-and-brown farmhouses slowly grew more numerous, but only occasionally did one see smoke coming from a chimney or a sturdy farm wife retrieving a basket of apples or squash from the fruit cellar.
Finally, about two miles from New York Harbor, the city itself came into view. From a distance, it looked as Washington remembered it, and at the sight he must have breathed a sigh of relief that the British hadn’t burned it like modern-day Vandals or Huns desecrating the new Rome. As he got closer, he could see that some buildings had indeed been burned, but these were so scarce and randomly placed that he suspected they were simple house fires, unquenched due to the lack of a fire brigade. Hundreds more buildings stood empty, though, with many others only nominally inhabited and often in terrible disrepair. Shutters sagged on hinges and broken glass had been replaced with wood or oilcloth. Holes gaped in gabled roofs where shingles had not been replaced for nearly a decade.
Even more haunting, though, were the dozen or so derelict ships that stood a half mile off the island, and the smells of disease and death that wafted across empty streets from the salty chop of the East River. The British had anchored a chain of some of their oldest (and least seaworthy) frigates off Manhattan to house their prisoners of war. Even now, hundreds of American soldiers, starving, ill, and freezing, were still desperately awaiting release. By some accounts, eleven thousand patriots had died in these ships, nearly three times the number who perished on the field of battle. Bones would wash up on shore for years to come.
Yet the city still stood at the mouth of the Hudson River, from which the furs and grains and timber of the Northeast flowed to European markets, poised to become a great mercantile center and quite possibly the capital of the new nation. Its climate was milder than Boston’s and its island status rendered it easier to defend than Philadelphia or Williamsburg. The Congress of the Confederation was so convinced of the city’s bright future that they chose it as the new nation’s temporary capital, after stints in Philadelphia and Trenton. Washington shared Congress’s high estimation of the city’s symbolic value.
Still resisting all calls to take a position in the government, Washington chose Samuel Fraunces’s Queen’s Head Tavern as the place to resign his commission and bid his faithful troops farewell on December 4, 1783, before returning to Mount Vernon, his beloved plantation in Virginia. One era was closing, while another was beginning, and though the past was cloaked in victory, the future was shrouded in uncertainty. Was this the end of the beginning for the emerging nation, or was it in fact the beginning of the end?
* * *
NOT FAR FROM Fraunces Tavern, Eliza Hamilton stood in the middle of her new front parlor staring forlornly at her husband, who was balanced atop one of the room’s few chairs measuring the windows with a long spool of tailor’s tape.
“I don’t understand why you don’t just walk over to Pearl Street and bid adieu to General Washington,” she said cautiously, to her husband’s white-shirted back.
Alex waited until he had measured the height of the window and recorded the figure in his notebook before answering. “If General Washington had wanted to bid me adieu, he would have invited me,” he said curtly, before climbing down off the chair and carrying it to the room’s second window.