BY TERESE LOEB KREUZER | Two-hundred-and-thirty-six years ago to this day, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia approved the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The good news reached New York City five days later. The declaration was read aloud at City Hall — where Federal Hall now stands at Broad and Nassau Streets — and then a mob raced over to Bowling Green at the foot of Broadway. The ecstatic crowd pulled down the statue of King George III that stood in the middle of New York City’s first public park and cut off the crowns from the iron fence that still surrounds it.
But not all New Yorkers were euphoric. The city, which then consisted of what we now know as Lower Manhattan, was home to many loyalists who supported the monarchy. They had reason to rejoice when the British Navy appeared in New York Harbor and defeated the American troops at the Battle of Brooklyn on Aug. 27, 1776, leaving New York City in British hands for the remainder of the war. But by the spring of 1783, it was clear that the Americans had won.
At the time, there were an estimated 35,000 civilians in New York City plus around 20,000 British troops. All of the troops had to be evacuated, and most of the civilians decided to leave.
“This was the largest group of people that had to be evacuated from anywhere,” according to Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard University and the winner of the 2012 Fraunces Tavern Book Award for her book “Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.”
“Basically,” she said, “the spring and summer of 1783 is when most people left.”
Jasanoff said she was “fascinated” to comb through the newspapers of that period, which were filled with advertisements of ships and goods as people attempted to offload what they couldn’t take with them. “The British military commissary office was actively selling off all of their saddles and shoe buckles, and carriage wheels and a lot of other stuff,” she said.
Most of the ships leaving from New York went to Nova Scotia and Great Britain, and a few of them went to the Bahamas, according to Jasanoff.
Among the New York civilians who evacuated were more than 3,000 former slaves who had been given their freedom by the British in exchange for agreeing to fight the Americans. They fled to assured freedom in Canada, even as their former masters were entering New York looking for their slaves.
“The British commanders stood up for the promises that they had made to the blacks and evacuated them and registered their names in a document called ‘The Book of Negroes.’” Jasanoff elaborated. There was actually a showdown, she said, between the British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, and George Washington in the Tappan Zee area in May 1783.
“Washington was extremely exorcised to find that the British were taking away these slaves, and Carleton calmly replied, ‘I found them free and there’s no telling them otherwise.’
Some of Washington’s former slaves were on convoys that were headed out of New York City, she noted.
According to the records, around 30,000 people left New York City for Nova Scotia. Another 2,500 loyalists went to Quebec and Abaco in the Bahamas.
On Nov. 25, 1783, George Washington and his troops triumphantly marched into New York City as the last of the British troops left.
“It was as if the population of the city turned inside out,” said Jasanoff. “People aren’t really aware of that.”
