Today is the anniversary of a fire that destroyed 20% of New York City, on Sept. 21, 1776. You’ve probably never heard of this fire, which is what the Founding Fathers intended. The Great New York Fire is a vivid example of Americans’ impulse to bury the ugliest parts of our origins. We tend to forget that the Revolution was a chaotic civil war, filled with trauma and terror.
The fire plunged Lower Manhattan into misery during the next seven years of the British army’s occupation, and beyond. The flames seemed to burst out in several places at once, and they destroyed almost everything on the West Side, from Whitehall Slip to City Hall Park. The fire hollowed out the first Trinity Church, at the head of Wall Street, along with hundreds of homes along Broadway. St. Paul’s Chapel survived to provide a place of refuge after another tragic disaster in September 2001.
George Washington’s army had occupied the city since the spring of 1776. After he lost the Battle of Brooklyn, Washington knew he could no longer defend Manhattan, so he evacuated on Sept. 15, and British troops took his place. Six days later, the fire raged through town. The British believed that a radical faction of New England soldiers had done the deed, because they hated New York’s churches, Loyalists, and extremes of wealth, and they wanted revenge for the coastal towns that the British had burnt.
By destroying Manhattan’s buildings, the Americans had hoped to deprive the British of a winter headquarters and naval base, and hurt many of the King’s supporters. They leveled the homes of some committed Patriots, too, but in 1776, radical republicans could claim that patriotism required such sacrifices. It was unclear whether New Yorkers themselves agreed.
Washington and his fellow officers seriously considered this idea of burning New York, but they later claimed to have obeyed an order from Congress not to destroy it. Moderates understood that radical actions like burning towns might alienate many civilians and tarnish the country’s reputation. There was no way, then, that anyone in the Continental Army could publicly take responsibility for setting fire to one of the country’s largest port towns.
But did Continental Army officers really obey the order from Congress? And did their men obey them? During the fire, the British caught American soldiers, officers, and civilians trying to torch buildings or carrying incendiary materials. One of them was apparently a mixed-race private from Connecticut. British soldiers threw a few of these people into the flames, including a woman who they caught making balls of gunpowder to spark further ignitions.
Many of the King’s supporters howled that Washington should have to answer for the fire. Yet Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and their allies all claimed that the fire must have been an accident. This was a plausible theory: the wind was high, most of the firemen were absent, and the firefighting equipment was in disrepair. The church bells that would have summoned bucket brigades had all been removed to be melted into cannon. The city’s carpenters had resisted better building codes for years, so the city was still mostly built of wood.
The Founding Fathers did their best to flood the landscape with their version of events. They launched a disinformation campaign, making sure that newspapers were filled with tales of marauding Hessian soldiers, mass executions, throat slitting, and murdered women. Only some of these tales had any truth, but never mind.
The Americans’ intention was to deflect attention away from British accusations about who must have started the fire. By the end of the year, few people were still talking about the fire, except for the families who had lost everything in the blaze.
Years after the war, New Yorkers enthusiastically built their growing city atop the ruins. Americans wrote histories of the war, denying that patriotic Americans might have deliberately tried to burn Gotham to the ground. If America was to be a great nation, its historians couldn’t admit any discussion of the bad deeds the nation had done in 1776. If New York was to be a great city, it had to move past its years of British occupation.
We still have this impulse: as the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, many Americans prefer the sanitized version of the American Revolution. We should still aspire to the best ideals of the Revolution, yet we do our children no favors when we don’t also tell the darker side of its history. New York is built on the ashes of its past, and Americans should commemorate the whole story.
Carp, a Brooklyn College history professor, is the author of “The Great New York Fire of 1776,” published this year by Yale University Press.
Benjamin L. Carp
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