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And then, on July 4, 1776, Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence. All patriot talk of union, reform, and British liberties was swept away, replaced by Thomas Jefferson’s crystalline presentation of universal, “self-evident,” and “unalienable rights.” On paper, the declaration transformed thirteen British colonies into independent and “united States of America.” It would take a lot more to make the United States real in practice, but the declaration had a critical effect on consolidating patriot and loyalist positions. From now on, independence was the dividing line: either you were for it or you were against it. Independence made anybody who aided or abetted the British into a traitor against the United States. It also came with a symbol attached. The language of the declaration turned King George III into the embodiment of everything patriots hated about British rule. For loyalists, by contrast, the king provided a focal point of unity; supporting him was the one thing they all believed in.
No more king, no more Parliament, no more British Empire: as news of the declaration whipped across America, people instantly understood its significance. Emblems of the king’s authority came crashing down in an iconoclastic frenzy. Patriots marched through the streets of Boston tearing down inn signs, placards, and anything else bearing royal insignia. In Baltimore, they wheeled a statue of the king through the streets like a condemned man headed for execution and set it ablaze before a crowd of thousands. On Bowling Green in New York City, a crowd of soldiers and eager civilians looped ropes around a monumental equestrian statue of King George III, toppled it from its marble pedestal, chopped off the statue’s head, and planted it on a spike of iron fence. Inglis recorded how the decapitated remains were paraded through the city to the Continental Army camp, where “the Declaration of Independency was read at the Head of several Regiments.” Its valuable lead would be melted down into more than forty thousand bullets.31
Inglis remained frightened by “the critical situation of affairs” and “the most violent threats flung out against any who would presume to pray for the King.” Fortunately for him, a deliverance of sorts was at hand. Preparing for an invasion of New York City, Royal Navy ships crowded into the harbor “as thick as trees in a forest.”32 In the last week of August 1776, thirty thousand British troops landed in Brooklyn in great red waves. They routed Washington’s Continental Army on Brooklyn Heights and crossed the East River to seize Manhattan. Britain’s comprehensive victory in New York almost ended the war on the spot—though through bad British decisions and good American luck, Washington escaped to fight another day. Instead, New York City became the central British base of operations for the rest of the war. It also became the largest loyalist stronghold in the colonies. Loyalists surged into this safe haven from surrounding war-torn areas.33 In September 1776, when the British occupation began, the city contained a mere five thousand residents, many patriots having fled in the face of the British advance. Less than six months later, loyalist refugees had doubled the population, and soon New York played home to twenty-five to thirty thousand loyalists, making it the second largest city in the colonies.34
Refugees came to New York City in search of protection and stability, but these, they found, had a price. A few nights after the British arrival, a fire broke out on one of the slips at Manhattan’s southeastern tip. Sheets of flame blazed up Broadway, consuming as many as a quarter of the city’s buildings in its wake. British commanders concluded that the fire had been started by patriot arsonists, and promptly placed New York City under martial law; it remained under military rule until the end of the war.35 Loyalists deeply resented living under military occupation, subordinated to the whims of raucous British troops.36 (Not for nothing had the quartering of British soldiers in American homes been a long-standing colonial grievance.) In the fall of 1776, the disgruntled New York refugees presented a petition to the British commanders in chief complaining about martial law. “Notwithstanding the tumult of the times, and the extreme difficulties and losses to which many of us have been exposed, we have always expressed, and do now give this Testimony of our Zeal to preserve and support the constitutional supremacy of Great Britain over the Colonies,” the petitioners stressed. “[S]o far from having given the least countenance of encouragement, to the most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion, that ever disgraced the annals of Time; we have on the contrary, steadily and uniformly opposed it, in every stage of its rise and progress, at the risque of our Lives and Fortunes.” In return for their loyalty, they argued, they deserved to be treated with “some line of distinction”—not the imperial iron fist that clenched them more tightly than ever.37
A frank declaration of dependence, this document conspicuously lacks the rhetorical grace and inspiration of the Declaration of Independence. But it gives clear insight into what a large cross section of American loyalists wanted from the British Empire. They had no wish to “dissolve the political bands” with Britain, as the Declaration of Independence had proclaimed. On the contrary, they sought “a speedy restoration of that union” between Britain and the colonies that had produced so much “mutual happiness and prosperity.” At the same time, these New Yorkers were not backward-looking reactionaries. Their quest for a civil reunion with Britain would have inclined them toward plans like Joseph Galloway’s, in which the colonies would gain greater autonomy. Nor were they unthinkingly “loyal” to what was effectively an army of occupation.
The “declaration of dependence” also nicely illustrates who these loyalists actually were. For three days in late November 1776, the petition sat on a table at Scott’s Tavern in Wall Street, to be signed by anybody who wished. In all, more than seven hundred people came to put their names to the parchment—twelve times the number who signed the Declaration of Independence. The list of signatories ranged from grandees fat with land and capital to small-time local farmers and artisans. The very first signer, Hugh Wallace, counted among the wealthiest traders in the city; he and his brother Alexander, émigrés from Ireland, had cemented their self-made success by marrying two sisters of Isaac Low, the former congressman. Charles Inglis and New York’s other principal clergymen followed immediately below. Representatives of New York’s great landed families, the DeLanceys, the Livingstons, and the Philipses, also inscribed their names to the petition. The majority of signatures, though, belonged to the ordinary people who made New York run: tavern-keepers and carpenters, farmers from the Hudson Valley and New Jersey, Germans, Dutch, Scots, and Welsh. Here was the baker Joseph Orchard, who supplied the British army with bread, and the hairdresser and perfumer James Deas. Many signatories later joined up to fight: men like Amos Lucas, who left his farm on Long Island to join a loyalist regiment, and the Greenwich blacksmith James Stewart, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, who enlisted in the British army in 1777. While the petition recorded the social hierarchy of the times—with “leading citizens” at the top and their clients and subordinates below—it also demonstrated the social diversity of loyalism.38
As patriots united around the idea of an independent nation, loyalty to the king helped a parallel America coalesce around an ideal of enduring empire. Yet these New York loyalists confronted an ominous portent of what would become a recurring loyalist predicament. They found a place of safety, yes, but it was not necessarily a comfortable one. What they wanted from Britain was not always what British authorities would give them. And though they were not prepared to abandon the imperial connection altogether, they had no desire to be treated as supplicant minions either. It was one thing to experience such treatment in a time of war. But many would find, to their chagrin, that such disjunctures between loyalist expectation and British practice stretched on well into the peace.
It was no wonder, then, that colonists inclined toward the king could feel pressed between a rock and a hard place, reluctant to commit themselves openly to a loyalist cause that might bring nothing but punishment, property confiscation, dislocation, and discomfort in its wake. This was the dilemma that New York landowner Beverley