History of New York City (1665–1783)

The history of New York City (1665-1783) began with the establishment of English rule over Dutch New Amsterdam and New Netherland. As the newly renamed City of New York and surrounding areas developed, there was a growing independent feeling among some, but the area was decidedly split in its loyalties. The site of modern New York City was the theatre of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early American Revolutionary War. After that, the city was under British occupation until the end of the war, and was the last port British ships evacuated in 1783.

Early English/British period

The English had renamed the colony the Province of New York, after the king's brother James, Duke of York and on June 12, 1665 appointed Thomas Willett the first of the mayors of New York. The city grew northward, and remained the largest and most important city in the Province of New York.

The Dutch regained the colony briefly in 1673, renaming it "New Orange", then ceded it permanently to the English in 1674 after the Third Anglo-Dutch War.

In the context of the Glorious Revolution in England, Jacob Leisler led Leisler's Rebellion and effectively controlled the city and surrounding areas from 1689-1691, before being arrested and executed. The rebellion laid bare class differences and some see it as a sort of precursor of the American Revolution.

New York was cosmopolitan from the first, established and governed largely as a strategic trading post. Sephardic Jews expelled from Brazil were welcome in New York. St. Patrick's Day was celebrated in New York City for the first time at the Crown and Thistle Tavern on March 17, 1756. This holiday has since become a yearly city-wide celebration that is famous around the world as the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Freedom of worship was part of the city's foundation, and the trial for libel in 1735 of John Peter Zenger, editor of the "New-York Weekly Journal" established the principle of freedom of the press in the British colonies.

The New York Slave Insurrection of 1741 was a major event with claims of arson and a conspiracy and many slaves executed on unclear charges.

Toward Revolution

The city was the base for British operations in the French and Indian War (the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War) from 1754-1763. That conflict united the colonies for the first time in common defense, and moreover eliminated the main military threat that the colonists had relied upon Britain to defend them from. When two years after the conclusion of that war in 1765, the British Parliament imposed a Stamp Act to help finance the cost of defending the colonies, delegates from nine colonies met to protest at what would later be known as Federal Hall on Manhattan for the Stamp Act Congress. The Sons of Liberty, a secretive and sometimes violent revolutionary group, was founded in the city, and in Boston immediately thereafter. The Sons engaged in a running conflict with British authority in the City over the raising of liberty poles in prominent public locations (see Battle of Golden Hill), from the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 until rebel control of the city in 1775. The poles, often when a signal device such as a red cap was placed atop the pole, served as rallying points for public assemblies to protest against the colonial government. The city was the main location of organized political resistance in the form of the Committee of Sixty and then later the New York Provincial Congress.

American Revolution

General Washington correctly surmised that after their defeat at the Siege of Boston the British strategy would be to divide the colonies by capturing the strategic port and waterways of New York City. He then began to fortify the city and took personal command of the Continental Army at New York in the summer of 1776. Five battles comprising the New York Campaign were fought around the city's then limits in late 1776, beginning with the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn on August 27 -- the largest battle of the entire war. A quarter of the city structures were destroyed in the Great Fire on September 21, a few days after the British Landing at Kip's Bay and the Battle of Harlem Heights. Following the highly suspicious fire, British authorities apprehended dozens of people for questioning, including Nathan Hale, who was executed a day later for espionage. The British conquest of Manhattan was completed with the fall of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776, and thereafter they held the city without challenge until 1783. Major General James Robertson, commandant in charge of the city confiscated houses of rebels who had left and distributed them to British officers.

Though the Sons of Liberty were active in the city and the lead statue of George III in Bowling Green was torn down and melted into musket balls in a celebration of the United States Declaration of Independence, the city probably held a larger proportion of Tories than any other place in the colonies before hostilities - though likely still short of a majority. After military occupation resulting from early British military success, itself resulting in the exodus of any remaining Patriots and a large influx of Loyalist refugees from throughout the former colonies, the city became solidly Loyalist for the remainder of the British occupation. The city became the British political and military center of operations for the rest of the conflict. The city's status as the British nexus made it the center of attention for Washington's intelligence network. American prisoners were held under deliberately inhumane conditions on rotting British prison ships in nearby Wallabout Bay for much of the war. The policy of making prison conditions unbearable was to encourage the soldiers to volunteer to join the British navy as an alternative. More American soldiers and sailors died on these ships from deliberate neglect than in every battle of the Revolution, combined.

The anniversary of Evacuation Day, in which the last British troops and many Tory supporters and collaborators departed in November 1783, was long celebrated in New York.