The Great New York City Fire of 1776

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. This week, we're digging into the mysteries of the Great Fire of New York City in 1776. In the early morning, hours of April 19, 1775, British troops marched into Lexington, Massachusetts, on their way to Concord, where they were under orders to destroy the weapons of the local militia in a preemptive move to stop rebellion by the colonists. However, the militia men had been warned by spies in Boston that troops were coming, and they met the troops on the Lexington Green. The fighting that broke out there was the start of what would become the American Revolution. By the time the Second Continental Congress declared independence in July, 1776, a full scale civil war was underway. In March of 1776, General George Washington's army had retaken Boston, which had been occupied by British forces for eight years at that point. When the British retreated, they promised they wouldn't destroy the city as long as they could leave without violence. Washington agreed, and the transfer of power in Boston was peaceful. British troops then focused their attention on a bigger prize, what they considered one of the most strategically important sites in the colonies, New York City. At the time, New York City was the second largest city in the American colonies, with 25,000 residents, compared to 40,000 in Philadelphia. Washington and his troops knew that the British were eyeing New York and that with their superior naval forces, they were likely to take it. As everyone prepared for British victory, rumors started flying that the Americans would burn the city when they left it. By this point in the war, the burning of a city by enemy forces would not have been a surprise. During the June, 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, British troops set fire to the abandoned city of Charlestown, Massachusetts, with the flames visible in Boston. A few months later, in October, 1775, the British Navy fired upon the town of Falmouth, where Portland, Maine now sits, with the resulting destruction from the conflagration being enormously costly. The British threatened further fiery destruction of port towns. On January 1, 1776, the British bombarded another port city, this time further south, in Norfolk, Virginia, then the sixth largest city in the 13 American colonies. In Norfolk, the British only intended to strategically burn a few houses, but the rebels, seeing how valuable the city was to the British, continued the burning until over 1300 structures had been ruined. In blaming the British for the fire's origin, the rebels hoped to recruit southerners to the revolutionary cause. So when the rumors started, that the rebels planned to burn New York City, the British were primed to believe them, and indeed, General Washington considered it, going so far as to write to Congress on September 2, "If we should be obliged to abandon this town, ought it to stand as winter quarters for the enemy?" The president of Congress, John Hancock, replied to Washington on September 3, "Congress would have a special care taken in case he should find it necessary to quit New York, that no damage be done to the said city by his troops on their leaving it." They hoped to be able to retake the city. That hope was in vain, however, as the British would maintain their occupation of New York City until the war's end. By this point in early September of 1776, retreat by Washington and his troops was considered inevitable. The British had already forced them from Long Island in late August. On September 15, over 12,000 British troops, under the direction of General William Howe, landed in lower Manhattan, driving the rebels from New York City. They withdrew to Harlem. Washington was disappointed in the conduct of his troops, who had fled without discipline, plundering as they went, but none of them had defied orders by setting fire to the city. But just days later, shortly before midnight, on September 20, a shopkeeper in New York City witnessed a wooden shed on fire, near Whitehall Slip at the southern tip of Manhattan. From a transport ship nearby, other people saw the fire spread, and what seemed like a second blaze erupt. They weren't alone in seeing multiple fires originate, with reports of 5, 15, or even 50 separate fires. During the night, as firefighters and residents battled the flames, they caught people, both men and women, whom they suspected to be at best obstructing the firefighters, and at worst, setting the fires themselves. Some of these suspects were sent to prison, but some were executed right on the street that night, often, leaving no record of who they were. By morning, when the winds finally shifted, and the fire died down, a fifth of New York City had burned, including Trinity Church, then the tallest building in the city, with a 180 foot spire. The British blamed rebels who had remained behind in Manhattan for the great fire. But the rebels, for the most part, were not claiming responsibility. Whoever started the fire, and on whatever orders, Washington only regretted that it hadn't done more damage. Writing to his cousin, "Providence, or some good honest fellow has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves, as near 1/4 of the city is supposed to be consumed. However, enough of it remains to answer their purposes." Joining me now to discuss the New York Fire, and the question of who started it, is Dr. Benjamin L. Carp, Professor and Daniel M. Lyons Chair of History at Brooklyn College, and author of, "The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution." But first, here's my son, Teddy, reading from a poem published in 1780, titled, "Conflagration."

Teddy  9:18  
'Twas night--- no friendly star appear'd on high,                                                                                                          Tumultuous clouds involv'd the sullen sky.                                                                                                                          Happy once more to gain my long lost home,                                                                                                                              I rest secure, and dream of joys to come.                                                                                                                              Happy once more repose my aching head                                                                                                                             While royal banners round my dwelling spread.                                                                                                                      Wrapt in soft slumbers, I no longer hear                                                                                                                                   The murmuring winds that spoke the tempest near,                                                                                                                The centinel's voice, the ship-bell's distant sound                                                                                                                       That mark'd the moments as they journey'd round.                                                                                                                       Sudden I start--- what means that dismal cry?                                                                                                                       "Fire! fire! awake, behold destruction nigh!"                                                                                                                               To the  high roof in trembling doubt I flew---                                                                                                                                The dreary prospect open'd on my view.                                                                                                                                 The engine's roar--- the carman's rattling wheel---                                                                                                                 The fireman's cry, the Soldier's glittering steel---                                                                                                                      Grief at each heart, in every face amaze,                                                                                                                                       The town all uproar, and the heavens ablaze.                                                                                                               Enormous ladders scale the tottering wall;                                                                                                                                      The lofty roofs in smoking ruins fall;                                                                                                                                           Vast flakes of fire before the tempest fly,                                                                                                                                         And tinge with blood the sailing clouds on high,                                                                                                                      Wide and more wide the flaming torrents roll,                                                                                                                                 No art can check them, and no force controul. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:51  
Hi, Ben, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  10:54  
 Thanks so much for having me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:55  
Yes, I have not done a whole lot of thinking about the American Revolution very deeply. So I'm super excited to talk about this with you. I wanted to start by asking just how you got interested in this topic? I think this is your third book. So why why now why, why did you write the about the great fire?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  11:14  
Yeah, this is my third book. But it's actually a topic I've been interested in since I was an undergraduate, I actually wrote my senior thesis on firefighters and the American Revolution. And that was based on a very bad junior year seminar paper that I wrote on fire and the revolution connected in some vague way. But that was when I first started reading about the fire. And that's the first time I got a look at one of the manuscript sources that's really at the core of my book, which is these 40, some these 40-odd interviews conducted by the British in October of 1783. Now records like that you'd think would be at the British National Archives over in London, but they are, in fact, in at the New York Historical Society on Central Park West, which is a whole other story. But anyway, I first got to look at those when I was an undergraduate, and so the fire has kind of been in my head for almost 20, more than 25 years, I think. I published an article on it back in 2006, but I felt that it deserved a longer treatment, I'd always thought that my second book was going to be on the destruction of towns, cities, and native set settlements in during the revolution. And I don't think I'm ever going to write that book. But I see this as a kind of great case study of the issues surrounding destruction in the American Revolution.

Kelly Therese Pollock  12:29  
So you mentioned one of the sources as this 1783 investigation. What are some of the other sources that we have about this? And then I want to sort of dig into what what we can know and not know, because there's a lot of course, even with all the investigation you're doing that we just can't know.

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  12:49  
Yeah, I mean, are we sure this is a history podcast? Because you're already getting to epistemology, right, maybe we're in a philosophy podcast now. The I mean, the sources, I got into the habit of just whenever I knew someone was corresponding anywhere close to August or September of 1776, I would just look and see if they had anything to say about the fire. I mean, New York City is really where the center of the action is, in August, September, 1776. So most people are kind of talking about what's going on there. So letters, diaries, newspapers, British newspapers, which often had correspondence from British officers. I eventually looked at naval records, captains' logs, and tenants' logs, military records, visual materials, you know, everything but archaeology really, I tried to, I tried to take a look at if it was related in some way to the fire. And obviously, there's a lot of contextual information. How disciplined were the soldiers during that era? What was Washington's strategy? Were there other towns that were burned in the early years of the war? So this additional information that really kind of underpinned what I was doing. And as far as how do we know, and what's knowable? I mean, that really is a question that it's that that's at the heart of my book. But the truth is, it's at the heart of every book, it's just that very often historians just kind of proceed with a lot of unquestioned assumptions. Like, do you have to be skeptical about everything? Well, yes. But does that mean that that skepticism prevents you from saying anything at all? No, not necessarily. What is the standard of proof that historians need to use? Does everything need to be beyond all reasonable doubt, the way we would have for a criminal trial, or is a preponderance of evidence plus good contextual knowledge, enough for us to be able to draw good conclusions? So I used all of the written information I had at my disposal. I recognized that the people who wrote these things, had their own biases and had their own preconceptions. You know, I tried to filter that out. I tried to match different sources against one another and assess their reliability. And I came up with the best conclusion that I could.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:48  
So let's set the scene a little bit. This is 1776 is as you describe it in this book, rather fraught time I don't know that I would have wanted to be living in the colonies in 1776. So can you talk a little bit about just the the environment? What's happening, what what it would have been like for just regular presidents?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  15:08  
Yeah, sure. I mean, we we focus on the Declaration of Independence and these founding fathers in their stockings and stuff, and we think, "Oh, okay, then we became a country, right?" However, right, there's gonna be, you know, the Americans had to fight for it. They had already been fighting since April of 1775. They were going to keep on fighting until the early 1780s. They had their work cut out for them. And what you have is a British army that's coming down on the North American colonies, like a ton of bricks, you know, something like 40,000 soldiers and sailors or 30,000, I'm blanking on it. You know, British soldiers that are sent with this mission to pacify this rebellion, possibly by making peace overtures, but if not, by conquering this upstart, army that Washington is at the head of. And so most of the action, you know, the British evacuate Boston in March of 1776. They hang out in Halifax for a while. But beginning around June, I guess, the you know, these warships and and troop transports begin congregating in New York Harbor. And that's really where the action is going to be all the way for the rest of the year. And the year is going to end with the British army marching across New Jersey all the way to the Delaware River. So it's really not looking good for the Americans for much of 1776. The British take Staten Island, Long Island, eventually all of Manhattan Island and much of New Jersey. And very often historians will refer to these as the dark days of the American Revolution, where if they'd managed to wipe out Washington's army, the British might well have been able to retain a greater hold on their colonies.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:38  
Yeah, I found myself wondering just with the, the Americans or the rebels, as you refer to them in the book, just how they did end up winning, because at this point in the story, it does not seem like that is going to be the outcome.

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  16:51  
Yeah, I mean, the British always thought there were going to be more loyalists flocking to their banner than it turned out to be. So it's possible that you know, the American rebel elite, by having control of the state governments and the newspapers and other important institutions, that they were able to kind of hold on to as much loyalty as they really needed in order to keep an army in the field and and prevent the cause from dying. So some historians kind of say, like, "Look, the British were always going to have an uphill battle trying to pacify this rebellion from 3000 miles away."

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:26  
And you do make a point to say that this is a rebellion and call it a civil war, which of course it was, but that's not how when I was growing up in Ohio, was not the way I was taught about it. Can you talk a little bit about why it's important to think about it as a civil war? Like what what that perspective gives us on the war?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  17:46  
Yeah, I mean, the idea of a revolution as a civil war is not new. The earliest historians of the revolution, going back to the 1790s, referred to it as a civil war. They understood that these were English speaking Protestant people against one another, for the most part, although obviously, there are aspects of the war that also involve the Spanish, the French, a variety of native nations, of course, and enslaved people had an important role to play during the war as well. But as far as the main belligerents, the United States and Britain, you know, we are talking about a civil war scenario in which it would not be obvious just from looking at someone or speaking to them, or knowing what their family background was that they would be siding with one side or another. And so you really do have communities that are torn apart in that respect, and relatives who would never see one another again. So these are some of the things that make it a civil war. And we can see it as a kind of middle civil war in a way between the English civil wars of the 17th century and the American Civil War of the 19th century, right. This was the 18th century's English speaking Civil War, in which the American colonists essentially decided that they wanted to be able to trade on their own and be in charge of their own government. The 13 colonies in the Western Hemisphere that rebelled, were maybe by some counts, 13 out of 26, right. There were plenty of Caribbean and Canadian colonies that stayed in the British Empire. And so you really see a kind of reshuffling of the of the New World as a result of this conflict. And people living through this experience, felt that on the ground. Which army might offer emancipation to the enslaved? If the if indigenous people were going to ally themselves with one group or another, which would be a better bet? If you're an ordinary person living within striking distance of the British or American army, whose side are you going to be on? Right? These are all questions that the people of the time really had to ask themselves.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:38  
So let's talk some about New York City. So New York at the time is not the biggest city in the American colonies, not yet. And I'm about to go see "Hamilton" again, and you know, I am trying to imagine the the New York as it actually was, you know, with this vision of Alexander Hamilton, you know, coming to New York and everyone's singing how it's the greatest city on Earth. It's not this like grand place at the time. So can you talk a little bit about what New York was really like, and the strategic importance of it in this war?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  20:13  
Yeah, I mean, New York City is has 25,000 people. And it is, you know, and you could walk from one end to the other very, very quickly. I mean, so we're talking smaller than a lot of college campuses nowadays, like a pretty small place. Yes, there are a lot of newcomers and sailors coming in farmers coming in and out of town every day. But for the most part for the residents of the city, they may well have recognized everyone else in it, you know, one way or the other, or at least people would look familiar, and certainly the important people would be known to everyone. It's a commercially very important place. It's an ethnically fairly diverse place. It is very much a slaveholding city, 14%, African American. So all these things were very important, religiously diverse, all these things were very important on the eve of the war. As the war descends, everyone understands that it's going to be strategically a very important place because New York City is the key to markets and potential troop movements in Long Island, Connecticut, the Hudson River Valley, and New Jersey, and the Hudson River, in turn, potentially gives you access to Lake Champlain, and then and then Montreal and Quebec beyond that. So everyone knew that New York was going to be of immense importance. It divides New England from the middle and Southern colonies. It was going to be an important place for either the British or the Americans, and for the Americans, and particularly if the British took it with their superior navy, it was gonna be very difficult for the Americans to then dislodge the British from that, that post. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:42  
And the people who lived in New York at the time, you know, is this a mix of loyalists and rebels like what what does the population look like? 

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  21:52  
Yeah, every big city had a mix of loyalists and rebels because in every city you had both government officials and merchants who depended on the British Empire for trade. Not all merchants depended on the British Empire for trade, but a subset of them definitely would have preferred to stay in the British Empire to do business. New York had a reputation, particularly among New Englanders, fairly or unfairly, for being more loyalist, for being more reluctant to revolt. That didn't mean there wasn't a robust rebel presence that had resisted the act of Parliaments over the previous dozen years. But for one reason and another, the New Englanders definitely had stereotyped New York City as a place with more loyalists, as a place with more strident Anglicans, in other words, leaders of the church of England. And so for that reason, New York City and the other downstate colonies had a reputation for having a greater loyalist presence. And that probably was true for Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and parts of Westchester as well, and certainly parts of the city too.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:55  
So you mentioned New Englanders. And I thought, you know, I had not thought that much about the difference between New Yorkers and New Englanders, but that is obviously important to the story. Can you talk a little bit about that and I'm sure New Englanders are not all the same but the the New England rebels like what, what they were like as different than maybe the people in New York?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  23:17  
Yeah, sure. I mean, sports fans nowadays are used to, you know, New England, New York rivalries. But those those existed in the 18th century, for sure. New Englanders tended to be of English descent. They tended to be members of a Congregationalist church. They it tended to be a more homogeneous population in that way. They had a reputation for being sharp elbowed merchants, they had a reputation among some Protestants for being religious fanatics, and they were dedicated, for the most part in a more homogeneous way to the patriot cause. Now New York was ethnically mixed, religiously mixed, politically mixed, right. New York City had been founded originally by the Dutch. There's still an enormous Dutch presence. New York has more Germans, more Jews, more Anglicans, more Quakers, more Presbyterians. It's just a very different sort of place. And New Englanders were moving into various parts of upstate New York. So there are rivalries involved in that. New Hampshire and New York are going to dispute the territory that becomes Vermont. So there are disputes over that. There's some rivalry trading rivalries between New York and the New England ports. So there are all sorts of reasons why there's a sort of mutual suspicion between New Yorkers and New Englanders. And the bulk of the Continental Army, during the first couple of years were New Englanders. And although New Yorkers contributed to the Quebec campaign, and to the defense of New York City during 1776, they also had to contend with these newcomers that had very different ideas about religion in particular and their patriotic zeal than they did and so that's, that sets up some of the rivalries here. The New York delegates to the Continental Congress were a little bit more, were a lot more moderate. They tended to be a lot more moderate than the New England delegates were.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:05  
Alright, so we've talked about how New York is strategically important. And we get to this point in the end of summer, beginning of fall of 1776, when the rebel forces under George Washington have to leave it, and there's all these rumors flying around about how they're going to set fire to it, to destroy it. So can you talk about because there's just tons of rumors flying. Can you talk about that, you know, what, what people in New York would have been expecting?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  25:35  
Yeah, the rumors go back as early as May, but they really accelerate in August of 1776, where the British are just convinced, and some Americans have heard this, too, that as soon as the Continental Army is forced to evacuate New York City that they will burn it behind them, rather than leave it as a valuable headquarters and naval base, for the British. There was some suggestion that they resented that the ordinary troops resented the wealth of some of the loyalists who lived on Broadway, that they resented the Church of England, that they resented the sex workers who worked behind St. Paul's Cathedral in an area that was later burned during the fire. So there were all these rumors, suggesting that this is what the Continental Army was going to do, and a recognition that this made some strategic sense, right? There are officers corresponding with Washington saying, "Hey, it may would make a lot of sense, rather than trying to defend this place, in which case, we'll get overwhelmed that we should just abandon it and burn it behind us so that the enemy can't use it." So there were this conversation was happening both at the rumor level in army camps, and at the more elite level at a Continental Army Headquarters.

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:46  
And cities were pretty combustible at that time, right? Like, it's not that difficult to cause a rather large fire.

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  26:56  
Cities were made of wood, the buildings are largely made of wood, they have wooden shingles on the top. If you can get a good wind going, you can you can burn an 18th century city very quickly. New York, colonial New York had actually been quite lucky and not had not had major fires the way Montreal and Boston and Charleston had. But, but New York City's number is up in September of 1776. And with the wind going, the fire does a tremendous amount of damage.

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:22  
And what does firefighting looked like at the time, because obviously, they don't have the fire trucks that we have today. So what what were people doing to actually put out fires and who was doing that?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  27:33  
Yeah, a small fire you can handle. You can get a bucket brigade going of ordinary civilians bringing water from a water source, either to the fire itself, or to a hand pumped engine where there would be specially trained engine men or firemen, who knew how to work the hand pump engine, knew how to guide the water stream, and can can launch water onto, let's say, a roof in order to douse a small fire. Now, if you had what modern fire scientists call flashover, and you have entire buildings being burned, and a rapidly spreading fire, then you're in more trouble. And you know, we think about hook and ladder companies today. You know, firemen would carry actual hooks, because what you would do is use those hooks to pull down bolt buildings in order to create fire breaks. In other words, in order to leave, give the fire no place to go right where it just comes up, again, it's house, house, house, and then nothingness, so that there's nowhere for a spark to catch. Or if a spark here and there catches, then you can douse it with a smaller amount of water. So ordinary citizens were meant to turn out during a big fire. And then you know, and then in order to work the engines, you would have engine companies comprised of engine men and then a foreman, you know, and perhaps a chief engineer at the head of these, people who were trained in how to work the equipment. Now on the night of November 21, 1776, New York City had been occupied by the American army from you know, April and before until September, and  had now been occupied by the British Army for six days. So you can imagine that a lot of ordinary civilians weren't there. A lot of the firefighters weren't there. A lot of the firefighting equipment would be broken or in disrepair. And in fact, even the church bells, which would sound the alarm in the middle of the night in the event of fire, those have been removed by the American army in order to be melted down into brass cannon. So New York City was kind of not in a very good position to respond to a fire emergency at that time.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:25  
So I asked earlier about the what what we can know and can't know. And of course, the the one thing that we can't, at least as far as we know, from the documentary evidence can't know for sure is who started the fires. So can you talk through a little bit what, what you were able to find, what people have speculated about who started the fire?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  29:46  
Yeah, I think the easiest way to break this down is that there's the accident thesis and the on purpose thesis. Now we know it wasn't a bolt of lightning. So it wasn't that type of accident, but it's quite possible. somebody knocks a candle over, there's an unswept chimney, an accidental fire breaks out and if the wind is right, that fire could then spread and burn 20% of the city. Possible. You know, or maybe it was drunken miscreants, people who had no kind of political reason for starting a fire, but through negligence and carelessness started one anyway. However, we have all sorts of evidence that the fire started in more than one place at once. The British caught people with either flaming torches or incendiary materials leaving the scene of a fire. So there was all sorts of eyewitness testimony suggesting that the fire did not just start accidentally and then spread naturally, but that there were multiple points of ignition, suggesting a purposeful act. Now who specifically did it is very hard to nail down. We know that the British captured a number of people, and that they executed maybe six or seven people on the spot, which under the laws of war you were allowed to do when you caught an incendiary in the act. Some of these people have names. Some of them only have the barest characterization of mixed race man, a woman, you know, and others are, you know, their names, I imagine are completely lost to history.

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:07  
Do you think that there is any chance that there is documentation out there somewhere that we just haven't found yet? Or is this probably something that just like this is the most we're going to know?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  31:19  
I mean, I certainly found documentation. I found a suggestion that a spy who an American spy was hanged by the British in New Jersey of June, 1777, apparently confessed on the gallows to also having burned New York City, but would not name his accomplices. That really suggests right that there was some kind of conspiracy afoot here. The British certainly captured a couple of American captains, at least three, who they accused of having set the fire. Maybe there's some contrary there is some contradictory evidence suggesting, "Wait, when exactly were they captured? Maybe it was before the fire?" Nevertheless, right, we have the British asserting that they had caught a series of people who had done this. There may well be more evidence, right? There may well be something in Connecticut archives somewhere saying, "Hey, I was one of the people who burned New York City." That, you know, that might well be the best evidence we could possibly find. On the other hand, do we really think that that evidence would be out there? You know, you know, as they say, in the wire, "You don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy," right? It may well be that, you know, what we would call smoking gun evidence was later destroyed. Now, that makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. And of course, you can't argue from an absence of evidence. And nevertheless, I think there is sufficient contextual evidence and very suggestive evidence that points to a deliberate, coordinated act, to burn New York City. Whether it was ordered top down by Washington, or planned spontaneously by a group of radical actors from the bottom up, I leave open the suggestion that either of those or both could be true, you know, but I really do think that the evidence is there that that it was deliberate, even though I don't think we can name names. We might some day be able to learn more as more records become digitized. As you know, I'm hoping that my book will kind of send out a bat signal for people toiling away in archives that I didn't consult, you know, who may come across something and some random letter from a husband, you know, home to his his wife in New London, Connecticut, saying, "Oh, yeah, a couple of guys from my regimen were definitely ordered to do this," you know, but again, I present the best evidence I can. I also present contradictory evidence that might point to an accident. And to some degree, I let the reader just decide. But on the other hand, I, I kind of think that readers ought to reject the consensus that developed among historians in the 19th century was passed down to us today that, "Oh, no, no, it couldn't possibly have been on purpose, and Washington couldn't possibly have had anything to do with it." I think that consensus is a little bit lazy, a little bit over patriotic and I hope people will consider an alternative narrative.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:55  
So let's talk about the reasons then that if the rebels had done this, or this had been ordered by Washington that they wouldn't want to let anyone know, you know, because you might think on the one hand, that they'd be like, "Look what we just did, we burned down a fifth of New York City," but obviously they didn't do that. So what are the reasons that they would have wanted to keep that secret or disavow knowledge of it? 

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  34:19  
Yeah, we talked about the American Revolution being a civil war before and the thing about a civil war is that you can't just win battles. You also have to persuade civilians, that your cause is righteous and just and that if your side prevails, your family's interests will be better protected, right. So the Americans had gotten a lot of mileage in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere for accusing the British of having burned American towns. The British had burned Charlestown, Massachusetts during the Battle of Bunker Hill in June of 1775, Falmouth, Maine in October of 1775, Jamestown, Rhode Island. The Americans had actually burned most of Norfolk, Virginia, but they accused the British of having done it. So all these smoldering towns where the Americans were able to place pin blame on the British, they could say, "Look at how the king treats his subject peoples. They don't care about civilian property. They're just going to burn towns willy nilly. And they're, they're committing all these other atrocities, clearly. You need to join the rebellion. And then you will be on the side of righteousness." Now, if the Americans had come forward and be like, "Hey, we burned a city too," you know, then then that kind of undermines their case to, to a certain degree. Washington was very concerned with his own reputation. And I think he wanted to have he wanted to have some distance from the idea of Americans setting a deliberate fire. I think that's clear from the way he conducted himself throughout the Revolutionary War.

Kelly Therese Pollock  35:43  
Yeah, he seems, obviously he's well regarded as a general and a military leader, but he seems so politically savvy too.

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  35:51  
Yeah, sure. I mean, you look at the correspondence. He's spending the entire war writing to governors, writing to congressman. He's a very politically savvy figure. And he's able to beat back a few challenges to his authority during the Revolutionary War.

Kelly Therese Pollock  36:06  
So I want to ask in the chapter about the fire itself, you work in a poem. There are, you know, you'll have like a few lines of the poem, and then you'll write some description, and then another few lines of the poem. So I wanted to ask a little bit about what what that poem is and why you chose to frame it this way?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  36:26  
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I know very little about it. And I don't even know that it's necessarily a stellar example of 18th century poetry. However, it is so emotionally evocative of what it's definitely intended for a loyalist audience, right. And it's just very emotionally evocative of what it must have meant to live through the fire, and not only see your own property burned, but to see that the Americans right had done it, these people who were the vaunted protectors of American liberties, here they are undermined undermining their own case, in a sense by burning an American city. And so I tried to intersperse that narrative evocation of the fire with, you know, by supplementing it with other kinds of evidence, what did eyewitnesses say? What did you know what had correspondents say? How did the newspapers report on it? How did various diarists report on it, so that I could just create the most vivid but also the most accurate picture of what had happened because, of course, it's a confusing situation, and even an eyewitness, you know, once they sit down at their desk to write, who knows whether their perceptions of what was happening around them amid all the noise and smoke and blistering heat, who knows whether their perceptions were actually accurate? And what's interesting to me is that there was enough of a consensus among the loyalists that the Americans had done it, that you were able to kind of concretize that in poetry. And yet that narrative, that version of events, holds no purchase, among other Americans, right? If you look at more rebel newspapers, you know, they are downplaying all of this, "Oh, it, must have been an accident. We have no idea how this happened, maybe drunken British, British soldiers did this themselves, nothing to see here, move along, and look at how atrocious the British were behaving," you know, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So the, so it goes down in American history as a, probably an accidental fire. And yet, right, to me this poem, this poem is a statement of like, "Oh, no, there is this alternative understanding of what had happened that night." And so I try and, you know, exerpt some of the most vivid lines and use that in lieu of more traditional section breaks, in order to kind of tell the different aspects of the fire, try and tell it somewhat chronologically, but also focus in on particular aspects of it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:41  
You mentioned toward the beginning that one of the best sources we have for this is in 1783, when they're doing this investigation. So why are they doing this investigation and seven years later to try to figure out what was going on? It's shortly before the British leave New York.

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  38:58  
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to me, the the big, the biggest mystery of the fire is who did it, right, and why? And then the second biggest mystery is why did the British bother to investigate it in October of 1783, when everyone knew it was all over? They're just waiting for the formal treaty to arrive. You know, the civilian soldiers had largely evacuated by then. It was really just the last few regiments that that were still due to embark. And then Guy Carleton, who was the last British commander in chief, he commissioned three of his officers, including his, you know, his head of espionage, to kind of say, "Alright, before everybody scatters to the four winds, let's gather 40 people together, ask them what you know what they knew about the fire." Now, why does he do this? Carleton never says. I think that he did it for a few different reasons. He saw that the American states were seizing a lot of loyalists' property, and as justification they were saying, "Well, of course we have to take some of the loyalists' property. Look at what the British Army had done to a bunch of American cities." Right. And so what I think Carleton was trying to do is balance the scales a little bit and say, "Well, hold on, the Americans also burned a major city as well. And so when the loyalists are looking for compensation or equal treatment, let's balance the ledger a little bit." I also think he was trying to make the Americans potentially look bad, because he thought that the United States was going to collapse any second. And he thought that a lot of Americans would come rushing back into the British Empire, and they might be able to use bad publicity, the British might be able to use bad publicity like this as a kind of enticement of like, look at these chaos mongers, you know, they call themselves Americans, right, the better protector of your interests will be the British. So I think it's Carleton's last attempt to kind of say, "Hey, these Americans are not great. And we may be leaving, but in case we come back, this might be a reason for you to join us. Or even if we don't come back, let's hope that this gives the loyalists some leverage, either with the British government or with the American state governments, because the Treaty of Paris of 1783 really does not do enough to protect the British loyalists who are losing all of their property, you know, and losing it to the Americans." So that's why I think Carleton did it. He wanted to find out what was the real story here? Well, let's, let's get this in the records. But the problem is, is that nobody back in Britain is interested in dredging this up again, they're, they're out of money, they just want to sue for peace, they're hoping that they can hang on to some American commercial interests, they don't want the Americans to become too closely allied with the French or Spanish, right? So the British are like, let's just get out and cut the best deal we can. That comes at the expense of Native Americans. Of course, it comes at the expense of loyalists. And, you know, it comes at the expense of, you know, having a truer reckoning for this fire. And so going forward, right, the Americans are going to kind of have this story to themselves to kind of say, "Yep, fire, not too important. You know, if you want to see somebody who really destroyed a lot of towns, look at the British army. Boy, we're glad we, you know, left that empire," without a kind of counterbalancing force, with some, you know, exceptional, dissenting voices, about once every 20 years, you know, someone would pop up and be like, "You know, I've looked at this evidence, and it kind of looks like the Americans probably did it." And so I'm trying to be one of those other lone voices in a way, because many historians since World War II have been like, "Yeah, okay, Washington says some suggestive things here that he knew more than, than he's letting on. But I don't feel comfortable saying that the Americans definitely did it." I'm trying to open the door to be like, "Let's be a little more comfortable with saying that the Americans have done it."

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:37  
Well, your book is terrific. How can people get a copy?

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  42:41  
Thanks so much. Well, wherever books are sold. They are working on both a paperback and an audiobook, as I understand. The price on Amazon is very low at the moment, but of course, one should support one's local bookstores, or the Yale University Press itself. And yeah, and then just be on the lookout for for other editions.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:59  
Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining me. I really enjoyed having a chance to think a little more deeply about the revolution and this will be top of my mind when I go see "Hamilton."

Dr. Benjamin L. Carp  43:09  
All right, thanks, Kelly. 

Teddy  43:11  
For twelve long hours, with unabated force,                                                                                                                                  The angry Daemon held his vengeful course;                                                                                                                         One vast extent of desolation round,                                                                                                                                              And ruins pil'd on ruins press'd the smoking ground.                                                                                                                    Come, meek ey'd Pity! view a scene like this,                                                                                                                           And mourn th' uncertainty of earthly bliss!                                                                                                                                Come, mild Compassion! with endearing grace,                                                                                                              Receive the wretched to thy warm embrace,                                                                                                                          Console the orphan weeping at thy door,                                                                                                                                    Oh! clothe the naked--- feed the famished poor!                                                                                                                            Fly hateful discord! deadly faction cease!                                                                                                                                    Return ye joys of all-enlivening peace!                                                                                                                                          Then shall our fields their grateful tribute bring,                                                                                                                           The weak be cherished, and the poor man sing,                                                                                                                          No fears shall damp us, no distress annoy,                                                                                                                                 But universal Nature shout in strains of joy! 

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