John Adams was making his way from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania for a convening of the delegates tasked to craft a response to the Coercive Acts when he and his entourage arrived in Manhattan on the morning of Saturday August 20, 1774. He met that day with numerous dignitaries and dined late into the evening at […]
Captain Abraham Van Dyck of New York faced military justice twice during the Revolutionary War: first by the British for burning his hometown, and then by his fellow Continental Army officers for killing a Black soldier in camp. In each case, imperfect evidence presents historians with a puzzle. Notably, African American men were central to […]
Marinus Willett was born the son of a Quaker, Edward Willett, on July 31, 1740, in Jamaica, Long Island (now part of Queens). After spending his early years on a farm in Jamaica, he relocated to a place known then as Cedar Grove, along the East River and now part of New York City. This […]
William Goforth played significant roles in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in the age of the American Revolution and the Early Republic and he stands out across the centuries as a man who lived by enlightened values. Yet even though he corresponded or directly cooperated with several very famous counterparts—the likes of Benjamin Franklin, John […]
Constant Avery of Eaton, in New York’s Madison County, travelled sixteen miles to the county seat in Wampsville in the first week of October 1832. On October 8 he appeared in open court to apply for a federal pension for his years as a soldier in the Continental Army. Avery was “aged seventy three years […]
In Douglas S. Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee, he noted: Corps activities took a certain amount of Lee’s time that winter. Kosciuszko was in those days the patron saint of West Point. He had designed the Revolutionary forts, Clinton and Putnam, and had resided in the little cottage that had been preserved. For some […]
Despite the rescission of the Stamp Act in 1766, many imperial controversies persisted in New York City. Leading among them were: The annual demands of the royal governor for funds to support the troops quartered in the town;[1] The continuing post-(French and Indian) war recession; The Townshend taxes of 1767, which of course distressed all the […]
The officers of the Continental Army were sullen. It was December 1782, and they were stationed in and around Newburgh, New York, and neighboring New Windsor, where some 10,000 soldiers, the bulk of Gen. George Washington’s force, kept an eye on the British in New York City and waited to learn whether the war would […]
Documents that contain the original signatures of more than one Continental Army general are rare. During the eight years of the Revolutionary War, generals penned thousands of pages of military orders, official correspondence, and private letters. The vast preponderance of these signed documents are in archives and museums, but some are cherished and preserved in […]
Jamaican-born Scotsman Colonel Ann Hawkes Hay of the 2nd Regiment of Orange County Militia looked over his property in Haverstraw, New York towards the wide expanse of Haverstraw Bay in the Hudson River on the morning of March 23, 1777. What he saw shocked him: British sails in the river. Col. Hay wrote to General […]
