The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Happy Evacuation Day

    By rmrd0000 on Fri, 11/25/2011 - 10:40am |

    Evacuation Day does not mark the elimination process that follows over-eating on Thanksgiving but celebrates November 25,1783 when the last British troops  left New York City at the end of the Revolutionary War. The holiday was once more popular in New York City than Thanksgiving. The celebration included parades, speeches and fireworks

    New York City was the last piece of the 13 colonies surrendered by the British. The British occupation had traumatized the city.

    From today's New York Daily News (linked above):

    That occupation had not been kind to the city. Gen. Henry Clinton, the city’s commandant for four years, wanted “to gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America,” but his aide-de-camp, Lord Francis Rawdon, wrote of giving “free liberty to the soldiers to ravage at will” so that “these infatuated wretches” would understand “what a calamity war is.”

    Rawdon’s view prevailed. British officers let their troops rape, murder and steal, while entertaining themselves with banquets, balls and “drunken orgies.” Food and firewood were hoarded for the troops; fires destroyed much of the city’s housing stock, leaving thousands in tent cities with no effective sanitation and setting off epidemics of cholera.

    Worst of all were conditions in the rotting British prison ships, where thousands of American prisoners-of-war were kept. Some 11,500 died in all — more than the sum of all Americans killed on the battlefield throughout the Revolution.

    The British troops left after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 with the former 13 colonies.

    George Washington led 800 weather beaten Continental Army troops through the ravaged city approximately on hour after the smartly dressed redcoats left the city. In a final taunt, the British troops left a Union Jack above a flag-pole on at their Battery. The pole was greased to make removal of the British flag difficult. The American response was to making pole climbing a part of the Evacuation Day celebration.

    Sarah Vowell had an excellent (and funny) segment about New York's Evacuation Day on the Daily Show on  November 18th. In her view, Evacuation Day trumps Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving took the prominent role because of the "evil" Abraham Lincoln.

    On this date in history, New York officially returned to the United States

     

     

    Comments

    Now that's punny.

    And funny!


    by Richard Day on Fri, 11/25/2011 - 11:30am

    One of the stories on this celebration noted that the it marked the last shot fired of the Revolutionary War when a sailor on one the departing ships fired a cannon at some of the jeering crowds that were watching them leave, but the cannonball landed harmlessly in the water.  What a way to end a war.  Thanks for telling me this story. I was not previously aware of it.


    by MrSmith1 on Fri, 11/25/2011 - 4:03pm