War Weary Nature: Environment, British Occupation, and the Winter of 1779-1780

By Blake McGready

"View across the lower Harlem valley, looking to the east" New York Public Library Digital Collections.

In December 1779, New Yorkers helplessly watched as their harbor froze solid and ice slowly strangled the proud entrepôt. In the late 18th century, New York City served as the principal destination for packet ships, offered a range of specialized services for the British military, and facilitated trade between the continental interior and Atlantic world.[1] The loss of the city’s maritime and riverine networks, even temporarily, were disastrous. Ice floes appeared in the Hudson River early in the month. By December 22, the lawyer William Smith reported that ice had formed along the shoreline and had obstructed transportation between Manhattan and New Jersey.[2] In his diary over the coming weeks, Smith described how some parties found themselves trapped between floes while attempting to cross the river.[3] He recalled the grim sight of “numerous Bodies” frozen in the water. [4] “The oldest Man in this Country does not remember such a long Continuance of very severe Cold,” he wrote.[5]

Throughout the winter of 1779-1780, an extraordinary freeze and the ongoing American Revolution tested the city’s limits.[6] After British forces captured New York in September 1776, political and environmental factors prevented them from adequately provisioning the thousands of loyalists, soldiers, and wartime refugees living in Manhattan. Officials struggled to meet inhabitants’ demands for food, fuel, medical and sanitary services, shelter, water, and more. “Fresh victuals were hardly to be had,” wrote one German officer, “nor did we have the price to pay for them. In short, it was real misery.”[7]

How did the situation become so dire? Revolutionaries effectively harassed foraging parties scouring the countryside for fuel, livestock, or vegetables.[8] Rebel privateers used the coves and creeks on Westchester and Connecticut shorelines to intercept supply ships moving through the Long Island Sound.[9] Even when the rivers froze solid and permitted soldiers to travel safely on foot to New Jersey and Long Island, the ice bridges empowered revolutionary forces. [10] “The Town alarmed,” Smith reported on January 15. “If the Ice grows stronger and a Snow Storm rises,” he suggested, “Washington may find us open to a Surprize on every Side.”[11] With much of the royal fleet posted around the globe defending other colonies from United States allies such as France and Spain, officials ordered city’s residents to arrange themselves into ranks and provided them weapons.[12] During the coldest winter months, New York’s waterborne networks, natural systems that powered the city’s growth, trapped inhabitants on Manhattan. And after three years of British occupation, the island’s natural environment was already showing signs of wartime fatigue.

The precarious military situation forced the British to wrest resources from an overburdened Manhattan. Historians have long demonstrated how seizing supplies from New Yorkers’ farms, storehouses, and woodlots strained relations between the army and civilians and encouraged noncombatants to evade British mandates.[13] While provisioning jeopardized the British war effort, it also transformed the city’s island ecology. In fact, British responses to the widespread distress worsened environmental challenges that soldiers and civilians faced in later years. And despite the city’s reputation as a colonial nerve center, the winter forced inhabitants to reckon with New York’s island geography and the isolation that natural features imposed.[14]

In February, Smith recorded an incident that exemplified how the punishing winter altered the city’s geography. He reported that a “Wild Cat shot last Sunday robbing the Hen Roosts… about a Mile from the Town. It must have crossed the Ice from the Western Shore. The first Instance of such Game on this Island I ever heard of, and perhaps in 100 Years.”[15] The expansion of predators’ hunting grounds along with other accounts of unusual animal behaviors underscored the cataclysmic winter overwhelming New York. “Almost all the wild beasts of the field,” wrote Continental Army General Nathanael Greene, “and the birds of the Air, have perished with the cold.”[16] Hungry New Yorkers capitalized on such events, including a Staten Island farmer who plucked “a parcel of ducks” from frozen waters.[17]

A Plan of the works on Spikendevil Hill. Library of Congress, Digital Collections.

The winter’s fuel shortage, in particular, underscored the city’s geographic isolation, shaped British military and political strategy, and caused environmental transformations. In order to provide New Yorkers sufficient fuel, the British relied on their military outposts at Staten Island and Paulus Hook. But the unprecedented ice blocked the city’s access to timberlands beyond Manhattan. New York required six hundred cords to warm the city a week, and at times, the British only counted seventy in their reserves.[18] “We often hear of the Deaths of the Poor, frozen in their Houses,” Smith reported.[19] A rebel newspaper claimed that New Yorkers “are so necessitated for fuel, that near 100 of them have perished during this inclement season for want thereof.”[20]

In order to sustain the meager supply, soldiers saw their fuel rations reduced multiple times.[21] The commandant restricted the operations of distilleries for lack of wood. [22] Military officials purchased old ships and hulks to distribute the wood to soldiers and the poor.[23] Profiteering abounded in timber-rich areas. Staten Islanders reportedly hoarded fuel in order to raise the price, a practice that ended when authorities seized roughly 1000 cords.[24] Commanders tried in vain to protect private property from anxious troops.[25] One civilian complained soldiers “behaved in a very unruly manner by breaking open an apartment and taking away his Poultry, making use of his Hay and burning his Firewood in a very lavish manner.”[26] Commanders pleaded with regulars to defend, not assail, loyal New Yorkers’ remaining woodlots. “These Attacks upon private Property great[ly] offend,” Smith wrote.[27]

The army devastated Manhattan’s remaining tree stands. In early January, Smith predicted “this Island will be totally disforested in a Week.”[28] Hasty cutting throughout Manhattan worsened an already dangerous situation. “Our need was so great,” wrote one German officer, “that…the trees of the beautiful avenues on York Island as well as the fruit trees had to be cut down ruthlessly.”[29] “All the wood upon New York Island was cut down,” Judge Thomas Jones recalled. “The forest trees planted in gardens, in court yards, in avenues, along lanes, and about the houses of gentlemen by way of ornament, shared the same fate. Quantities of apple trees, peach trees, plum trees, cherry trees, and pear trees, were also cut down… necessity required it.”[30] Surveying northern Manhattan a year later, George Washington described an island “totally stripped of Trees, & wood of every kind.”[31] Contemporary visual representations also illustrate that occupiers had eradicated upper Manhattan’s canopy.[32] Even under the best environmental circumstances, such as steady seasonal temperatures and nutrient-rich soils, New York’s trees would have required about three decades to recover.[33] 

Overcutting strained relations between Crown forces and inhabitants and left an immediate impact on the landscape. German soldier Philip Von Krafft recorded his unit’s struggles securing clean water in upper Manhattan, the part of the island that suffered mostly acutely from tree cutting. “Our camp there was very poor,” he recalled, “because many of the huts which lay around the foot of the hill, among them mine, got full of water whenever it rained. The drinking water was also very bad, and… if no change is made, diseases must unavoidably arise.”[34] Without a canopy above or root network below, Manhattan’s hills struggled to retain water. When drought gripped the region in the summer of 1782, Krafft noted that his unit “could find no water on account of the great heat of this year which had dried up everything.” Soldiers attempted to dig wells to no avail.[35]  The sudden shock of deforestation contributed to the poor water quality and intensified drought during dry seasons.

The winter’s environmental consequences extended into sanitation as well. Typically, in the spring, British officials issued their orders for waste and rubbish removal. [36] But the growing population and the suspension of civil sanitary services created challenges. Moreover, severe cold discouraged inhabitants from regularly removing waste throughout the winter. In April 1780, Pattison ordered inhabitants to perform their own waste removal by throwing their garbage “into the open lots in the Swamp (near the Jews burying-ground) which are under water.”[37] Officials deemed fringe spaces beyond the city, like those near the Shearith Israel Cemetery, to be satisfactory locations for rubbish heaps. Depositing waste into swamps or marshlands, integral components to the estuary ecosystems, damaged the harbor and polluted the city’s drinking water. While British and city officials usually issued sanitation orders during the winter thaw, never before had New Yorkers been asked to assume personal expense or travel such distances to remove their waste. Like the destruction of Manhattan forests, the wartime extension of waste removal signaled the continued expansion of urban New York northward along Manhattan.

From December 1779 to March 1780, ice-bound rivers, deadly frostbites, and snow drifts four feet high gripped New York City in one of the Little Ice Age’s most punishing winters.[38] Hypothermia took the lives of soldiers and civilians. Ice prevented vital outside news from reaching New York. And the city’s waterborne connections, significant urban assets, became obstacles that separated inhabitants from the mainland. At the same time nature influenced the tide of war, British political and military decision-making compounded their environmental challenges. Officials’ poor planning and misunderstandings about nature abetted drought, pollution, soil erosion, and more. By placing the British occupation within its environmental context, we are reminded how nature and human relationships with the natural world shaped the course of revolution.

Blake McGready is a PhD Student at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He studies environmental history and the American Revolution.

[1] Rohit T. Aggarwala, “‘I Want a Packet to Arrive’: Making New York City the Headquarters of British America, 1696-1783,” New York History 98, no. 1 (2017): 7–39.

[2] William H. W Sabine, ed., Historical Memoirs from 26 August 1778 to 12 November 1783 of William Smith (New York: Arno Press Inc., 1971), 196-97.

[3] Ibid., 214.

[4] Ibid., 217.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Environmental studies of the American Revolution include Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); David C. Hsiung, “Food, Fuel, and the New England Environment in the War for Independence, 1775–1776,” The New England Quarterly 80, no. 4 (December 1, 2007): 614–54; J.R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620 - 1914, New Approaches to the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Vaughn Scribner, “Cultivating ‘Cities in the Wilderness’: New York City’s Commercial Pleasure Gardens and the British American Pursuit of Rural Urbanism,” Urban History 45, no. 2 (2018): 275–305; Rachel B. Herrmann, No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2020).

[7] Carl Leopold Baurmeister, Revolution in America; Confidential Letters and Journals, 1776-1784, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957), 341.

[8] “Official Letters of Major General James Pattison,” in Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1875 (New York, 1876), 336.

[9]  New-York Gazette, and Weekly Mercury, March 24, 1777; Royal American Gazette, September 8, 1778.

[10] Johann Conrad Döhla, A Hessian Diary of the American Revolution, ed. Bruce E. Burgoyne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 119.

[11] Historical Memoirs, 216.

[12] “Extract of a letter from Major-General Pattison, to Lord George Germain, dated New-York, February 22, 1780”, in William Nelson, ed., Documents Relating to the Revolutionary History of the State of New Jersey, 5 vols. (Trenton, 1914), 4:469-70.

[13] For studies of occupied New York, see Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Donald F. Johnson, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

[14] Historical Memoirs, 220.

[15] Ibid., 230.

[16] The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, ed. Richard K. Showman, Robert E. McCarthy, and Margaret Cobb (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 5: 365.

[17] Thomas Jones, History of New York during the Revolutionary War: And of the Leading Events in the Other Colonies at That Period, ed. Edward F. De Lancey, 2 vols. (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1879), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000365425, 1: 321-22.

[18] Oscar Theodore Barck, New York City during the War for Independence, with Special Reference to the Period of British Occupation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 115.

[19] Historical Memoirs, 214.

[20]  Pennsylvania Evening Post, January 29, 1780.

[21] “Official Letters,” 304-05.

[22] Ibid., 307.

[23] Ibid., 340, 348.

[24] Ibid., 319.

[25] Ibid., 360.

[26] “Official Letters,” 365.

[27] Historical Memoirs, 197.

[28] Historical Memoirs, 209.

[29] Baurmeister, 341.

[30] Jones, 320.

[31] “[July 1781],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-03-02-0007-0003. [Original source: The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 3, 1 January 1771–5 November 1781, ed. Donald Jackson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978, pp. 388–404.]

[32] Spencer Collection, The New York Public Library, "View across the lower Harlem valley, looking to the east", New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/be0f6d75-d1e8-1529-e040-e00a18065909

[33] How long did it take to regrow trees that had been cut down? In Report of Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (1846), George B. Emerson estimated the average woodlot could produce fuel again in twenty to twenty-eight years. He notes, however, “Differences of situation, exposure, soil, and kind of trees, would of necessity lead to them.” (In 1986, Gordon Whitney and William Davis endorsed Emerson’s nineteenth-century findings.) Areas “where the trees are principally oak” required roughly a decade longer to mature. According to Eric Sanderson, beyond the city, particularly in undeveloped areas in northern Manhattan, oak-tulip, oak-pine, and oak-hickory forests dominated. Furthermore, for Manhattan’s coniferous trees required not only 40 to 60 years to regrow but also the seeds distributed by living trees. Revolutionary war may have interrupted this vital cycle. See George B. Emerson, Report of Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (Boston, 1846), 25-26; Gordon G. Whitney and William C. Davis, “From Primitive Woods to Cultivated Woodlots: Thoreau and the Forest History of Concord, Massachusetts,” Journal of Forest History 30, no. 2 (1986): 76; Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (New York: Abrams Books, 2009), 156-57. On the relationship between war and forest recovery, see J. R. McNeill, “Woods and Warfare in World History,” Environmental History 9, no. 3 (2004): 388–410.

 [34] “Journal of Lieutenant John Charles Philip Von Krafft, of the Regiment Von Bose, 1776–1784,” in Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1882 (New York, 1883), 71.

[35] Ibid., 167.

[36] “Official Letters,” 221.

[37] Royal Gazette, Apr. 19, 1780.

[38] Memoirs of Major-General Heath (Boston, 1798), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102579484, 226.