In the first half of the eighteenth century, despite its proximity to Manhattan, Kings County grew more slowly than any other in the province. Between 1698 and 1771 its population rose from 2,017 to 3,623 (an 80 percent increase); during the same period, the population of New York County, just across the East River, climbed from 4,937 to 21,863 (a 343 percent increase) while that of the entire colony jumped from 18,067 to 163,348 (an 804 percent increase).¹ Not that Kings County was an undesirable place to put down roots: its original Native American inhabitants had been driven out or marginalized, and by all accounts the western end of Long Island (then often called Nassau Island) was as fertile as it was beautiful. Visitors never failed to marvel at its abundant wildlife, dense forests, bountiful orchards, fat cattle, and sweeping fields of wheat, corn, and tobacco—“the richest spot, in the opinion of New-Yorkers, of all America,” wrote the Rev. Andrew Burnaby.²

     Why would the richest spot in New York, let alone all America, have captured so small a share of the burgeoning provincial population? The answer turns on two circumstances, both of which bear directly on how the people of Kings County would experience and remember the Revolution.

     First, the vast majority of its white inhabitants were fourth- or fifth-generation descendants of the Dutch and Walloon colonists who colonized New Netherland in the middle of the previous century and stubbornly resisted Anglicization after the English conquest of 1664. They spoke and wrote in Dutch, and they insisted on Dutch mates for their sons and daughters; many could boast of working the same land that had belonged to their grandfathers and should in the fullness of time belong to their own grandchildren. They relied on the Reformed Church rather than English courts for the resolution of disputes, and they clung to the Roman-Dutch legal tradition, which among other things allowed married women to use their own names and control their own property. Thus, although Kings County itself was an institution of English local government (set up when the entire province was “shired” in 1683), its small rural communities remained so determinedly Dutch – so insulated from the economic and social forces reshaping British North America in the eighteenth century – that it is no wonder prospective settlers tended to look elsewhere.³

     But Kings County presented a second, and arguably even more formidable obstacle to newcomers: the growing dependence of its Dutch farmers on African slave labor. Between 1698 and 1771, the number of slaves in the county rose from 296 to 1,162 – an increase of 866 as against an increase of only 740 in the number of whites. On the eve of the Revolution, one out of every three residents was in bondage, more than any other county north of the Mason-Dixon line, and slaves represented a significant share of the wealth of the Rapeljes, Van Brunts, Cowenhovens, Leffertses, Sudayms, Lotts, Wyckoffs, Remsens, and other prominent families. It is the breadth of slave ownership that commands attention, however. Nearly 60 percent of the county’s white families owned one or more slaves, relying on them to perform a wide variety of tasks: cooking and cleaning, tending crops and livestock, hauling agricultural produce to mills and markets, maintaining fences, building roads. The result, as a pair of observant Hessians discovered in 1776, was that Kings County offered few if any opportunities for a poor white man to make a living. “Near every dwelling-house negroes (their slaves) are settled, who cultivate the most fertile land, pasture the cattle, and do all the menial work,” observed Major Baurmeister. Whites, added Chaplain Waldeck, “cannot earn anything with fieldwork or other handwork in this area, since the landed gentleman has his work done by his own Negroes.” Besides, as the county’s servile population grew, so had the urgency of vigilance. Disorderly, disobedient, and runaway slaves became a more and more familiar feature of local affairs, and all whites, whether they owned slaves or not, were expected to aid and abet the racial regime.⁴

     These two circumstances–Dutch clannishness and resistance to assimilation, plus the intensifying exploitation of slave labor–not only help explain why the population of Kings County failed to keep pace with the rest of the province, but also why the bulk of its white landowners took a dim view of whig resistance to Britain’s colonial policy after the end of the Seven Years War. True, their forebears had rejoiced when Adm. Cornelis Evertsen drove the English out of New York in 1673, then despaired when the Netherlands gave it back; true, too, they had cheered Jacob Leisler’s revolt, neither forgetting nor forgiving his brutal execution in 1691. Since then, however, they had been left pretty much to their own devices—and indeed flourished under the umbrella of imperial commercial regulations, which encouraged New York City merchants to funnel more and more of the county’s grain and cattle into the lucrative West Indian trade. No less important, the provincial political establishment had steadfastly supported the power of white masters over their black chattel, crushing slave rebellions without mercy and tightening the colony’s slave code until the color line became absolute and immutable. Even the most Anglophobic Dutchman could see that nothing good would come from meddling with the status quo, least of all in the cause of liberty.⁵

     Just how few Kings County residents sympathized with the whigs became clear over the summer of 1774, when a county-wide meeting was called to elect delegates to the first Continental Congress and only two men appeared.⁶ Shortly thereafter, Congress warned the inhabitants of America to prepare for war, announced a boycott of British goods, and urged every town and county in America to form an association to enforce the boycott. This time Kings County did not respond at all. In fact, the first significant county-wide political event—after a decade of turmoil elsewhere in America—apparently did not occur until mid-April 1775, when twenty-one delegates from all of the towns except Flatlands converged on the County Hall in Flatbush. Their task was to pick delegates to the Provincial Convention that would assemble a week later in New York City for the purpose of choosing representatives to the second Continental Congress. Judging by what happened elsewhere, the unprecedented interest in the Flatbush meeting probably reflected a widespread loyalist assumption that if they could not stop Congress from meeting, the next best thing would be to control it.⁷

     But no sooner had the convention in New York concluded its business than reports began to arrive of the clash at Lexington and Concord. Buoyed by public outrage, whigs in the city immediately called for the formation of a Provincial Congress to stiffen and coordinate resistance. On May 20, the “Magistrates and Freeholders” of Brooklyn gathered to denounce “the unjust plunder and inhuman carnage committed on the property and persons of our brethren in Massachusetts.” They then chose two delegates to the Provincial Congress and resolved “to observe all warrantable acts, associations and orders, as said Congress shall direct.” At a second meeting in Flatbush on the 22^nd, deputies from the other towns added another half-dozen names to the county’s delegation.⁸

     Kings County whigs nonetheless remained a distinct minority and very much on the defensive. During the summer and fall of 1775, while the Provincial Congress cautiously began to assume the powers and responsibilities of government, the county’s loyalists drew additional strength from an influx of refugees fleeing the turmoil in New York City. Flatbush alone played host to such luminaries as Mayor David Mathews, Gov. William Tryon, Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden, and William Axtell, a member of the Governor’s council whose rural seat, Melrose Hall, stood just north of the village on the road to Brooklyn. (Flatbush tories also took comfort from the presence of the Rev. Johannes Rubel, an outspoken supporter of the crown who shared the pulpit of the Flatbush Church with the Rev. Ulpianus van Sinderen, an equally outspoken whig.) As one American officer reported from Red Hook the following June, “most of the country towns” in the neighborhood were crawling with tories from the city. “It is almost incredible how many of these vermin there are.” In October, when the Provincial Congress drew up a Defense or General Association (not to be confused with the Continental Association) and prepared to seize the weapons of those “inimicals” and “equivocals” who refused to sign, and when the Continental Congress then ordered the arrest of anyone who might endanger “the safety of the colonies,” tories prepared for armed conflict.⁹

     Whites throughout the region had in the meantime become alarmed by rumors of renewed discontent among their slaves. In August 1775, worried that nothing cooled patriotic ardor like the prospect of servile insurrection, the Provincial Congress ordered that if a local militia unit were called away to deal with a British invasion, its commanding officer should leave a detachment behind “to guard against the insurrection of slaves, or if judged more expedient and safe, may take the slaves or part of them with him and employ them in carrying baggage, dragging cannon or the like.”¹⁰ Then, in late November, came word that Governor Dunmore of Virginia had offered freedom to any slave who deserted a rebel master and enlisted with His Majesty’s forces.  Whigs everywhere cried foul, and six months later the Declaration of Independence would complain that the crown “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.” Kings County slave owners now had more than enough reason to conclude that they stood on the brink of the abyss. Support for the patriots, such as it was, boiled away almost overnight, and by the end of November, the county evidently did not even hold public elections for delegates to the Second Provincial Congress. The few men who eventually served were probably dispatched by local whig committees and attended only intermittently. After May 1776, they stopped altogether.¹¹ 

II

     It was against this background of mounting racial tensions and receding whig resolve that Kings County endured two invasions—by the Americans in the spring and summer of 1776, and then by the British, who drove the Americans out at the end of the summer and held on for the next seven years. What made the county a prime target for both armies was the understanding that New York City could not be defended against an enemy who held Brooklyn Heights and was thus able to interdict shipping on the East River.  For His Majesty’s forces, securing Kings County, and indeed all of Long Island, was also a logistical imperative, because without access to the county’s bountiful farms, herds, and forests, a prolonged occupation of New York would be extremely difficult. As Gen. Charles Lee advised Washington in February, 1776, “should the enemy take possession of New York, when Long Island is in our hands, they will find it almost impossible to subsist.”¹²

     The American invasion began at the end of February 1776, when Washington sent Lee to prepare the city’s defenses, and Lee deployed a regiment of 600 Connecticut volunteers to begin fortifications on Brooklyn Heights. The Provincial Congress suggested, with a touch of exasperation, that the Kings County deputies might want to attend its sessions so they could help arrange suitable lodgings for the Connecticut men in Brooklyn. The deputies consented to appear, and after making inquiries, advised Congress that it would be necessary to billet the soldiers in private houses, for which the inhabitants would charge 7s. per week for officers and 1s. 4d. per week for privates. Not unreasonable rates, perhaps, but not exactly a memorable display of patriotism, either—which probably explains why Congress then “recommended” that local residents also supply all timber for the project. “The known zeal of the inhabitants of Kings County to promote the public cause,” Congress added dryly, “we doubt not will stimulate them to promote the necessary work.” Once it became definite that the British were on the way, however, the gloves came off. In mid-March Congress simply ordered the people of Brooklyn to help on the fortifications by “turning out for service at least one-half their male population (negroes included) every day, with spades, hoes, and pickaxes” until they finished the job.¹³

     Construction of the Brooklyn works continued on through the spring and summer of 1776 under a succession of commanders designated by Washington—Gen. William Alexander (Lord Stirling), who replaced Gen. Lee in early March, then Gen. Nathanael Greene, who replaced Stirling in April, and finally Gen. John Sullivan, who took over from Greene in mid-August. When finally completed, the American defenses in the county consisted of three elements: first, a pair of harbor batteries at Fort Stirling on Columbia Heights and Fort Defiance on Red Hook, which in conjunction with batteries on Governors Island and Manhattan were intended to prevent British warships from approaching New York; second, a chain of redoubts, trenches, and palisades between Gowanus and Wallabout, situated to thwart  an attack on the harbor batteries by land; and third, an outer line of posts on the roads cutting through the Heights of Guan or Gowanus, a thickly-wooded ridge, forty to ninety feet high, that split Kings County from southwest to northeast about two miles outside the inner line. In addition to these fixed positions, a company of Pennsylvania riflemen patrolled the shore above and below the Narrows to stop “disaffected” locals from communicating with British warships in the harbor, evidently a regular occurrence that underscored how little support the American cause enjoyed in the county.¹⁴

     Meanwhile, at the end of June, the much-anticipated British invasion had begun with the arrival off Staten Island of better than a hundred vessels and nine thousand regulars under the command of Gen. William Howe and his brother, Adm. Richard Howe. Generals Henry Clinton and Lord Charles Cornwallis, having failed to capture Charleston, appeared a month later with eight regiments of veterans. Only days behind them came a convoy of twenty-two ships bearing additional regiments from England and Scotland. Finally, in mid-August, still another fleet arrived with eight or nine thousand Hessian mercenaries under Gen. Philip von Heister. In all, the Howe brothers now had at their disposal two men-of-war and two dozen frigates mounting a combined twelve hundred cannon, plus four hundred transports, thirty-two thousand troops in twenty-seven regiments, and thirteen thousand seamen. It was the greatest concentration of military and naval power ever assembled in the colonies and the largest British expeditionary force in history to date, marshaling better than 40 percent of all men and ships on active duty in the Royal Navy. Washington, by contrast, had no proper navy, and the forces at his disposal in and around New York—which by the most generous accounting numbered over thirty-five thousand men and officers—were a hodge-podge of  inexperienced militia and Continental levies without adequate equipment or training. Often entire units broke camp and went home on a moment’s notice. Worse, dysentery and “putrid fever” (a term used for both typhus and typhoid fever) ran through the camps in July and August, laying up as many as one-third of the men at a time. If Washington had twenty-three thousand troops fit for duty by midAugust, he was lucky.¹⁵

      While they waited for the hammer to fall, Washington and the provincial government continued to grapple with widespread apathy, even defiance, in Kings County.¹⁶ The county’s regiment dwindled alarmingly as disaffected militiamen went over to the British on Staten Island or simply dropped out of sight, “skulking” in the marshes and thickets around Jamaica Bay; provincial authorities eventually did the prudent thing and moved the regiment within the lines at Brooklyn, where the men who remained could be kept under tighter discipline.¹⁷ Militia from Queens and Suffolk had in the meantime begun the gargantuan task of stripping local farms of livestock, hay, grain, and anything else that might be useful to the enemy; what could not be carried off was burned. This necessary but inevitably unpopular policy bred more disaffection, and the Provincial Congress, now calling itself the State Convention, soon got wind of  allegations “that the inhabitants of Kings county have determined not to oppose the enemy.” On August 19, the Convention angrily responded by dispatching a committee to investigate. Should the rumors prove true, Continental troops from the Brooklyn defenses would be sent to disarm and arrest troublemakers, seize or destroy their crops, and if necessary “lay the whole county waste.”¹⁸

     Before that order could be carried out, however, General Howe made his move. At daybreak on Thursday, August 22, 1776, a swarm of British transports crossed the narrows from Staten Island to Gravesend Bay, disgorging 15,500 redcoats and Hessians along with forty pieces of artillery on the beach below Denyse’s Ferry in New Utrecht. Marching inland, the men appeared  “as merry as in a Holiday, and regaled themselves with the fine apples, which hung every where upon the Trees in great abundance.” Wisely, the Pennsylvania riflemen on shore patrol nearby offered no opposition, but fell back through the village of New Utrecht toward Flatbush, burning stacks of hay and shooting cattle as they went. By late afternoon, the British were spread out along a broad arc, about eight miles long, that ran east from New Utrecht, where Howe established his headquarters, through Gravesend to Flatlands. General Cornwallis led an advance column up from Gravesend to occupy Flatbush, whose residents displayed some uncertainly as to whether their indifference to the American cause would matter to His Majesty’s soldiers. “The whole village was in commotion,” one resident recalled many years later. “Women and children were running hither and thither. Men on horseback were riding about in all directions.” As the family watched nervously, “our faithful old negro man, Caesar” loaded the wagon with their most prized possessions—“the great Dutch Bible with its huge brass clasps and brass corners” and “the old Dutch clock,” as well as assorted furniture and articles of clothing. Instead of fleeing, Dominie Rubel welcomed the British with open arms and led His Majesty’s soldiers the extensive wine collection of David Clarkson, one of the village’s few whigs.¹⁹

     Washington quickly sent reinforcements from New York to strengthen the forward posts on the Gowanus Heights, which under Gen. Sullivan’s management had become increasingly important to the American defenses. On Friday the 23^rd, the Americans skirmished with the Hessians on the outskirts of Flatbush, drove them back into the village, and then withdrew. Several private houses and other buildings were burned, according to Sullivan, and “one of our gunners threw a shell into Mr. Axtell’s house where a number of officers were at dinner.”²⁰ More impromptu skirmishing flared around Flatbush over the weekend. The Americans gave as good as they got, but Washington began to hear complaints that his soldiers were looting the homes of friend and foe alike —the kind of  “licentious and disorderly behavior,” he grumbled that one would expect of a mob, not a well-regulated army.²¹

     With instructions to improve discipline, Washington abruptly shifted the overall command on Long Island from Sullivan to Gen. Israel Putnam of Connecticut, a crusty but popular old veteran of the fighting on Bunker Hill. On Monday, August 26, Washington fed Putnam additional regiments from New York City, bringing the size of the American force in Kings County to around nine thousand officers and men. About three thousand were deployed to block the country roads that wound around and through the Gowanus Heights to Brooklyn. Of these, approximately eight hundred men from Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New York covered the Gowanus Road, which ran along the shore on the right or west end of the American lines. Further east, near the American center, a somewhat larger body of troops from New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, supported by a battery of field pieces, occupied the Flatbush Pass, a wide notch where the road from Flatbush ran up to Brooklyn. The remainder, a mix of Continental regulars and Connecticut militia,  held the Bedford Pass, the point at which the road from Bedford came down to join the Flatbush Road just above Flatbush village. Opposing them were almost twenty thousand redcoats, Hessians, and tories, including hundreds of newly emancipated blacks. It was a strange scene indeed—British, German, and African soldiers massing in Dutch fields and villages while boys from New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, led by Virginia tobacco planter, waited on the hills to give them battle.²²

     The Americans did not wait for long. Gen. Clinton had discovered—maybe when reconnoitering the American positions, maybe from one of the many Kings County tories who attached themselves to the British army—that Washington or his subordinates had neglected to guard a fourth opening in the Gowanus Heights. This was the Jamaica Pass, four miles east of Brooklyn on the far left of the American lines, where the Jamaica Road, running east from Bedford, wound through a deep ravine on its way to Queens County and eastern Long Island. Clinton persuaded Howe to let him attack the pass in strength. Just after sundown on Monday the 26^th, he and Cornwallis led ten thousand regulars in a two-mile-long column out of Flatlands toward New Lots in the east. With them went two companies of Long Island tories under Colonel Oliver De Lancey and several tory scouts from Flatbush. To deceive any watching Americans, they moved quietly and left their campfires burning. At New Lots they turned north to Jamaica and about 3:00 a.m. on the 27^th slipped through the Jamaica Pass without opposition. They then wheeled west toward the village of Bedford, where they arrived around 8:30 a.m. and fired a signal gun to alert the rest of the army.

     Two smaller forces now swung into action. In the center of the American line, 5,000 blue-coated Hessians charged into the Flatbush Pass. Realizing from the signal gun that the enemy had somehow snuck around behind them, the Americans and their commander, Gen. Sullivan, fell back along the road to Brooklyn—only to discover Howe’s light infantry pounding down the Jamaica Road from Bedford. Hundreds of Americans sprinted into the woods and fields in a desperate attempt to reach safety behind the lines in Brooklyn Heights, joined as they ran by the men who had been defending the nearby Bedford Pass. Those who failed to get away and attempted to surrender were slaughtered by the oncoming Hessians. “The greater part of the riflemen were pierced with the bayonet to trees,” gloated a German officer, while a British officer observed that “it was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the Rebels with their bayonets after we had surrounded them so they could not resist.” Sullivan himself would be taken in a cornfield near what is now Battle Pass in Prospect Park. By late morning the fighting in this part of the battlefield was done.²³

     At Gowanus, on the far right of the American line, Maj. Gen. James Grant had meanwhile led seven thousand redcoats and two companies of Long Island tories against the defenders commanded by Gen. Stirling. Stirling’s men fought gamely to keep control of the high ground (now “Battle Hill” in Green-Wood Cemetery) until the collapse of the American center at Flatbush made their position hopeless. Redcoats from Bedford were closing in behind them, while Hessians were crashing through the woods on their left. To give the rest of his force time to escape across the tidal flats along Gowanus Creek, Stirling counterattacked with a few hundred Maryland troops. Washington, observing Stirling advance from a small hill where Court Street now crosses Atlantic Avenue, reportedly cried out, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!” Survivors remembered the “confusion and horror” that followed, as the fleeing Americans tried desperately to cross eighty yards of muddy flats under a hail of British canister, grape, and chain. “Some of them were mired and crying to their fellows for God’s sake to help them out; but every man was intent on his own safety and no assistance was rendered.” After savage fighting on the Gowanus Road near the Cortelyou House (today called the “Old Stone House”), Stirling was captured. By 2:00 p.m. all but a handful of the Marylanders had been taken prisoner or killed. Thanks to them, however, hundreds of their countrymen managed to wade or swim to safety in Brooklyn Heights.²⁴

     Had Howe kept up the pursuit, he might well have driven Washington’s demoralized forces off the Heights and into the East River. In only a few hours of fighting the Americans had lost two or three hundred dead and approximately several times that number in wounded, captured, or missing—among them three generals and scores of junior officers. The British and Hessians together reported only 63 dead and 314 wounded or missing.²⁵

     But despite pleas by Clinton, Cornwallis, and others to finish what they had begun, Howe stopped—deterred perhaps by the memory of British losses at Bunker Hill, by the hope that the rebels would give up without a struggle, or by the contrary winds and rain and tides that prevented his brother from moving up the fleet to provide cover. Whatever the reason, he allowed the Americans to remain unmolested on Brooklyn Heights for another two days. That was all the time Washington needed for one of the boldest strokes of the war. On the night of Thursday, August 29, under the very noses of the enemy, he quietly evacuated the entire army across the East River to New York. Six weeks later, the slow-moving Howe crossed the river in pursuit, seized the city, and proceeded to drive the Americans off Manhattan altogether.²⁶

III

     As the war moved elsewhere, the residents of Kings County began the grim work of repairing the damage inflicted on their homes and farms by both armies—fields littered with debris and rotting animal carcasses, orchards put to the ax for firewood and fortifications, yards full of smashed furniture, wells stuffed with garbage, houses used as stables.²⁷ They expected nonetheless that the restoration of royal authority would allow them to rebuild their lives in short order, and took immediate steps to affirm their loyalty—sporting red badges on their hats and clothes, dispatching congratulations to His Majesty’s victorious generals, and even changing the names of local landmarks (Brooklyn’s Ferry House Tavern became the King’s Head, a favorite rendezvous for local tories, while a race course in Flatlands became Ascot Heath). In mid-November, four hundred men from every town converged on the Flatbush church to sign an oath of allegiance:  “I do sincerely promise and swear, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty, King George the Third, and that I will defend his crown and dignity, against all persons whatsoever. So help me God.” In early December, several dozen men who had served in the Provincial Congress or on various local committees also signed a memorial to the royal governor, “rejecting and disclaiming all power of Congress and Committees, totally refusing obedience thereto, and revoking all proceedings under them whatsoever, as being ... ruinous to the welfare and prosperity of this County.”²⁸

     It was a short honeymoon. His Majesty’s officers soon grew suspicious of the alacrity with which people throughout the colony lined up to profess their loyalty, openly ridiculing them as “red rags.” As one disbelieving officer wrote to his English patron: “They swallow the Oaths of Allegiance to the King, & Congress, Alternately, with as much ease as your Lordship does poached Eggs.”²⁹  For their part, the inhabitants quickly tired of the restrictions imposed on them by the British military. They needed passes for travel to and from New York and special certificates to bring goods out of the city. The prices of essential commodities were regulated by proclamation. Army quartermasters and barrack-masters commandeered horses, wagons, grain, hay, firewood, and even slaves as needed, leaving only I.O.U.’s that were almost impossible to collect. Shortages became commonplace and famine a distinct possibility in what had once been hailed as among the richest agricultural regions in America. As Gen. Jeremiah Johnson later recalled:  “The inhabitants of Brooklyn were often in great distress for want of food, as no grain or produce of any kind could be raised on this part of the Island, for the fences were all destroyed and the farms were all a great common over which the soldiers and animals roamed at will.” Certainly no one had bargained on quartering all those soldiers in their homes—especially the Hessians, whose disorderly behavior and habits prompted local Dutch farmers to dub them the “Dirty Blues.” Nor had anyone bargained on the venality of the county’s erstwhile liberators. Over and over again, money intended to compensate the owners of property taken by the army found its way into the pockets of officers and other functionaries who had no visible means of support. William Axtell got into the act, collecting funds to raise a regiment of five hundred men in the county, recruiting only thirty rather unsavory characters from somewhere else, and keeping the balance of the money for himself. He named his so-called “regiment” the “Nassau Blues,” but his disgusted Flatbush neighbocalled them the “Nasty Blues.”³⁰

     Adding to the county’s woes was a sharp rise in crime and lawlessness directly attributable to the occupation. “We were constantly being plundered,” declared one Flatbush matron, recalling experiences with predatory soldiers that formed the stuff of local memory for generations. That the Hessians figured prominently in these stories as well was, as Gen. Johnson explained,  the consequence of  “their cupidity and proneness to commit petty theft, and their readiness to appropriate every species of property which they could lay their hands upon.” Almost as bad as the Hessians were the army’s tory guides and scouts—hard men from all over the colonies who fought mainly for personal gain and plundered local farmers with impunity; several companies of them camped for five years on a farm in Bushwick, terrorizing the residents there with impunity. Many army units were withdrawn from the island in 1778 to bolster the British offensive in the south, but conditions actually went from bad to worse because whaleboat raiders from New England—many of whom were whig refugees from Long Island living along the Connecticut coast—siezed the opportunity to step up their forays across Long Island Sound. Tories operating under the authority of the Board of Associated Loyalists then retaliated in kind, and the ensuing free-for-all rapidly degenerated into pointless revenge and brigandage from which no one was immune. As Judge Thomas Jones described matters, it was common for the whaleboat men to strike even the south shore of the island, where they “frequently landed, robbed the inhabitants of their furniture, linen, wearing apparel, money, negroes, rum, wine, sugar, and salt; killed their cattle, hogs, sheep, and poultry; burnt their hay, their oats, wheat, rye, and Indian corn.” American raiders from New Jersey descended on New Utrecht and Flatbush twice in 1778, hunting for prominent tories they could exchange for American prisoners of war but allegedly making off with silver and other valuables as well.³¹

     But nothing proved more worrisome than the destabilizing effect of the occupation on race relations. Occupied New York City became a magnet for thousands of runaway slaves from all over the colonies, and whites on both sides of the lines grew fearful that they would soon have no slaves at all. Their fears mounted in 1779 when Gen. Clinton (now commander-in-chief of His Majesty’s forces), taking a leaf from Gov. Dunmore’s book, issued a proclamation offering freedom and employment to “every Negro who shall desert the Rebell Standdard” and freedom to all black children born within British lines. Besides drawing still more runaways to the city, Clinton’s offer struck a resonant chord with the slaves of tories as well as whigs. As the New York Weekly Mercury remarked the following year, “A desire of obtaining freedom unhappily reigns throughout the generality of slaves at present”—particularly disturbing news for nearby Kings County farmers, long accustomed to relying on their bondsmen to move goods back and forth from the city with little or no supervision. Now even leading Kings County tories like William Axtell and John  Rapalje found themselves struggling to locate and retrieve runaways.

    Even more unsettling was the fact that the British often seemed perversely oblivious to white anxieties and sensitivities. Military foragers employed black drivers (“chiefly ... run-away negroes,” Judge Jones wrote with disdain) to haul grain and wood taken from tory farmers, blacks and whites mingled freely in local taverns and race courses, and black units were from time to time billeted in and around villages where one out of every three or four residents was enslaved. When trouble occurred, British officials often failed to support the customary prerogative of whites to discipline contrary or disobedient blacks. Thus Jones recalled how “a young gentleman of fortune” from Long Island was abused and insulted “in the grossest manner” by a black driver attached to a foraging party. After getting a well-deserved boot in the seat of the pants, “the black rascal” complained to a British officer, who hauled the young gentleman before a court martial—“For what?” asked Jones incredulously. “For kicking a negro runaway, in the very act of committing a trespass upon his uncle’s property.” Henry Stiles, drawing heavily on local tradition for his history of Brooklyn, likewise observed that British officers “required the utmost condescension from the inhabitants, who were expected, while addressing them, to hold their hats under their arms: and should a farmer, in passing, neglect to doff his hat, he ran a strong risk of a good caning; although if he did it, the Briton rarely deigned to notice him or return his civility. As a natural consequence, insubordination arose among the slaves, who either ran away from or became less respectful to their masters.” Mothan a few slaves, Stiles added, became the “willing aiding and abettors” of the bandits who infested the county during the war, “and frequently guided them in their predatory expeditions.” As the war drew to an end, slaves in Kings County and elsewhere around the state thus found themselves more feared and despised than ever—by whigs, who thought they had become tories, and by tories, who thought they had become intractable.³²

IV

     In November 1783, Kings County whites celebrated Washington’s return to New York with apparent enthusiasm.  Residents of Bushwick offered him “our sincere congratulations, on this glorious and ever memorable era of the sovereignty and independence of the United States of America,” then treated themselves to an ox roast on the banks of the East River, just across from Manhattan—a day “spent in the greatest good humor, decency, and decorum.”  In New Utrecht and Flatbush, revelers fired cannon and raised liberty poles; in Flatbush, “the occasion was one of great joy and hilarity.”³³  Although cynics might have recalled the county’s equally enthusiastic reception of Gen. Howe seven years earlier, there is no reason to assume that these sentiments were anything but genuine.  Patriots driven out or silenced by the American defeat in 1776 could now speak their minds freely; influential tories like Axtell and Mathews had gone into exile, never to return; and except for the county’s numerous slaves, the boldest of whom had either run away or left with the British, residents of every political stripe must have been eager to put the long and onerous occupation behind them.³⁴

     Yet if they imagined that their lives would go on as before, they were in for another disappointment.  An early signal of what lay in store came almost immediately after the war, when a pair of  New York developers, Comfort and Joshua Sands, bought a farm confiscated from John Rapalje. Lying along the East River between Brooklyn and Wallabout Bay, the 160-acre tract became the site of their “City of Olympia,” which the brothers envisioned as a center for ship construction and repair.  They built wharves, warehouses, and a ropewalk, chopped the property into lots, and sold the lots to several dozen Yankee artisans and their families from New London, Connecticut. The Sands’ success inspired imitators—in the 1790s, a shipbuilder named John Jackson laid out Vinegar Hill, marketing the development to Irish refugees—all of which helps explain why the county’s population began to grow at an unprecedented pace, climbing to 4495 in 1790 (up 872 since 1771, a 24 percent increase in two decades) then to 5740 in 1800 (a 28 percent jump in just a single decade). It also explains why the percentage of Dutch residents dropped below 60 percent, the lowest on record, and continued to decline.  Land values in and around Brooklyn meanwhile rose steadily, boosted by New York City’s spectacular growth over the same period—from 23,610 in 1786 to 60,515 in 1800—and by the booming city’s appetite for the output of Long Island farms.³⁵

     The pressure of these developments on the traditional order in Kings County was magnified as burgeoning numbers of city dwellers acquired a taste for excursions to bucolic hamlets and shore resorts. Henry Wansey, who took “a pleasant rural ramble” through the county in 1794, observed that a Sunday afternoon in July or August might find three or four thousand Manhattan tourists strolling around what remained of Brooklyn’s Revolutionary War fortifications, picking fruit in local orchards, or hiring “coachees” to Flatbush, New Utrecht, and Gravesend, where enterprising locals had opened seaside boarding houses and pleasure gardens. Near the Coney Island beach, one entrepreneur reportedly had plans for “a very handsome tea-drinking pleasure house, to accommodate parties who come hither from all the neighboring ports; he intends also to have bathing machines, and several species of entertainment.  It seems parties are made here from thirty or forty miles distance, in the summer time.”  According to Moreau de St. Méry, “many New Yorkers” had also taken to renting houses in and around Brooklyn Heights for the entire summer. “The men,” he wrote, “go to New York in the morning, and return to Brooklyn after the Stock Exchange closes”—Wall Street commuters taking back the high ground that Washington had lost fewer than twenty years before.³⁶

     Yet the decisive blow to the county’s old way of life would be the extinction of slavery. Despite numerous wartime runaways—and despite a 1784 state law manumitting the slaves of attainted tories like William Axtell—the number of slaves in Kings County actually increased somewhat, from 1317 in 1786, to 1432  in 1790, then to 1479 in 1800; a significant majority of white households still relied on slave labor, and the proportion of households with four or more slaves nearly quadrupled, from 12 percent in 1755 to 44 percent in 1800.  Anti-slavery whigs meanwhile failed to get a clause in the 1777 state constitution “recommending” abolition. But opposition to the institution mounted steadily  outside the county, and the Manumission Society (1785), Quakers, freedmen, and other groups kept up the pressure.  Ultimately, over the strenuous objections of Dutch legislators from Kings County, a bill passed both houses of the state legislature in 1799 that would emancipate all slaves in the state by 1827. As one of the measure’s supporters recalled, the Dutchmen “raved and swore by dunder and blixen that we were robbing them of their property. We told them that they hand none and could hold none in human flesh … and we passed the law.” Kings County slaveowners hung on as long as they could—in 1820 they still held  879 slaves (8 percent of the total population)—but the end of their world was at hand.³⁷