I recently mentioned that city-wide fires used to be common in the United States. New York’s were all before the Civil War – more so by luck than because of protection or planning – and so are much less well known than Chicago’s or San Francisco’s. Thanks to an essay published by the Gotham Center, I recently learned of a very old investigation that is fascinating as a representation of a fraught moment in history and as a kind of forensic study well over 200 years ago.
The best known of New York’s conflagrations is the Great Fire of 1835, which burned about half of the downtown business district during an extremely cold and windy night. The name was so good there was a sequel, the Great Fire of 1845, which was somewhat smaller but did burn the site of our office. The one that tends to be forgotten is the Great Fire of New York in 1776, which took place less than a week after the British army captured New York, following the disastrous (for the US) Battle of Long Island. I had always assumed – based on the common histories of the era – that the fires were set by rebels to make life in the captured city more difficult for the British.
“The Carleton Commission And Evidence Of Arson In The Great New York Fire Of 1776” by Bruce Twickler looks at the commission of British army officers who studied the cause of the fire in 1783, seven years after it took place and weeks before the Revolutionary War ended. (We all know how the war ended overall; how it ended in New York can be guessed from the fact that the city long celebrated the November British departure with a holiday called Evacuation Day.) My suspicions are immediately raised by the timing of the commission: years after the event, but while the city was still occupied.
Twickler comes to the conclusion that, even though most of the witnesses were obviously biased towards the loyalist cause, the fires were most likely deliberately set. But that doesn’t imply organization, as much as anger. The most interesting evidence that the commission turned up was the prevalence of incendiaries in the city, meant for use in creating fire-bomb rafts to attack British ships. The incendiaries were called “fire sticks” or “matches” and sound like kitchen matches at a gargantuan scale: “The fire-sticks were eighteen inches long, one inch square of white cedar or walnut, with six inches of rosin and brimstone (sulfurous compounds) saturating one or both ends.”
It was difficult enough to keep fires from becoming serious in a pre-1900 US city center. Having caches of fire sticks every few blocks across the then small area of the city (see Twickler’s map) would make any fire worse; assuming that there were arsonists would make it impossible to prevent. The fact that the city was disorganized at the time – from the very recent arrival of an occupying army, to the effects of having supported the Continental Army through the preceding months, to the general disruptions in daily life caused by the recent start of war – would also have disrupted fire-fighting efforts. The British army fought the fire, but that effort was hampered by not knowing the city particularly well.
Given the horrendous fires in the same area 59 and 69 years later, it’s entirely possible, as Twickler discuses, that the fire started naturally and then some arsonists joined in. The entire discussion is a good reminder of how flammable the past was.
