An unusable past: urban elites, New York City's evacuation day, and the transformations of memory culture
Clifton Hood
Introduction
The social and cultural history of tradition and memory has become a lively area of inquiry for American historians. Much current work uses festivals and holidays as a lens to understand political culture, with, for example, David Waldstreicher, Simon P. Newman, and Len Travers viewing nationalistic fetes in the early republic as arenas where factions struggled to define national identity and set the limits of citizenship. Social historians such as Stephen Nissenbaum and Leigh Eric Schmidt have traced changes in customs and conventions by studying the contested development of particular holidays. Another vein of investigation involves racial and ethnic consciousness. Kirk Savage and David W. Blight use the memorialization of the Civil War to explore late nineteenth-century race relations, while Robert Anthony Orsi analyzes community formation among Italian immigrants by probing a Catholic church's festa. (1)
Despite this extensive literature, one aspect of this subject, the dissolution of tradition, has not been examined, even though an analysis of a lapsed tradition can improve our knowledge about historical memory. Rather than concentrate on memory itself, historians generally employ it to illuminate larger developments in social or cultural history, such as popular participation in republican politics or changing understandings of race. This scholarship is invaluable, but using memory as a tracer rather than foregrounding it exaggerates its stability and permanence and minimizes the difficulties of acquiring reliable knowledge about this elusive subject. By contrast, studying a lapsed tradition keeps historical memory in the forefront. The problem addressed here--how a tradition embraced by tens of thousands of people for two generations could disintegrate within half a century--is so puzzling that it prompts a consideration of general questions, including how an event becomes part of memory culture, how traditions are transmitted from generation to generation, how different traditions are related to one other and what the boundaries are between local and national traditions, to what extent social groups compete to define traditions, and why some traditions can be adapted to changing conditions and persist while others prove intractable and disappear. (2)
This essay will examine Evacuation Day, a New York City holiday that was celebrated every November 25th for over a century, honoring the day in 1783 when the British military ended its seven-year long occupation of the city. (3) Beginning in the late eighteenth century, thousands of people observed Evacuation Day. The 100th anniversary, in 1883, ranked as "one of the great civic events of the nineteenth century in New York City." (4) By 1900, however, only a few elite New Yorkers still commemorated it, and by 1920 no social group valued it.
The memorialization of November 25th was initiated by New York City merchants who prized the evacuation for exemplifying their ideals of elite rule, social harmony, national independence, and local boosterism. Their private commemorations acquired a more public dimension in 1787, when Federalists used representations of the evacuation in their campaign to ratify the Constitution, creating rituals that broadened the anniversary's appeal. These annual observances, though intensely nationalistic, remained confined to the New York City area and were never celebrated nationally. However, in a peculiar illustration of how traditions often shape other traditions, the one permanent legacy of this Federalist memorialization is the American custom of marking Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November.
Evacuation Day was associated with elites throughout its history. During the period covered by this essay--from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century--New York City went from being the second largest city in the United States to become the second largest city in the world, a metamorphosis that transformed the size and structure of its elites, the sources of their wealth and prestige, their means of exercising power, and their understandings of themselves and other social groups. Yet, throughout this period, elites--which are conceptualized here as status groups that consisted of friendship, marriage, and business networks and that enjoyed distinctive ways of life--continued to command a disproportionate share of power, wealth, and prestige and to provide leadership in the economic, political, and social spheres. As communities that were delimited by class and heritage, elites frequently turned to historical memory to proclaim their identities, mark their boundaries, or communicate their visions of social order. For elites, memory culture was primarily an arena for pursuing social and cultural concerns rather than simply a means of remembering and forgetting or an array of traditions. At times, elite leaders or retainers became 'memory keepers' who organized Evacuation Day rituals and defined their meaning, often altering popular interpretations of the holiday. (5)
Although the anniversary experienced a crisis of transmission in the 1820s and 1830s as the generation of New Yorkers who remembered the revolution at first-hand died off and as the day's emphasis changed from recalling a lived incident to honoring the unexperienced past, Evacuation Day survived by acquiring new meanings, stakeholders, and purposes. The holiday became a memorial of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, upper-class men employed it to assert their claims to social exclusivity and civic leadership, marching in aristocratic volunteer regiments that refashioned the annual military parades into competitions of masculine prowess and class privilege.
The Civil War severely damaged Evacuation Day. Although attendance at its rites soared in the 1860s when New Yorkers used the holiday to celebrate Union victories, Evacuation Day was actually in trouble, for the Civil War did not so much expand the anniversary's role as diminish its meaning. By exerting its special hold on American ideas of remembrance and warfare, the Civil War reduced Evacuation Day's audience and undermined its purpose. Still, although adherence to November 25th had weakened by the early 1870s, Evacuation Day lingered for several more decades. It was revived in the early 1880s by the Society of '83 (later renamed the Sons of the Revolution), a patriotic hereditary organization that subscribed to the Victorian ideal of cultural dichotomies and that sought to erect barriers around genteel society. Viewing colonial history as an elite preserve that reinforced their identity as members of the upper-class and prizing Evacuation Day for confirming their superiority to the masses, the Sons of the Revolution replaced popular spectacles (the parades) with didactic events (the dedication of statues and tablets) and private affairs (banquets and lectures). This privatization expanded the imaginative distance that separated modern New Yorkers from the colonial city, completing Evacuation Day's journey into the unusable past.
The Evacuation
The British army seized New York City in September 1776 and continued to occupy it when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown five years later. In the spring of 1783, after preliminary articles of peace had been drafted, American and British commissioners started negotiating arrangements for transferring control of New York. Aware that the unstable political and military situations would make evacuation dangerous and concerned that American and British troops might accidentally exchange fire during the transfer or that loyalists might resist it, the commissioners devised a protocol that was intended to accomplish three somewhat contradictory goals: keeping the two armies apart so that the British forces could embark without incident, enabling American forces to gain immediate control of the city and quell any resistance, and allowing General George Washington and New York State Governor George Clinton to make a ceremonial entrance that would proclaim the United States' wartime victory and sovereignty. (6)
Once word arrived in early November 1783 that the peace treaty had been signed, this plan could be implemented. Early on the morning of November 25, 1783, 800 American soldiers under the command of General Henry Knox fell into formation at a camp in northern Manhattan and began marching toward New York City. This small force consisted of a troop of dragoons in front, an advance guard of light infantry, a few artillery batteries, and several infantry regiments in the rear. Most, though not all, were Continentals. The detachment halted for several hours at Bowery Lane, above the city's northern boundary, until a cannon fired at one o'clock, signaling that the last British troops were boarding their transports and that Knox's unit could enter the city. It met no resistance. The only noteworthy incident was that some British soldiers had greased Fort George's flagpole and cut its halyards. Several Americans tried to mount the pole, only to slide ignominiously back down to the bottom, to the delight of British troops rowing away from the island. A sailor named John Van Arsdale finally put on a pair of cleats, climbed to the top, and raised the American flag over the city for the first time. With that, American artillerymen fired a thirteen-gun salute. Meanwhile, General Washington and Governor Clinton, who had been waiting north of the city, began their triumphal parade. Escorted by dragoons and accompanied by military aides and prominent citizens, Washington and Clinton marched down Queen Street (now Pearl Street) and Broadway to Cape's Tavern, where dignitaries had gathered to toast the military victory and national independence. (7)
The celebrations lasted another week. At many events--a dinner that Governor Clinton held for General Washington and his generals on the 25th, for instance, and the balls that merchants threw in taverns and coffee houses--attendance was restricted to social and military elites and genteel standards of decorum prevailed. More raucous merrymaking took place in public spaces as artisans and farmers raised liberty poles and enlisted men fired thirteen-gun salutes. The festivities climaxed on December 2nd, when the Continental Army staged a fireworks display said to be the grandest ever held in North America. (8)
As newspaper editors weighed evacuation's significance, most returned again and again to its orderliness. The Independent Journal praised American troops for entering New York with "an inviolable regard to order and discipline, as Tyranny could have never enforced." (9) The New York Packet contrasted the civil disturbances that had plagued the occupied city with its current tranquility: "no mobs--no riots--no disorders ... everything is quietness and safety." The Packet quoted a British officer as marveling: "These Americans ... are a curious original people, they know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them." (10) This understanding of evacuation as an emblem of social order and national independence would shape early efforts at memorialization. As with the celebrations of November and December 1783, these commemorations would reflect the country's social divisions even as they proclaimed its unity.
The Formation of Tradition
Although eighteenth-century Britons and Americans routinely used the term evacuation to describe a military or civilian exodus from a city, New Yorkers did not automatically apply this name to November 25th. New York City had experienced two evacuations during the Revolutionary War, the withdrawal of the Continental Army in 1776 and the departure of the British in 1783. Already accustomed to referring to the 1776 retreat as the evacuation, New Yorkers were slow to call the events of 1783 by that or any other name. Yet their initial failure to label November 25th also reflected their trauma about the war itself.
Insight into the naming of the anniversary is provided by petitions that property owners submitted to the municipal government in the hope of reducing their ground rents, owed to the Corporation of the City of New York and overdue since 1776. Needing to show that they had neither assisted nor benefitted from the British occupation, petitioners took pains to disclose their whereabouts during the conflict, and especially during the two evacuations. Yet the earliest petitioners chose to write much more about the war's beginning than its end. Nearly all the petitions submitted from February 1784 through the early fall of 1784 reserved the word evacuation for the Americans' 1776 retreat, as when Robert Thomas claimed to have paid his rent "till the Evacuation of City by the Continental Troops" and to have lost his horse and cart while assisting "Evacuation all in his power." (11) They were more mindful of the war itself than its conclusion and more conscious of British power than British defeat. Indeed, many petitioners either did not mention that the conflict had ended or else used phrases such as the "the late War" that bespoke their continuing preoccupation with it. (12) There was little notion of a distinct post-war era or of peace itself as something other than the absence of fighting. This word usage began to change in the fall of 1784, as petitioners focused on the war's conclusion and its aftermath. In petitions written from roughly September 1784 on, and increasingly in 1785, evacuation almost always meant November 1783--"the Evacuation of this City by the British Troops," in common parlance--rather than August and September 1776. (13) The evidence suggests that November 25th acquired its name--and that memories of the evacuation of 1776 faded--only when ordinary people felt the war was over, in the sense that their suffering belonged to a past that was irretrievably completed rather than a continuing present.
The memorialization of the evacuation preceded fitfully, too. On November 25, 1784, and again in succeeding years, upper-class New Yorkers held the first annual observances of the evacuation by giving dinners in taverns and coffee houses for "a select group of ladies and gentlemen" who ate a lavish meal, drank patriotic toasts, and danced. (14) These anniversary gatherings were in keeping with polite society's finest formal entertainments, and echoed the dinners that had been held at Cape's Tavern, Fraunces' Tavern, and other venues in November and December 1783. (15)
These dinners were ostensibly private social gatherings with no political meaning, but upper-class New Yorkers' willingness to honor evacuation and national independence privately and then use the press to communicate it to the rest of the population spoke volumes about their understanding of citizenship's limits. When in 1786 a diner offered a toast calling for a strong central government, it was clear that he expected people like his companions to share such sentiments and others to accede to them. (16) Leaders of the city's lesser merchants and artisans denied that such Tory balls had legitimacy. In 1784, the New-York Journal and State Gazette claimed that the first anniversary of evacuation had gone "totally unnoticed and unregarded." While a dinner had been held at Cape's Tavern, the Journal insisted that it was a wholly social affair that had no larger meaning because so many New Yorkers had been barred from it. Such exclusivity, the Journal argued, exemplified "the old British conviviality" that had no place in republican America. (17)
The mode of celebration changed in 1787, when Federalists used representations of the evacuation in their campaign to ratify the Constitution. No longer satisfied with private celebrations, the Federalists turned the anniversary into a public festival designed to win support for the Constitution and, later, the new national government. According to Simon P. Newman and David Waldstreicher, fetes such as Evacuation Day were nationalistic rites employed by competing political groups to advance their causes and convey an aura of social cohesion and unanimity. (18) Evacuation Day may have had a special appeal to New York City's Federalist elite, which was oriented locally and nationally and which asserted its concerns and leadership claims in both arenas, since its rituals operated simultaneously on the two levels.
Although the dinners continued to take place every November 25th and their invitation lists remained exclusive, changes in newspaper coverage gave them larger audiences. Instead of the brief and erratic notices that had appeared earlier, the Federalist press regularly printed detailed accounts of the dinners, particularly of the toasts proclaiming that the national government carried on the spirit of national unity and wartime sacrifice that had characterized evacuation. (19) Federalists also appealed to a broader constituency by organizing rites that built on key events of November and December 1783--such as Washington's triumphal procession and the Continental Army's fireworks--and that took place in public space and had the rhythm of popular festivals. In 1787, the army brigade that garrisoned New York City moved its annual full-dress review to November 25th. Late in the morning, the troops marched up Broadway from Fort George to the parade grounds (now City Hall Park), where they passed in review before national leaders and a crowd of ordinary citizens. In later years, the review culminated in the feu de joi, a complicated infantry maneuver whereby muskets were fired continuously, reaching a crescendo. The feu de joie--literally, "the firing of joy"--began with companies discharging their muskets one soldier at a time, going from right to left and back to front. Regiments then fired in the same order, one company at a time. Finally, the brigade engaged in 'running fire,' with soldiers shooting as quickly as possible to create a cacophony of sound. After the review, artillery batteries at Fort George made a thirteen-gun 'national' or 'federal' salute. Despite late November's sometimes harsh weather, thousands of people regularly turned out for these spectacles. (20)
Organized by the Corporation of the City of New York, these observances promoted the Federalist vision of a hierarchical society with a strong central government and a commercial economy. Making evacuation the occasion of public celebration portrayed the liberation of a major seaport as the culmination of the Revolutionary War. It also confirmed elites' claims to governance and demonstrated the importance of the social order. That the Continental Army's regulars, not the state militias, had marched into New York, and that General Washington had led the triumphal procession, signified that elite institutions had won the Revolutionary War. (21)
Capitalizing on the Continental Army's liberation of the city, Federalists assigned the regular army a prominent place in the celebratory rites. The military reviews advertised a European-style professional army as among the chief blessings of a strong national government. The reviews embodied a Federalist social ideal, with "his Excellency, the Commander in Chief, and several other personages of rank and distinction" inspecting the brigade, with a professional officer corps giving orders, and with a soldiery faithfully obeying them amounting to an exhibit of proper order and discipline. (22) The review's highpoint, the imposing feu de joi, demonstrated great military skill and discipline. But although Federalists organized the anniversaries to showcase the regular army, and although Federalist editors applauded the troops for their "martial appearance and the exactness of their maneuver" and "the skill and care of officers, and the emulation and pride of the soldier," this military professionalism was fictive. (23) Because Congress had reduced the size of the military after the end of the war, the U.S. Army was too small to fulfill the Federalist representations that regulars comprised the military units that paraded every November 25th, and most of the soldiers who marched in the celebrations were actually militiamen. Approximately 2,000 troops took part in the 1789 review, for instance, at a time when the entire regular army contained only 672 men. Some anti-Federalist organs, noting the delicious irony that the marchers consisted largely of militiamen whom the Federalists imagined As professionals, argued that the fetes should have a Republican and democratic spirit rather than the Federalist and elitist tone that they were acquiring. (24)
This Federalist memorialization of evacuation is responsible for Thanksgiving's place on the American calendar. On October 3,1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation calling for a national day of thanksgiving on Thursday, November 26, 1789. There had been earlier national thanksgivings, but this would be the first since the ratification of the Constitution and it was intended to legitimate the new federal government. This idea had surfaced in the House of Representatives, where, on September 25th, Elias Boudinot, a Federalist from Elizabethtown, New Jersey and an ally of Alexander Hamilton, introduced a resolution asking the president to declare "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer" that would allow Americans to acknowledge "the many signal favors of Almighty God," especially the establishment of "a Constitution of government for their safety and happiness." (25) Boudinot's resolution became entangled with the issue that dominated debate in the House that month, the location of a permanent seat of government, and provoked a sharp discussion. Though none of the thanksgiving resolution's supporters wanted New York to become the national capital--Boudinot favored Trenton while Roger Sherman spoke up for Philadelphia--they did agree that the capital should be located in a northern commercial city. By contrast, the resolution was opposed by southern Republicans such as Thomas Tudor Tucker and Aedanus Burke of South Carolina, whose advocacy of a southern, agrarian capital reflected their antagonism to the Constitution and their suspicion of Federalists' concentration of power. The resolution passed the House and the Senate and went to the president. Washington's proclamation made various appeals--to religious belief and festival tradition, to memories of wartime sacrifice and pride in national independence--to marshal support for the Constitution and the new government. A similar calculation probably lay behind the designation of November 26th for this thanksgiving. Neither Washington nor his aides referred explicitly to the evacuation of New York, but their thinking seems clear since Washington's proclamation and the Federalist representations of the evacuation emphasized the same themes of wartime sacrifice, national independence, and social unity. This connection between evacuation and the federal government was reinforced because New York City was still the national capital, giving November 26th a special significance for the new nation. Because the evacuation on November 25th, 1783 had removed British forces from the last scrap of American soil (except for some frontier posts) that had remained under their control and from the city that became the capital, November 26th could be considered the anniversary of the first day of full American independence. (That November 26th, 1789 fell on a Thursday was inconsequential to Washington and his contemporaries; it was the date that mattered, not the day of the week.) (26) By happenstance and accident, this 1789 thanksgiving ultimately led to the establishment of Thanks-giving as a national legal holiday on the fourth Thursday of November. (27)
At first, the Federalists' opponents ignored the anniversaries. Then, around 1791, as disputes between the Federalists and Republicans intensified, members of the Society of St. Tammany started organizing counter-celebrations--with their own banquets and receptions--to contest evacuation's meaning. Since the Federalist representation was dominant, Republicans had difficulty formulating their responses. Some mocked the evacuation itself, as with one writer who ridiculed it as a "sudden and chop-fallen retreat" that paled next to more "glorious feats of war." (28) Because that appraisal could be construed as a denunciation of the Revolution, shrewder Republicans tried to recast evacuation to fit their own ideals by interpreting it as a blow against standing armies, monarchy, and oppression. Disregarding the Continental Army's regulars who had entered New York in 1783, the Republican press praised the militia and independent companies that participated in the annual parades--"a formidably martial body of republican veterans," according to the New-York Journal--for protecting liberty against the threats of a standing army and a despotic government. (29) Speakers at the Tammany Society banquets linked November 25th with opposition to monarchy by offering such toasts as, "May the friends of Tyranny and oppression in every Country experience the fate of the British in New York on the 25th November 1783" and "The People--the only source of legitimate power--may [Secretary of State] T[imothy] Pickering and every other Federal officer remember it." (30)
Although the Republicans moderated the Federalist-elitist meaning of the celebration, they could not alter evacuation's primary associations with social privilege, the nation-state, and the military. That evacuation had acquired enough stability and continuity of meaning to resist redefinition indicates that it was becoming established as a tradition. By the mid-1790s, Evacuation Day was accepted as part of the usual way of doing things in and around New York City. With the holiday providing opportunities for socializing, celebrants transcended partisan politics and enjoyed the festivities on their own terms. A common pattern was for circles of friends and family members to watch the parade together in small, intimate groups and then to separate, with some going to a museum or a coffee house. Many people attended church services as well. The friendship and family circles often re-formed later in private houses for tea, dinner, or music. Around 1801, the anniversary became an occasion of popular entertainments, as theaters and museums started offering pageants and plays keyed to the evacuation. During the weeks prior to November 25th, the American Museum, the Panorama Theater, and others advertised their shows by displaying on their front walls huge illuminated transparencies that depicted scenes from the evacuation, paintings of General Washington, or renditions of famous battles. The performances featured melodramas on subjects such as Columbus' discovery of America and the Revolutionary War; lectures about American history; and band music, popular songs, and dances. By providing a physical space where strangers mixed in close proximity, albeit with the sanction of nationalism, these commercial entertainments allowed residents to experience situations that were neither wholly public nor private and that constituted a social sphere, where the privileges of class and rank were blurred or attenuated. (31)
The anniversaries also helped New Yorkers come to terms with the Revolutionary War. By defining evacuation as a military event that involved the replacement of one nation's army by another's, New Yorkers commemorated the city's liberation and national independence while glossing over the war's social divisions. Many loyalists and loyalist sympathizers who had lived in occupied New York stayed on after 1783, to the great discomfort of other residents. As the New York Journal and State Gazette remarked, the city's "virtuous Whigs and Exiles" had proven themselves "remarkable for forgiving and forgetting past crimes and offenses." (32) The anniversaries of the evacuation became a ritual of unity that at once celebrated the patriotic victory and concealed wartime discord, permitting New Yorkers to imagine a harmony that had not actually existed. (33)
By the mid-1790s, the anniversary had become a public event with a regular place on the yearly calendar and well-known rituals, so ingrained that newspapers simply reported that the latest anniversary had been observed "as usual" or "with the usual military honor." (34) This routinization is also revealed in diary entries. Alexander Anderson, a medical student, wrote of his activities on November 25, 1794: "Attended Dr. Mitchill's lecture. Afterwards walk'd with Dr. Davidson to see the troops whch. we found drawn up in Broadway--this being the anniversary of the Evacuation of the city by the British." (35) A year later, his brother John, a lawyer, wrote:
Anniversary of the Evacuation of the British troops. Went out with
Mr. Adams, & saw the uniformed companies parade. About noon they
made a sham retreat, through Broadway--Wall Street, Maiden Lane, &
went up the Bowery Lane. They then return'd to town, in the same
order the American troops enter'd at the peace. On the Battery 15
guns were fired, and a feu de joye. In the afternoon went to the
Museum with Mr. Adams--he, with Mr. Baxter, afterwards, drank tea at
our house. (36)
Some years neither young man wrote anything about the anniversary. Other years one or both registered the holiday's occurrence but dwelled on personal matters that counted for more in their daily lives--gifts purchased, medical lectures heard, dinners attended. (37)
A notable feature of these two diarist brothers is that neither took note of the spectators who watched the anniversary rituals. Both men recounted the military parades and the artillery salutes that they had seen and heard, at times in detail, and both recorded their interactions with friends and family members. Of the masses of strangers that were present in the streets, however, there is no mention. A similar pattern is evident from the newspapers, which chronicled public events such as the parade and semi-private events such as the banquets but almost completely ignored the crowds. Although this evidence should not be pushed too far, it is clear that these diarists and newspaper editors were not manifesting the fear of the crowd that was so commonplace after the French Revolution, for they expressed no sense of menace or danger. Rather, these affluent New Yorkers appear to have been discomfited by the uncontrolled social mixing with strangers that occurred in public space. They studiously ignored the crowds, neither mentioning nor describing particular strangers or the mass of people. There was, for instance, nothing like the references to the collective 'mood of the crowd' that became prevalent in the nineteenth century. Instead, these elite observers concentrated on their friends and relatives and acted as if they were watching the parades among their intimate circles with nobody else present. It was the existence of a social sphere, neither wholly public nor private and a deviation from genteel conventions, that made them uneasy and to which they responded by rendering themselves oblivious to the people surrounding them. (38)
Despite its use of national symbols, the anniversary remained a local phenomenon whose observances were confined to New York City and neighboring Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Hoboken. Almanacs and diaries sold in New York City usually referred to the evacuation, while those marketed elsewhere ignored it. The holiday failed to catch on nationally because it was a local rather than a national event and because it honored an anti-climatic incident that did not change the Revolutionary War's outcome or meaning and that did not affect the daily lives of ordinary people outside of New York. Except for some Massachusetts infantrymen who were part of Knox's force, the evacuation had not required the kind of external assistance that might have invested other Americans in it. A good comparison is with the British raid on Baltimore during the War of 1812, when people from around the country rushed to Baltimore's defense by volunteering to fight and by donating money and supplies to the relief effort, an outpouring of support that contributed to the acceptance of Francis Scott Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem. (39)
Evacuation Day's organizers disliked its provincialism and insisted on proclaiming its national significance. Holidays and other customs do not have to be national to thrive, however, and the anniversary had become well-ensconced as a tradition. (40)
The Transmission of Tradition
Edward Shils says that traditions often undergo crises during their transmission from the first to the second generation that determine whether they will survive or lapse. (41) Evacuation Day underwent such a crisis during the 1820s and 1830s. As the New Yorkers who could claim to have lived through the occupation and evacuation were dying, more and more people lacked direct knowledge of the Revolution. November 25th would remain a major day on the city calendar, but the process of passing this tradition to a new generation altered memory culture.
The problem of conveying historical memory across generations can be examined by comparing two New Yorkers' relationships to evacuation. John Pintard and George Templeton Strong were both lifelong city residents who belonged to the mercantile elite, were active in civic affairs, and esteemed the past. Yet because Pintard was sixty-one years older than Strong, the two men understood the British evacuation and its anniversary much differently. Born in 1759, John Pintard fled New York during the British occupation, returning in time to witness the evacuation. He later wrote:
Well do I recall an event so auspicious to the long exiled families
of this city, who after the privations of 7 long years returned home
to their habitations wh[ich] they left in the enjoyment of ease &
comfort to [return in] almost poverty, many of them to weep over the
ruins of their dwellings & all to lament the loss of many & dear
friends & relatives. (42)
For Pintard, anniversaries of the evacuation evoked powerful personal memories--his father-in-law's death in exile, his loss of a fortune in depreciated Continental currency, the burning of neighbors' homes. Pintard attached such significance to the evacuation that he made its anniversary a central part of his inner life, reserving November 25th as an occasion to repair his family tomb and reflect on recent accomplishments. Yet Pintard could also use his memories to transcend personal circumstances and evoke the larger cause of American independence. "Never can I forget," he wrote in 1825, "the joyful event wh[ich] Consummated our Independence." (43) Just as the traumas of war and revolution had forged his age cohort into a unique generation, the personal and public dimensions had become intermingled and self-reinforcing in his conception of evacuation.
Pintard was alert to the difficulties of transmitting meaning across generational lines: his memories of the evacuation are recorded in letters he wrote to his daughter. These letters are didactic and strained, evidence of Pintard's struggle to relate his searing experiences to a young woman who had not endured them. Like Pintard's daughter, George Templeton Strong grew up hearing his elders talk about the evacuation. As a student at Columbia College in the 1830s, however, Strong was concerned about whether classes would be canceled on November 25th, once lampooning "the glorious Evacuation Day, glorious in one point, at least, and that is that it allows us to kick up our heels all day at our leisure." (44) When Columbia scheduled classes for Evacuation Day in 1836, Strong protested this "[d]iabolical outrage!" and, vowing that "[w]e shall have to take it," exploited the college's oversight to justify playing hooky with his friends. (45) He later chortled that the campus was abuzz with "great excitement about the affair of the 25th." (46) Yet his rationalization of their prank was less cynical than naive, for although his understanding of the anniversary was less complex and solemn than Pintard's, Strong never disputed its importance. And, as he aged, Strong employed his memories of Evacuation Day to express nostalgia for his boyhood, lamenting when the parade was disappointing one year that "the glory of Evacuation Day has departed." (47) Although both men used the anniversary to summon "the remote period" of their youths, there was this profound difference: while Pintard was remembering the evacuation itself, Strong was remembering a holiday. (48)
This generational shift was accompanied by the spread of a new naming practice. Before the 1820s, people carefully distinguished between the evacuation and its celebration. They spoke of "the anniversary of the evacuation" or "the anniversary of the evacuation of this city by British troops," or they noted how much time had passed since evacuation by referring--in 1792, for example--to "the 9th anniversary of the evacuation of this city and country by the British troops and their mercenary allies." (49) This usage was replaced by a new term that appeared in the 1820s and 1830s, Evacuation Day. Popularized by the newspaper advertisements that theaters ran to publicize their November 25th pageants, the new name became standard by the 1840s. An act of historical simplification and emotional distancing that signaled that November 25th was becoming a holiday, a day reserved for the special purpose of memorializing the Revolutionary War, the adoption of this label indicated that career of Evacuation Day was becoming independent of the evacuation itself and even of the anniversaries of the evacuation, and that acts of remembrance now seemed more authentic than what was supposedly being remembered. (50)
Another element of this generational change were increasing complaints that the anniversary was no longer being observed as faithfully as it had been in the past. Typical was this 1828 lament: "Today is the forty-fifth return of this anniversary. It has now somewhat fallen off from that ceremony and festivity with which it was formerly observed." (51) And this explanation of 1839's disappointing parade:
The inclemency of the weather accounted in a measure for the
diminution of the military display, although we fear that decreasing
reverence for antiquity and ancient principles has something to do
in causing this indifference, to what used to be a holiday of great
celebrity. (52)
And this comment from 1848:
The day had been so far forgotten, that many enquired the object of
the parade. Old things have passed away, and their interest seems
lost, however important the object commemorated. (53)
This grumbling first became routine in the 1820s. Its intensity escalated in years when snowstorms or cold rains spoiled the parades, but complaints were made when Brooklyn and Jersey City scheduled their own celebrations, when the grand march included 5,000 troops and lasted for hours, and when the crowds were so large that pickpockets flourished. Similar laments are made about holidays today such as the Fourth of July and Memorial Day and are usually taken at face value as proof of declension. That reading is simplistic: such protests often indicate that a tradition is experiencing a transmission crisis that it will probably survive, albeit in altered form. (54) (Significantly, few objections were voiced after the Civil War when Evacuation Day was really decaying.) The complaints about Evacuation Day were made with the expectation of being obeyed: they were voiced with authority and in public settings, they appealed to shared values, and they were intended to rouse the faithful. It was not that New Yorkers were apathetic; no matter how implausible a tradition Evacuation Day may seem to us today, the contemporary claims that it should be "a holiday of great celebrity" and that "the object commemorated" was important went unchallenged. (55) Rather, it was that the events of November 25, 1783 lacked the immediacy for George Templeton Strong's generation that they had had for John Pintard's generation. Evacuation Day truly was different from the anniversary of the evacuation. (56)
To survive, Evacuation Day needed to acquire new constituencies and new purposes that could invigorate it. Its organizers sought to tie Evacuation Day to comparable events such as the South American revolutions of the 1820s and the French Revolution of 1830, but these foreign rebellions did not strike a chord with New Yorkers. (57) A better solution lay in making November 25th a vehicle for commemorating the War of 1812, a connection that began during the conflict itself, when theaters and museums used the anniversary to stage pageants about victories like the Battle of Lake Champlain. After the war, the similarities between the First and Second Wars of American Independence made Evacuation Day a forum for celebrating U.S. military success and American nationalism. Veterans of the War of 1812 continued to play central roles in the Evacuation Day observances as late as 1888, instantly recognizable in their old uniforms and with their battle flags and banners as they marched or rode in the parades, and great crowd favorites. As they aged and their numbers dwindled, the veterans were given ritualistic duties like flag-raising that were less taxing but that kept them in the public eye. As sociologist W. Lloyd Warner wrote of the Memorial Day commemorations in Yankee City following World War II, such rites constituted "a modern cult of the dead" that related living members of the community to "a system of sacred beliefs and dramatic rituals" embodied in the dead soldiery and expressed ceremoniously. (58) The War of 1812 veterans were living relics who bound contemporaries to the Revolution and American nationalism. Nobody was more important in this regard than David Van Arsdale, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the son of John Van Arsdale, the sailor who had climbed the greased flagpole above Fort George on November 25, 1783 and hoisted the first American flag to fly over New York City. For many years, David Van Arsdale was entrusted with raising the colors on the Battery at sunrise on Evacuation Day. After his death, his grandson, Christopher R. Forbes, performed this rite. (59)
Another solution was that of upper-class New Yorkers, who employed Evacuation Day as a response to the city's rapid population and economic growth and as an affirmation of their own leadership and social standing. The new uses that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s conferred a higher degree of social refinement onto the Evacuation Day rites, especially the annual parade. Although fire brigades and political societies still took part, by mid-century workingmen's trade societies--harbor pilots, printers, and butchers, for instance--appeared in the parades much less frequently than in earlier decades, and the parades and their representations in the press had become more socially exclusive. (60) The composition of the military units changed significantly, too. Although there had never been enough regulars to fill the ranks, the expanded size of the parade created a need for more soldiers, which was met by elite volunteer units such as the Washington Grays, the Scottish Guard, the Jefferson Guard, Lafayette Horse Guards, and the Montgomery Light Guard. The aristocratic young men who belonged to these regiments competed fiercely over the precision of their marching and the elegance of their uniforms in a rivalry that employed masculine display, national symbols, and wealth to legitimate the city's changing upper-class and define its boundaries. This rivalry did not involve military prowess so much as its image, at the service of social prestige. Significantly, the feu de joie--which posed a real test of military skill--was dropped around this time. (61)
In the decades before the Civil War, the Evacuation Day parades were extravaganzas that lasted several hours and drew thousands of onlookers, with regimental bands playing martial music and with smartly-dressed infantrymen and cavalry troopers stepping out. Among the parade's highlights were the volunteer units. (62) This antebellum elite's joy in flaunting its status in public settings represents a drastic change from the late eighteenth century elite that felt an aversion to public space and to mingling with members of other social groups in uncontrolled settings. An explanation for the exuberant public performances of the antebellum elite is provided by anthropologist Alessandro Falassi, who observes that festival competitions can create hierarchy out of equality by validating a contest's form and rules, the selection of its participants, and the designation of its winners and losers. (63) In effect, the young aristocrats sought to transform parade spectators into an audience and implicate them in a rite of competition that would affirm their own power. That members of the volunteer regiments withdrew to exclusive gatherings that were held in private space--banquets and dinners--after taking part in the parade only underscored their assertion of elite authority and identity. (64) The mid-nineteenth century was a volatile period for New York's elites, for whom explosive urban growth meant not only new sources of wealth and power but also the blurring of upper-class boundaries and social credentials, the widening of divisions with other urban groups, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of German and Irish immigrants. In these turbulent times, the upper class had a powerful need to affirm itself as a community of feeling and heritage. Conspicuous participation in the Evacuation Day parade--with its associations with nationalism, elite rule, and social harmony--offered one solution to this problem. As most elites did not care about the poor and were oblivious of the actual terms of their existence, the regimental displays provided the reassuring illusion of seeming to contour a society that was becoming dangerously boundless. As the New York Times exulted in 1859, the splendor and discipline of the volunteer units demonstrated that their blue blood members came from better "raw material" than the "demoralized mob." (65) It was the elites themselves, then, who were the ultimate audience for these performances.
Although the popularity of the antebellum parades indicated that Evacuation Day had weathered its transmission crisis, a greater threat lay ahead.
The Dissolution of Tradition
After marching with his National Guard regiment in the 1865 Evacuation Day parade, Major John Ward, Jr. recorded his impressions in his diary. Although most diarists wrote just a sentence or two about a ritual that had come to seem ordinary, Ward devoted an entire page to the 1865 procession, in the longest and most detailed journal entry that has surfaced about Evacuation Day. (66) That year's parade not only marked the first time that the newly promoted Ward commanded his own company, but it was also an electrifying event that featured 8,000 soldiers of the First National Guard Division and twenty regimental bands and that was watched by a crowd of tens of thousands of people that blocked the sidewalks and filled the rooftops and windows. With the holiday's nationalistic and militaristic ethos encouraging New Yorkers to transform it into a celebration of the Union victory, it was the largest Evacuation Day parade that had been mounted.
Although Ward described everything from the fit of his new epaulettes and his company's acceptance of his leadership to the route of the parade and the formidable demeanor of the veterans, he neglected to say anything about Evacuation Day itself, the nominal basis of this spectacle. It was the Civil War and his own military exploits that preoccupied Ward, not the anniversary of evacuation. (67) His omission presaged the blow that the Civil War would administer to Evacuation Day in precipitating its dissolution as a tradition.
The Civil War had two main effects on Evacuation Day, one that proved fleeting and inconsequential and a second that was permanent and debilitating. The first effect was that the Civil War temporarily sustained new constituencies and meanings and disrupted old ones. The best example of this discontinuity involved Irish-Americans. Since celebrating Evacuation Day enabled Irish immigrants to simultaneously adopt an American custom and voice their grievances against Great Britain, they laid their own claim to the holiday and tried to redefine its meaning. Even before the Civil War, the lessons that Irish leaders took from evacuation had centered on national liberty and British defeat rather than the mainstream themes of elites and the military. For example, in 1850 the Irish-American applauded "the anniversary of the hour and moment in 1783 when the Britishers evacuated New York and the flag of liberty was hoisted over the Battery" for marking "a moment which rendered the United States of America a free and independent nation," while six years later the same paper registered its delight "that the British were kicked from the Battery for the 73rd time." (68) The implication was obvious, but during the antebellum period Irish leaders avoided making overt comparisons between Britain's occupation of revolutionary New York and its domination of Ireland. That preference for the oblique disappeared after the Civil War, when, with a new assertiveness borne of their participation in the fighting and of their growing power in urban politics, Irish-Americans expressed their interpretations of evacuation much more directly. In the late 1860s, Irish-American newspapers added Evacuation Day to their lists of historic events that had occurred during the month of November. One year, the Irish World said of November 25th:
The forces of King George leave New York, bag and baggage, a free
city in a free land, 1783. [Let us hope we will not have to wait
till 1883 for the forces of Victoria to leave in the same way, a
place we know of, where they have no right to be.] (69)
The newspapers also gave their ethnicity credit for evacuation's success by boasting that two Americans of Irish descent, Governor George Clinton and General Henry Knox, had directed the operation. Yet such uses of Evacuation Day remained limited and proved impermanent. For instance, although the Congress of the Fenian Brotherhood convened in Philadelphia on November 24, 1868, no speaker saw fit to draw a parallel with evacuation. (70) References to the holiday in the Irish-American press decreased in the late 1870s, and by the early 1880s newspapers either ignored it or confined themselves to brief notices that had no ethno-nationalist content, while newspaper calendars of anniversaries that fell in late November replaced Evacuation Day with the Civil War's Battle of Lookout Mountain. (71)
The Irish failed to gain traction because of the tradition's continuing strong identification with the urban upper class. Although the antebellum elite's use of the holiday for public displays ended during the Civil War when the volunteer regiments stopped being featured in the parades, Evacuation Day's relationship with the city's increasingly Anglophilic upper class created more cultural distance than working-class Irish-Americans could readily bridge. Rather than challenge the dominant interpretation, Irish-Americans chose to link their late November military reviews and balls with another holiday that often overlapped with Evacuation Day and that also possessed a nationalist element, Thanksgiving. Because Irish-Americans and members of other social groups could make a place for themselves within its more inclusive set of meanings, Thanksgiving started becoming an alternative to Evacuation Day as early as the 1870s. This movement away from Evacuation Day, of course, only reinforced its social exclusivity. The elitist dimensions of Evacuation Day contrast sharply with those of a corresponding holiday in Boston, the anniversary of the British evacuation from that city in 1776. The success of Boston's Evacuation Day, a legal holiday that is still observed today, is attributable to the coincidence of its falling on March 17th--St. Patrick's Day--and to Irish Bostonians' embracing its anti-British content in determining its meaning. (72)
The second effect of the Civil War lay in altering Americans' historical memory. Although the Civil War originally appeared to revitalize the anniversary much as the War of 1812 had done, it wound up diminishing Evacuation Day through its transformation of American understandings of war and remembrance. Warfare had been important to American memory culture before the 1860s, but in a distinctive way. A patchwork of local memory events--such as Evacuation Day itself or Bunker Hill--had coincided with nation-wide memorials, while military successes were celebrated less in their own right than as confirmation of civic virtues deemed appropriate to a republic: suffering and fortitude (as with Valley Forge), heroic defiance of tyranny (Lexington and Concord, James Lawrence of the Chesapeake), and communal unity and national triumph (Bunker Hill, the siege of Baltimore). Because fears of standing armies and aristocracy had discouraged the glorification of the military, and because the U.S. military's primary goal of avoiding defeat had kept it from winning many decisive victories, even triumphs such as the Battle of Saratoga did not become objects of remembrance. This older pattern was not so much replaced by as suffused with a new memory culture following the Civil War. Emphasizing destructive warfare, it combined a conception of military conflict as an emblem of U.S. industrial and technological achievement, a messianic belief in devastation as necessary for redemption, a commitment to aggressive masculinity as expressed in warfare or its analogues, and a reliance on citizen-armies to obtain national ideals. As this new memory culture became accepted as conventional, the problem for Evacuation Day was that its meanings did not jibe with the emerging values of destructive warfare and that its veneration of the British departure did not resonate with people whose expectations of warfare and the military were shaped by Shiloh, Antietam, and the Wilderness. Evacuation Day's local orientation was also out of synch with another post-Civil War development that has been examined by historians Kirk Savage and David W. Blight, the nationalization of war remembrance. (73)
Evacuation Day's close relationship with the Civil War began early in the conflict because its nationalistic and military content led New Yorkers to identify the holiday with the Union cause and to embroil it in political disputes over the war. In 1861, Horace Greeley and others turned November 25th into a demonstration of support for the war effort, with Greeley's Tribune declaring that the sight of "the Stars and Stripes float[ing] proudly from housetop and dome in every part of the city" revealed the public's sympathies. (74) In 1862 and 1863, Copperheads in the municipal government thwarted the Unionists by refusing to appropriate funds for Evacuation Day, a strategy that led to the anniversary's being "practically abandoned" as only the Veterans of 1812 marched in the parade and as crowd turnout dropped. (75) This relationship continued in peacetime because the holiday became a vehicle for celebrating the Northern victory. The parades that were held in the late 1860s--including the procession that dazzled John Ward in 1865--were extraordinary for their size and intensity, largely because of the participation of the entire First Division of the New York State National Guard, with its more than 8,000 troops, many of them combat veterans who carried their battle flags in a graphic reminder of the hostilities. Further cementing this association was Governor Reuben E. Fenton's practice of delivering speeches on Civil War themes on the anniversary, praising the accomplishments of the Union forces one year, and demanding a firmer program for reconstructing the Southern states the next year. (76)
Although these scenes persuaded the New York Times "that there is a growing tendency to revive the memory of a day which is so glorious in our national annals," the renaissance ended abruptly when Major General Alexander Shaler, the commander of the First Division, dropped Evacuation Day from the division's parade schedule in 1870. Because his troops had made several extra parades that summer, Shaler wanted to eliminate one of their fall reviews, a decision that led him to target Evacuation Day because it fell the day before Thanksgiving and interfered with his men's holiday plans. Within a few years, the reduction of the National Guard presence from the First Division's 8,000 troops to a single regiment of 750 men deprived the parades of so much excitement that attendance plummeted. More telling than Shaler's decision, however, was the indifference of ordinary residents to it and its consequences. In contrast to the flood of complaints that had been made between the 1820s and the 1860s, when the holiday was robust, that New Yorkers were observing its traditions less faithfully than before, very few people objected to the parade's contraction or the anniversary's subsequent collapse. Their silence suggests that emotional involvement and identification with the anniversary had weakened by the 1870s. (77)
As the Herald observed in 1872, "the real business of actual warfare" had eclipsed Evacuation Day. (78) Although the anniversary had provided a forum for organizing Union rites during and just after the war, that role ended as the Civil War developed its own memory apparatus, including Memorial Day, the Grand Army of the Republic, and statues of soldiers. By the 1870s, Evacuation Day had lost much of its following and begun to dissolve. (79)
Revival and Relapse
Traditions do not die easily. Their age and mere existence confer legitimacy, and sometimes inspire campaigns to revive traditions that are lapsing. Evacuation Day experienced such a resurgence when patriotic hereditary groups took it over in the 1880s. Although this revival failed to save the holiday, it substantially altered its rites and its meaning. (80)
The revival was initiated by John Austin Stevens, a merchant and patrician historian who organized Evacuation Day's 100th anniversary, in 1883, in his capacity as secretary of the New-York Historical Society. Working closely with business and social leaders, Stevens made the centennial one of nineteenth-century New York's greatest extravaganzas. Like a supernova that exploded in a final brief display of brilliance before being reduced to the nothingness of a black hole, the 1883 parade was both the largest Evacuation Day gala ever staged and the last big one. Over a million people attended, including President Chester A. Arthur, several Cabinet officers, and eight governors. Twenty-five thousand troops marched in the parade, while a marine pageant featured 300 warships, private yachts, and other vessels.
Businessmen controlled the centennial. Stevens entrusted its planning to committees that comprised the presidents of the merchants' exchanges, bankers, railroad executives, corporate lawyers, and administrators of men's clubs, who arranged the events and shared center stage with political and military officials. Although Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper praised the centennial for dramatizing the social progress and civic harmony that New York had attained under business leadership, others denounced it as the triumph of a capitalist aristocracy that betrayed the democratic and nationalistic spirit of the American Revolution. (81) The Irish-American damned the celebration's organizers as "the 'shoddy aristocracy' of New York--the men who stand on their money-bags,--swelled by stock-gambling."
These degenerate Americans, by their aping of everything English,
and their fawning on the representatives of English royalty, while
their slight their own country, show that they regret the abolition
of class distinctions, and the equalization of all men before the
law, which the Revolution brought about. (82)
The last straw for the Irish-American was a report that "Anglo-maniac snobs" from the Produce Exchange had invited the British ambassador to an Evacuation Day banquet and toasted Queen Victoria's health. (83) The New York Sun also took aim at the elite's social pretensions:
The boast which now most stirs the envy of Newport is not of descent
from patriots, but from Tories of the Revolution. A trace of Tory
blood is coveted by the aspiring aristocrat. The Anglomaniacs of
this day are not driven into exile and despoiled of their
possessions. They have become the leaders of fashion and the
exemplars for our most luxurious society. To be mistaken for
Englishmen is their highest and fondest ambition. (84)
John Swinton's Paper, a radical labor organ, rebuked "our ruling swashbucklers" for using the land and marine parades to brandish the raw military power available to the upper classes. Instead of that display of class might, Swinton's Paper imagined an alternative procession that would have comprised battalions of industrial workers marching behind a banner that proclaimed: "Millionaires, None." (85)
A month later, Stevens founded an organization named the Society of '83 (later reconstituted as the Sons of the Revolution) to arrange subsequent Evacuation Day rites and to improve Americans' patriotic spirit and their appreciation of their colonial heritage. An early patriotic hereditary society that was a forerunner of the better-known Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames of America, the Sons of the Revolution was also established as an ancestral society to preserve the past from the immigrant present. With its membership restricted to 250 descendants of revolutionary New York City families, the society boasted prominent New York City names such as Beekman, Schermerhorn, Hamilton, Morris, and Montgomery. (86)
The revival of Evacuation Day was part of a larger elite project to idealize the historical memory of colonial New York. In the late nineteenth century, patrician historians produced hundreds of books, prints, lectures, classes, and tours about an imagined colonial city known as Old New York. Devoid of immigrants, labor unrest, and factories, Old New York offered an emotional alternative to the modern city and exerted a strong hold on upper- and middle-class New Yorkers who were disconcerted by rapid urban change. (87)
Evacuation Day occupied a prominent place in these fictive histories. According to James Riker, the holiday's foremost nineteenth-century historian, Old New Yorkers had resisted the British occupiers with a unity and bravery that made it "the most signal [event] in [city] history." (88) Riker prized the evacuation as "the closing scene in that stupendous struggle which gave birth to our free and noble Republic" and "brought our city deliverance from a foreign power" and as a reminder to "keep unimpaired our love of country and kindle the patriotism of those who come after us." (89)
Turning to history and its aura of cultural authority as a response to the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, elites and their retainers used the revival of Evacuation Day to position themselves as stewards of American history and to confirm their superiority. Because the Battery was the location of both Evacuation Day's sunrise flag-raising ceremony and Castle Garden's immigrant station, collisions between the Sons of the Revolution and immigrants became a staple of representations of the anniversary. One year, an account of cannons that had supposedly been trained on the departing British transports suggested that they be used to drive immigrants away. Another year, a newspaper depicted a Rumanian Jewish family who witnessed the flag-raising ceremony yet proved so incapable of grasping its patriotic meaning that they "walked away with angry looks on their faces." (90)
Evacuation Day also enabled social and economic elites to respond to the transformation of upper-class society. With the emergence of vast new fortunes multiplying the number of newcomers who were clamoring for admission to the inner circles, elites had experienced a blurring of class boundaries and a confusion over social credentials that many found to be disconcerting. By affirming elite society as a community of feeling and knowledge whose members were distinguished by their breeding and heritage, Evacuation Day offered one solution to this problem of identity. (91) A case in point involves Anglophilia. With the United States approaching the industrial might of Great Britain and its upper class emulating the English aristocracy, American elites began to feel ambivalence toward the old enemy. Evacuation Day let them see themselves as part of an Anglo-Saxon unity that was rooted in the colonial period and that excluded immigrants and other unworthies. It also allowed them to combine expressions of American patriotism with professions of admiration for Great Britain. Speaking at a Society of '83 banquet, Chauncey M. Depew, a vice president of the New York Central Railroad, struck this note in asserting that the American Revolution was responsible for Britain's imperial success:
We have reached across Great Britain and liberalized her
institutions. We furnished an impetus to Great Britain, and if she
stands to-day supreme and grand among the nations of the world in
all that constitutes magnitude and merit, it is largely to the fact
of the independence of these colonies and the creation of the
American Republic. (92)
As the Irish-American and the New York Sun grasped in denouncing the 'Anglomaniacs' who dominated the centennial, Anglophilia revealed the elite's cultural aspirations and self-identity as an aristocracy. Anglophilia also contradicted the original purpose of the holiday and substituted myth for reality and the present for the past.
Because the holiday's recent loss of adherence supported their belief that ordinary Americans devalued their heritage, Evacuation Day was a good vehicle for Stevens and his fellow Sons of the Revolution. But although Stevens and the others enjoyed pointing to the drop in parade attendance as evidence that elites should become guardians of American history, they disliked the uncontrolled social mixing and frivolity of public celebrations. Unlike their counterparts earlier in the century who had used public performances to legitimate hierarchy, members of the late nineteenth century elite wanted to constitute themselves as an aristocracy and sought to avoid the ill-bred and vulgar. Accordingly, they refined the parade by decreasing the number of bands and military units that appeared in it, changes that further diminished its appeal and its audience. By the mid-1890s, the parade was no longer held annually and, when it did occur, usually consisted of little more than a flag escort and several companies of history buffs wearing colonial military uniforms. From being integral to New Yorkers' historical memories, the parade had come to exert little cultural resonance beyond the participants themselves. The Sons of the Revolution, preferring dignified events that took place in controlled settings, introduced a new ritual, the dedication of statues that honored great Americans such as George Washington and Nathan Hale and tablets that commemorated historic sites such as the Battle of Harlem Heights. The dedication ceremonies featured lengthy speeches extolling the importance of colonial history that demonstrated the historical knowledge and cultural authority of the Sons of the Revolution. The patriotic and ancestral societies' favorite milieu, however, were private gatherings. Every November 25th, the Sons of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames of America, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Children of the Holland Dames held dinners at exclusive venues such as Delmonico's, the Astor House, the Waldorf-Astoria, and Fraunces' Tavern, where their members could socialize and hear historical lectures without rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi. (93)
The Sons of the Revolution's predilection for the intellectual and the didactic accelerated Evacuation Day's dissolution. One sign of the holiday's difficulties was that newspapers began to ridicule it. Concluding that the fundamental problem was that "the peaceful departure of the British" was not "specially heroic," the New York Times argued in 1888 that Evacuation Day would warrant more than its "slight annual commemoration" had General Washington and his troops only done something "more strenuous than that of watching the Redcoats go." (94) Other newspapers exploited the huge imaginative gap that existed between colonial and modern New York City by mocking the history buffs who wore replica Continental Army uniforms on subway and elevated trains. The lowpoint came in 1907, when the City History Club organized an Evacuation Day program of lectures for 600 elementary school children in a Brooklyn park. (95) After waiting for over an hour for the program to begin, the children started screaming and running around the park, finally mobbing the speakers, who, the Times dryly observed, "fled a good deal faster than the British ever did." (96)
The dissolution of the holiday led organizations that had scheduled events for Evacuation Day to transfer them to Thanksgiving. New York State's National Guard regiments, which had held military drills and balls on Evacuation Day for decades, started moving them to Thanksgiving about 1905. Several Daughters of the American Revolution chapters shifted their galas to Thanksgiving around the same time. (97) There were a few stubborn holdouts, especially the Sons of the Revolution, which slated Evacuation Day banquets as late as the 1920s. But although its speakers went on proclaiming Old New York's glories and railing against the public's disregard of the past, they came off as cranks. By then, even elites no longer adhered to Evacuation Day. With the emergence of modernist thinking encouraging a more skeptical approach to history, the reverence for the past that had characterized Evacuation Day seemed old fashioned. The upper class' use of history as a social credential faded, replaced by a new emphasis on consumption, sports, higher education, and careers. Evacuation Day's localism also made it vulnerable, because of changes in the elite's outlook. Unlike New York's Federalist elite, which was oriented both nationally and locally, or its mid- to late-nineteenth century elite, which was strongly localist, the early twentieth century economic elite increasingly had a national perspective, as corporations altered business culture. Local history started to seem parochial. (98)
Wealthy New Yorkers' drift away from history cost Evacuation Day its last constituency. By the 1920s, the tradition was no longer meaningful for any social group. Except for the Irish-Americans immediately after the Civil War, most immigrants and workers had never contested Evacuation Day directly. Instead, some responded by turning Thanksgiving into an alternative tradition. A variant of Thanksgiving became a haven for working-class New Yorkers repelled by Evacuation Day's nativism and elitism. Before a uniform Thanksgiving based on New England precedents and revolving around the family emerged, a range of Thanksgiving practices had existed, including a radical strain, centered in Protestant and Catholic churches, that critiqued American capitalism by reinterpreting its themes of a bountiful harvest and gift exchange as an argument for the redistribution of wealth and power. This radical variant lapsed as Thanksgiving evolved in another direction, but it inoculated its working-class adherents against Evacuation Day. (99)
A few Evacuation Day observances have taken place subsequently, on major anniversaries, like the 200th, in 1983. Yet Evacuation Day survives today as an historical curiosity, known chiefly for its disappearance. And perhaps that is the final irony: a holiday that was dedicated to memory is itself remembered for having been forgotten. (100)
ENDNOTES
I want to thank Elizabeth Blackmar, Frederic Cople Jaher, and Daniel J. Singal for their criticism of this essay.
1. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, 1997); Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York, 1996); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, 1995); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 1997); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, 2001); and Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1915 (New Haven, 1985). For the use of memory and history, see also Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions:" 1-14 and Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland:" 15-41, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983) and Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998).
2. Shils discusses the "dissolution" and "attenuation" of tradition and speaks of traditions that lose "adherence" to populations. Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago, 1981): 283-286. For analyses of the purposeful and sometimes organized oblivion of social memory, see Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (Oxford, 1999). Other lapsed American traditions include Guy Fawkes Day, Juneteenth, and Pinkster. Alwyn Barr, "Juneteenth," Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill, 1989): 216; "Guy Fawkes Day," The Folklore of American Holidays, ed. Henning Cohen and Tristram Potter Cohen, 2nd ed. (Detroit, 1991): 386-389.
3. This article is the first systematic analysis of Evacuation Day, but other accounts have been made of it, chiefly encyclopedia and almanac entries. Most attribute its disappearance to the decline of anti-English sentiment or to competition with Thanksgiving. Both factors did enter into the holiday's demise, but more subtly than earlier authors allow. See Robert I. Goler, "Evacuation Day," The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven, 1995): 385; Brooks McNamera, Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788-1909 (New Brunswick, 1997): 35-39; Gary Jennings, Parades: Celebrations and Circuses on the March (Philadelphia, 1966): 59; and Jane M. Hatch, comp. and ed., The American Book of Days, 3rd ed. (New York, 1978): 1051-1053. For loyalist experiences of the evacuation, see Robert Ernst, "A Tory-eye View of the Evacuation of New York," New York History 64 (October 1983): 377-94.
4. Goler, "Evacuation Day," The Encyclopedia of New York City: 385.
5. Max Weber, "Class, Status, and Party:" 180-195, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946). For American elites, see Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Philadelphia, 1979); Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982); David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1982); Kathryn A. Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1995); and Sven Beckert, The Moneyed Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bougeoisie, 1850-1896 (New York, 2001). For an analysis of memory keepers, see Peter Dobkin Hall, "The Empty Tomb: The Making of Dynastic Identity:" 255-348, in George E. Marcus with Peter Dobkin Hill, Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America (Boulder, 1992).
6. "Preliminary Articles for a Treaty of Peace:" 243-50, in Journals of the Continental Congress, v. 24, entry for April 15, 1783 (Washington, D.C., 1922); "Definitive Articles of a Treaty of Peace:" 23-28, in Journals of the Continental Congress, v. 28, entry for January 14, 1784 (Washington, D.C., 1928); Journals of the Continental Congress, v. 24, entries for April 24 and July 16, 1783: 274 and 436; Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, March 17, 1783: 290-93, Continental Congress Report on Proposal of Sir Guy Carleton, April 22, 1783: 338, and Alexander Hamilton and William Floyd to George Clinton, April 23, 1783: 338-39, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 1782-1786, v. 3, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York, 1961); H.G. Letter V [attributed to Hamilton], February 25, 1789: 270, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 1787-1788, v. 4, ed. by Harold C. Syrett (New York, 1962). For the Revolution and New York City, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origin of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1979); and Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore, 1981).
7. Rivington's New York Gazette, November 26, 1783; The Independent New-York Gazette, November 29, 1783; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 (New York, 1999): 259-261; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, v. 5, Victory with the Help of France (New York, 1952): 461; James Thomas Flexner, George Washington, v. 3, In the American Revolution (1775-1783) (Boston, 1967): 522-28. Van Arsdale has sometimes been identified as an Army enlisted man or an Army officer.
8. New York Packet, January 15, 1784; The Independent New-York Gazette, November 29, December 6, 1783; The Independent Journal: or, The General Advertiser, December 1, 1783.
9. The Independent Journal: or, The General Advertiser, December 1, 1783. Emphasis in the original.
10. New York Packet, January 15, 1784. Emphasis in the original.
11. Robert Thomas, Petition to the Mayor and the Corporation of the City of New York, April 14, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, New York City Common Council Papers, 1630-1831, microfilm edition, Municipal Archives of the New York City Department of Records, New York, NY (hereafter cited as CCP). See also David Barclay, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, February 13, 1784, reel 8, folder 302, CCP, and Adolph Waldron, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonality, April 4, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, CCP. Some early petitioners did not use the term evacuation, speaking instead of "the approach of the British Troops," "the Invasion of this State by the British Troops," or "when the Enemy took Possession of the Island." Elizabeth Ritchie, Memorial, April 22, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, CCP; Richard Norwood, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonality, March 6, 1784, reel 8, folder 302, CCP; Michael Brooks, Petition to the Corporation of the City of New York, March 21, 1784, reel 8, folder 304, CCP.
12. Andrew Thompson and Joseph Cheesman, Petition to the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen, and Common Council, March 30, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, CCP.
13. William Backhouse, Petition, July 9, 1785, reel 9, folder 322, CCP. See also Elizabeth Mesier, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, September 8, 1784, reel 8, folder 305, CCP; John Ferrers, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonality, December 12, 1785, reel 9, folder 325, CCP. Midway in 1784, references to the beginning of the British occupation became non-specific and almost never used the term evacuation. John Barlow thus referred to owing two years' rent "when the British came over & took New York." John Barlow, Petition to the Mayor, the Aldermen, and Common Council, September 8, 1784, reel 8, folder 305, CCP.
14. The Independent Journal; or, The General Advertiser, November 30, 1785. For the historical memory of ordinary Americans, see Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 1999): vii-xvii, 87-91 and Robert E. Cray, Jr., "Commemorating the Prison Ship Dead: Revolutionary Memory and the Politics of Sepulture in the Early Republic, 1776-1808," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 56 (July 1999): 565-590.
15. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992): 353-365. The data are too thin to be conclusive, but the first evacuation observances may also have been inspired by St. Andrew's Day, the Scottish name day, celebrated every November 30th and a signal event on the eighteenth-century social calendar that consisted of dinners that were attended by the governor, the mayor, aldermen, merchants, and their wives. By the 1780s, St. Andrew's Day had acquired an ethno-nationalistic component, and many New Yorkers used it to attack England for its tyranny of 'North Britain' and the United States. St. Andrew's Day probably contributed to the development of Evacuation Day by habituating New Yorkers to an anniversary that fell at the end of November, was marked with private dinners, and had a nationalistic content. New York Journal and State Gazette, December 2, 1784; New-York Journal, or the Weekly Register, December 1, 1785. Walter Friedman, "Scots:" 1052-1053, in The Encyclopedia of New York City.
16. The Independent Journal; or, The General Advertiser, November 25, 1786.
17. The New York Journal and State Gazette, December 2, 1784.
18. Waldstreicher, In The Midst of Perpetual Fetes: 18-52 and Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: 1-10, 39. See also Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: 1-14.
19. Independent Journal; Or, the General Advertiser, November 25, 1786.
20. Trevor N. Dupuy, Curt Johnson, and Grace P. Hayes, Dictionary of Military Terms: A Guide to the Language of Warfare and Military Institutions (New York, 1986): 88.
21. New-York Packet, November 28, 1788; New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27, 1798. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: 47-51. For the celebration of national holidays before the Civil War, see Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1988): 69-84 and Cecilia Elizabeth Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, 1999): 3-23.
22. New-York Packet, November 27, 1787.
23. American Minerva, November 26, 1796; New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27, 1798.
24. The New-York Journal, and Daily Patriotic Register, November 27, 1787, December 3, 1789; New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27, 1798. New York City Common Council, Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831, v. 2 (New York: n.p., 1831): 51, 53, 120, 202, 410, 484, 588, 689, 691. Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army, enlarged edition (Bloomington, 1984): 74-94. Russell F. Weigley to author, October 12, 1999, letter in author's possession. See also Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (New York, 1979): 37-38, 45-48, 341-360.
25. U.S. Congress, Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, v. 1, From March 3, 1789 to March 3, 1791 (Washington, D.C., 1834): 949-50.
26. Ibid., 958-959. George Adams Boyd, Elias Boudinot: Patriot and Statesman, 1740-1821 (Princeton, 1952): 172-173. George Washington, "Thanksgiving Proclamation," October 3, 1789, in The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, v. 30, June 20, 1788-January 21, 1790, ed. by John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, D.C., 1939): 427-428; New York Packet, November 24, 1789; New-York Weekly Journal, and Weekly Register, December 3, 1789; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, v. 6, Patriot and President (New York, 1954): 246. On Thanksgiving, see Jack Santino, All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life (Urbana, 1994): 167-178; Lin T. Humphrey, "Thanksgiving Day," American Folklore: An Encyclopedia: 705-06; and Hatch, comp. and ed., American Book of Days: 1053-57. On the national capital, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York, 1993): 163-193.
27. Although Washington's decision to declare November 26th, 1789 a day of prayer and thanksgiving was not intended to create a holiday with a fixed place on the annual calendar, it did establish a relationship between Thanksgiving and late November that became meaningful later. Before the early twentieth century, there was no single, nationally standardized Thanksgiving but rather a patchwork of thanksgivings that varied by region, class, and ethnicity. The custom of celebrating the holiday on the last Thursday in November was nonetheless established in New England and the Middle Atlantic states by the 1840s. The creation of a national legal holiday took place independently. When Abraham Lincoln revived the idea of a national Thanksgiving in 1863 and when Franklin D. Roosevelt codified it in 1942, both slated the holiday for the last Thursday in November because that was when the first Thanksgiving day following the Constitution's adoption had occurred. Although Lincoln did not explicitly link his thanksgiving proclamation to Washington's 1789 proclamation, he emphasized the same themes that Washington did--war, national independence, and national unity under the Constitution--and he chose to issue it on the same day of the year, October 3rd. The fact that Lincoln and Roosevelt designated Thanksgiving for the last Thursday in November rather than for November 25th or 26th indicates that the original connection to the evacuation of New York City had been forgotten. Sarah Anne Todd, Diary, entries for November 31, 1837, November 27, 1846, November 25, 1847, and November 25, 1851, Library, New-York Historical Society, New York, NY (hereafter cited as N-YHS); Henry Dana Ward, Diary, entry for November 27, 1851, Rare Book and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY; Andrew Lester, Diary, entry for November 25, 1852, N-YHS; John Ward Diary, entry for November 24, 1858, N-YHS; Alfred Janson Bloor, Diary, 1848-1858, entries for November 29, 1855 and November 26, 1857, N-YHS. New York City Common Council, Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831, v. 8: 87-88 and v. 9: 354; New York Daily Express, November 25, 1837. Hatch, comp. and ed., American Book of Days: 1053-57; Santino, All Around the Year: 172. Abraham Lincoln, "Proclamation of Thanksgiving," October 3, 1863: 496-97, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, v. 6 (New Brunswick, 1953).
28. New York Journal, and Patriotic Register, November 26, 1791. Emphasis in original.
29. New-York Journal, and Daily Patriotic Register, November 27, 1787.
30. New York City Society of St. Tammany, or Columbian Order, "Minutes, March 4, 1799-Feb. 1, 1808," entry for meeting of November 25, 1799. Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. New York City Society of Tammany, or Columbian, Order, Committee of Amusement, "Minutes, Oct. 24, 1791-Feb. 23, 1795," entry for meeting of November 26, 1792. Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY See also New-York Journal, and Patriotic Register, November 29, 1790 and November 27, 1793.
31. New York Evening Post, November 25, 1801, November 25, 1807, November 26, 1810. November 25, 1811; November 25, 1813, November 28, 1815. For a conception of customs as "the usual way of doing things," defined as "an activity performed with such regularity that it is considered social behavior or part of social protocol," see Richard Sweterlitsch, "Custom," American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvald (New York, 1996): 186.
32. New York Journal and State Gazette, December 2, 1784.
33. New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27, 1798, November 26, 1799; The Spectator, December 1, 1798, November 27, 1799; American Minerva, November 26, 1796; New-York Packet, November 28, 1788. See also Elkins and McKittrick, The Age of Federalism: 163-193.
34. American Minerva, November, 26, 1796; The Spectator, November 27, 1799.
35. Dr. Alexander Anderson, Diary, entry for November 25, 1794. N-YHS.
36. John Anderson, Jr., Diary, entry for November 25, 1795. N-YHS.
37. Alexander Anderson Diary, entry for November 25, 1793. N-YHS.
38. The New-York Journal, and Daily Patriotic Register, November 27, 1787, December 3, 1789, November 29, 1790, November 27, 1791; New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27, 1798, November 26, 1799. On crowds, see Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987): 5-35, 43-52 and George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1848, revd. ed. (London, 1981): 3-16.
39. Two reasons why Evacuation Day was sometimes observed in Brooklyn and, less often, in Jersey City and Hoboken are that, first, the British also occupied these areas during the Revolutionary War and that, second, the three cities became part of New York's cultural orbit by the mid-nineteenth century. New York Herald, November 26, 1847, November 26, 1850, and November 26, 1854; New York Times, November 26, 1853, November 27, 1855, November 26, 1856, and November 26, 1858. Wood's Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1813 (New York, 1812): unpaginated; Hutchins' Improved: Being an Almanac and Ephemeris for the Year of Our Lord 1818 (New York, 1817): unpaginated; Hutchins' Improved: Being an Almanac for the Year of Our Lord, 1821 (New York, 1820): unpaginated; Farmers' Diary, or Catskill Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1831 (Catskill, 1830): unpaginated; Hutchin's Revived Almanac, for the Year of Our Lord 1833 (New York, 1832): unpaginated; Hutchins' Improved Family Almanac for the Year 1845 (New York, 1844): 15. One of the few times Evacuation Day was commemorated beyond the New York City area was in 1829, when residents of Baltimore dedicated a statue of George Washington on November 25th to acknowledge the aid New Yorkers had sent during the War of 1812. New York Evening Post, November 25, 1829; excerpt from unnamed and undated Baltimore newspaper, quoted in New York Journal of Commerce, November 28, 1829. New York Tribune, November 26, 1863. Walter Lord, The Dawn's Early Light (New York, 1972): 235-37, 295-97.
40. Sue Ellen Thompson and Barbara W. Carlson, comps., Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary (Detroit, 1994): 160; Allen Cabaniss, "Holidays," Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: 628-29; Hatch, comp. and ed., The American Book of Days: 227-30, 359-60, 383-85, 686-90, 790-91; Schmidt, Consumer Rites: 21, 33-34. The insistence that Evacuation Day had national significance was part of an effort to create a heroic past for New York City in response to its rapid economic and population growth after 1820. See Clifton Hood, "Journeying to 'Old New York': Elite New Yorkers and Their Invention of an Idealized City History in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries." Journal of Urban History 28 (September 2002): 699-716.
41. Shils, Tradition: 36-38, 63-74; Edward Shils, "Traditions and the Generations: On the Difficulties of Transmission," American Scholar 53 (Winter 1983-84): 27-40.
42. John Pintard to Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, November 25, 1828: 47, in Letters from John Pintard to His Daughter, Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, 1816-1833, v. 3, 1828-1831 (New York, 1940).
43. John Pintard to Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, November 25, 1825: 202, in Letters from John Pintard to His Daughter, Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, 1816-1833, v. 2, 1821-1827 (New York, 1940).
44. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, v. 1, Young Man in New York, 1835-1849 (New York, 1952): 6.
45. Ibid.: 42.
46. Ibid.: 42.
47. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong., v. 4, Post-War Years, 1865-1875 (New York, 1952): 458.
48. Ibid.: 458.
49. American Minerva, November 26, 1796; The Spectator, November 28, 1798. New-York Journal, and Patriotic Register, December 5, 1792.
50. New York Evening Post, November 26, 1821, New York Herald, November 26, 1847. The understanding of the evacuation was simplified, too. Nearly every account written before the 1820s described the evacuation of the British troops or the British army. In the 1820s, New Yorkers started referring to the evacuation of the British. The two usages were commonplace until the 1870s, when the new form became standard. The new usage did not take into account the complexity of the city's transfer from British to American hands. It also indicates that nineteenth-century New Yorkers imagined that Evacuation Day marked New York's transition from a British colonial town into a modern American city, a transition leading to two related developments: the emergence of the United States and the growth of New York City as the national metropolis. New York Times, November 27, 1855, New York Evening Post, November 26, 1823. For an example of Evacuation Day's use as a break point in city history, see William L. Stone, History of New York City from the Discovery to the Present Day (New York, 1865): 163.
51. New York Evening Post, November 25, 1828.
52. New York American, November 26, 1839.
53. New York Herald, November 26, 1848.
54. Claims of declension also involved violations of the sacred, in terms of Durkheim's sacred/profane dichotomy. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London, 1915): 36-42. See also Alessandro Falassi, "Festival: Definition and Morphology:" 1-3, in Alessandro Falassi, ed., Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque, 1987) and Stanley Brandes, Power and Persuasion: Fiestas and Social Control in Rural Mexico (Philadelphia, 1988): 1-9, 167-186.
55. New York American, November 26, 1839; New York Herald, November 26, 1848.
56. New York Evening Post, November 26, 1820; New York Journal of Commerce, November 28, 1829; New York Daily Express, November 27, 1837; New York Times, November 26, 1858, November 26, 1859.
57. New York Journal of Commerce, November 28, 1829, November 27, 1830; New York Times, November 28, 1858. Although the decline of American hostility to Britain has been advanced as an explanation of Evacuation Day's dissolution, the holiday was rarely used to express anti-British sentiments after the War of 1812. One exception involves Irish-Americans, discussed later. Another exception followed the Oregon controversy of the 1840s. In 1849 the New York Herald celebrated Evacuation Day for humbling "the pride of mighty Britain ... in the dust." New York Herald, November 27, 1849. In 1850 the Herald re-imagined the evacuation by having American soldiers drive the fleeing British troops to their ships in disarray and "at the point of the bayonet" and capture the Union Jack atop Fort George as a war trophy. New York Herald, November 26, 1850.
58. W. Lloyd Warner, The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans, Yankee City Series (New Haven, 1959): 278. For a critical assessment of Warner's neo-Durkheimian analysis, see Steven Lukes, Essays in Social Theory (New York, 1977): 52-73.
59. New York Times, November 27, 1854, November 26, 1876, November 26, 1878; November 26, 1885; New York Herald, November 26, 1845; New York Times, November 26, 1885, November 26, 1890. Although the parades sometimes passed by, and paused at, the Worth Monument, the chief New York site associated with the Mexican War, Evacuation Day was not used to memorialize the Mexican War. New York Times, November 27, 1865.
60. New York Evening Post, November 27, 1820; New York Journal of Commerce, November 27, 1830. On the social dimension of early nineteenth-century parades, see also Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984): 3-22 and Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1986): 9-22.
61. National Trades' Union, November 28, 1835; New York Herald, November 26, 1841, November 26, 1848; New York Times, November 27, 1855.
62. The adoption of a new route moved the parade to the new residential and commercial districts being developed farther uptown. By the 1830s, the parade went down Broadway from Union Square to City Hall Park. The spatial expansion of New York City also precipitated urban development in areas that had Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites, including Fort Washington in upper Manhattan and McGowan's Pass in what is now Central Park. These sites, formerly beyond the city limits and not featured in the early commemorations, were used for flag-raising and other ceremonies during the nineteenth century, as urban growth led to these previously forgotten sites being rediscovered, viewed as 'historic,' and venerated as ruins. New York Herald, November 26, 1840, November 26, 1844, November 26, 1847, November 27, 1854, November 26, 1858; New York Times, November 27, 1854, November 27, 1857. See also Henry A. Patterson, Diary, July 1836-June 1839, entry for November 25, 1836, N-YHS.
63. Falassi, "Festival: Definition and Morphology:" 10, in Falassi, ed., Time Out of Time. For the relationship between contests and upper-class virtues such as honor and bravery, see Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London, 1949): 1-27, 63-71.
64. John Ward, Jr., Diary, entry for November 25, 1859. N-YHS. Bloor Diary, 1848-1858, entry for November 25, 1857.
65. New York Times, November 26, 1859.
66. Of the 1859 parade, for instance, Ward merely noted: "In the morning at 10.15 am I paraded in the 6th Company, 7th Reg't. Capt. Nevers." Ward Diary, entry for November 25, 1859. N-YHS.
67. Ward Diary, entry for November 24, 1865. N-YHS. New York Daily News, November 25, 1865; New York Sun, November 25, 1865; New York Tribune, November 26, 1865; New York Times, November 25 and 27, 1865.
68. Irish-American, November 30, 1850, November 29, 1856.
69. Irish World, November 23, 1873.
70. Irish World, November 27 and 28, 1873.
71. Irish-American, November 21 and 28, December 7 and 8, 1868, December 6, 1884; Irish World, November 23 and 25, 1876. The Battle of Lookout Mountain took place on November 23-25, 1863, with the climatic assault on Missionary Ridge occurring on the 25th. The one exception to my statement that Irish-American newspapers reduced their coverage of Evacuation Day in the late 1870s involves the holiday's centennial, in 1883, discussed below. Since the newspapers that discussed the centennial celebration did so to condemn the tradition's manipulation by an Anglophilic business elite, their commentaries are consistent with the point that Evacuation Day no longer fit the needs of many Irish-Americans.
72. Irish-American, December 7, 1872, December 2, 1876, November 30, 1878; Advocate, November 21, 1914. Evacuation Day is a legal holiday in Massachusetts' Suffolk County. Thompson and Carlson, comps., Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary: 100-01; Ruth W. Gregory, Anniversaries and Holidays, 4th ed. (Chicago, 1983): 38.
73. New York Times, November 26, 1870, November 26, 1872, November 26, 1873, September 15 and November 25 and 26, 1876, November 26, 1875, November 27, 1877, November 26, 1878. 'Conventionalisation' is F. C. Bartlett's term for the process by which new customs, beliefs, and trends become established as memories. F.C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge, 1932): 244-246, 268-280. For a re-assessment of Bartlett, see Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, 1990): 55-59. For the Civil War's transformation of American understandings of war, see Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York, 1991): 321-417; Gerald F. Lindeman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York, 1987): 7-33, 266-297; Philip Shaw Paludan, "A People's Contest:" The Union and the Civil War, 1861-1865, 2nd ed. (Lawrence, 1996): ix-xx, 339-374; and David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore, 2000): 1-10. For changing understandings of war remembrance, see O'Leary, To Die For: 1-8, 29-48; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991): 3-14; Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields, 2nd ed. (Urbana, 1993): 1-7; James M. Mayo, War Memorials as Sacred Places: The American Experience and Beyond (New York, 1988): 1-13; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: 3-20, 162-208; and Blight, Race and Reunion: 1-30. For masculinity in the late nineteenth century, see Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990); Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995); and Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996). For the historical memory of the Revolutionary War, see Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party; David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere's Ride (New York, 1994); Barbara MacDonald Powell, "The Most Celebrated Encampment: Valley Forge in American Culture, 1777-1983" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1983); Lorett Treese, Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol (University Park, 1995). See also Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (New York, 1979) and Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington, Man and Monument (Boston, 1958). For Saratoga, see Alfred Billings Street, Burgoyne: A Poem Written for the Centennial Celebration at Schulyerville, on the 17th of October 1877, of Burgoyne's Surrender (Albany, 1877); and William L. Stone, comp., Ballads and Poems Relating to the Burgoyne Campaign (Albany, 1893). For Bunker Hill, see Daniel Webster, An Address Delivered at the Laying of the Cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument (Boston, 1825).
74. New York Daily Tribune, November 26, 1861. See also New York World, November 26, 1861 and New York Times, November 26, 1861.
75. New York Daily Tribune, November 26, 1862.
76. New York Tribune, November 26, 1862, November 26, 1863, November 26, 1865, November 26, 1867, November 26, 1868; New York Times, November 25 and 27, 1865, November 27, 1866, November 26, 1867, November 26, 1868, November 26, 1869; New York Daily News, November 25, 1865.
77. New York Times, November 25, 1870; New York Tribune, November 26, 1873, November 26, 1876, November 26, 1879; New York Herald, November 26, 1870, November 26, 1872, November 25, 1873, November 26, 1877, November 26, 1878; New York World, November 26 1874, November 26, 1875
78. New York Herald, November 24, 1872.
79. New York Times, November 26, 1870, November 26, 1872, November 26, 1873, September 15 and November 25 and 26, 1876, November 26, 1875, November 27, 1877, November 26, 1878.
80. Shils, Tradition: 253-254, 283-286. Shils says that the resurgence of an attenuated tradition occurs when there are still some adherents to it, a point that applies to the revival of Evacuation Day by Stevens and the Sons of the Revolution. Shils also distinguishes between the resurgence of a tradition in the process of dissolution and the reconstruction of a tradition that has disappeared.
81. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: 101-131; Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans' and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783-1900 (Cambridge, 1955): 44-73. Report of the Joint Committee on the Centennial Celebration of the Evacuation of New York by the British, November 26, 1883, with an Historical Introduction by John Austin Stevens (New York, 1885): 7, 160-169; Minutes of the Committee of Arrangements, volume 1, entries for November 8, 9, and 13, 1883, Evacuation Day, Committee of Arrangements Box, John Austin Stevens Papers, N-YHS; New York City Board of Aldermen, Proceedings of the Board of Aldermen of the City of New York, from October 1st 1883 to January 7th, 1884 (New York, 1884): 7, 404-405, 620-625; New York Times, November 24, 26, and 27, 1883; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, December 1, 1883; Andrew Lester, Diary, November 23, 1879-April 29, 1888, entry for November 26, 1883, N-YHS.
82. Irish-American, December 2, 1883.
83. Irish-American, December 8, 1883.
84. New York Sun, November 25, 1883.
85. John Swinton's Paper, November 25, 1883.
86. New York Times, December 24, 1883, November 6, 1884. For members' names, see Society of the Sons of the Revolution, New York Society, Yearbook, 1899 (New York, 1895): 9-12. The Sons of the Revolution (SR) was separate from and a rival of the Sons of the American Revolution. Society of the Sons of the Revolution, New York Society, Yearbook, 1899: 9. See also Davies, Patriotism on Parade: 47-53; Kammen, Mystic Chords: 211-224; and John St. Paul, Jr., The History of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution (New Orleans, 1962): 1-4, 7-9. For the D.A.R., see Peggy Anderson, The Daughters: An Unconventional Look at America's Fan Club--The DAR (New York, 1974) and Martha Strayer, The D.A.R.: An Informal History (Washington, D.C., 1958). For the colonial revival movement, see Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture, 1876-1986 (Cambridge, 1988).
87. Hood, "Journeying to 'Old New York'" Journal of Urban History: 699-716.
88. James Riker, Evacuation Day, 1783; Its Many Stirring Events; With Recollections of Capt. John Van Arsdale of the Veteran Corps of Artillery, By Whose Efforts on That Day the Enemy Were Circumvented and the American Flag Successfully Raised on the Battery (New York, 1883): 3.
89. Ibid.: 3.
90. New York Times, November 26, 1890, November 26, 1891.
91. Daniel J. Singal, "Towards a Definition of American Modernism," American Quarterly 39 (Spring 1987): 12-13.
92. New York Times, November 26, 1884.
93. New York Times, November 26, 1891, November 26, 1892, November 25 and 26, 1893, November 26, 1896, November 26, 1899, November 26, 1901, November 26, 1908; New York Tribune, November 26, 1895, November 26, 1897; New York World, November 26, 1893, November 26, 1895, November 26, 1896, November 26, 1897.
94. New York Times, November 25, 1888.
95. New York Tribune, November 26, 1897; New York World, November 26, 1895, November 25, 1900; New York Times, November 26, 1907, November 26, 1914.
96. New York Times, November 26, 1907.
97. New York World, November 26, 1906, November 26, 1908; New York Times, November 26 1912, November 26, 1913, November 26, 1914.
98. On modernism and urban culture, see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago, 1981); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995); and Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000).
99. New York Sun, November 26, 1868, November 25, 1875, November 30, 1882; New York World, November 26, 1897; New York Times, November 26, 1903. For Thanksgiving and the nationalization of New England regionalism, see Joseph Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 2001): 195-96. On the social significance of forgetting or not remembering customs, see David Lowenthal, "Preface:" xii, in The Art of Forgetting.
100. New York Times, October 19, 1924. William A. Marble, "Address of Welcome," Eighteenth Annual Banquet of the Empire Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, Hotel Waldorf-Astoria, New York, November 25, 1907, 41-42, in the Sons of the American Revolution, Empire State Society, Yearbook of the Empire State Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, 1907-1908 (New York, 1908.).
By Clifton Hood
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Department of History
Geneva, NY 14456-3397
COPYRIGHT 2004 Journal of Social History
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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