Fight at the New York City Jail

When we left off William Heth’s account of the New York doctors’ riot of April 1788, the anti-dissection crowd had started to attack the city jail, where some anatomy teachers and students had taken refuge. Heth wrote:

The militia were ordered out, small parties were sent to disperse them [the rioters], but they instantly disarmed those attachments, broke their guns to peices, arid made them scamper to save their lives.

The evening advanced apace, and the affair became very serious. The Governor [George Clinton, shown here], after trudging about all day, first with the mob in the morning, endeavouring to pacify and accommodate, and in the afternoon to assemble a body respectable enough to preserve the goal [i.e., jail] and to restore peace and good order, advanced about dusk with a number of the Citizens, but without any kind of order or without any other than a few side arms and canes, while the Adjutant-Gen’l of the militia [Nicholas Fish], about 300 yards in his rear, led up in very good order about 150 men, tho’ not more than half with firearms, among whom were many gentlemen of the city and strangers, volunteers.

This body were not long before the goal before the bricks and stones from the mob provoked several to fire, and perhaps their might, on the whole, have been 60 guns discharged, but this is mere guess. This body made their way into the goal where a party remained all night, but a sally of 60 or 70 were defeated. Three of the mob were killed on the spot, and one has since died of his wounds, and several were wounded. One of them was bayonetted on attempting to force into a window of the prison which he saw filled with armed men, a proof of the astonishing lengths to which popular rage will sometimes carry men.

Numbers on the Governor’s side, besides himself, are severely bruised. Baron Steuben rec’d a wound just above the corner of his left eye and nose, from which he lost a great deal of blood. Mr. [John] Jay got his Scull almost cracked, and are both now laid up. Gen’l [John] Armstrong has got a bruised leg, but is able to go out.

Yesterday the militia turned out again, and made a respectable appearance, and paraded about exceedingly, both Horse and Foot, but it must be observed that the enemy were not be heard of.

In truth numbers who were in the mob on Monday evening turned out yesterday to support government.

It looks like “Gen’l Armstrong” was John Armstrong, Jr. (1758-1843), adjutant general of Pennsylvania and central figure in the so-called “Newburgh Conspiracy.” He was in New York as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and would soon settle in that state.

According to a letter from John Jay’s wife Sarah to her mother, it took a while for doctors “to decide whether his brain was injur’d or not.” While they debated, the doctors bled him, of course. Jay recovered.

TOMORROW: Treating the baron’s injury.

Washington “holding aloft a large stone”?

On the night of 29-30 Aug 1776, the Continental Army evacuated almost all of its troops from Long Island to Manhattan Island as the bigger and stronger British military closed in.

Some authors continue to treat the success of this evacuation as a sign of Providence looking out for the American cause. Of course, Providence hadn’t seen fit to give the Continentals a victory in the preceding Battle of Brooklyn, and wouldn’t offer many more victories for quite a while. In 1776 the evacuation was seen mostly as a desperate and ignominious retreat.

Among the anecdotes of the evacuation is this about Gen. George Washington, from Henry Stiles’s History of the City of Brooklyn, published in 1867:

It is related, on the authority of Col. Fish, one of Washington’s aids, Judge Daggett of New Haven, and others, that the crowd and confusion among the troops who were, at this juncture, huddled on the beach, was extreme, and bordered on a panic; and that Washington, annoyed and alarmed at its probable consequences, sprang to the side of a boat into which the men were crowding, and, holding aloft a large stone with both hands, ordered them, with an impassioned oath, to leave the boat instanter, or he would “sink it to hell.” It is needless to say that the towering figure and wrathful eye of their revered general restored the scared troops to their senses, and the embarkation proceeded with more order than before.

That dramatic story shows up in many subsequent histories of the event, including recent ones. But is it reliable? Would Gen. Washington have risked either a precious boat or his even more precious credibility in case his threat didn’t succeed? Was he so upset as to lose his temper in front of his men?

As his first authority, Stiles cited “Col. Fish, one of Washington’s aids.” The commander didn’t have any aides de camp named Fish, but Nicholas Fish (1758-1833, shown above, courtesy of the New York Society Library) was part of the Continental Army administration later in the war.

However, when Fish died, the Knickerbocker, or New York Magazine, stated:

Colonel Fish was Aid-de-Camp to Brig. Gen. John Morin Scott, and he and his corps went into service, “as six months’ men,” on the 21st Nov. 1776…

Thus, according to his obituary Fish wasn’t in the American army until almost three months after the evacuation from Brooklyn.

Stiles’s second authority is “Judge Daggett of New Haven.” I think that’s David Daggett (1764-1851), a Connecticut jurist and Congressman. Daggett was only eleven years old during the Battle of Brooklyn. He was growing up in Attleboro, and never served in the Continental Army.

Stiles said Fish, Daggett, and “others” told the same story, so the anecdote was evidently widespread. However, none of the many men who were supposedly present at the moment appears to have left a firsthand account.