New York City

New York City was the great prize the British held for nearly the entire war. From September 1776, when General Howe's forces drove Washington's army out of Manhattan, until November 25, 1783, when the last British troops departed, the city served as the primary British military base in North America. It was the longest occupation of any American city during the Revolution, and it transformed New York into a place of divided loyalties, wartime suffering, and strategic consequence.

The Battle of Long Island in August 1776 was the largest engagement of the war, and it was a disaster for the Americans. Washington's army was outmaneuvered and nearly trapped on Brooklyn Heights before a desperate nighttime evacuation across the East River saved the army from destruction. The subsequent retreat through Manhattan and into New Jersey was one of the lowest points of the American cause.

Under British occupation, New York became a magnet for Loyalists from across the colonies and a center of British military planning. It was also a place of extraordinary suffering. The Great Fire of September 1776 destroyed a quarter of the city. The prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay became floating death camps where an estimated 11,500 American prisoners died of disease, starvation, and neglect — more Americans than died in all the battles of the war combined.

Evacuation Day — November 25, 1783 — was celebrated in New York for decades as a holiday marking the end of occupation. Washington rode into the city at the head of the Continental Army as the British sailed away. The city that had been the enemy's stronghold became, briefly, the first capital of the new nation.