New York at War (2 page)

The tension between a sense of immunity and denial on the one hand, and of vulnerability on the other, runs as a deep current through New York’s history. Urban life (and not just in New York) tends to breed two contrasting sensibilities. On one side, cities imply a sheltering anonymity, a safety in numbers, a calculation that the odds of survival favor the individual who can disappear into the crowd or find safety behind one of a million closed doors. On the other side, cities evoke disorder, claustrophobia, random misfortune, and the threat of becoming a prime target for dangerous and often devious enemies. These two sensibilities can pit city dwellers against each other and just as often unite them in ambivalence. At moments of crisis and war, New Yorkers have grappled with these two aspects of their city on a day-to-day basis, weighing the odds of safety against the risks of danger—sometimes consciously, sometimes below the surface of conscious intent.

Other tensions have also pulsed through the city’s streets and neighborhoods in times of stress. The ocean that brought commerce to its shores also made New York the world’s great landfall for immigrants, a role that shaped the city’s identity from its earliest decades. The diversity of its communities, the ongoing invigoration and rejuvenation of New York by the peoples of the world seeking opportunity and freedom here, has always been one of the city’s greatest strengths and glories. But the challenges of mutual toleration and accommodation between different religious, ethnic, and racial groups, many of whom brought deep animosities from their distant homelands and embraced new ones here, has also repeatedly shaped New York. So have tensions between natives and newcomers and between rich and poor. In times of international stress and war, New Yorkers have turned on each other, transforming the city’s streets into battlegrounds and its public forums into arenas of mistrust and repression. Battles over ostensibly antagonistic or hidden loyalties, the legitimacy of dissent during wartime, and the extent to which “enemies within the gates” undermine unity and safety have all been fought here. New York has recurrently been a city at war with itself.

These tensions have been vented in both explosive and trivial ways. In late September 2001, I watched on lower Broadway as a turbaned Sikh driver tried, mistakenly, to enter the no-drive zone around Ground Zero. A burly New York City policeman brusquely waved him onto Chambers Street instead. “Bin Laden himself couldn’t get through here,” the officer half-smirked, half-sneered to a colleague. The anger, fear, and indiscriminate suspicion embodied in that casual remark has a long history in New York, although the specific wars and suspected groups have changed. This is not to deny that, over the course of the city’s history, as we shall see, some New Yorkers have served as spies, saboteurs, and agents of belligerent powers, and hence as real threats to the city’s and nation’s security. Rather, it is to acknowledge that New York has been a place where the task of picking out real enemies from the communities whose innocent majorities provide them with unwitting cover has been a recurrent challenge.

During times of war, New Yorkers have grappled with the conundrum of how to ensure domestic security while maintaining a society defined by openness and inclusion. Too often, they have failed to temper their answers with wisdom or justice. The difficulty of distinguishing enemies from innocents in a place where different peoples converge but remain suspicious of each other is one of the more sobering legacies of New York’s experiences. So is the difficulty of sustaining tolerance in times of great stress and fear, a truth borne out by the speed and eagerness with which generations of New Yorkers have been willing to accuse each other of disloyalty and treachery during wartime. New Yorkers have repeatedly had to confront the conflicting demands of toleration and “homeland security,” and their struggles over these conflicts, as well as their failure to come up with perfect or, often, even viable solutions, can produce a shock of recognition.

My goal in this book is to restore a military dimension to New York’s history—a dimension that has been largely erased from the city’s historical narrative and public memory. New Yorkers have always been quick to forget yesterday’s battles, and most Americans have no awareness of the city’s role in the nation’s wars. After September 11, as I stumbled on sites of military significance scattered across the city, I was struck by how thoroughly erased their history was, or at best how modestly they were distinguished by plaques and monuments largely ignored by natives and visitors alike. Founded not as a refuge for embattled religious groups but as a base for commercial exchange, New York has always been about pursuing the main chance today or tomorrow and has little time for the events of yesterday. “The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost,” John Jay Chapman recognized in 1909. Looking to the future and to appreciating land values, New Yorkers have consistently torn down the landmarks of their past (despite the lamentations, and intermittent victories, of the minority of preservationists in their midst). “The very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century,” former mayor Philip Hone complained in 1845, “and one generation of men seems studious to remove all relics of those who preceded them.” As New York became ever more spectacularly the “capital of capitalism,” looking forward meant building the city anew, over and over again, while effacing its obstructive, irrelevant, and profitless past.
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By the same token, New York’s role as the great immigrant city has played a part in reducing its consciousness of its own history. Wave after wave of immigrants brought their own deeply felt memories and allegiances to New York’s shores, and they continue to do so. For these multitudes, New York has been the place to start afresh, to grapple with the pain and exhilaration of preserving cherished traditions while also reinventing oneself as something new and different. For these newcomers, the meaning of abandoned forts glimpsed out of a ferry or trolley window proved as immaterial as for the real estate developers bent on demolishing old sites and building anew. When new wars loomed in the daily lives of these New Yorkers, the conflicts often fostered segregated sets of meanings, rather than a unifying narrative that survived in the city’s shared public memory, precisely because war pitted different groups, and their divergent agendas, against each other.

There is, of course, a simpler and more obvious reason why New Yorkers, like people in many other places, have forgotten so much of their city’s past. Memories of communal conflict, loss, and fear are painful in much the same way as traumatic individual memories. Such memories nag at us with the reminder that we can be attacked again, that we can feel vulnerable again, that once more we can become prey to anxiety and suspicion. Putting such things behind us becomes a kind of psychic insurance policy against their future recurrence. Much of this amnesia is healthy and vitally necessary for urban existence. Cities, after all, are neither museums nor mausoleums but living, breathing places. Cities (and nations) survive because their populations are able to put sorrowful pasts behind them. “Rebuild,” the finger scrawl in the dust commanded in late September 2001.

Rebuilding, however, poses the risk of so eradicating vestiges of our history that we are unprepared when unfolding events throw new challenges—new “history”—in our way. We can find no solace or perspective for present tragedies in a past that has been erased from memory and whose landmarks are no longer visible. As long as New York City remains one of the world’s great urban centers, and as long as it persists as an open society worth living in, it will be vulnerable to attack. This is one lesson of its four centuries of survival and glory. It is a history we should face and seek to understand, rather than turn our backs on.

CHAPTER 1

Savages and Salty Men

The Dutch-Lenape Encounter, 1609–1664

E
arly on September 6, 1609, Henry Hudson, the English captain of the Dutch ship the
Halve Maen
, dispatched John Colman and four other sailors to reconnoiter an inlet to the north of their anchorage. Two days earlier, Hudson had nosed the eighty-ton vessel into what Robert Juet, one of his officers, described as “a very good harbour,” sheltered by a long grassy sandbar. Steering a small boat northward, the five men passed through the Narrows separating Staten and Long Islands into the broader expanse of Upper New York Bay and possibly Newark Bay, observing a shoreline, in Juet’s words, “pleasant with grass and flowers, and goodly trees, as ever they had seen, and very sweet smells came from them.”
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As the boat headed back to its mother ship, Colman and his comrades saw something that must have quickened their pulses: two Indian canoes—one carrying twelve men, the other fourteen—bearing down on them. At some point, the five sailors decided that trying to outrun their pursuers would be fruitless. As the Indians closed in, the Europeans tried frantically to ignite the fuse of the matchlock gun they had brought along, but a sudden rainstorm extinguished their match. An arrow plunged into Colman’s neck, killing him. Two of his boat mates were also wounded. Somehow, the four survivors managed to escape further pursuit, but spent an exhausting night rowing to regain the
Halve Maen
, which they could not find in the darkness.

Colman’s death constitutes the first one documented in what is today the New York City region and the first recorded fatality of an act of war in the region’s history. While the Lenape people of the river estuary may well have warred among themselves and against neighboring Indians before the arrival of Europeans, scant evidence of their military history survives. Early European accounts mention instances of belligerence between the Lenape and the Mahicans and Iroquois to their north and west, but the exact nature of these conflicts, and whether they predated European arrival, remains murky. The lack of a Lenape written language and written records has consigned their “prehistory” to an obscurity that archaeologists and historians have only recently begun to illuminate.
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John Colman was far from his home that day in 1609. In the five months since the
Halve Maen
had sailed from the island of Texel on the Netherlands coast under orders from the Dutch East India Company, he and his fellow seamen had first headed into the frigid arctic waters above Scandinavia in a failed search for a navigable passage to the riches of Asia, then west across the Atlantic to seek a similar channel through the New World of North America.

On September 4, after working his way along what we now know as the New Jersey coast, Hudson had anchored his vessel in the bay behind the sandbar later called Sandy Hook. As some of his twenty-odd crew members cast nets from the beach to catch edible fish, they were joined by curious visitors. Robert Juet noted in his log that “this day the people of the country came aboard of us, seeming very glad of our coming, and brought green tobacco, and gave us of it for knives and beads. They go in deer skins loose, well dressed . . . and are very civil.”
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The next day more Lenape Indians, both men and women, came aboard the ship, some adorned with copper amulets and carrying tobacco pipes, many wearing feathers and “diverse sorts of good furs.” Although the Indians brought hemp as gifts or items of barter, Juet recorded the crew’s relief upon their guests’ departure. “At night they went on land again,” he noted, “so we rode very quiet, but durst not trust them.”
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The Indians’ friendly overtures did little to overcome the Europeans’ engrained distrust. In the century and more since Columbus’s first voyages of discovery, European mariners had told, heard, and embellished stories of encounters with New World natives—Indians who, in some accounts, remained docile and friendly but also sometimes proved treacherous and hostile. This early lore often demonized native peoples and justified their exploitation, and it probably shaped the crew’s first encounter with Indians on the Maine coast six weeks before the Sandy Hook landfall. For reasons not fully clear, twelve of Hudson’s men, armed with muskets, had descended on a village of “savages . . . and took the spoil of them, as they would have done of us.” Hudson’s mixed crew of Dutch and English sailors slept more easily the night of September 5 knowing that the
Halve Maen
’s high deck and cannon stood between them and the natives who had disappeared back into the high grass and oak forests of the shore.
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After Colman’s death and the return of his boat mates, Hudson’s crew carried their comrade’s corpse ashore and buried him at a place they named Colman’s Point, probably amidst the dunes of Sandy Hook. That night, Hudson ordered a particularly vigilant watch. On September 8, Indians returned to the ship with tobacco and corn to trade for knives and beads, with the Europeans anxious to see if “they would make any show of the death of our man.” The barterers seemed ignorant of the confrontation.
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We know nothing about John Colman’s life except that he was one of the English seamen hired for Henry Hudson’s voyage. For that matter, we know little about the events leading to his demise, since our only account of it appears in a few brief lines in Robert Juet’s logbook. Only Europeans left written accounts justifying their interactions with Native Americans in the region Hudson claimed for the Dutch Republic—and all too often, these records offer only a brief glimpse into the area’s tumultuous past.

Hudson would have two other violent confrontations with Indians before sailing back to Europe. On September 11 the
Halve Maen
began ascending the river that would one day bear the captain’s name. Hudson had taken hostage two Lenape men to ensure his ship’s safety (and probably as “gifts” to be presented to the East India Company back in Amsterdam), although they managed to escape from the ship further upriver. After determining on September 22 that the river was not the channel to Asia he had hoped it would be, Hudson sailed back downstream from the vicinity of what is now Albany toward the open Atlantic. He continued to greet and trade with Indians when he sensed it was safe to do so. But on October 1, an Indian climbed from a canoe through the cabin window at the
Halve Maen
’s stern and made off with Juet’s pillow, two shirts, and two belts. A sailor shot and killed the thief. When crewmen manned their small boat to retrieve Juet’s belongings, another Indian, seeking to overturn the boat from the water, had his hand severed by a sword wielded by the
Halve Maen
’s cook and drowned. The next day, incited by one of the escaped hostages, two canoes full of warriors pursued the ship, leading to an exchange of arrows and musket balls that left two or three of the Indians dead. A full-fledged skirmish ensued, with about one hundred Lenape on the shore and in canoes wielding their bows against the ship. Blasts from the ship’s cannon and muskets killed six or seven more. Two days later, having passed the place “called Manna-hata,” the
Halve Maen
was back out to sea, headed for the Netherlands.
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