Happy Evacuation Day!
New York's little-remembered holiday
While everyone is busy prepping for Thanksgiving, tomorrow is actually my favorite holiday, one that is seldom celebrated in New York (or anywhere) anymore: Evacuation Day.
Like Patriots’ Day—which marks the commencement of the War of Independence (and today is the date of the Boston Marathon)—Evacuation Day commemorates the end of the Revolution. On November 25, 1783, George Washington led the victorious Americans into the city and the final British troops evacuated, giving the holiday its name.
The British had surrendered to Washington at the Battle of Yorktown over two years earlier, in October 1781. However, despite the subsequent ratification of the Peace of Paris that ended the war, British troops refused to leave their headquarters in New York City. In part, that’s because the British commander, Guy Carelton, didn’t want to abandon the large number of Loyalist refugees who had come to the city following the British surrender. Many of those refugees eventually ended up settling in New Brunswick, Canada.
To end the occupation once and for all, George Washington returned to New York on November 25, 1783, returning to the city for the first time since he had lost Manhattan to the British in 1776. In a carefully negotiated handover, British troops pulled out of the city that morning, sailing from the Battery through the Narrows. (Allegedly, the last shot of the Revolutionary War was fired in anger at the shore of Staten Island.) Once the British had gone, Washington and his commanders marched into the city in triumph.
However, the British had left at least one insult behind. Someone had run a Union Jack up a flagpole, cut the halyard, and greased the pole so that when Washington arrived he’d still see the British colors flying over the city. In a story that seems so good that it’s often written off as legend, a young sailor named John van Arsdale decided to rectify the situation. Using nails, he created cleats on the side of the flagpole and managed to carry a Stars-and-Stripes up to the top of the pole and replace the Union Jack before Washington’s arrival.
Van Arsdale’s exploits are what you see in the top image. However, bear in mind that this image is a propaganda piece published by a short-lived periodical called The Pictorial War Record, the name of which nearly encapsulates its mission: it published pictures of war. Its contents were made up mostly of images from the Civil War (which was less than a generation old at that point), but other conflicts sometimes made the cut.
In 1883, when this image was published, Evacuation Day was celebrating its centennial with great gusto. There were parades, speeches, fireworks, and the unveiling of the JQA Ward’s handsome statue of George Washington on the steps of old Custom House on Wall Street, the building (which today we call Federal Hall) that replaced that spot where Washington had been sworn in as president.1
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