Dan's Papers - June 29, 2007

It was apparent to most people living in the English Colonies of North America in 1770 that the time had come to break away from the British Crown and declare their independence.

But the farmers and fishermen of the eastern end of Long Island were not among them. To appreciate why, you have to consider just how bountiful the North and South Forks were and how the local residents felt themselves so fully able to prosper and sustain themselves, getting almost all of what they might ever need from the land and sea. And there weren't very many of them, after all. Estimates today are that there were no more than 5,000 residents on the East End in 1776.

There were, of course, the local villages and their downtowns. Many of the more prosperous residents had little saltbox homes lined up on the main streets. There were also churches, windmills, meeting houses, a few stores, a farmhouse or two with the farmland stretching out back, facilities for the town dentist, horse stabling and blacksmithing, a tavern or two, a stagecoach shelter and that was about it.

The Montauk Highway, of course, was dirt. And occasionally a wagon drawn by horses would come through. Beyond these main towns -- Southampton, East Hampton, Southold and Bridgehampton -- there was really nothing, except rolling hills and flatlands, some of which were plowed and planted, but most of which were just forests. Here in the East End, there were occasional families that lived out of town amidst the fields, but not so far that they could not get into town on horseback for Sunday services or shopping. And there were the Indians, who kept their own encampments and who, though in decline, were still around, keeping their separate ways and looking suspiciously at these newcomers.

Down along the shorelines of the ponds, harbors, lakes and bays, there were the homes of clammers and fishermen, men who would work the bays or who owned small boats that could motor out into the ocean to harvest lobsters and fish, or, working with the Indians, who were experts at this, harvest whales that could be found just offshore. The whales would be harpooned and dragged to shore, their carcasses cut up into pieces and the blubber put in giant iron kettles over bonfires where it was melted down for oil. The bones would be used for a wide variety of purposes. The Indians got the fins. The fins were sacred.

This was a stable, prosperous, rural community. There were large cities of fifty thousand people or so -- New York and Boston. But they were a long way away. In particular, in order to get to New York, the people of the East End had to endure a two-day stagecoach ride.

And so the men and women here, for the most part, only wanted to be left alone. Things were just fine. Their children, in their teens and early twenties, had their own ideas about what was going on in the rest of the thirteen colonies. But their parents, ascribing that to youthful enthusiasm, believed they would soon grow out of it.

In 1775, however, a group of young men from the Hamptons, much to the surprise of their parents, mustered on parade grounds in Bridgehampton to form the Bridgehampton Militia. They then headed west to answer a call to arms from a rebel leader known as George Washington.

Carrying a flag only slightly different from the one designed by Betsy Ross for General Washington earlier that year, these men, an estimated 1000 in all, marched all the way to New York -- which was now in rebel hands -- and then up the Hudson River to assist the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont in planning and carrying out an attack on Fort Ticonderoga. The attack was held at night. The sleepy guards were surprised and those in the British fortress overpowered. During the four hours they were there, the rebels removed all the cannons mounted in the towers of the fort, carried them down to the ground and had them dragged onto wagons and delivered to George Washington's army, now encamped near Boston. But the Bridgehampton Militia didn't participate in this. As it turned out, they had arrived after the raid was over. But they were able to serve the cause by escorting British prisoners back down the Hudson to stockades in New York City.

The next year, on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia. The news of this was greeted with surprise and concern on the East End. People might be killed. A large majority of those people hoped that the British would quickly put this rebellion down so things could return to normal. But there were others in town, particularly family members of the militia, who wanted the plan that the rebels had in mind to succeed.

A contingent of British soldiers soon made its way out to the eastern end of Long Island. A rebel army, headed by the plucky General Washington, had been routed in Brooklyn by the British and sent fleeing through New Jersey toward Pennsylvania. Now the British wanted everyone on the East End to sign a document pledging their allegiance to the King. Most signed. A few refused, and hearing that they might be arrested or conscripted into the King's army, either went into hiding or fled at night by rowboat across Long Island Sound to Connecticut, where the rebel cause was flourishing. Families were torn asunder and fear spread throughout the East End.

But there was more. Among the British Redcoats there were officers who treated the locals brutally. And when that happened and there were no apologies, all the good will the British had came to an end. Now there was almost no one here in favor of the Crown.

Some of the young people now became rebel spies. And there was one occasion where a local woman, disturbed that British soldiers wanted to search her home, threw a boiling pot of porridge at them when they tried to come up the stairs to her second floor. The soldiers fled.

The main concerns of the British, as far as the East End went, at this time only involved using this community to provide provisions for their their Army and Navy, which had sailed across the Atlantic to put the rebellion down. And so the British knocked on many doors and insisted on receiving food and drink from the barns and larders of the local citizenry. Much of what they took was taken by wagon to the only viable port on the East End at that time -- other than a landing on the North Fork -- which was called Sag Harbor. Here, the foodstuffs were stored in warehouses protected by British guards. And here, the British Navy anchored offshore, spending their time offloading troops, officers, weapons and ammunition they had carried from the home country for this military effort in the west.

One of the highlights of those times was the invitation, brought around by British soldiers on horseback to prosperous local residents, to ask them to come to Sag Harbor to a particular ship, where an Admiral or Vice Admiral was having a dinner party or an evening of games. It was an invitation one could not refuse. And so the local men went. And traitorous stares were sometimes aimed their way. In any case, it was not the most comfortable situation. But the men would return with the news. The British were not so bad.

Just after sundown on May 23, 1777, a group of 130 young men, mostly East Enders, boarded thirteen whaleboard boats and two armed sloops beached on the shore of Mystic, Connecticut and, in the growing darkness, began to row and sail across Long Island Sound toward the North Fork.

Arriving around midnight at a beach they knew on the North Fork -- today called Truman Beach -- they landed in the darkness and dragged their boats across the narrow peninsula there to re-launch them into the quieter waters of Peconic Bay.

At three a.m., they arrived at the stretch of beach known today as Long Beach, just northwest of the docks at Sag Harbor. Creeping through the woods with muskets and ammunition, they soon arrived just one hundred yards from the barracks building in which the British were fast asleep. And they attacked.

While several of the rebels watched the sleeping guards, the rest of the rebels spread out and, at a signal, set everything they could find on fire. In the end, the entire port of Sag Harbor was destroyed in a great conflagration. Gone was the Long Wharf and British ships that were tied up there, gone were all of the warehouses and all of the foodstuffs and ammunition -- all were destroyed in a great explosion. As for the British, several were shot when they ran out of their barracks house. The rest surrendered. The rowboats, now heavy with rebel boys and British soldiers, made their way out across Peconic Bay back to the North Fork, observing as they went -- the British were rowing -- that some of the Men o' War of the British fleet had literally fled from the area, pulling anchor and sailing away, their captains afraid that sparks from the big fire might ignite them.

Until the war ended, the British never knew how they came to lose Sag Harbor in what has since become known as Meigs Raid, in honor of the man who led it. They have, however, learned since.

This raid, as it turned out, was the only battle ever held on the eastern end of Long Island during the Revolution.

Later on in that war, when the British forces here melted away to chase the rebels further inland down into Virginia, only to be surrounded there, some of the young American rebels in Connecticut returned home, and soon volunteered and joined the American Army for the final push to defeat the British. General Cornwallis signed the surrender documents on October 19, 1781 at Yorktown, Virginia and the British sailed away. Soon thereafter, the new American government named July 4th a national holiday. Celebrate it this weekend, by participating in or going to Southampton's the Independence Day parade on Main Street, beginning at 10 a.m. on Sunday, July 3, or by going to one of the many Fourth of July fireworks displays, the locations of which can be found on page xx.

The usual East Hampton Main Beach Fireworks, usually held on Saturday night of the holiday weekend, have been postponed until September 1. There's a family of piping plovers that have established a nest right where they set off the fireworks. And we have to leave them alone until the chicks hatch and leave. They should be gone by August, we hope.