Evacuation Day: Washington Reclaims New York, 1783
On November 25, 1783, the last British troops sailed out of New York and George Washington marched in — the final act of the American Revolution.
Nearly three months after the Treaty of Paris formally ended the American Revolution, the war's last chapter played out on a cold morning in New York. On November 25, 1783 — Evacuation Day — the last British soldiers withdrew from New York City, the final British military position in the former Thirteen Colonies. The city had been in British hands since its capture in September 1776, seven long years earlier.
The withdrawal, overseen by British commander Sir Guy Carleton, was an enormous undertaking. Redcoats marched to the waterfront and boarded transports bound for Canada and other British territories — along with tens of thousands of Loyalists who had stayed faithful to the Crown, and thousands of formerly enslaved Black people who had been promised their freedom for supporting the British cause, many of them bound for Nova Scotia as free settlers. For the Loyalists it was exile; their confiscated lands and belongings were lost to them, and many would start over in Nova Scotia and what is now Ontario.
As the British filed out, George Washington and the Continental Army marched in from the north, down through Manhattan to the Battery at the island's tip, to the cheers of thousands of New Yorkers. According to legend, the departing British had nailed their flag to the pole at the Battery and greased it to spite the Americans — and a young sailor traditionally named as John Van Arsdale scaled the slippery pole to run up the Stars and Stripes. That afternoon Washington repaired to his quarters at Fraunces Tavern, where New York's governor, George Clinton, gave a public dinner for the officers of the army. As evening fell the town was brilliantly illuminated, rockets shot up from rooftops, and bonfires blazed at nearly every corner. At sunset, on that clear, frosty day, the last vessel of the retiring British transports disappeared beyond the Narrows — and New York belonged to its own people again.
New Yorkers did not let the day fade. Evacuation Day became an annual holiday, celebrated with parades, dinners, and the flying of flags — for nearly a century it rivaled the Fourth of July in the city. The commemorations only dwindled as the last veterans died and a newer national holiday, Thanksgiving, took hold of late November after 1863.
Within months of the evacuation, New York was named the capital of the new nation, and in 1789 Washington took the oath of office there as the first president. The city the British had held for seven years had become the seat of the country they had failed to keep.
Photo: E.P. & L. Restein, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
