Welcome! Today is September 21

Welcome to the website! Today is the solemn and strange anniversary of September 21, 1776, the day that a devastating fire mysteriously burned about a fifth of New York City (then principally located at the tip of lower Manhattan). In a few months, my book, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, will tell that story, and you can pre-order it now, if you like.

Today I just want to think about the lives lost on that day. Many historians have been skeptical that the Great Fire was anything other than an accident. Yet the evidence seems indisputable that British soldiers (who had just occupied the city six days before) and their allies in the city killed a number of people who they suspected of setting New York City on fire. And these were gruesome murders, too—supposedly some of the victims were stabbed with bayonets or thrown into burning buildings to be immolated. We don’t know how many people were killed this way. We only know one of their names, for now: a carpenter named Wright White, who may well have been a Loyalist suffering from alcoholism, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other victims are anonymous. The laws of war at the time said that it was justifiable to summarily execute a person caught in the act of incendiarism. Nevertheless, it bothers me that we have so little evidence by which we might remember the people killed in the wee hours of September 21, while the city burned all around them.

The British had no need to memorialize these people: they just used them as examples of how depraved the American rebels were. The rebels didn’t want to memorialize them either—they were too busy denying that the Continental Army (and George Washington) had anything to do with the burning of New York City.

UPDATE: Of course, on today of all days, it’d be churlish not to end a post on memory without this song by Earth, Wind, and Fire.