An Unusable Past

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An unusable past: urban elites, New York City's evacuation

day, and the transformations of memory culture

by Clifton Hood

Introduction

The social and cultural history of tradition and memory has become a lively area of inquiry for

American historians. Much current work uses festivals andholidaysas a lens to understandpolitical culture, with, for example, David Waldstreicher, Simon P. Newman, and Len Travers

viewing nationalistic fetes in the early republic as arenas where factions struggled to define

national identity and set the limits of citizenship. Social historians such as Stephen Nissenbaum

and Leigh Eric Schmidt have traced changes in customs and conventions by studying the

contested development of particular holidays. Another vein of investigation involves racial andethnic consciousness. Kirk Savage and David W. Blight use the memorialization of the Civil

War to explore late nineteenth-century race relations, while Robert Anthony Orsi analyzescommunity formation among Italian immigrants by probing a Catholic church's festa. (1)

Despite this extensive literature, one aspect of this subject, the dissolution of tradition, has not

been examined, even though an analysis of alapsed tradition can improve our knowledge about

historical memory. Rather than concentrate on memory itself, historians generally employ it toilluminate larger developments in social or cultural history, such as popular participation in

republican politics or changing understandings of race. This scholarship is invaluable, but using

memory as a tracer rather than foregrounding it exaggerates its stability and permanence and

minimizes the difficulties of acquiring reliable knowledge about this elusive subject. By contrast,studying a lapsed tradition keeps historical memory in the forefront. The problem addressed

here--how a tradition embraced by tens of thousands of people for two generations coulddisintegrate within half a century--is so puzzling that it prompts a consideration of general

questions, including how an event becomes part of memory culture, how traditions are

transmitted from generation to generation, how different traditions are related to one other and

what the boundaries are between local and national traditions, to what extent social groupscompete to define traditions, and why some traditions can be adapted to changing conditions and

persist while others prove intractable and disappear. (2)

This essay will examine Evacuation Day, a New York City holiday that was celebrated every

November 25th for over a century, honoring the day in 1783 when the British military ended itsseven-year long occupation of the city. (3) Beginning in the late eighteenth century, thousands of

people observed Evacuation Day. The 100th anniversary, in 1883, ranked as "one of the great

civic events of the nineteenth century in New York City." (4) By 1900, however, only a few eliteNew Yorkers still commemorated it, and by 1920 no social group valued it.

The memorialization of November 25th was initiated by New York City merchants who prized

the evacuation for exemplifying their ideals of elite rule, social harmony, national independence,
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and local boosterism. Their private commemorations acquired a more public dimension in 1787,

when Federalists used representations of the evacuation in their campaign to ratify the

Constitution, creating rituals that broadened the anniversary's appeal. These annual observances,though intensely nationalistic, remained confined to the New York City area and were never

celebrated nationally. However, in a peculiar illustration of how traditions often shape other

traditions, the one permanent legacy of this Federalist memorialization is the American customof marking Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November.

Evacuation Day was associated with elites throughout its history. During the period covered by

this essay--from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century--New York City went from

being the second largest city in the United States to become the second largest city in the world,a metamorphosis that transformed the size and structure of its elites, the sources of their wealth

and prestige, their means of exercising power, and their understandings of themselves and other

social groups. Yet, throughout this period, elites--which are conceptualized here as status groupsthat consisted of friendship, marriage, and business networks and that enjoyed distinctive ways

of life--continued to command a disproportionate share of power, wealth, and prestige and to

provide leadership in the economic, political, and social spheres. As communities that weredelimited by class and heritage, elites frequently turned to historical memory to proclaim theiridentities, mark their boundaries, or communicate their visions of social order. For elites,

memory culture was primarily an arena for pursuing social and cultural concerns rather than

simply a means of remembering and forgetting or an array of traditions. At times, elite leaders orretainers became 'memory keepers' who organized Evacuation Day rituals and defined their

meaning, often altering popular interpretations of the holiday. (5)

Although the anniversary experienced a crisis of transmission in the 1820s and 1830s as the

generation of New Yorkers who remembered the revolution at first-hand died off and as the day'semphasis changed from recalling a lived incident to honoring the unexperienced past, Evacuation

Day survived by acquiring new meanings, stakeholders, and purposes. The holiday became amemorial of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s,upper-class men employed it to assert their claims to social exclusivity and civic leadership,

marching in aristocratic volunteer regiments that refashioned the annual military parades into

competitions of masculine prowess and class privilege.

The Civil War severely damaged Evacuation Day. Although attendance at its rites soared in the1860s when New Yorkers used the holiday to celebrate Union victories, Evacuation Day was

actually in trouble, for the Civil War did not so much expand the anniversary's role as diminish

its meaning. By exerting its special hold on American ideas of remembrance and warfare, theCivil War reduced Evacuation Day's audience and undermined its purpose. Still, although

adherence to November 25th had weakened by the early 1870s, Evacuation Day lingered for

several more decades. It was revived in the early 1880s by the Society of '83 (later renamed theSons of the Revolution), a patriotic hereditary organization that subscribed to the Victorian ideal

of cultural dichotomies and that sought to erect barriers around genteel society. Viewing colonial

history as an elite preserve that reinforced their identity as members of the upper-class and

prizing Evacuation Day for confirming their superiority to the masses, the Sons of theRevolution replaced popular spectacles (the parades) with didactic events (the dedication of

statues and tablets) and private affairs (banquets and lectures). This privatization expanded the


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inviolable regard to order and discipline, as Tyranny could have never enforced." (9) The New

York Packet contrasted the civil disturbances that had plagued the occupied city with its current

tranquility: "no mobs--no riots--no disorders ... everything is quietness and safety." The Packetquoted a British officer as marveling: "These Americans ... are a curious original people, they

know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them." (10) This understanding of

evacuation as an emblem of social order and national independence would shape early efforts atmemorialization. As with the celebrations of November and December 1783, these

commemorations would reflect the country's social divisions even as they proclaimed its unity.

The Formation of Tradition

Although eighteenth-century Britons and Americans routinely used the term evacuation to

describe a military or civilian exodus from a city, New Yorkers did not automatically apply thisname to November 25th. New York City had experienced two evacuations during the

Revolutionary War, the withdrawal of the Continental Army in 1776 and the departure of the

British in 1783. Already accustomed to referring to the 1776 retreat as the evacuation, New

Yorkers were slow to call the events of 1783 by that or any other name. Yet their initial failure tolabel November 25th also reflected their trauma about the war itself.

Insight into the naming of the anniversary is provided by petitions that property owners

submitted to the municipal government in the hope of reducing their ground rents, owed to theCorporation of the City of New York and overdue since 1776. Needing to show that they had

neither assisted nor benefitted from the British occupation, petitioners took pains to disclose their

whereabouts during the conflict, and especially during the two evacuations. Yet the earliestpetitioners chose to write much more about the war's beginning than its end. Nearly all the

petitions submitted from February 1784 through the early fall of 1784 reserved the word

evacuation for the Americans' 1776 retreat, as when Robert Thomas claimed to have paid his rent

"till the Evacuation of City by the Continental Troops" and to have lost his horse and cart whileassisting "Evacuation all in his power." (11) They were more mindful of the war itself than its

conclusion and more conscious of British power than British defeat. Indeed, many petitioners

either did not mention that the conflict had ended or else used phrases such as the "the late War"that bespoke their continuing preoccupation with it. (12) There was little notion of a distinct

post-war era or of peace itself as something other than the absence of fighting. This word usage

began to change in the fall of 1784, as petitioners focused on the war's conclusion and itsaftermath. In petitions written from roughly September 1784 on, and increasingly in 1785,

evacuation almost always meant November 1783--"the Evacuation of this City by the British

Troops," in common parlance--rather than August and September 1776. (13) The evidencesuggests that November 25th acquired its name--and that memories of the evacuation of 1776

faded--only when ordinary people felt the war was over, in the sense that their suffering

belonged to a past that was irretrievably completed rather than a continuing present.

The memorialization of the evacuation preceded fitfully, too. On November 25, 1784, and againin succeeding years, upper-class New Yorkers held the first annual observances of the evacuation

by giving dinners in taverns and coffee houses for "a select group of ladies and gentlemen" who

ate a lavish meal, drank patriotic toasts, and danced. (14) These anniversary gatherings were inkeeping with polite society's finest formal entertainments, and echoed the dinners that had been


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held at Cape's Tavern, Fraunces' Tavern, and other venues in November and December 1783.

(15)

These dinners were ostensibly private social gatherings with no political meaning, but upper-class New Yorkers' willingness to honor evacuation and national independence privately and

then use the press to communicate it to the rest of the population spoke volumes about theirunderstanding of citizenship's limits. When in 1786 a diner offered a toast calling for a strong

central government, it was clear that he expected people like his companions to share suchsentiments and others to accede to them. (16) Leaders of the city's lesser merchants and artisans

denied that such Tory balls had legitimacy. In 1784, the New-York Journal and State Gazette

claimed that the first anniversary of evacuation had gone "totally unnoticed and unregarded."While a dinner had been held at Cape's Tavern, the Journal insisted that it was a wholly social

affair that had no larger meaning because so many New Yorkers had been barred from it. Such

exclusivity, the Journal argued, exemplified "the old British conviviality" that had no place inrepublican America. (17)

The mode of celebration changed in 1787, when Federalists used representations of theevacuation in their campaign to ratify the Constitution. No longer satisfied with private

celebrations, the Federalists turned the anniversary into a public festival designed to win supportfor the Constitution and, later, the new national government. According to Simon P. Newman

and David Waldstreicher, fetes such as Evacuation Day were nationalistic rites employed by

competing political groups to advance their causes and convey an aura of social cohesion andunanimity. (18) Evacuation Day may have had a special appeal to New York City's Federalist

elite, which was oriented locally and nationally and which asserted its concerns and leadership

claims in both arenas, since its rituals operated simultaneously on the two levels.

Although the dinners continued to take place every November 25th and their invitation lists

remained exclusive, changes in newspaper coverage gave them larger audiences. Instead of thebrief and erratic notices that had appeared earlier, the Federalist press regularly printed detailed

accounts of the dinners, particularly of the toasts proclaiming that the national government

carried on the spirit of national unity and wartime sacrifice that had characterized evacuation.(19) Federalists also appealed to a broader constituency by organizing rites that built on key

events of November and December 1783--such as Washington's triumphal procession and the

Continental Army's fireworks--and that took place in public space and had the rhythm of popularfestivals. In 1787, the army brigade that garrisoned New York City moved its annual full-dress

review to November 25th. Late in the morning, the troops marched up Broadway from Fort

George to the parade grounds (now City Hall Park), where they passed in review before nationalleaders and a crowd of ordinary citizens. In later years, the review culminated in the feu de joi, a

complicated infantry maneuver whereby muskets were fired continuously, reaching a crescendo.

The feu de joie--literally, "the firing of joy"--began with companies discharging their musketsone soldier at a time, going from right to left and back to front. Regiments then fired in the same

order, one company at a time. Finally, the brigade engaged in 'running fire,' with soldiers

shooting as quickly as possible to create a cacophony of sound. After the review, artillery

batteries at Fort George made a thirteen-gun 'national' or 'federal' salute. Despite late November'ssometimes harsh weather, thousands of people regularly turned out for these spectacles. (20)


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Organized by the Corporation of the City of New York, these observances promoted the

Federalist vision of a hierarchical society with a strong central government and a commercial

economy. Making evacuation the occasion of public celebration portrayed the liberation of amajor seaport as the culmination of the Revolutionary War. It also confirmed elites' claims to

governance and demonstrated the importance of the social order. That the Continental Army's

regulars, not the state militias, had marched into New York, and that General Washington hadled the triumphal procession, signified that elite institutions had won the Revolutionary War.

(21)

Capitalizing on the Continental Army's liberation of the city, Federalists assigned the regular

army a prominent place in the celebratory rites. The military reviews advertised a European-styleprofessional army as among the chief blessings of a strong national government. The reviews

embodied a Federalist social ideal, with "his Excellency, the Commander in Chief, and several

other personages of rank and distinction" inspecting the brigade, with a professional officer corpsgiving orders, and with a soldiery faithfully obeying them amounting to an exhibit of proper

order and discipline. (22) The review's highpoint, the imposing feu de joi, demonstrated great

military skill and discipline. But although Federalists organized the anniversaries to showcasethe regular army, and although Federalist editors applauded the troops for their "martialappearance and the exactness of their maneuver" and "the skill and care of officers, and the

emulation and pride of the soldier," this military professionalism was fictive. (23) Because

Congress had reduced the size of the military after the end of the war, the U.S. Army was toosmall to fulfill the Federalist representations that regulars comprised the military units that

paraded every November 25th, and most of the soldiers who marched in the celebrations were

actually militiamen. Approximately 2,000 troops took part in the 1789 review, for instance, at atime when the entire regular army contained only 672 men. Some anti-Federalist organs, noting

the delicious irony that the marchers consisted largely of militiamen whom the Federalists

imagined As professionals, argued that the fetes should have a Republican and democratic spirit

rather than the Federalist and elitist tone that they were acquiring. (24)

This Federalist memorialization of evacuation is responsible for Thanksgiving's place on the

American calendar. On October 3,1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation

calling for a national day of thanksgiving on Thursday, November 26, 1789. There had beenearlier national thanksgivings, but this would be the first since the ratification of the Constitution

and it was intended to legitimate the new federal government. This idea had surfaced in the

House of Representatives, where, on September 25th, Elias Boudinot, a Federalist from

Elizabethtown, New Jersey and an ally of Alexander Hamilton, introduced a resolution askingthe president to declare "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer" that would allow Americans to

acknowledge "the many signal favors of Almighty God," especially the establishment of "a

Constitution of government for their safety and happiness." (25) Boudinot's resolution becameentangled with the issue that dominated debate in the House that month, the location of a

permanent seat of government, and provoked a sharp discussion. Though none of the

thanksgiving resolution's supporters wanted New York to become the national capital--Boudinotfavored Trenton while Roger Sherman spoke up for Philadelphia--they did agree that the capital

should be located in a northern commercial city. By contrast, the resolution was opposed by

southern Republicans such as Thomas Tudor Tucker and Aedanus Burke of South Carolina,whose advocacy of a southern, agrarian capital reflected their antagonism to the Constitution and


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their suspicion of Federalists' concentration of power. The resolution passed the House and the

Senate and went to the president. Washington's proclamation made various appeals--to religious

belief and festival tradition, to memories of wartime sacrifice and pride in nationalindependence--to marshal support for the Constitution and the new government. A similar

calculation probably lay behind the designation of November 26th for this thanksgiving. Neither

Washington nor his aides referred explicitly to the evacuation of New York, but their thinkingseems clear since Washington's proclamation and the Federalist representations of the evacuation

emphasized the same themes of wartime sacrifice, national independence, and social unity. This

connection between evacuation and the federal government was reinforced because New YorkCity was still the national capital, giving November 26th a special significance for the new

nation. Because the evacuation on November 25th, 1783 had removed British forces from the

last scrap of American soil (except for some frontier posts) that had remained under their control

and from the city that became the capital, November 26th could be considered the anniversary ofthe first day of full American independence. (That November 26th, 1789 fell on a Thursday was

inconsequential to Washington and his contemporaries; it was the date that mattered, not the day

of the week.) (26) By happenstance and accident, this 1789 thanksgiving ultimately led to the

establishment of Thanks-giving as a national legal holiday on the fourth Thursday of November.(27)

At first, the Federalists' opponents ignored the anniversaries. Then, around 1791, as disputes

between the Federalists and Republicans intensified, members of the Society of St. Tammanystarted organizing counter-celebrations--with their own banquets and receptions--to contest

evacuation's meaning. Since the Federalist representation was dominant, Republicans had

difficulty formulating their responses. Some mocked the evacuation itself, as with one writerwho ridiculed it as a "sudden and chop-fallen retreat" that paled next to more "glorious feats of

war." (28) Because that appraisal could be construed as a denunciation of the Revolution,

shrewder Republicans tried to recast evacuation to fit their own ideals by interpreting it as a blow

against standing armies, monarchy, and oppression. Disregarding the Continental Army'sregulars who had entered New York in 1783, the Republican press praised the militia and

independent companies that participated in the annual parades--"a formidably martial body of

republican veterans," according to the New-York Journal--for protecting liberty against thethreats of a standing army and a despotic government. (29) Speakers at the Tammany Society

banquets linked November 25th with opposition to monarchy by offering such toasts as, "May

the friends of Tyranny and oppression in every Country experience the fate of the British in NewYork on the 25th November 1783" and "The People--the only source of legitimate power--may

[Secretary of State] T[imothy] Pickering and every other Federal officer remember it." (30)

Although the Republicans moderated the Federalist-elitist meaning of the celebration, they could

not alter evacuation's primary associations with social privilege, the nation-state, and themilitary. That evacuation had acquired enough stability and continuity of meaning to resist

redefinition indicates that it was becoming established as a tradition. By the mid-1790s,

Evacuation Day was accepted as part of the usual way of doing things in and around New YorkCity. With the holiday providing opportunities for socializing, celebrants transcended partisan

politics and enjoyed the festivities on their own terms. A common pattern was for circles of

friends and family members to watch the parade together in small, intimate groups and then toseparate, with some going to a museum or a coffee house. Many people attended church services


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as well. The friendship and family circles often re-formed later in private houses for tea, dinner,

or music. Around 1801, the anniversary became an occasion of popular entertainments, as

theaters and museums started offering pageants and plays keyed to the evacuation. During theweeks prior to November 25th, the American Museum, the Panorama Theater, and others

advertised their shows by displaying on their front walls huge illuminated transparencies that

depicted scenes from the evacuation, paintings of General Washington, or renditions of famousbattles. The performances featured melodramas on subjects such as Columbus' discovery of

America and the Revolutionary War; lectures about American history; and band music, popular

songs, and dances. By providing a physical space where strangers mixed in close proximity,albeit with the sanction of nationalism, these commercial entertainments allowed residents to

experience situations that were neither wholly public nor private and that constituted a social

sphere, where the privileges of class and rank were blurred or attenuated. (31)

The anniversaries also helped New Yorkers come to terms with the Revolutionary War. Bydefining evacuation as a military event that involved the replacement of one nation's army by

another's, New Yorkers commemorated the city's liberation and national independence while

glossing over the war's social divisions. Many loyalists and loyalist sympathizers who had livedin occupied New York stayed on after 1783, to the great discomfort of other residents. As theNew York Journal and State Gazette remarked, the city's "virtuous Whigs and Exiles" had

proven themselves "remarkable for forgiving and forgetting past crimes and offenses." (32) The

anniversaries of the evacuation became a ritual of unity that at once celebrated the patrioticvictory and concealed wartime discord, permitting New Yorkers to imagine a harmony that had

not actually existed. (33)

By the mid-1790s, the anniversary had become a public event with a regular place on the yearly

calendar and well-known rituals, so ingrained that newspapers simply reported that the latestanniversary had been observed "as usual" or "with the usual military honor." (34) This

routinization is also revealed in diary entries. Alexander Anderson, a medical student, wrote ofhis activities on November 25, 1794: "Attended Dr. Mitchill's lecture. Afterwards walk'd withDr. Davidson to see the troops whch. we found drawn up in Broadway--this being the

anniversary of the Evacuation of the city by the British." (35) A year later, his brother John, a

lawyer, wrote:

Anniversary of the Evacuation of the British troops. Went out with

Mr. Adams, & saw the uniformed companies parade. About noon they

made a sham retreat, through Broadway--Wall Street, Maiden Lane, &

went up the Bowery Lane. They then return'd to town, in the same

order the American troops enter'd at the peace. On the Battery 15

guns were fired, and a feu de joye. In the afternoon went to the

Museum with Mr. Adams--he, with Mr. Baxter, afterwards, drank tea at

our house. (36)

Some years neither young man wrote anything about the anniversary. Other years one or both

registered the holiday's occurrence but dwelled on personal matters that counted for more in theirdaily lives--gifts purchased, medical lectures heard, dinners attended. (37)

A notable feature of these two diarist brothers is that neither took note of the spectators who

watched the anniversary rituals. Both men recounted the military parades and the artillery salutes


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that they had seen and heard, at times in detail, and both recorded their interactions with friends

and family members. Of the masses of strangers that were present in the streets, however, there

is no mention. A similar pattern is evident from the newspapers, which chronicled public eventssuch as the parade and semi-private events such as the banquets but almost completely ignored

the crowds. Although this evidence should not be pushed too far, it is clear that these diarists and

newspaper editors were not manifesting the fear of the crowd that was so commonplace after theFrench Revolution, for they expressed no sense of menace or danger. Rather, these affluent New

Yorkers appear to have been discomfited by the uncontrolled social mixing with strangers that

occurred in public space. They studiously ignored the crowds, neither mentioning nor describingparticular strangers or the mass of people. There was, for instance, nothing like the references to

the collective 'mood of the crowd' that became prevalent in the nineteenth century. Instead, these

elite observers concentrated on their friends and relatives and acted as if they were watching the

parades among their intimate circles with nobody else present. It was the existence of a socialsphere, neither wholly public nor private and a deviation from genteel conventions, that made

them uneasy and to which they responded by rendering themselves oblivious to the people

surrounding them. (38)

Despite its use of national symbols, the anniversary remained a local phenomenon whoseobservances were confined to New York City and neighboring Brooklyn, Jersey City, and

Hoboken. Almanacs and diaries sold in New York City usually referred to the evacuation, while

those marketed elsewhere ignored it. The holiday failed to catch on nationally because it was alocal rather than a national event and because it honored an anti-climatic incident that did not

change the Revolutionary War's outcome or meaning and that did not affect the daily lives of

ordinary people outside of New York. Except for some Massachusetts infantrymen who werepart of Knox's force, the evacuation had not required the kind of external assistance that might

have invested other Americans in it. A good comparison is with the British raid on Baltimore

during the War of 1812, when people from around the country rushed to Baltimore's defense by

volunteering to fight and by donating money and supplies to the relief effort, an outpouring ofsupport that contributed to the acceptance of Francis Scott Key's "The Star-Spangled Banner" as

the national anthem. (39)

Evacuation Day's organizers disliked its provincialism and insisted on proclaiming its nationalsignificance. Holidays and other customs do not have to be national to thrive, however, and the

anniversary had become well-ensconced as a tradition. (40)

The Transmission of Tradition

Edward Shils says that traditions often undergo crises during their transmission from the first to

the second generation that determine whether they will survive or lapse. (41) Evacuation Dayunderwent such a crisis during the 1820s and 1830s. As the New Yorkers who could claim to

have lived through the occupation and evacuation were dying, more and more people lacked

direct knowledge of the Revolution. November 25th would remain a major day on the citycalendar, but the process of passing this tradition to a new generation altered memory culture.

The problem of conveying historical memory across generations can be examined by comparing

two New Yorkers' relationships to evacuation. John Pintard and George Templeton Strong were


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both lifelong city residents who belonged to the mercantile elite, were active in civic affairs, and

esteemed the past. Yet because Pintard was sixty-one years older than Strong, the two men

understood the British evacuation and its anniversary much differently. Born in 1759, JohnPintard fled New York during the British occupation, returning in time to witness the evacuation.

He later wrote:

Well do I recall an event so auspicious to the long exiled families

of this city, who after the privations of 7 long years returned home

to their habitations wh[ich] they left in the enjoyment of ease &

comfort to [return in] almost poverty, many of them to weep over the

ruins of their dwellings & all to lament the loss of many & dear

friends & relatives. (42)

For Pintard, anniversaries of the evacuation evoked powerful personal memories--his father-in-

law's death in exile, his loss of a fortune in depreciated Continental currency, the burning ofneighbors' homes. Pintard attached such significance to the evacuation that he made its

anniversary a central part of his inner life, reserving November 25th as an occasion to repair his

family tomb and reflect on recent accomplishments. Yet Pintard could also use his memories totranscend personal circumstances and evoke the larger cause of American independence. "Never

can I forget," he wrote in 1825, "the joyful event wh[ich] Consummated our Independence." (43)

Just as the traumas of war and revolution had forged his age cohort into a unique generation, thepersonal and public dimensions had become intermingled and self-reinforcing in his conception

of evacuation.

Pintard was alert to the difficulties of transmitting meaning across generational lines: his

memories of the evacuation are recorded in letters he wrote to his daughter. These letters aredidactic and strained, evidence of Pintard's struggle to relate his searing experiences to a young

woman who had not endured them. Like Pintard's daughter, George Templeton Strong grew up

hearing his elders talk about the evacuation. As a student at Columbia College in the 1830s,

however, Strong was concerned about whether classes would be canceled on November 25th,once lampooning "the glorious Evacuation Day, glorious in one point, at least, and that is that it

allows us to kick up our heels all day at our leisure." (44) When Columbia scheduled classes for

Evacuation Day in 1836, Strong protested this "[d]iabolical outrage!" and, vowing that "[w]eshall have to take it," exploited the college's oversight to justify playing hooky with his friends.

(45) He later chortled that the campus was abuzz with "great excitement about the affair of the

25th." (46) Yet his rationalization of their prank was less cynical than naive, for although hisunderstanding of the anniversary was less complex and solemn than Pintard's, Strong never

disputed its importance. And, as he aged, Strong employed his memories of Evacuation Day to

express nostalgia for his boyhood, lamenting when the parade was disappointing one year that

"the glory of Evacuation Day has departed." (47) Although both men used the anniversary tosummon "the remote period" of their youths, there was this profound difference: while Pintard

was remembering the evacuation itself, Strong was remembering a holiday. (48)

This generational shift was accompanied by the spread of a new naming practice. Before the1820s, people carefully distinguished between the evacuation and its celebration. They spoke of

"the anniversary of the evacuation" or "the anniversary of the evacuation of this city by British

troops," or they noted how much time had passed since evacuation by referring--in 1792, for


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example--to "the 9th anniversary of the evacuation of this city and country by the British troops

and their mercenary allies." (49) This usage was replaced by a new term that appeared in the

1820s and 1830s, Evacuation Day. Popularized by the newspaper advertisements that theatersran to publicize their November 25th pageants, the new name became standard by the 1840s. An

act of historical simplification and emotional distancing that signaled that November 25th was

becoming a holiday, a day reserved for the special purpose of memorializing the RevolutionaryWar, the adoption of this label indicated that career of Evacuation Day was becoming

independent of the evacuation itself and even of the anniversaries of the evacuation, and that acts

of remembrance now seemed more authentic than what was supposedly being remembered. (50)

Another element of this generational change were increasing complaints that the anniversary wasno longer being observed as faithfully as it had been in the past. Typical was this 1828 lament:

"Today is the forty-fifth return of this anniversary. It has now somewhat fallen off from that

ceremony and festivity with which it was formerly observed." (51) And this explanation of1839's disappointing parade:

The inclemency of the weather accounted in a measure for the

diminution of the military display, although we fear that decreasing

reverence for antiquity and ancient principles has something to do

in causing this indifference, to what used to be a holiday of great

celebrity. (52)

And this comment from 1848:

The day had been so far forgotten, that many enquired the object of

the parade. Old things have passed away, and their interest seems

lost, however important the object commemorated. (53)

This grumbling first became routine in the 1820s. Its intensity escalated in years when

snowstorms or cold rains spoiled the parades, but complaints were made when Brooklyn andJersey City scheduled their own celebrations, when the grand march included 5,000 troops and

lasted for hours, and when the crowds were so large that pickpockets flourished. Similar lamentsare made about holidays today such as the Fourth of July and Memorial Day and are usually

taken at face value as proof of declension. That reading is simplistic: such protests often indicate

that a tradition is experiencing a transmission crisis that it will probably survive, albeit in altered

form. (54) (Significantly, few objections were voiced after the Civil War when Evacuation Daywas really decaying.) The complaints about Evacuation Day were made with the expectation of

being obeyed: they were voiced with authority and in public settings, they appealed to shared

values, and they were intended to rouse the faithful. It was not that New Yorkers were apathetic;no matter how implausible a tradition Evacuation Day may seem to us today, the contemporary

claims that it should be "a holiday of great celebrity" and that "the object commemorated" wasimportant went unchallenged. (55) Rather, it was that the events of November 25, 1783 lackedthe immediacy for George Templeton Strong's generation that they had had for John Pintard's

generation. Evacuation Day truly was different from the anniversary of the evacuation. (56)

To survive, Evacuation Day needed to acquire new constituencies and new purposes that could

invigorate it. Its organizers sought to tie Evacuation Day to comparable events such as the SouthAmerican revolutions of the 1820s and the French Revolution of 1830, but these foreign


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rebellions did not strike a chord with New Yorkers. (57) A better solution lay in making

November 25th a vehicle for commemorating the War of 1812, a connection that began during

the conflict itself, when theaters and museums used the anniversary to stage pageants aboutvictories like the Battle of Lake Champlain. After the war, the similarities between the First and

Second Wars of American Independence made Evacuation Day a forum for celebrating U.S.

military success and American nationalism. Veterans of the War of 1812 continued to playcentral roles in the Evacuation Day observances as late as 1888, instantly recognizable in their

old uniforms and with their battle flags and banners as they marched or rode in the parades, and

great crowd favorites. As they aged and their numbers dwindled, the veterans were givenritualistic duties like flag-raising that were less taxing but that kept them in the public eye. As

sociologist W. Lloyd Warner wrote of the Memorial Day commemorations in Yankee City

following World War II, such rites constituted "a modern cult of the dead" that related living

members of the community to "a system of sacred beliefs and dramatic rituals" embodied in thedead soldiery and expressed ceremoniously. (58) The War of 1812 veterans were living relics

who bound contemporaries to the Revolution and American nationalism. Nobody was more

important in this regard than David Van Arsdale, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the son of

John Van Arsdale, the sailor who had climbed the greased flagpole above Fort George onNovember 25, 1783 and hoisted the first American flag to fly over New York City. For many

years, David Van Arsdale was entrusted with raising the colors on the Battery at sunrise onEvacuation Day. After his death, his grandson, Christopher R. Forbes, performed this rite. (59)

Another solution was that of upper-class New Yorkers, who employed Evacuation Day as a

response to the city's rapid population and economic growth and as an affirmation of their own

leadership and social standing. The new uses that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s conferred ahigher degree of social refinement onto the Evacuation Day rites, especially the annual parade.

Although fire brigades and political societies still took part, by mid-century workingmen's trade

societies--harbor pilots, printers, and butchers, for instance--appeared in the parades much less

frequently than in earlier decades, and the parades and their representations in the press hadbecome more socially exclusive. (60) The composition of the military units changed

significantly, too. Although there had never been enough regulars to fill the ranks, the expanded

size of the parade created a need for more soldiers, which was met by elite volunteer units suchas the Washington Grays, the Scottish Guard, the Jefferson Guard, Lafayette Horse Guards, and

the Montgomery Light Guard. The aristocratic young men who belonged to these regiments

competed fiercely over the precision of their marching and the elegance of their uniforms in arivalry that employed masculine display, national symbols, and wealth to legitimate the city's

changing upper-class and define its boundaries. This rivalry did not involve military prowess so

much as its image, at the service of social prestige. Significantly, the feu de joie--which posed areal test of military skill--was dropped around this time. (61)

In the decades before the Civil War, the Evacuation Day parades were extravaganzas that lasted

several hours and drew thousands of onlookers, with regimental bands playing martial music and

with smartly-dressed infantrymen and cavalry troopers stepping out. Among the parade'shighlights were the volunteer units. (62) This antebellum elite's joy in flaunting its status in

public settings represents a drastic change from the late eighteenth century elite that felt an

aversion to public space and to mingling with members of other social groups in uncontrolledsettings. An explanation for the exuberant public performances of the antebellum elite is


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provided by anthropologist Alessandro Falassi, who observes that festival competitions can

create hierarchy out of equality by validating a contest's form and rules, the selection of its

participants, and the designation of its winners and losers. (63) In effect, the young aristocratssought to transform parade spectators into an audience and implicate them in a rite of

competition that would affirm their own power. That members of the volunteer regiments

withdrew to exclusive gatherings that were held in private space--banquets and dinners--aftertaking part in the parade only underscored their assertion of elite authority and identity. (64) The

mid-nineteenth century was a volatile period for New York's elites, for whom explosive urban

growth meant not only new sources of wealth and power but also the blurring of upper-classboundaries and social credentials, the widening of divisions with other urban groups, and the

arrival of hundreds of thousands of German and Irish immigrants. In these turbulent times, the

upper class had a powerful need to affirm itself as a community of feeling and heritage.

Conspicuous participation in the Evacuation Day parade--with its associations with nationalism,elite rule, and social harmony--offered one solution to this problem. As most elites did not care

about the poor and were oblivious of the actual terms of their existence, the regimental displays

provided the reassuring illusion of seeming to contour a society that was becoming dangerously

boundless. As the New York Times exulted in 1859, the splendor and discipline of the volunteerunits demonstrated that their blue blood members came from better "raw material" than the

"demoralized mob." (65) It was the elites themselves, then, who were the ultimate audience forthese performances.

Although the popularity of the antebellum parades indicated that Evacuation Day had weathered

its transmission crisis, a greater threat lay ahead.

The Dissolution of Tradition

After marching with his National Guard regiment in the 1865 Evacuation Day parade, Major

John Ward, Jr. recorded his impressions in his diary. Although most diarists wrote just a sentenceor two about a ritual that had come to seem ordinary, Ward devoted an entire page to the 1865

procession, in the longest and most detailed journal entry that has surfaced about Evacuation

Day. (66) That year's parade not only marked the first time that the newly promoted Wardcommanded his own company, but it was also an electrifying event that featured 8,000 soldiers

of the First National Guard Division and twenty regimental bands and that was watched by a

crowd of tens of thousands of people that blocked the sidewalks and filled the rooftops andwindows. With the holiday's nationalistic and militaristic ethos encouraging New Yorkers to

transform it into a celebration of the Union victory, it was the largest Evacuation Day parade that

had been mounted.

Although Ward described everything from the fit of his new epaulettes and his company'sacceptance of his leadership to the route of the parade and the formidable demeanor of the

veterans, he neglected to say anything about Evacuation Day itself, the nominal basis of this

spectacle. It was the Civil War and his own military exploits that preoccupied Ward, not theanniversary of evacuation. (67) His omission presaged the blow that the Civil War would

administer to Evacuation Day in precipitating its dissolution as a tradition.


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The Civil War had two main effects on Evacuation Day, one that proved fleeting and

inconsequential and a second that was permanent and debilitating. The first effect was that the

Civil War temporarily sustained new constituencies and meanings and disrupted old ones. Thebest example of this discontinuity involved Irish-Americans. Since celebrating Evacuation Day

enabled Irish immigrants to simultaneously adopt an American custom and voice their

grievances against Great Britain, they laid their own claim to the holiday and tried to redefine itsmeaning. Even before the Civil War, the lessons that Irish leaders took from evacuation had

centered on national liberty and British defeat rather than the mainstream themes of elites and the

military. For example, in 1850 the Irish-American applauded "the anniversary of the hour andmoment in 1783 when the Britishers evacuated New York and the flag of liberty was hoisted

over the Battery" for marking "a moment which rendered the United States of America a free and

independent nation," while six years later the same paper registered its delight "that the British

were kicked from the Battery for the 73rd time." (68) The implication was obvious, but duringthe antebellum period Irish leaders avoided making overt comparisons between Britain's

occupation of revolutionary New York and its domination of Ireland. That preference for the

oblique disappeared after the Civil War, when, with a new assertiveness borne of their

participation in the fighting and of their growing power in urban politics, Irish-Americansexpressed their interpretations of evacuation much more directly. In the late 1860s, Irish-

American newspapers added Evacuation Day to their lists of historic events that had occurredduring the month of November. One year, the Irish World said of November 25th:

The forces of King George leave New York, bag and baggage, a free

city in a free land, 1783. [Let us hope we will not have to wait

till 1883 for the forces of Victoria to leave in the same way, a

place we know of, where they have no right to be.] (69)

The newspapers also gave their ethnicity credit for evacuation's success by boasting that two

Americans of Irish descent, Governor George Clinton and General Henry Knox, had directed the

operation. Yet such uses of Evacuation Day remained limited and proved impermanent. Forinstance, although the Congress of the Fenian Brotherhood convened in Philadelphia on

November 24, 1868, no speaker saw fit to draw a parallel with evacuation. (70) References to the

holiday in the Irish-American press decreased in the late 1870s, and by the early 1880snewspapers either ignored it or confined themselves to brief notices that had no ethno-nationalist

content, while newspaper calendars of anniversaries that fell in late November replaced

Evacuation Day with the Civil War's Battle of Lookout Mountain. (71)

The Irish failed to gain traction because of the tradition's continuing strong identification with

the urban upper class. Although the antebellum elite's use of the holiday for public displays

ended during the Civil War when the volunteer regiments stopped being featured in the parades,

Evacuation Day's relationship with the city's increasingly Anglophilic upper class created morecultural distance than working-class Irish-Americans could readily bridge. Rather than challenge

the dominant interpretation, Irish-Americans chose to link their late November military reviews

and balls with another holiday that often overlapped with Evacuation Day and that alsopossessed a nationalist element, Thanksgiving. Because Irish-Americans and members of other

social groups could make a place for themselves within its more inclusive set of meanings,

Thanksgiving started becoming an alternative to Evacuation Day as early as the 1870s. Thismovement away from Evacuation Day, of course, only reinforced its social exclusivity. The


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elitist dimensions of Evacuation Day contrast sharply with those of a corresponding holiday in

Boston, the anniversary of the British evacuation from that city in 1776. The success of Boston's

Evacuation Day, a legal holiday that is still observed today, is attributable to the coincidence ofits falling on March 17th--St. Patrick's Day--and to Irish Bostonians' embracing its anti-British

content in determining its meaning. (72)

The second effect of the Civil War lay in altering Americans' historical memory. Although the

Civil War originally appeared to revitalize the anniversary much as the War of 1812 had done, itwound up diminishing Evacuation Day through its transformation of American understandings

of war and remembrance. Warfare had been important to American memory culture before the

1860s, but in a distinctive way. A patchwork of local memory events--such as Evacuation Dayitself or Bunker Hill--had coincided with nation-wide memorials, while military successes were

celebrated less in their own right than as confirmation of civic virtues deemed appropriate to a

republic: suffering and fortitude (as with Valley Forge), heroic defiance of tyranny (Lexingtonand Concord, James Lawrence of the Chesapeake), and communal unity and national triumph

(Bunker Hill, the siege of Baltimore). Because fears of standing armies and aristocracy had

discouraged the glorification of the military, and because the U.S. military's primary goal ofavoiding defeat had kept it from winning many decisive victories, even triumphs such as theBattle of Saratoga did not become objects of remembrance. This older pattern was not so much

replaced by as suffused with a new memory culture following the Civil War. Emphasizing

destructive warfare, it combined a conception of military conflict as an emblem of U.S. industrialand technological achievement, a messianic belief in devastation as necessary for redemption, a

commitment to aggressive masculinity as expressed in warfare or its analogues, and a reliance on

citizen-armies to obtain national ideals. As this new memory culture became accepted asconventional, the problem for Evacuation Day was that its meanings did not jibe with the

emerging values of destructive warfare and that its veneration of the British departure did not

resonate with people whose expectations of warfare and the military were shaped by Shiloh,

Antietam, and the Wilderness. Evacuation Day's local orientation was also out of synch withanother post-Civil War development that has been examined by historians Kirk Savage and

David W. Blight, the nationalization of war remembrance. (73)

Evacuation Day's close relationship with the Civil War began early in the conflict because itsnationalistic and military content led New Yorkers to identify the holiday with the Union cause

and to embroil it in political disputes over the war. In 1861, Horace Greeley and others turned

November 25th into a demonstration of support for the war effort, with Greeley's Tribune

declaring that the sight of "the Stars and Stripes float[ing] proudly from housetop and dome inevery part of the city" revealed the public's sympathies. (74) In 1862 and 1863, Copperheads in

the municipal government thwarted the Unionists by refusing to appropriate funds for

Evacuation Day, a strategy that led to the anniversary's being "practically abandoned" as only theVeterans of 1812 marched in the parade and as crowd turnout dropped. (75) This relationship

continued in peacetime because the holiday became a vehicle for celebrating the Northern

victory. The parades that were held in the late 1860s--including the procession that dazzled JohnWard in 1865--were extraordinary for their size and intensity, largely because of the participation

of the entire First Division of the New York State National Guard, with its more than 8,000

troops, many of them combat veterans who carried their battle flags in a graphic reminder of thehostilities. Further cementing this association was Governor Reuben E. Fenton's practice of


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delivering speeches on Civil War themes on the anniversary, praising the accomplishments of the

Union forces one year, and demanding a firmer program for reconstructing the Southern states

the next year. (76)

Although these scenes persuaded the New York Times "that there is a growing tendency to

revive the memory of a day which is so glorious in our national annals," the renaissance endedabruptly when Major General Alexander Shaler, the commander of the First Division, dropped

Evacuation Day from the division's parade schedule in 1870. Because his troops had madeseveral extra parades that summer, Shaler wanted to eliminate one of their fall reviews, a

decision that led him to target Evacuation Day because it fell the day before Thanksgiving and

interfered with his men's holiday plans. Within a few years, the reduction of the National Guardpresence from the First Division's 8,000 troops to a single regiment of 750 men deprived the

parades of so much excitement that attendance plummeted. More telling than Shaler's decision,

however, was the indifference of ordinary residents to it and its consequences. In contrast to theflood of complaints that had been made between the 1820s and the 1860s, when the holiday was

robust, that New Yorkers were observing its traditions less faithfully than before, very few

people objected to the parade's contraction or the anniversary's subsequent collapse. Their silencesuggests that emotional involvement and identification with the anniversary had weakened by the1870s. (77)

As the Herald observed in 1872, "the real business of actual warfare" had eclipsed Evacuation

Day. (78) Although the anniversary had provided a forum for organizing Union rites during andjust after the war, that role ended as the Civil War developed its own memory apparatus,

including Memorial Day, the Grand Army of the Republic, and statues of soldiers. By the 1870s,

Evacuation Day had lost much of its following and begun to dissolve. (79)

Revival and Relapse

Traditions do not die easily. Their age and mere existence confer legitimacy, and sometimesinspire campaigns to revive traditions that are lapsing. Evacuation Day experienced such a

resurgence when patriotic hereditary groups took it over in the 1880s. Although this revival

failed to save the holiday, it substantially altered its rites and its meaning. (80)

The revival was initiated by John Austin Stevens, a merchant and patrician historian whoorganized Evacuation Day's 100th anniversary, in 1883, in his capacity as secretary of the New-

York Historical Society. Working closely with business and social leaders, Stevens made the

centennial one of nineteenth-century New York's greatest extravaganzas. Like a supernova thatexploded in a final brief display of brilliance before being reduced to the nothingness of a black

hole, the 1883 parade was both the largest Evacuation Day gala ever staged and the last big one.

Over a million people attended, including President Chester A. Arthur, several Cabinet officers,and eight governors. Twenty-five thousand troops marched in the parade, while a marine pageant

featured 300 warships, private yachts, and other vessels.

Businessmen controlled the centennial. Stevens entrusted its planning to committees that

comprised the presidents of the merchants' exchanges, bankers, railroad executives, corporatelawyers, and administrators of men's clubs, who arranged the events and shared center stage with


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political and military officials. Although Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper praised the

centennial for dramatizing the social progress and civic harmony that New York had attained

under business leadership, others denounced it as the triumph of a capitalist aristocracy thatbetrayed the democratic and nationalistic spirit of the American Revolution. (81) The Irish-

American damned the celebration's organizers as "the 'shoddy aristocracy' of New York--the men

who stand on their money-bags,--swelled by stock-gambling."

These degenerate Americans, by their aping of everything English,

and their fawning on the representatives of English royalty, while

their slight their own country, show that they regret the abolition

of class distinctions, and the equalization of all men before the

law, which the Revolution brought about. (82)

The last straw for the Irish-American was a report that "Anglo-maniac snobs" from the Produce

Exchange had invited the British ambassador to an Evacuation Day banquet and toasted Queen

Victoria's health. (83) The New York Sun also took aim at the elite's social pretensions:

The boast which now most stirs the envy of Newport is not of descent

from patriots, but from Tories of the Revolution. A trace of Tory

blood is coveted by the aspiring aristocrat. The Anglomaniacs of

this day are not driven into exile and despoiled of their

possessions. They have become the leaders of fashion and the

exemplars for our most luxurious society. To be mistaken for

Englishmen is their highest and fondest ambition. (84)

John Swinton's Paper, a radical labor organ, rebuked "our ruling swashbucklers" for using the

land and marine parades to brandish the raw military power available to the upper classes.Instead of that display of class might, Swinton's Paper imagined an alternative procession that

would have comprised battalions of industrial workers marching behind a banner that

proclaimed: "Millionaires, None." (85)

A month later, Stevens founded an organization named the Society of '83 (later reconstituted asthe Sons of the Revolution) to arrange subsequent Evacuation Day rites and to improve

Americans' patriotic spirit and their appreciation of their colonial heritage. An early patriotic

hereditary society that was a forerunner of the better-known Daughters of the AmericanRevolution and the Colonial Dames of America, the Sons of the Revolution was also established

as an ancestral society to preserve the past from the immigrant present. With its membership

restricted to 250 descendants of revolutionary New York City families, the society boastedprominent New York City names such as Beekman, Schermerhorn, Hamilton, Morris, and

Montgomery. (86)

The revival of Evacuation Day was part of a larger elite project to idealize the historical memory

of colonial New York. In the late nineteenth century, patrician historians produced hundreds ofbooks, prints, lectures, classes, and tours about an imagined colonial city known as Old New

York. Devoid of immigrants, labor unrest, and factories, Old New York offered an emotional

alternative to the modern city and exerted a strong hold on upper- and middle-class New Yorkerswho were disconcerted by rapid urban change. (87)


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Evacuation Day occupied a prominent place in these fictive histories. According to James Riker,

the holiday's foremost nineteenth-century historian, Old New Yorkers had resisted the British

occupiers with a unity and bravery that made it "the most signal [event] in [city] history." (88)Riker prized the evacuation as "the closing scene in that stupendous struggle which gave birth to

our free and noble Republic" and "brought our city deliverance from a foreign power" and as a

reminder to "keep unimpaired our love of country and kindle the patriotism of those who comeafter us." (89)

Turning to history and its aura of cultural authority as a response to the immigration of southern

and eastern Europeans, elites and their retainers used the revival of Evacuation Day to position

themselves as stewards of American history and to confirm their superiority. Because the Batterywas the location of both Evacuation Day's sunrise flag-raising ceremony and Castle Garden's

immigrant station, collisions between the Sons of the Revolution and immigrants became a staple

of representations of the anniversary. One year, an account of cannons that had supposedly beentrained on the departing British transports suggested that they be used to drive immigrants away.

Another year, a newspaper depicted a Rumanian Jewish family who witnessed the flag-raising

ceremony yet proved so incapable of grasping its patriotic meaning that they "walked away withangry looks on their faces." (90)

Evacuation Day also enabled social and economic elites to respond to the transformation of

upper-class society. With the emergence of vast new fortunes multiplying the number of

newcomers who were clamoring for admission to the inner circles, elites had experienced ablurring of class boundaries and a confusion over social credentials that many found to be

disconcerting. By affirming elite society as a community of feeling and knowledge whose

members were distinguished by their breeding and heritage, Evacuation Day offered one solution

to this problem of identity. (91) A case in point involves Anglophilia. With the United Statesapproaching the industrial might of Great Britain and its upper class emulating the English

aristocracy, American elites began to feel ambivalence toward the old enemy. Evacuation Daylet them see themselves as part of an Anglo-Saxon unity that was rooted in the colonial periodand that excluded immigrants and other unworthies. It also allowed them to combine expressions

of American patriotism with professions of admiration for Great Britain. Speaking at a Society of

'83 banquet, Chauncey M. Depew, a vice president of the New York Central Railroad, struck thisnote in asserting that the American Revolution was responsible for Britain's imperial success:

We have reached across Great Britain and liberalized her

institutions. We furnished an impetus to Great Britain, and if she

stands to-day supreme and grand among the nations of the world in

all that constitutes magnitude and merit, it is largely to the fact

of the independence of these colonies and the creation of the

American Republic. (92)

As the Irish-American and the New York Sun grasped in denouncing the 'Anglomaniacs' who

dominated the centennial, Anglophilia revealed the elite's cultural aspirations and self-identity as

an aristocracy. Anglophilia also contradicted the original purpose of the holiday and substitutedmyth for reality and the present for the past.


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Because the holiday's recent loss of adherence supported their belief that ordinary Americans

devalued their heritage, Evacuation Day was a good vehicle for Stevens and his fellow Sons of

the Revolution. But although Stevens and the others enjoyed pointing to the drop in paradeattendance as evidence that elites should become guardians of American history, they disliked

the uncontrolled social mixing and frivolity of public celebrations. Unlike their counterparts

earlier in the century who had used public performances to legitimate hierarchy, members of thelate nineteenth century elite wanted to constitute themselves as an aristocracy and sought to

avoid the ill-bred and vulgar. Accordingly, they refined the parade by decreasing the number of

bands and military units that appeared in it, changes that further diminished its appeal and itsaudience. By the mid-1890s, the parade was no longer held annually and, when it did occur,

usually consisted of little more than a flag escort and several companies of history buffs wearing

colonial military uniforms. From being integral to New Yorkers' historical memories, the parade

had come to exert little cultural resonance beyond the participants themselves. The Sons of theRevolution, preferring dignified events that took place in controlled settings, introduced a new

ritual, the dedication of statues that honored great Americans such as George Washington and

Nathan Hale and tablets that commemorated historic sites such as the Battle of Harlem Heights.

The dedication ceremonies featured lengthy speeches extolling the importance of colonial historythat demonstrated the historical knowledge and cultural authority of the Sons of the Revolution.

The patriotic and ancestral societies' favorite milieu, however, were private gatherings. EveryNovember 25th, the Sons of the Revolution, the Colonial Dames of America, the Daughters of

the American Revolution, and the Children of the Holland Dames held dinners at exclusive

venues such as Delmonico's, the Astor House, the Waldorf-Astoria, and Fraunces' Tavern, where

their members could socialize and hear historical lectures without rubbing elbows with the hoipolloi. (93)

The Sons of the Revolution's predilection for the intellectual and the didactic accelerated

Evacuation Day's dissolution. One sign of the holiday's difficulties was that newspapers began to

ridicule it. Concluding that the fundamental problem was that "the peaceful departure of theBritish" was not "specially heroic," the New York Times argued in 1888 that Evacuation Day

would warrant more than its "slight annual commemoration" had General Washington and his

troops only done something "more strenuous than that of watching the Redcoats go." (94) Othernewspapers exploited the huge imaginative gap that existed between colonial and modern New

York City by mocking the history buffs who wore replica Continental Army uniforms on subway

and elevated trains. The lowpoint came in 1907, when the City History Club organized anEvacuation Day program of lectures for 600 elementary school children in a Brooklyn park. (95)

After waiting for over an hour for the program to begin, the children started screaming and

running around the park, finally mobbing the speakers, who, the Times dryly observed, "fled agood deal faster than the British ever did." (96)

The dissolution of the holiday led organizations that had scheduled events for Evacuation Day to

transfer them to Thanksgiving. New York State's National Guard regiments, which had held

military drills and balls on Evacuation Day for decades, started moving them to Thanksgivingabout 1905. Several Daughters of the American Revolution chapters shifted their galas to

Thanksgiving around the same time. (97) There were a few stubborn holdouts, especially the

Sons of the Revolution, which slated Evacuation Day banquets as late as the 1920s. But althoughits speakers went on proclaiming Old New York's glories and railing against the public's


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disregard of the past, they came off as cranks. By then, even elites no longer adhered to

Evacuation Day. With the emergence of modernist thinking encouraging a more skeptical

approach to history, the reverence for the past that had characterized Evacuation Day seemed oldfashioned. The upper class' use of history as a social credential faded, replaced by a new

emphasis on consumption, sports, higher education, and careers. Evacuation Day's localism also

made it vulnerable, because of changes in the elite's outlook. Unlike New York's Federalist elite,which was oriented both nationally and locally, or its mid- to late-nineteenth century elite, which

was strongly localist, the early twentieth century economic elite increasingly had a national

perspective, as corporations altered business culture. Local history started to seem parochial. (98)

Wealthy New Yorkers' drift away from history cost Evacuation Day its last constituency. By the1920s, the tradition was no longer meaningful for any social group. Except for the Irish-

Americans immediately after the Civil War, most immigrants and workers had never contested

Evacuation Day directly. Instead, some responded by turning Thanksgiving into an alternativetradition. A variant of Thanksgiving became a haven for working-class New Yorkers repelled by

Evacuation Day's nativism and elitism. Before a uniform Thanksgiving based on New England

precedents and revolving around the family emerged, a range of Thanksgiving practices hadexisted, including a radical strain, centered in Protestant and Catholic churches, that critiquedAmerican capitalism by reinterpreting its themes of a bountiful harvest and gift exchange as an

argument for the redistribution of wealth and power. This radical variant lapsed as Thanksgiving

evolved in another direction, but it inoculated its working-class adherents against EvacuationDay. (99)

A few Evacuation Day observances have taken place subsequently, on major anniversaries, like

the 200th, in 1983. Yet Evacuation Day survives today as an historical curiosity, known chiefly

for its disappearance. And perhaps that is the final irony: a holiday that was dedicated to memoryis itself remembered for having been forgotten. (100)

ENDNOTES

I want to thank Elizabeth Blackmar, Frederic Cople Jaher, and Daniel J. Singal for their criticism

of this essay.

1. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism,1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street:

Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating

the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst,1997); Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York, 1996); Leigh Eric Schmidt,

Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, 1995); Kirk Savage,

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America(Princeton, 1997); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

(Cambridge, 2001); and Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and

Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1915 (New Haven, 1985). For the use of memory and

history, see also Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions:" 1-14 and Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland:" 15-41, in Eric

Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983) and Roy


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Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American

Life (New York, 1998).

2. Shils discusses the "dissolution" and "attenuation" of tradition and speaks of traditions thatlose "adherence" to populations. Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago, 1981): 283-286. For analyses

of the purposeful and sometimes organized oblivion of social memory, see Adrian Forty andSusanne Kuchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (Oxford, 1999). Other lapsed American traditions

include Guy Fawkes Day, Juneteenth, and Pinkster. Alwyn Barr, "Juneteenth," Encyclopedia ofSouthern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill, 1989): 216; "Guy

Fawkes Day," The Folklore of American Holidays, ed. Henning Cohen and Tristram Potter

Cohen, 2nd ed. (Detroit, 1991): 386-389.

3. This article is the first systematic analysis of Evacuation Day, but other accounts have beenmade of it, chiefly encyclopedia and almanac entries. Most attribute its disappearance to the

decline of anti-English sentiment or to competition with Thanksgiving. Both factors did enter

into the holiday's demise, but more subtly than earlier authors allow. See Robert I. Goler,

"Evacuation Day," The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (New Haven,1995): 385; Brooks McNamera, Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New

York, 1788-1909 (New Brunswick, 1997): 35-39; Gary Jennings, Parades: Celebrations andCircuses on the March (Philadelphia, 1966): 59; and Jane M. Hatch, comp. and ed., The

American Book of Days, 3rd ed. (New York, 1978): 1051-1053. For loyalist experiences of the

evacuation, see Robert Ernst, "A Tory-eye View of the Evacuation of New York," New YorkHistory 64 (October 1983): 377-94.

4. Goler, "Evacuation Day," The Encyclopedia of New York City: 385.

5. Max Weber, "Class, Status, and Party:" 180-195, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,

ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946). For American elites, see DigbyBaltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Philadelphia, 1979);Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston,

Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982); David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater

New York at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1982); Kathryn A. Jacob, Capital Elites: HighSociety in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1995); and Sven Beckert,

The Moneyed Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bougeoisie,

1850-1896 (New York, 2001). For an analysis of memory keepers, see Peter Dobkin Hall, "TheEmpty Tomb: The Making of Dynastic Identity:" 255-348, in George E. Marcus with Peter

Dobkin Hill, Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century

America (Boulder, 1992).

6. "Preliminary Articles for a Treaty of Peace:" 243-50, in Journals of the Continental Congress,v. 24, entry for April 15, 1783 (Washington, D.C., 1922); "Definitive Articles of a Treaty of

Peace:" 23-28, in Journals of the Continental Congress, v. 28, entry for January 14, 1784

(Washington, D.C., 1928); Journals of the Continental Congress, v. 24, entries for April 24 and

July 16, 1783: 274 and 436; Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, March 17, 1783: 290-93, Continental Congress Report on Proposal of Sir Guy Carleton, April 22, 1783: 338, and

Alexander Hamilton and William Floyd to George Clinton, April 23, 1783: 338-39, in The


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Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 1782-1786, v. 3, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York, 1961); H.G.

Letter V [attributed to Hamilton], February 25, 1789: 270, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton,

1787-1788, v. 4, ed. by Harold C. Syrett (New York, 1962). For the Revolution and New YorkCity, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the

Origin of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1979); and Edward Countryman, A People in

Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790(Baltimore, 1981).

7. Rivington's New York Gazette, November 26, 1783; The Independent New-York Gazette,

November 29, 1783; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to

1898 (New York, 1999): 259-261; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: ABiography, v. 5, Victory with the Help of France (New York, 1952): 461; James Thomas

Flexner, George Washington, v. 3, In the American Revolution (1775-1783) (Boston, 1967):

522-28. Van Arsdale has sometimes been identified as an Army enlisted man or an Army officer.

8. New York Packet, January 15, 1784; The Independent New-York Gazette, November 29,

December 6, 1783; The Independent Journal: or, The General Advertiser, December 1, 1783.

9. The Independent Journal: or, The General Advertiser, December 1, 1783. Emphasis in the

original.

10. New York Packet, January 15, 1784. Emphasis in the original.

11. Robert Thomas, Petition to the Mayor and the Corporation of the City of New York, April14, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, New York City Common Council Papers, 1630-1831, microfilm

edition, Municipal Archives of the New York City Department of Records, New York, NY

(hereafter cited as CCP). See also David Barclay, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common

Council, February 13, 1784, reel 8, folder 302, CCP, and Adolph Waldron, Petition to theMayor, Aldermen, and Commonality, April 4, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, CCP. Some early

petitioners did not use the term evacuation, speaking instead of "the approach of the BritishTroops," "the Invasion of this State by the British Troops," or "when the Enemy took Possession

of the Island." Elizabeth Ritchie, Memorial, April 22, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, CCP; Richard

Norwood, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonality, March 6, 1784, reel 8, folder 302,

CCP; Michael Brooks, Petition to the Corporation of the City of New York, March 21, 1784, reel8, folder 304, CCP.

12. Andrew Thompson and Joseph Cheesman, Petition to the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen, and

Common Council, March 30, 1784, reel 8, folder 303, CCP.

13. William Backhouse, Petition, July 9, 1785, reel 9, folder 322, CCP. See also ElizabethMesier, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, September 8, 1784, reel 8,

folder 305, CCP; John Ferrers, Petition to the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonality, December

12, 1785, reel 9, folder 325, CCP. Midway in 1784, references to the beginning of the Britishoccupation became non-specific and almost never used the term evacuation. John Barlow thus

referred to owing two years' rent "when the British came over & took New York." John Barlow,


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Petition to the Mayor, the Aldermen, and Common Council, September 8, 1784, reel 8, folder

305, CCP.

14. The Independent Journal; or, The General Advertiser, November 30, 1785. For the historicalmemory of ordinary Americans, see Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party:

Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 1999): vii-xvii, 87-91 and Robert E. Cray, Jr.,"Commemorating the Prison Ship Dead: Revolutionary Memory and the Politics of Sepulture in

the Early Republic, 1776-1808," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 56 (July 1999): 565-590.

15. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York,

1992): 353-365. The data are too thin to be conclusive, but the first evacuation observances may

also have been inspired by St. Andrew's Day, the Scottish name day, celebrated every November30th and a signal event on the eighteenth-century social calendar that consisted of dinners that

were attended by the governor, the mayor, aldermen, merchants, and their wives. By the 1780s,

St. Andrew's Day had acquired an ethno-nationalistic component, and many New Yorkers used it

to attack England for its tyranny of 'North Britain' and the United States. St. Andrew's Dayprobably contributed to the development of Evacuation Day by habituating New Yorkers to an

anniversary that fell at the end of November, was marked with private dinners, and had anationalistic content. New York Journal and State Gazette, December 2, 1784; New-York

Journal, or the Weekly Register, December 1, 1785. Walter Friedman, "Scots:" 1052-1053, in

The Encyclopedia of New York City.

16. The Independent Journal; or, The General Advertiser, November 25, 1786.

17. The New York Journal and State Gazette, December 2, 1784.

18. Waldstreicher, In The Midst of Perpetual Fetes: 18-52 and Newman, Parades and the Politicsof the Street: 1-10, 39. See also Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: 1-14.

19. Independent Journal; Or, the General Advertiser, November 25, 1786.

20. Trevor N. Dupuy, Curt Johnson, and Grace P. Hayes, Dictionary of Military Terms: A Guide

to the Language of Warfare and Military Institutions (New York, 1986): 88.

21. New-York Packet, November 28, 1788; New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27,

1798. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: 47-51. For the celebration of national

holidays before the Civil War, see Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic

Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill, 1988): 69-84 and Cecilia Elizabeth Leary,To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, 1999): 3-23.

22. New-York Packet, November 27, 1787.

23. American Minerva, November 26, 1796; New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27,

1798.


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24. The New-York Journal, and Daily Patriotic Register, November 27, 1787, December 3,

1789; New York Commercial Advertiser, November 27, 1798. New York City Common

Council, Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831, v. 2 (New York:n.p., 1831): 51, 53, 120, 202, 410, 484, 588, 689, 691. Russell F. Weigley, History of the United

States Army, enlarged edition (Bloomington, 1984): 74-94. Russell F. Weigley to author,

October 12, 1999, letter in author's possession. See also Charles Royster, A RevolutionaryPeople at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (New York, 1979):

37-38, 45-48, 341-360.

25. U.S. Congress, Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, v. 1, From

March 3, 1789 to March 3, 1791 (Washington, D.C., 1834): 949-50.

26. Ibid., 958-959. George Adams Boyd, Elias Boudinot: Patriot and Statesman, 1740-1821(Princeton, 1952): 172-173. George Washington, "Thanksgiving Proclamation," October 3,

1789, in The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799,

v. 30, June 20, 1788-January 21, 1790, ed. by John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, D.C., 1939):

427-428; New York Packet, November 24, 1789; New-York Weekly Journal, and WeeklyRegister, December 3, 1789; Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, v. 6,

Patriot and President (New York, 1954): 246. On Thanksgiving, see Jack Santino, All Aroundthe Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life (Urbana, 1994): 167-178; Lin T.

Humphrey, "Thanksgiving Day," American Folklore: An Encyclopedia: 705-06; and Hatch,

comp. and ed., American Book of Days: 1053-57. On the national capital, see Stanley Elkins andEric McKittrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (New York,

1993): 163-193.

27. Although Washington's decision to declare November 26th, 1789 a day of prayer and

thanksgiving was not intended to create a holiday with a fixed place on the annual calendar, it

did establish a relationship between Thanksgiving and late November that became meaningfullater. Before the early twentieth century, there was no single, nationally standardized

Thanksgiving but rather a patchwork of thanksgivings that varied by region, class, and ethnicity.

The custom of celebrating the holiday on the last Thursday in November was nonethelessestablished in New England and the Middle Atlantic states by the 1840s. The creation of a

national legal holiday took place independently. When Abraham Lincoln revived the idea of a

national Thanksgiving in 1863 and when Franklin D. Roosevelt codified it in 1942, both slatedthe holiday for the last Thursday in November because that was when the first Thanksgiving day

following the Constitution's adoption had occurred. Although Lincoln did not explicitly link his

thanksgiving proclamation to Washington's 1789 proclamation, he emphasized the same themesthat Washington did--war, national independence, and national unity under the Constitution--and

he chose to issue it on the same day of the year, October 3rd. The fact that Lincoln and Roosevelt

designated Thanksgiving for the last Thursday in November rather than for November 25th or26th indicates that the original connection to the evacuation of New York City had been

forgotten. Sarah Anne Todd, Diary, entries for November 31, 1837, November 27, 1846,

November 25, 1847, and November 25, 1851, Library, New-York Historical Society, New York,

NY (hereafter cited as N-YHS); Henry Dana Ward, Diary, entry for November 27, 1851, RareBook and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY; Andrew Lester,

Diary, entry for November 25, 1852, N-YHS; John Ward Diary, entry for November 24, 1858,


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N-YHS; Alfred Janson Bloor, Diary, 1848-1858, entries f

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