Happy Evacuation Day!

[Fatman]

Good thing bygones are bygones. Otherwise our best friends would be... the Crapauds!

November 25, 2008, 7:00 am
Celebrating 225 Years Since the British Left Town
By Sam Roberts
George Washington’s triumphal entry into New York City on Evacuation Day, Nov. 25, 1783, as depicted in an 1879 lithograph. (Image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

You probably haven’t programmed this as an alert from your P.D.A., but 225 years ago, the last British Red Coats left from a longboat in the Battery after occupying the city for seven years. Happy Evacuation Day!

For well over a century, no holiday was memorialized annually in the city with greater gusto — not only by the Sons of the Revolution and other descendants of the Continental Army, but also by Irish immigrants who weren’t averse to reviving anti-British sentiment.

The holiday lost much of its popular appeal around World War I. By then, most New Yorkers figured it was time to let bygones be bygones and that it might seem like bad form to sneer at our British allies.

This year, the Sons of the Revolution (the New York chapter is still 950 strong) commemorated the evacuation with a parade at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan on Saturday and a dinner on Monday night at Fraunces Tavern, their headquarters.

On Tuesday, the National Parks of New York Harbor is holding commemorations at Trinity Church and at Federal Hall on Wall Street, the site of George Washington’s inauguration. A statue of Washington was unveiled there in 1883, the centennial of Evacuation Day.

That year, Mayor Franklin Edson urged not only that New Yorkers take the day off to mark the “culminating event of the Revolution,” but that the anniversary be celebrated in perpetuity by descendants of the original patriots and by “those — and the children of those — who have since then found upon these shores a refuge from exactions and acts of oppression by rulers of foreign countries.”

While New York was widely regarded as a loyalist (or Tory) town, Arthur Piccolo, chairman of the Bowling Green Association, said on Monday: “It can be argued the American Revolutionary War both began and ended at Bowling Green. The first ‘official’ act of rebellion following the signing of the Declaration of Independence was the destruction of the statue of King George II in Bowling Green Park on July 9, 1776. And the war came to its complete end with the lowering of the last British flag in the United States here on Nov. 25, 1783, and the last British troops leaving American soil.”

While the British surrendered in Yorktown in 1781 and the Treaty of Paris was signed in September 1783, the British took their time in getting out of town and gathering up thousands of loyalists and former slaves to take with them.

Departing British troops nailed their flag to a pole downtown and greased it. Every November, a descendant would re-enact the legendary feat of John Van Arsdale, a sailor, who donned cleats and shimmied up the flagpole to replace the British colors with the Stars and Stripes.

As George Washington triumphantly proceeded Downtown, jeering Americans on Staten Island were fired upon by a British ship in what has been described as the last shot fired in the war.

On Monday, a spokeswoman for the British consul-general in New York said he had no plans to commemorate Evacuation Day.

(For a little-known aspect of this forgotten holiday, read this post from an unofficial police historian.)

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/celebrating-225-years-since-the-british-left-town/?hp

[Big Frank]

I'm so embarrassed. After the big Thanksgiving dinner I ate, I was thinking something else when I read "Evacuation Day".

[PegLeg45]

I'm so embarrassed. After the big Thanksgiving dinner I ate, I was thinking something else when I read "Evacuation Day".

+1

Giggle, Giggle, snort........me too.       

[Fatman]

lol, was it the reference to 'Crapaud' that did it?  That's what the Redcoats used to call the French, and yes it does mean frog.  The French, in turn used to call the Redcoats 'goddamns'.