On September 21, 1776, a fifth of New York City burned to the ground, right before the British soldiers’ eyes.
But for almost 250 years, most New York City historians either ignored the Great Fire of 1776 or argued for its unimportance. They assumed that the fire was caused either by accident or by apolitical miscreants, and they chose to diminish the reports of outraged eyewitnesses who believed the fire was deliberate. The firefighter John Baltus Dash, for instance, testified that the fire broke out in two places at once, far too soon for the wind to have communicated flaming brands from one place to the other. He also found fire buckets with their handles cut and saw British soldiers arrest several people who had concealed combustible materials under their clothes. British officers and their Loyalist allies reported these facts and other evidence through their channels of news and intelligence, arguing that the Rebels — including General George Washington himself — were incendiaries who had perpetrated a villainous and atrocious act.
But most Americans never heard this story, then or since, because intelligence reports from Washington, the Continental Congress, and Rebel newspapers suppressed any suggestion that Rebels might have burned New York City; they called it an accident or suggested that the British soldiers themselves had done the job. John Sloss Hobart, for instance, a member of the New York Provincial Congress, wrote that British soldiers, “having been promised the plunder of the town in case of conquest, . . . have set fire to the town in order to facilitate their views.” To deflect blame for the fire, Hobart reported, General William Howe’s soldiers threw suspected incendiaries into the flames or slit their throats. American historians, relying on these rebel accounts, played down the story of the Great Fire or turned it into a British atrocity.
Americans were, in other words, encouraged to remember the Great Fire in a certain way. They developed a myth of American exceptionalism and tried to make New York City’s experience as a British garrison fit within that myth. Among New Yorkers, the memory of the Great Fire in the 19th century and beyond owed a great deal to a German-born tavernkeeper and merchant named David Grim. Grim lived in New York City as a Loyalist throughout the British occupation and he almost certainly knew Dash and other men who fought the fire. Grim died in 1826, but his reminiscences were discovered by the banker-historian John Fanning Watson during a visit to New York in 1828. From there, Grim’s tale became a staple: it propagated, through paraphrase and repeated reprintings, in at least twenty historical works over the course of the 19th century. Plenty of other histories ignored the fire entirely. The myth of an accidental fire took hold and became entrenched.