War made American households more permeable and more precarious. This was especially true in cities occupied by the British army, where the presence of thousands of occupying soldiers disrupted the rhythms and routines of urban life. Troops drilled in public spaces. Civilians were forced to adhere to curfews timed to military schedules. Drunken and rowdy soldiers filled city streets. Interior spaces offered little refuge. Civilians were often victims of robbery or plunder. Officers and soldiers regularly appeared at the door requisitioning provisions or requesting quarters. Anything made of wood was liable to being torn down for kindling. Under military occupation the routines of daily life took on new levels of danger, especially for female civilians, as they attempted to continue their lives and domestic responsibilities amidst the chaos of the occupied city.
For American men, occupation brought different kinds of danger. Opponents to British rule were often exiled or imprisoned. Seeking to avoid this fate, many patriots fled prior to the army’s arrival, trusting in their wives to protect family property and businesses in their absence. Those men that chose to remain experienced a more subtle erosion of their authority within occupied cities, as the British army restructured American homes and resources to facilitate military aims. To be sure, several loyalists benefited from their fidelity to the Crown and gained new levels of authority under British military rule. Other men were more flexible in their allegiances and deployed them strategically to protect their families and property during the conflict. Yet, in many instances, as the British army consolidated their control over American cities, it did so in ways that sublimated American men’s patriarchal authority to that of occupying British forces. In British-occupied cities American men were no longer wholly in charge of their households. Rather, civilian homes and resources were subject, first and foremost, to the needs of the British army.
Examining this domestic experience suggests how war gave new meaning to nascent ideas about domestic privacy. During the American Revolution inhabitants of occupied cities primarily experienced war within their homes and through the lens of domestic concerns. For these people, the Revolution played out most immediately not on the battlefield, but in the total disruption of their cities, homes, and the world that they inhabited. It was evident in the diminished power of American men over their households, in women’s attempts to feed their families and protect precious resources from rapacious armies, in the flight of household laborers both enslaved and free, and in the British officers who appeared at their doors requesting quarter.