The Making of an American

The outright stealing of land, houses, barns, animals, supplies, and people by occupation troops was going on during the entire period of time.

The burning down of whole towns especially churches was condoned by the British. Also the desecration of churches by using them as stables and whorehouses was also a common practice.

The continuous bayoneting of troops by the Hessians, after these troops had tried to surrender.

The placing of bounties and rewards on the heads of clergymen like the Reverend James Caldwell, that was responsible for the death of his wife and eventually his death.

The use of Native Americans as a fear tactic against rural farmers. That is, threatening them with scalping and burning. This was a real worry because The British paid bounty for scalps.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not condoning any abuses that the Americans may have done to Tory loyalists. But this practice was very strongly punished by Washington’ s troops. The penalty for guilty was hanging and this was strictly enforced by General Washington.

I am not trying to convince anyone of my viewpoints but I felt that I, as a direct descendant, had to make this statement.

A lot of us can remember that this kind of treatment happened in the Second World War and is still going on in the 20th Century and now in the 21st Century. But, it should never be condoned.

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Jeremiah was born March 3, 1760. He was the youngest of seven children raised in an English - Dutch religious family. There is a very good chance that his mother died shortly after his birth and his father remarried Judith Lammerse about a year later. He was lucky to be born into a large family. There were many cousins and relatives, who lived in Brooklyn and Jamaica, New York. His uncles, Nicholas and Abraham Brouwer owned the Gowanus Mills, that were located on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

New York City and Manhattan Island had changed very little in 1760 from the way it had been back when the Dutch had owned it. Once it was rugged terrain, some of it all but impassable, with sheer cliffs and ravines and bare limestone outcroppings – the rough northern part of Central Park is typical of the whole island--and several rather imposing elevations. Commanding lower Manhattan was Bayard’s Mount, a hill that reared 100 feet above Mott and Pell Streets, in the heart of what is now Chinatown. Its cedar-crested summit looked west across the Hudson River to the Newark Moutains, east to the fertile green plains of Long Island, south to the gabled roofs and spires of the little city a mile away. At its base, about Foley Square, was New York’s main source of fresh water, a natural lake called Collect Pond, which was supposed to be bottomless and to hold a sea monster. Bayard’s Mount has been leveled to fill the bottomless lake; the sea monster is locked forever beneath New York’s Municipal Court.

Many of New York’s winding streets trace the course of forgotten brooks. Maiden Lane was a footpath along a crystal stream which tumbled over flat stones in cascades and rills, forming occasional pools where Dutch vrouws and their dimpled daughters came to do their washing. Minetta Street marks a willow-lined rill, which started in a swamp at Fifth Avenue and 21st Street and meandered west through Greenwich Village to the Hudson. The pronounced dip in Park Avenue at 31st Street, where the underpass emerges, is the ancient bed of Sunfish Pond, the loveliest fishing lake on the island. Its grassy banks were shaded by hickories and oaks, and boys with willow poles angled in its spring-fed water for sunnies and sticklebacks and yellow-bellied cobblers, the sweetest perch of all.

Porpoises and sharks and an occasional whale cruised off the black rocks of the Battery, and sturgeon plunged and rolled up the Hudson as far as the Highlands. Lobsters were plentiful in the unpolluted East River. The muddy banks abounded in oysters and clams. It was a beautiful and bountiful island, still largely uninhabited, with native cherries and plums and mulberries everywhere. Wild strawberries grew in such profusion that people lay down in the fields and gorged themselves. This was the natural surroundings that Jeremiah grew up in. After chores, he could go hunting or fishing with his brothers or anything else that a boys imagination could think of.

But it wasn’t to be so completely idyllic. There were outside pressures happening around him. When he was just turned five in 1765, the hated Stamp Act went into effect. This caused immediate reaction from the people. They revolted and mobs went on a rampage led by the Sons of Liberty. Tyranny was tyranny, whether abroad or at home. The masses echoed the phrases "Taxation without Representation! Rights of Man! Slavery! Tyranny! Enemies of Liberty, Beware!" Though they had no property to tax, they banged their tankards in protest against the Stamp Act and rallied to the heady cry of "Liberty".

General civil war was averted when a fast packet from London brought word that the Stamp Act had been revoked, and newspapers hailed the "Glorious news for America and no more Shim Shams." Church bells rang all night, an ox was roasted whole on the Commons. A large mob of the Sons of Liberty went to the Fort to congratulate the Governor. The grateful Assembly voted funds to erect a statue of King George III in Bowling Green, and broadsides were posted in all coffeehouses: "Peace proclaimed."

It was an uneasy peace, finally late in 1769, when the British soldiers, weary of epithets and brickbats, revenged themselves on their tormentors by chopping down the pine post called the Tree of Liberty. After four successive poles had been destroyed, the Sons of Liberty secured a tall ship’s mast, bound it with iron bands, and set it in a deep hole on the Commons. Some members of the Sixteenth Regiment, during the dead hours of the night, blew it up with gunpowder and insolently deposited the fragments on the doorstep of the Widow de la Montagne’s Tavern on Broadway, the rebel rondezous. In retaliation the mob collared three lobsterbacks next morning and marched them towards the Mayor’s office. A group of comrades in arms came to their rescue, wielding musket butts and bayonets, but the civilians defended themselves so vigorously with canes and cart stakes that the soldiers retreated toward Golden Hill, a waterfront section near Burling Slip. Here a lively street fight broke out, one citizen was slain and several were wounded, and the mob leader named Isaac Sears, received a bayonet scratch on his arm. The Battle of Golden Hill marked the first bloodshed of the Revolution, two months before the Boston Massacre.