Mary McTamaney

We know that Independence Day has been revered in every state of the union since colonists signed their names to a document composed by Thomas Jefferson declaring the people’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and formed a United States. We know that in time July 4th became a declared national holiday and by the 1930’s a paid day off from work. What we don’t know as clearly and what we rarely think about is what that Declaration of Independence meant to average citizens like those in Newburgh, at the time it was signed and in the first few years afterward.

Newburgh was a very small settlement in 1776. There were fewer than 100 buildings in the entire town, less than half of which were dwellings. It was already ethnically diverse a generation after a group of Palatine refugees established a settlement that branched from the Quassaick Creek to Balmville. Newburgh was a community of predominantly first- and second- generation immigrants just coming to an understanding of how they might make their way in this Colony of New York.

Before the rumblings of revolution against England, everyone in Newburgh had understood that they were establishing themselves as subjects of a monarchy across the Atlantic. They worked and paid taxes and voted for representatives who served a king in Britain. New York was especially tied to the monarchy because its governor was a royal appointee. Most other colonies had established charters whereby towns and villages and counties selected their own colonial representatives and therefore elected their own governors, but not New York. Governor Tryon was leading us in 1776, and King George sent him to us. Accepting revolution meant setting aside familiar government structures and establishing new ones.

So by mid-July as news of the Declaration of Independence reached Newburgh, there must have been much fear mixed with feelings of hope. Newburgh townsfolk understood the threats of war. They had experience with the French and Indian War that had recently affected the New York Colony. They understood that their parent country, England, would now deploy troops to quell a rebellion and that they were very close indeed to the impending action, with a British fleet anchored in New York harbor right down the river. Wasting no time, they met as a local Committee of Safety. They drafted a militia to guard the town. Then they faced the orders of the new Continental Congress that told them to canvas the little settlement and have their citizens sign an oath of loyalty to the new nation.

There was no courthouse or town hall in 1776. They met in the house of Jonathan Hasbrouck. His farm covered the hillside on the south side of the precinct along the road known as King’s Highway. To debate into the night the dangerous choices ahead, they left Hasbrouck’s (his family did live there, including children) and went to the local tavern and hotel run by Martin Weigand, one of the remaining Palatine descendants. There on Broad Street near Liberty they reviewed news dispatches and results of their canvas of fellow citizens.

They wrote out lists of their neighbors who would not sign and sent them by messenger as ordered by the New York provincial convention knowing that action would be taken against these old friends.

It has been reported by historians who interviewed Newburghers who were here in the Revolutionary War that, for the duration of the war, the sounds of drums and fifes and marching was almost always heard in the little dirt streets of our town. Martial law had taken over and checkpoints were common. It was a wooded wilderness in several directions beyond our small settlement and there was always the fear of incursions by British or Indians “paid” by the British, or Ulster County slaves also lured into the fight or just those foraging for scarce food and supplies once the army needed to commandeer much from local storehouses.

George Washington’s calming and commanding presence didn’t arrive in Newburgh until 1782 when he moved into the same Hasbrouck house where our local precinct leaders first gathered. On America’s first Independence Day in 1776 we were on our own and bravely stood in our own defense and the defense of our valley.