cart. The Brevoorts, and Whitehead Hicks who married the only daughter of John Brevoort, had elegant houses near by; as did one branch of the Van Zandts, Theophylact Bache, fifth president of the chamber of commerce, Elias Desbrosses, whose name has been perpetuated by a street and a ferry, the lord proprietor of Philipse manor, and several branches of the Livingstons. In Liberty street, alongside the Dutch church, was the great ugly-looking sugar-house of the Livingstons, a gray stone building, six stories high, with immensely thick walls and small deep windows.

The British army found this great structure admirably adapted for the incarceration of their American prisoners-of-war, on taking possession of New York city in 1776. Each story was divided into two great rooms with low ceilings, into which were huddled the sick and the well, indiscriminately, thousands of them; and their captors had little else to furnish except iron bars for the windows, and chains to keep the poor suffering prisoners from walking about within their narrow confines. A ponderous jail-like door opened into Liberty street to the court-yard, through which two British sentinels were constantly pacing night and day. On the southeast a heavy door opened into the dismal cellar used as a dungeon. The yard was surrounded by a close board fence nine feet high. The building was erected long years before for a sugar-refinery, and the genius of an enemy could not have fashioned it better as a place of torture. The prisoners taken on Long Island and at Fort Washington were the first to enter it. The coarsest food was doled out in scanty measure, and the men devoured it like hungry wolves or ceased to eat at all. During the winter months they had no fire or blankets, and in the torrid heat of summer almost no air to breathe. These victims were constantly decreased by death, and as constantly increased by newly captured patriots.

William Dunlap writes: "I went to school in Little Queen (now Cedar) street, and my seat at the desk, in an upper room of a large storehouse kind of building, placed me in full view of the sugar-house corner of Crown (now Liberty) street and Nassau. The reader may have noticed the tall pile of building with little port-hole windows tier above tier. In that place crowds of American prisoners were incarcerated, pined, sickened, and died. During the suffocating heat of summer, when my schoolroom windows were all open and I could not catch a cooling breeze, I saw opposite to me every narrow aperture of those stone walls filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a portion of the external air. What must have been the atmosphere within? Andros's description of

the prison-ship tells us. Child as I was, this spectacle sunk deep into my heart. I can see the picture now." *

The pretty Dutch church was in convenient proximity to receive the overflow. The pews were torn out and used for fire-wood during that first winter, and the whole interior disfigured, dismantled, and destroyed. A floor was laid from one gallery to another, and three thousand prisoners were accommodated. They were packed together so close they could hardly breathe, and the church became the scene of some of the most harrowing and tragic events in the annals of the country. The sufferings of that winter were scarcely less here than in the sugar house of the Livingstons, which ranked foremost in horrors among the sugar-house prisons, as the old Jersey prison-ship took precedence among its kind upon the water. The inmates of the church were the following year transferred to other prisons, the glass was taken from the windows, the shutters thrown off, and the floor taken up and covered with tan-bark; the sacred edifice was thus converted into a riding-school for the training of dragoon horses. A pole was placed across the middle of the interior for the horses to jump over, and it was a noisy, rollicking meeting-place for British officers and soldiers until the end of the war.

New York city was severely humiliated during its occupation by a foreign foe. It was transformed virtually into a garrison town, all courts

*The father of young Dunlap was an Irish officer who was wounded at Quebec. Being a loyalist he went to New York in the spring of 1777, taking his boy with him. Later on the boy from his school in Cedar street developed into the portrait artist and distinguished author of his generation.

of justice were closed, trade ceased, there was no employment for laborers, provisions and fuel were scarce and extravagantly high, and the poor were in a perishing condition. The poisonous prisons on every hand were agonizing to the inhabitants. A few of the opulent citizens who took no part in the unhappy disputes tried to remedy evils, but military law pre

vailed, no communication was allowed with the captive patriots, and aid conveyed to them by stealth only doomed the benefactor to the same fate. When the victims confined in the Middle Dutch church crawled to the windows begging for food, a sentinel, pistol in hand, would turn back the gifts of the charitable. Among the notable men associated with these

harrowing scenes was John Pintard, the founder of historical societies in America, then a clerk for his uncle, Lewis Pintard, the commissary of American prisoners, a bright, handsome, college-bred, energetic young man of twenty. He was in New York three of those distressing years, and wrote graphic and thrilling descriptions of what came to his notice.

Among the practical philanthropists who unostentatiously went about doing good while the black cloud hovered over the city was Andrew Hamersley, for whom Hamersley street was named, a rich importing merchant who resided in a handsome house in Hanover square. He tried to alleviate the woes of the sick and dying prisoners, and there was hardly a day that he might not have been seen in Nassau street, near the old church. He was a great favorite with the British officers, and his movements were neither watched nor hampered. He was one of those gentle, unassuming men who inspire universal confidence, with great strength and symmetry of Christian character. His wife was the granddaughter of Thomas Gordon (son of Sir George Gordon) who was one of the twentyseven original lords proprietors of East New Jersey, and she inherited the interests in that Lords Proprietory which has been handed along in the slow process of division to the Hamersley family of the present day. The Revolution seriously impaired the fortunes of Andrew Hamersley, but he was a lavish giver to the needy all the same. He however inherited an estate in the West Indies from his mother's brother, Louis Carré, a Huguenot, which retrieved the disaster in a measure. He entertained almost every Englishman of note at his house during the Revolutionary period, who chanced to be in New York. His family rarely, if ever, dined without visitors. Lord Drummond was his guest, and pronounced the Hamersley household one of the loveliest within the circle of his knowledge. He had three sons, William, Thomas, and Louis Carré. William was the first professor of the institute of medicine in Columbia college; Thomas was a man of learning, and married the granddaughter of Governor William Livingston; Louis Carré was the father of the late John W. Hamersley, a sketch of whose career will be found on another page.

With the welcome return of peace the ruined church was restored at considerable expense, but remained unfinished until the summer of 1790. It was opened on the Fourth of July of that year, and the first sermon under its new roof was preached by the eminent Rev. John H. Livingston, D.D., afterward president of the college at New Brunswick. It would be interesting if practicable to marshal before us in friendly review some of the many important characters who in the course of its dozen decades of chequered existence were wont to kneel in prayer within its walls. No

VOL. XXII.-No. 3.-14

church in New York was ever more thoroughly saturated, so to speak, with varied historic associations. Dr. Franklin prosecuted certain of his experiments in electricity in it, using the belfry as an observatory. It was well filled with sabbath worshipers during the first quarter of the present century, and on Sunday evenings crowded. The chief portion of the congregation lived in the vicinity. The tide however was sweeping northerly, and the time came when the old church must be abandoned. Farewell exercises were conducted by Rev. Dr. Knox and Rev. Thomas De Witt, D.D., on the 11th of August, 1844, in presence of an audience that thronged the building to its utmost capacity. Both the Dutch and English language were used on this memorable occasion-the last words of prayer and the benediction being uttered in Dutch. The property was then leased to the United States government for a post-office. It was quickly altered in its outward aspect, and the interior converted into a busy workshop. The post-office authorities found its walls marvelously solid; they bored holes enough into them. to have destroyed any

ordinary masonry. They built stories on the top, and stuck little rooms on here and there in convenient places, with an effect that reminded one of a packhorse heavily laden for a long journey. In 1860 negotiations were instituted for the purchase of the church property by the government, and the price fixed was $200,000. Having obtained authority to sell, a committee from the church proceeded to Washington and tendered the deed to Howell Cobb, then secretary of the treasury, and afterward to Jeremiah Black, the attorney-general. But the country was on the eve of war, and Secretary Cobb was disinclined to allow the money to pass out of the treasury.