Augsburg is spectacular city in Bavaria with a rich history in finance and culture. It was home to the Fugger family of bankers who rose to become a global powerhouse of capitalism in the space of just three generations. Wealth was translated into cultural splendor.
As far back as the High Middle Ages, travelers were astounded by the cathedral with its stunning bronze doors. Over time stylish fountains, guild houses, churches and the Town Hall combined to form a unique cityscape.
Augsburg was the birthplace of Leopold Mozart, father to Wolfgang Amadeus (the city still celebrates an annual Mozart Festival). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a center of printmaking, an “Empire of Prints.” By the 1770s a new genre emerged that was known as vues d’optique (perspective views).
These printed images were intended to be shown on a wall or screen by using a magic lantern, an optical device that projected the image by means of candles and mirrors. Titles were printed backwards so that they could be read when reflected in the mirror.
At the same time an “optical machine” was developed for magnifying flat pictures. The so-called zograscope enhanced the sense of the depth shown in an image.
Perspective views depicted landscapes, street views, architectural interiors or historical events. They also communicated contemporary news stories – journalism in colored images. The uprising against British oppression connects Augsburg with the city of New York.
Bowling Green
European reporting on America happened through press or print. The French-language Dutch newspaper Gazette de Leyde (Gazette of Leiden) was a leading newspaper that disseminated stories on America. Distributed throughout Europe, its contents were freely copied by other papers.
Distance and a lack of channels made news unreliable and most articles on the American Revolution were second-hand reports or simply rumors. Plausible facts were scarce. Uncertainty about sources of information undermined the journalistic claim to tell the truth. Print makers struggled with identical problems.
The Revolution was good for the print business. Between 1775 and 1779 London publishers Thomas Hart, C. Shepherd and John Morris were associated with a series of portraits of American leaders, including George Washington, John Hancock, Israel Putnam, Charles Lee and others.
The images were fraudulent. Turned out in haste to meet public demand, none of these bears any resemblance to its subject. The names of the publishers seem to be fictitious too. With one possible exception, they are not associated with any other prints.
It was probably too risky for them to be identified with the glorification of a rebellion against British rule. Judging by their stylistic features, these prints were produced in Augsburg on behalf of London publishers.
At the time of the American Revolution, Franz Xaver Habermann and his younger colleague Balthasar Friedrich Leizelt (or Leizel) issued a series of cityscapes titled “Collection des Prospects.”
Published in Augsburg, these perspective views were aimed at a European market (their titles were presented in several languages as they were marketed in Paris, London and elsewhere). Their prints show North American landscapes and cities such as Boston, New York or Philadelphia.
Neither artist had ever set foot in America, but such was the appeal of Americana that they could not resist the temptation to create “imagined” views.
Canaletto, pioneer of the cityscape, realized that the demand for prospects of his native Venice among foreign visitors offered a commercial opportunity. Throughout his career, in creating urban panoramas he took the liberty of including distortions in order to “improve” reality for effect and salability.
When it came to America, European print-makers went a step further. They based their designs on preexisting images and incorporated selective features into their own. As originality was not (yet) considered an aesthetic criterion, they felt no qualms about borrowing from the work of others.
Habermann and Leizelt were confronted with an additional problem when working on their vues d’optique. There were few contemporary views of North American cities in circulation.
Instead, they used familiar views of European towns. Such was the interest in developments taking place across the Atlantic, that they felt compelled to supply their own interpretation of events.
As competition amongst print makers was intense and profit margins precarious, they had to secure their niche in the market. A number of Habermann and Leizelt’s fictionalized American views (especially their harbor scenes in Philadelphia and New York) match various popular European cityscapes.
A decade before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, New York’s Assembly commissioned the London-based sculptor Joseph Wilton to produce an equestrian statue of King George III. It was unveiled in Bowling Green, a park at Manhattan’s southernmost tip.
Five days after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, a group of Patriots known as the Sons of Liberty tore the statue down as it symbolized British power (the monument is said to have been melted to produce over 40,000 bullets).
Habermann’s imaginative recreation of that event shows enslaved and free black men performing most of the pulling of the statue, but they are dressed in fanciful Turkish attire (a costume often worn by Black men in European painting on slavery in the Ottoman Empire).
The architecture is characteristic of a large European city rather than Anglo-Dutch colonial New York. The statue itself was incorrectly depicted as a non-equestrian representation of George III.
Great Fire
By the time the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, the city of New York had developed into a hub of trade and commerce. The Province of New York was politically divided with growing animosity between Loyalists and Patriots.
The Continental Army under General George Washington occupied the city in early 1776, but British General William Howe recognized the strategic value of the city’s harbor.
In early summer 1776, Howe launched a campaign by occupying Staten Island. He then defeated the Continental forces on Long Island in August and on September 16, 1776, British troops marched into Manhattan, beginning a seven-year occupation.
With the withdrawal of the Continental Army to Harlem Heights, a mass exodus of civilians began. New York became like a ghost town because of the sheer number of citizens that had evacuated, including most of the city’s fire fighters.
At least 20,000 British troops, including 11,000 German mercenaries, occupied the city. (You can read about the British occupation of New York here).
When the Dutch first arrived in Manhattan, the East River waterfront was a swamp. Familiar with such surroundings, settlers started the draining process, leaving inlets for ships to enter or depart. These were known as “slips.”
Over time, they gave their names to the streets or squares that replaced them such as Old Slip, Peck’s Slip or Catharine Slip. Whitehall Slip was located at the bottom of Whitehall Street, adjoining the Battery.
On September 21, 1776, five days after the occupation of the city by British forces, a fatal fire broke out. According to John Joseph Henry, an American prisoner aboard HMS Pearl anchored in the harbor, the fire started in the Fighting Cocks tavern on Whitehall Street where drunken revelers were unable to stop the blaze.
The weather had been dry with high winds, so the fire quickly spread among tightly packed homes and businesses. It continued into the daylight hours and burned most of the city between Broadway and the Hudson River. At least a quarter of the city was destroyed.
Most buildings were constructed of wood with roofs of wood shingles. Because of fire risks, New York’s Provincial government had required that by January 1766 new structures were to be built in brick and roofs made of tile or slate. The regulations were ignored because of cost and the scarcity of materials.
As the cause of the fire was not known, the blame game started almost immediately. General Washington denied that his troops were responsible, but the British blamed rebels who had remained hidden in Manhattan.
Some believed that hostile soldiers had started the fire so they could accuse the retreating Patriots. Acting as fire fighters, British soldiers discovered that much of the equipment had been sabotaged.
They accused the locals, arresting over two hundred suspects, although no official charges were filed against any of the accused.
News of the calamity trickled over to Europe and Habermann was quick to report the sensational event of the Great Fire in a perspective view. In an imagined reconstruction, his view depicts parts of downtown New York, near Broadway, with the original Stock Exchange and Trinity Church.
Flames are shown engulfing large, elegant buildings as Redcoats are savagely beating up panicked inhabitants, while enslaved people take advantage of the mayhem to loot the blazing buildings. In this depiction too, the architecture is distinctly Continental and derived from European sources.
In Europe, prints made a deeper impact than press reports on the American adventure. Images lingered in the public’s imagination and would, eventually, fire support for the rebellious Patriots and fuel anti-British feelings in France and the Low Countries in particular.
A City in Ruins
New York City was a rowdy place. In the early days of Dutch settlement, the colony was conceived of in paradoxical terms: at once a land of commercial possibilities and an unpleasant backwater.
Colonial settlements in general served as outlets for unloading an underclass of vagrants, beggars and petty criminals. Thanks to its remote location, New Amsterdam was a refuge for pirates, a rogue’s paradise.
Prostitution was rife. Peace keepers had to deal with a string of offenses, from violent robberies to murderous assaults. Early regulations were imposed in an attempt to quell upheavals in the outpost, but officials proved unable to lay down the law.
Little changed under British rule and it got worse after the Great Fire. Following the disaster, the British established a regime of strict martial law rather than returning to civilian administration.
Nothing was undertaken to clear the devastated areas and start reconstruction. Little was done to improve the fire department during occupation (or even after the American victory in 1783 as demonstrated by the fire of 1835).
Many residents lived for years in squalor in tents and shacks (a “canvas town”). Sanitation was miserable and crime a persistent problem. In addition, the occupying British forces were unruly and ill-disciplined. Their drunken behavior led to continued civil disorder.
Continuous problems with rationing the troops, created a thriving black market. New York harbor was a haven for
smugglers.
Patriot homes were confiscated in order to house officers; churches were converted to prisons, infirmaries or barracks (but not if belonging to the Church of England); thousands of prisoners of war were confined in disease infested prisons or in crowded prison ships moored in the East River.
British “administration” was officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783. In November that year (celebrated as Evacuation Day), the British finally withdrew and New York City embarked on a transformative journey of urban renewal and revitalization.
The impact of the American Revolution would be felt globally as the war itself was part of a much wider conflict and involved major players. Benjamin Franklin suggested that every European nation wanted to see “Britain humbled, having all in their time been offended by her insolence.”
Anti-British feelings were rife. France allied itself with the new American republic. The Netherlands welcomed the opportunity to weaken Britain’s economic might. Although opting for neutrality, it supported the United States through trade.
The Irish were seeking ways of expelling British rule from the nation (a large number of Irishmen joined the Patriot armies).
This hostility largely reflected political power games at the time, but there was a strong populist element as well. Fed with often wildly inaccurate information, activists and students were enthused by the news that came their way from across the Atlantic.
The volcanic activity of the Revolution caused a subsequent eruption of discontent in Europe. Print makers stoked the popular imagination. The perceived American experience, the fight for freedom over tyranny, stirred nationalist and revolutionary emotions in France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Belgium and elsewhere. The newly created Republic shaped events in “old” Europe.
When the European dream collapsed and repressive regimes were re-installed, disillusioned migrants moved en masse across the Atlantic carrying with them misconstrued ideas and perceptions about the host nation that had been fed by a rich tradition of fake images, many of which had originated in Augsburg.
Illustrations, from above: Franz Xaver Habermann’s imagined print of the fire in New York during teh Revolution seen as lit from the back; a late eighteen century zograscope for viewing vues d’optique; Thomas Hart’s imagined portrait of Charles Lee, 1776; Habermann imagined “The Destruction of the Royal Statue at New York on July 9, 1776,” ca. 1776; Franz Xaver Habermann’s imagined “Representation du feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck” (Representation of the terrible fire at New York, that the Americans lit during the night of September 19, 1776), ca. 1776; and William Howe, 1777, color mezzotint by Richard Purcell aka Charles Corbutt (ca 1736-ca 1766).
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