The Night Kingston Burned

They could see it from the hills. The families who had fled when Vaughan's ships appeared on the river — carrying what they could, leaving the rest — stood on the ridges above the Rondout Creek and watched their town burn.

Kingston had been built over more than a century of Dutch and English settlement, its streets laid out in the pattern established in the 1650s, its stone houses constructed with Dutch solidity. The Stockade District had long since outgrown its original palisade walls, but the pattern remained: a dense, ordered town that had become the seat of a new state.

The burning was systematic. Vaughan's soldiers moved through the streets with torches. The Dutch Reformed Church burned. The courthouse burned. The taverns and houses and shops that made Kingston function burned. By morning, the Stockade District was ruins. The Senate House — thick stone, stone roof — survived. A handful of other stone buildings survived. Everything else was gone.

The people on the hills watching the fire knew exactly what they were seeing. They had built a government in that town. The New York State Senate had met there. The first governor had been inaugurated there. The constitution of a new republic had been written and adopted there. All of it had just been burned by an army trying to win a war it was losing.

What they could not know was that twenty miles north, at Saratoga, Burgoyne's army was in the final hours of its own destruction. The burning of Kingston was supposed to relieve pressure on Burgoyne. By the time the last embers cooled, it no longer mattered. Burgoyne surrendered the next morning. Kingston burned for nothing.