New London, Connecticut: Patriot Port and the Flames of Betrayal

Long before the first shots of the American Revolution rang out at Lexington and Concord, New London, Connecticut, was already a town defined by the sea. Situated at the mouth of the Thames River, with a deep natural harbor that opened onto Long Island Sound, the town had spent more than a century cultivating a maritime economy that made it one of the busiest ports between Boston and New York. The harbor was considered to be the best deep water harbor on Long Island Sound , and its wharves handled whale oil, rum, provisions, and the steady traffic of merchant vessels that linked the colonies to the Caribbean and beyond. As the only deep-water port between British-held Newport, Rhode Island, and British headquarters in New York, it was the perfect location from which to launch attacks on British shipping. When the imperial crisis of the 1770s forced American communities to choose between loyalty and resistance, New London's merchants, mariners, and civic leaders did not hesitate. They transformed their commercial port into one of the most aggressive centers of naval warfare in the Revolution—a decision that would ultimately bring catastrophic consequences at the hands of a man who had once called Connecticut home.

New London's political awakening mirrored the broader pattern of colonial resistance, but the town's mercantile class gave it an unusually sharp edge. In 1773, local leaders established a Committee of Correspondence, joining the network of intercolonial communication that Samuel Adams and others had pioneered in Massachusetts. Through this committee, New London's patriots coordinated boycotts of British goods, monitored loyalist sentiment, and ensured that news of British provocations circulated rapidly along the Connecticut coast. Bringing commodities into port without paying duties to the King was so common as to be called part of the "constitution" of the Connecticut citizen, and many of these New England captains and merchants also fervently opposed further British taxation. Among the most influential voices in these early years was Nathaniel Shaw Jr., a wealthy merchant whose stone mansion on the hill overlooking the harbor would soon become the nerve center of Connecticut's naval war effort. Shaw Jr. had taken over the family business around 1763, when trade resumed after the Seven Years' War, and by the early 1760s he was an established merchant in the West Indian trade. Commonly his brigs and sloops took lumber, cattle, or provisions to the West Indies and brought back sugar and molasses.

He was a shrewd businessman with deep connections to the Atlantic trade, and he understood earlier than most that the coming conflict would be won or lost not only on battlefields but on the water.

The mansion itself had an unusual origin. The house was built in 1756 for Nathaniel Shaw Sr. with the labor of Acadians who had been brought to New London as refugees from the English Expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia during the French and Indian Wars.

In that year French refugees from Nova Scotia arrived in New London with few resources and few choices. Captain Shaw put them to work cutting the granite ledge on his property overlooking the Thames River to erect his granite mansion dwelling.

Despite the abundance of natural stone, stone houses were uncommon in this region. Shaw may have been inspired to build this unusual house by an unexpected abundance of cheap labor in the form of displaced Acadians. These French colonists from Nova Scotia had been driven out by the British conquest of the area during the French and Indian War. Many were placed under the temporary care of various New England towns until a permanent home was found.

Nathaniel Shaw put them to work quarrying stone on this property and erecting the house, thereby helping to defray the town's cost of supporting them.

The house, completed in 1758, was constructed by French Canadian builders, who used granite from the ledge behind the property. That granite construction—a rarity among New England homes of the period—would prove fateful a quarter-century later, when the town around it burned to the ground.

New London was also shaping the minds of young patriots. The Connecticut patriot Nathan Hale taught in a one-room schoolhouse in New London from 1774 to 1775, just a few short years after graduating from Yale at the age of eighteen.

Hale moved there to take over the Union Grammar School after complaining of the "remote life in the wilderness called Moodus" and leaving East Haddam.

In 1775, Hale enlisted to fight for independence in the American Revolution, soon after being promoted to the rank of Captain.

On September 8, 1776, with the British on Long Island, Hale volunteered to go behind enemy lines and report on British troop movements. The British captured Hale and sentenced him to hang for spying. He was just twenty-one years old. In 1985, by an act of the General Assembly, Hale officially became Connecticut's state hero. The schoolhouse where he once taught still stands in New London as a museum.

As armed conflict escalated, New London moved swiftly to fortify its harbor. In 1775, Governor Jonathan Trumbull recommended building a fortification at the port of New London to protect the Connecticut government's seat. Built on a rocky point of land near the mouth of the Thames River on Long Island Sound, the fort was completed in 1777 and named for Governor Trumbull. Across the river in Groton, a more substantial work called Fort Griswold was also erected, creating a defensive system to guard both sides of the harbor approach.

The Continental Navy's earliest operations linked New London directly to the birth of American sea power. The first naval force of the Continental Congress was fitted out in New London and returned there after a raid on Nassau to acquire military supplies.

The little fleet returned to New London on April 8, 1776, having also made prizes of two British merchantmen and a six-gun schooner. That fleet was commanded by Esek Hopkins, the first commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. Days later, on April 9, 1776, an even more illustrious visitor arrived. George Washington spent the night of April 9 at the home of Nathaniel Shaw, Jr., a prominent New London merchant.

Later in the day Washington inspected the fortifications under construction at New London and Groton.

Esek Hopkins, commander of the navy, had just returned to New London from Nassau. Washington, Hopkins, General Nathanael Greene, and other officers shared dinner at Nathaniel Shaw's house, where Washington was given the master bedroom for the night.

Shaw's commission as naval agent was signed by John Hancock two weeks later.

On April 17, 1776, Nathaniel Shaw Jr. was appointed the Navy Agent in Connecticut.

He was appointed by both the Continental Congress and the State of Connecticut as the naval agent during the American Revolutionary War, and he had the responsibility of drawing up orders for privateers as well as distributing captured prizes.

Shaw was also First Selectman of the town, and the Shaw Mansion became naval headquarters for Connecticut's state navy as well as close to fifty privateers working out of New London.

Shaw Jr. transformed his merchant ships into a privateering corps, and worked vigilantly to collect supplies of gun powder from his trade connections in the French West Indies. Where once he ran a fleet of trading vessels, he now owned a string of privateers. The most pretentious, the General Putnam, was a brig of twenty guns.

One of his own privateers, the sloop Revenge, mounting ten Salisbury cannon, captured nineteen prizes.

The privateering effort operating out of New London proved devastating to British commerce. It has been said no port took more prizes than New London, with between 400 and 800 being credited to New London privateers.