What Three Years of Occupation Cost

People visit Newport today and see the mansions, the harbor, the preserved colonial architecture. What they do not see is the town that was destroyed between 1776 and 1779. The British occupation of Newport lasted nearly three years, and it ended the town's status as one of the five largest and wealthiest cities in the American colonies. Newport never got it back.

The numbers tell part of the story. Before the occupation, Newport had roughly 9,000 residents. By the time the British left, fewer than 4,000 remained. The British tore down hundreds of buildings for firewood and fortification material. Trees were cut, fences stripped, wharves dismantled. When Mary Gould Almy wrote in her diary about watching the town be consumed, she was describing a process that was both military strategy and slow-motion demolition.

What strikes me most in the collections is the evidence of what did not come back. The merchant families who had made Newport a center of trade scattered to Providence, to Connecticut, to places that had not been occupied. The trade routes they had built over decades were severed. Providence, which had been Newport's inland rival, grew while Newport shrank. The shift in economic power within Rhode Island that the occupation caused has never fully reversed.

The French arrival in 1780 brought temporary prosperity — Rochambeau's army spent money and the troops were remarkably well-behaved by eighteenth-century standards. But the French left too, marching south to Yorktown. Newport was left to rebuild with diminished resources and a diminished population. The Revolution gave America its independence. It gave Newport a wound that shaped the town for the next two centuries.