![]() ![]() Grim held leadership positions in the Chamber of Commerce and the Mutual Assurance Company. He was a treasurer of the Lutheran Church (which had lost its building in the great Fire - Grim rented the ruin as a storehouse) and became president of the German Society in 1795. He was active in Federalist politics and belonged to the Society for the Relief of Distressed Prisoners and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Then, after the war’s end, he became a merchant and prominent patron in federal New York. During the occupation of 1776–1783, he sold dry goods, served drinks to Hessian soldiers, and managed lotteries for Loyalist charities. He electioneered for the DeLancey faction (who favored imperial trade and mostly became Loyalists) in the 1760s and celebrated the Stamp Act’s repeal in 17. Indeed, Grim had good reasons to adhere to whatever flag New York was flying, since he had actively shaped New York City’s political and economic growth for decades. Still, Grim’s Loyalism was not fixed throughout his life he may have revised his opinions as his allegiance shifted to the new United States. Since Loyalists believed that the Rebels had deliberately set the fire, Grim appeared to be going against the grain. For them, David Grim was a useful vehicle for banalizing the Great Fire of 1776. Since the city had been a British garrison town for almost the entirety of the war, it fit awkwardly into a national story, and local historians seemed reluctant to sully the city’s reputation. New York was slow, compared to many other states, in developing its local history. Over the course of the 19th century, as Gotham’s population swelled to over a million people, audiences yearned for a local past that would serve its future. Watson - and the many historians who followed him - characterized Grim as a fellow antiquarian who helpfully shared maps and sketches of the city’s bygone days. It is however believed to have occurred solely from accident.” Map of fire damage, Image via NYPL The Great Fire of 1776, he wrote, “excited a fear at the time, that the ‘American Rebels’ had purposed to oust them, by their own sacrifices, like another Moscow. Watson used Grim’s account to exonerate the Americans from the British accusation that Washington’s men had committed an act of incendiarism. Grim diminished the credibility of the troops and the Loyalist eyewitnesses, who - in their reports - universally accused the Rebels of having set the fire. ![]() Finally, he did not mention any of the incendiaries whom the British executed: he only mentioned one victim, Wright White, as an unfortunate Loyalist in his cups whose erratic behavior got him killed (which contemporary sources corroborated). He also hinted that the British troops arrested many a “suspicious person,” but then released most of them he made the troops sound quick to judge but devoid of proof. This figure was lower than most contemporary estimates, which minimized the fire’s effect. Grim gave the unusually precise figure of 493 houses destroyed. The map implies that the flames spread naturally, with no assistance from incendiaries (unless he meant that the “men and women of a bad character” were the incendiaries themselves). ![]() Grim’s map - which has been reprinted and adapted repeatedly - shows the destroyed portion of the city as a contiguous area, with no indication of the suspicious combustibles that New Yorkers found elsewhere in the city. Grim’s remembrance never said outright that the fire was an accident, but unlike Dash’s testimony, it gave the fire a single point of origin - a Whitehall Slip tavern, which “was then occupied by a number of men and women, of a bad character.” (This titillating detail certainly intrigued the 19th-century audiences.) The reminiscence also described the fire’s subsequent wind-borne progress. ![]() The myth of an accidental fire took hold and became entrenched. Plenty of other histories ignored the fire entirely. From there, Grim’s tale became a staple: it propagated, through paraphrase and repeated reprintings, in at least twenty historical works over the course of the 19th century. Grim died in 1826, but his reminiscences were discovered by the banker-historian John Fanning Watson during a visit to New York in 1828. Grim lived in New York City as a Loyalist throughout the British occupation and he almost certainly knew Dash and other men who fought the fire. Among New Yorkers, the memory of the Great Fire in the 19th century and beyond owed a great deal to a German-born tavernkeeper and merchant named David Grim. They developed a myth of American exceptionalism and tried to make New York City’s experience as a British garrison fit within that myth. Americans were, in other words, encouraged to remember the Great Fire in a certain way. ![]()
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