Founding the Chamber > Evacuation Day
As British defeat appeared more likely, the meetings minutes grew briefer, and more members were cited for absences and tardiness. Finally, after seven years of occupation, the British retired from the city on November 25, 1783. With them went several elite merchants. Isaac Low left for exile in England, taking with him the silver seal of the Chamber of Commerce.
The American celebrations of Evacuation Day began with a thirteen-gun salute that chased the British through the Narrows, and continued for a week. Among the most raucous revelers were the merchants who remained; the itemized bill for their feast included, “120 dinners, 135 bottles Madira, 36 bottles Port, 60 bottles English beer, 30 Bouls Punch, 60 Wine Glass Broken, 8 Cutt decanters Broken, Coffee for 8 Gentlemen.”
In later years, chroniclers of the Chamber’s history tended to dodge the delicate question of collaboration with the British. “Words of censure are not becoming here or now. The actors in these scenes have met their final judgment,” secretary John Austin Stevens had insisted in the 1860s. “Over the errors of the defeated, discomfited royalists, let oblivion draw its dusky veil.” In the twentieth century, the activities of Low and the others were elided further. “The Revolutionary War presented an interlude in the activities of the Chamber,” was the gloss offered by L. Elsa Loeber, the institution’s official librarian, in the 1930s.
But, in the 1780s, there was no need for such word games. People knew the Chamber’s record, and confronted it. Merchants displaced by the war returned and resumed their meetings, despite the knowledge that the “Charter of the said Chamber had been forfeited and lost by reason of the Misuse and Nonuse of the same.” Since the King no longer held authority, they petitioned the state legislature for a new charter. The institution’s abetting of the British may have appeared odious, but its perceived value apparently outweighed any and all disapprobation. In April 1784, the charter was approved and the body took its new name: the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New-York.