In August 1814, as the British naval blockade of New York tightened, the "free people of color" called a public meeting and resolved to offer their services to the city's Committee of Defense. To that end, they inserted a notice in the New York Evening Post, instructing the blacks to assemble in the park at five o'clock on Monday morning and to proceed from there to Brooklyn Heights where they would assist in erecting fortifications. The subsequent labors of the group were of little practical value as the expected attack did not materialize; later that week the British forces sailed up the Potomac and burned the Capitol and White House. But the symbolic importance of the involvement of New York's free blacks in the defense of their city was considerable. The vast majority of those who crossed the East River to help fortify Brooklyn Heights were either ex-slaves or the sons of slaves. The looming crisis threatened to bring down a regime that recently had enslaved them and that still held many of their compatriots in bondage. But instead of showing hostility or indifference, New York's free blacks had publicly seized the opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance to the city. A letter by a "Citizen of Color" printed in the Evening Post under the caption "A Test of Patriotism" made that very point. It was, he declared, the "duty of every colored man resident in this city to volunteer." Under New York's liberal laws, the writer continued, "we dwell in safety and pursue our honest callings, none daring to molest us, whatever his complexion or circumstances." Such statements were probably dictated as much by pragmatism as by patriotism, by blacks' desire to convince white New Yorkers of their civic worth and thus to win better treatment. Hindsight has shown that such hopes would eventually prove naive. Leon E Litwack and others have demonstrated that free blacks were not in the end able to live as independent and equal citizens in a society paying no heed to "complexion or circum