This is CBS, I On the World. I'm John Batchewitt, Professor Benjamin Carp, a book in college

of the CUNY Graduate Center, his new book, The Great New York Fire of 1776, a lost story

of the American Revolution. This is like an inquiry hundreds of years later. All the principles, all their children, all the memoirs, the historians have written about this, celebrated it or made accusations, people who wander away from it, and we're still looking at facts that can be gathered to ask, accident or design in the burning of a city where I note, as the professor did, this city was a leading

part of the trade for the North Atlantic, prospering. Boston and Philadelphia, identified as rebel

cities, were envious of New York, and men who know New England were the Continental Army, men in Philadelphia

where the Congress were responsible for the raising of the Pennsylvania regiments and Maryland

regiments that will be responsible for fighting the war as it goes forward. We're inquiring about

who ordered this if it was ordered

and what to make of the accusations afterwards that continue.

Three captains, and this helps a deal because the professor identifies these men and their

fates as not persuasive.

It's all circumstantial.

Unless you get a video of somebody setting a match to Trinity Church, you're not going to get anything stronger than circumstantial.

We begin with Captain Amos Fellows.

He is jailed immediately afterwards, and he suffers grievously in jail.

Many of the prisoners who were on either prison barges or in jails afterwards died of disease.

Who was Amos Fellows?

And how does he contribute or puzzle us to this day, Professor?

Well, Amos Fellows was a captain from Tallinn, Connecticut, and he was elected, you know,

as a field officer by his men, and he is part of the Continental Army. And yes, he is supposedly

captured. He may have been the person

that's mentioned in a newspaper account as having been the New England captain that was caught

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