The George Washington of American legend is the humanitarian who, in a young lady’s widely published acrostic, “Intent on virtue, and her cause so fair, / Now treats his captive with a parent’s care!” From the very start of the conflict, Washington had been adamant that his army’s conduct towards prisoners of war align with European customs. The honor of the American nation, as well as Washington’s own obligations as a gentleman officer and wartime leader, was at stake. It was, after all, for a place among the world’s civilized nations that America was vying. For leaders like Washington, treating prisoners of war adequately was a genuine moral concern that also made sound strategic sense.¹

Washington had a personal history to reckon with. In his very first combat mission, on the Ohio frontier in 1754, he had failed to prevent his Native American allies from committing the gruesome ritualistic murder of a French envoy, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, and then massacring other French soldiers after they had surrendered to him. Washington had covered up the disaster as best he could. His official report glossed over the extreme violence, making it sound as if all French casualties had been sustained during an honest fight. But when he had to surrender Fort Necessity to the French later that year, Washington—unable to read French—signed terms of capitulation that held him responsible for Jumonville’s “assassination.”²

When the British and American Loyalists resurrected the murder charges two decades later, we can only imagine how it must have nettled Washington, who guarded his honor and reputation as jealously as any gentleman officer in the British Empire. He appreciated that he must go out of his way to observe—and, crucially, to be seen observing—the codes of civilized warfare. Washington knew that defending “the sacred Cause of my Country, of Liberty” required him and his army to embrace Enlightenment ideals and what John Adams called a “policy of humanity.”³

Washington had absorbed the codes of war pertaining to the capture, treatment, and exchange of prisoners of war, as far as conflicts among European powers were concerned, when fighting alongside British officers in the Seven Years’ War. These codes of war allowed an army to imprison any enemy soldier or officer in order to prevent him from taking up arms or as a ransom for peace terms. Captors, however, had no right over the life of a surrendered soldier: prisoners of war were not to be killed unless they made a new attempt to fight or had committed a crime warranting death. Both sides had a vested interest in the preservation, and ultimately the exchange, of expensively trained captive soldiers.⁴

In the eighteenth century, conventions of war dictated that captive soldiers were to be fed, housed, and cared for like one’s own armed forces, although they were to receive clothing and payment from their own state or army (and not their captors). Enlisting prisoners of war in one’s own military was forbidden. During most eighteenth-century conflicts among Western European powers, ransoms and, increasingly, agreements between belligerent powers, so-called cartels, regulated the imprisonment, provisioning, and exchange of captives. Although a state was bound to procure its own prisoners’ release—a promise that was crucial to recruitment—commanders might delay exchanges in order to temporarily impose a greater economic burden on their opponents or deny them fighting strength. At war’s end, ransom or compensation would settle mutual claims. Unlike soldiers, captured officers were commonly released back home or allowed to move freely within a specified territory, on their honor and parole—from the French for “spoken word”—to abide by certain restrictions.⁵

These principles of prisoner treatment were not easy to uphold under the conditions of war. Unequal numbers of captives, inadequate record keeping, and the sheer scale of transcontinental warfare in the eighteenth century meant that exchanges were complex to organize. There was, therefore, a broad trend away from large-scale exchanges and towards holding prisoners for longer periods of time in the captors’ homeland. In the American Revolutionary War, unique politico-legal circumstances further complicated matters: the British refused to designate captured rebel combatants as prisoners of war, since that would mean recognizing the United States as a sovereign state. In doing so, they rendered large-scale exchanges characteristic of wars between European nations impossible, which meant that both sides faced the challenge of keeping unusually large populations of captives. Throughout much of the war, British officers sought to arrange partial, ad hoc exchanges on the honor of the local commander and without formally invoking the king’s name, so as not to compromise the government’s position.

Whereas Washington was bent on a pragmatic humanitarianism and hence willing to participate in exchanges in order to alleviate prisoner suffering, Congress wanted to use the issue of prisoners to force Britain to recognize the United States. It also wished to avoid returning too many British soldiers. It was keen not to pay for large exchanges if accounts could not be settled. And it preferred to conceal the short terms of enlistment of American soldiers. Throughout the war, American and British leaders blamed each other for the repeated collapse of exchange negotiations. The numbers of prisoners exchanged through ad hoc arrangements, though probably totaling several thousand over the war as a whole, proved too small to relieve in a meaningful way the pressure on detention sites in most places at most times.⁶

Some British officers in America demanded that “rebel” captives be treated as such, and not like prisoners from legitimate, conventional European armies. At least keeping them indefinitely, suggested the Irish-born Captain Frederick Mackenzie, “and in a state of uncertainty with respect to their fate, would certainly strike great terror into their army.” He worried that the failure to implement capital punishment—“Not one rebel has suffered death, except in Action”—only encouraged the insurgency. Nevertheless, even Mackenzie later insisted that it was “right to treat our Enemies as if they might one day become our friends. Humanity is the characteristic of the British troops, and I should be sorry they should run the risque of forfeiting what redounds so much to their honor, by one act of even necessary severity.” Mackenzie advocated strategic humanitarianism in order for Britain to create the right climate for postwar reconciliation. In practice, the British could hardly treat American captives as traitors without any rights. This was, first, because officials in charge of recruiting German troops had asked the British government not to complicate their task by repeating the situation of the anti-Jacobite campaign of 1745: prisoners then could not be exchanged, a predicament the German negotiators were now well aware of. And once the Americans had captured significant numbers of British troops, Britain had to treat American captives as de facto prisoners of war in order to protect their own from retaliation.⁷

Washington set the tone early on in the Anglo-American debate about prisoners. Just weeks after taking charge of his new army at Cambridge in 1775, he complained to General Gage that “the Officers engaged in the Cause of Liberty and their Country, who by the Fortune of War have fallen into your Hands, have been thrown indiscriminately into a common Gaol appropriated for Felons—That no Consideration has been had for those of the most respectable Rank, when languishing with Wounds and Sickness. That some have been even amputated in this unworthy Situation.” Washington demanded that politics be set aside; instead, he asserted, “[o]bligations arising from the Rights of Humanity, & Claims of Rank, are universally binding and extensive, except in Case of Retaliation.” With this caveat, Washington invoked another principle in the laws of war, thus putting Gage on notice that in the future his treatment of Anglo-German captives would mirror the treatment of American prisoners in British hands.⁸

Gage replied that, to “the Glory of Civilized Nations, humanity and War have been compatible; and Compassion to the subdued, is become almost a general system.” The British, he reassured Washington, “ever preeminent in Mercy, have outgone common examples, and overlooked the Criminal in the Captive. Upon these principles your Prisoners, whose Lives by the Laws of the Land are destined to the Cord, have hitherto been treated with care and kindness, and more comfortably lodged than the King’s Troops in the Hospitals.” It was Britain’s natural humanitarian impulse, Gage was saying, not her obligations under the laws of war, that had ensured the good treatment of rebel prisoners. If he indeed had ignored distinctions of rank, it was only because “I Acknowledge no Rank that is not derived from the King.” Retaliation worked for Gage as well, he reassured Washington, especially since he also had the American Loyalists to consider:

My intelligence from your Army would justify severe recrimination. I understand there are of the King’s faithfull Subjects, taken sometime since by the Rebels, labouring like Negro Slaves, to gain their daily Subsistence, or reduced to the Wretched Alternative, to perish by famine, or take Arms against their King and Country. Those who have made the Treatment of the Prisoners in my hands, or of your other Friends in Boston, a pretence for such Measures, found Barbarity upon falsehood.⁹

But Washington was not going to be intimidated by imperious saber-rattling. He lectured Gage that he had deliberately avoided political questions, such as whether “British, or American Mercy, Fortitude, & Patience are most preeminent,” or “whether our virtuous Citizens whom the Hand of Tyranny has forced into Arms” deserved to be hanged as rebels. As far as the Loyalists were concerned, however, Washington had made inquiries and reported that “[n]ot only your Officers, and Soldiers have been treated with a Tenderness due to Fellow Citizens, & Brethren; but even those execrable Parricides, whose Counsels & Aid have deluged their Country with Blood, have been protected from the Fury of a justly enraged People.” Congress duly published the Washington-Gage correspondence for propagandistic effect. By this time, not only in America but in Britain, too, Washington was becoming widely recognized as an honorable gentleman officer who sought to uphold high ethical standards.¹⁰

Even as allegations of British maltreatment of American captives soured relations, and perhaps especially then, Washington continued to cling to these standards: he would always try to “render the situation of all prisoners in my hands as comfortable as I can, and nothing will induce me to depart from this rule, not a contrary line of conduct to those in your possession. Captivity of itself is sufficiently grievous, and it is cruel to add to its distresses.” Noble ideals, captured in soaring rhetoric, found their real test in the actual treatment of prisoners under the strains and stresses of a grueling war. As Patriot soldiers learned throughout the conflict, being a rebel prisoner in British hands was a precarious and often violent experience.¹¹

Capture to Burial

American soldiers surrendering to British and Hessian forces lived in fear of what awaited them. Many had heard stories of mistreatment and even death at the hands of the enemy. In early 1777, a Patriot newspaper published an ironic fictional account of General Sir William Howe’s release of all captive American privates at New York: “Half he sent to the world of spirits for want of food: the others he hath sent to warn their countrymen of the danger of falling into his hands, and to convince them by ocular demonstration, that it is infinitely better to be slain in battle, than to be taken prisoner by British brutes, whose tender mercies are cruelties.” American Patriots often portrayed the British treatment of prisoners as intentionally brutal: they appeared to abuse American captives as the result of “cool reflection, and a preconceived system,” opined the anonymous author of a very widely circulated essay. As a naturally cruel people, the British murdered American captives “by inches” to punish them for rebelling.¹²

During the war’s first full campaign in the fall and winter of 1776, one American burial detail on Harlem Heights had encountered a dozen dead Americans who had had their heads split open, allegedly after surrendering to Hessian units. Continental soldiers who survived the act of surrender were commonly robbed of watches, money, rings, shoe and knee buckles, and any other valuables they might be carrying. They were also regularly deprived of parts of their clothing, such as their shoes or coats, a serious matter in the harsh winter months. Even when the terms of capitulation guaranteed that a particular set of prisoners could keep their belongings, items were sometimes still taken from them. Captive officers later reported capriciously varying treatment: some had been shown respect at the moment of capture, others were ridiculed.¹³

In the early hours and days of captivity, prisoners routinely endured verbal harassment. Not infrequently, they also suffered beatings and other physical assaults. Even where the captors’ officers did not officially condone violence, they did not necessarily prevent it. The Hessian army chaplain Philip Waldeck admitted after the surrender of Fort Washington that, against strict orders,

the prisoners received a number of blows. Especially comical, I watched the treatment handed out by a Hessian grenadier. One of the rebels being led through looked around proudly…The grenadier grabbed him on the ears with both hands…Another tied him up with his scarf. Two others hit him on the sides of his head. A third gave him a kick in the rump so that he flew through three ranks…The poor guy never knew what hit him, nor why he had been hit.

Other Hessians reportedly subjected a Pennsylvania rifleman to a mock hanging on a tree three times; they also used a prisoner for target practice. British soldiers were said to stage sham executions, carting off captives seated on coffins with nooses around their necks, all the while crying terms of abuse: “rebels,” “scoundrels,” “murderers.” Whether true, half-true, or purely fabricated, such stories had the power to instill fear in American soldiers. They shaped their expectations of the enemy and sometimes their conduct at the point of surrendering.¹⁴

Most captives were initially held in some sort of makeshift prison near their place of capture: a warehouse, jail, or private house or barn. Such accommodations were crowded and unsanitary; adequate bedding and clothing were usually lacking. Captured in the New York area, Samuel Young was confined in a stable with five hundred men, who had food thrown to them “as if to so many hogs, a quantity of old biscuit, broken, and in crumbs, mostly moulded, and some of it crawling with maggots, which they were obliged to scramble for…the next day they had a little pork given to each of them, which they were obliged to eat raw.”¹⁵

Prisoners detained in temporary accommodations on private estates eventually had to be moved. A lucky few were exchanged locally to reduce the immediate demands on food, fuel, and clothing. Most, however, were transferred to the main British prison system in New York City. This brought further hardship, as columns of marching captives regularly suffered verbal and physical abuse both from their captors and from local inhabitants. Of the ten-mile-long trek from Harlem Heights to New York City, one Connecticut soldier recalled that he and his fellow captives were “marched through the British and Hessian army where we were insulted, kicked, beaten with the butt of their guns. Some of us were smashed down with poles on our heads and robbed of blankets.” John Adlum recalled that crowds of Loyalists, Hessian army followers, and “soldiers’ trulls” along the route and in New York City pelted the captives with abuse—calling them “damn’d rebels” who “ought to or would be hanged”—and sometimes pelted them with stones, too.¹⁶

Transport by ship was in many ways worse. Major Abraham Leggett, a veteran of the New York campaign, was captured when Fort Montgomery on the Hudson fell. Together with three hundred officers and men, Leggett was shipped to New York on the small transport Mertell, under conditions so crowded “that Several was near suffocated.” The only water offered was too foul even for the desperately thirsty to drink. Leggett’s captors were so worried about an insurrection that they placed four-pounders, a type of small cannon, on the deck facing the hold, “with a threat if we made the least noize they would Fire Down amongst us.” Transfer by sea also carried its own special risks. The commanding officer of one British prisoner transport from the Turks Islands, southeast of the Bahamas, to Rhode Island shared with his Revolutionary captive, George Ballerman, his standing orders in case of a fire on board: Let the prisoners burn belowdecks, and shoot to kill anyone jumping overboard.¹⁷

Unsurprisingly, the conditions and treatment of captives varied, sometimes even at the same site. Ebenezer Fletcher commented that in a British field hospital near the place of his capture in the state of New York, some of his captors were “very kind; while others were very spiteful and malicious.” Occasionally, British officers appeared to invest in a form of strategic magnanimity. General Sir Guy Carleton’s considerate treatment of American prisoners captured in Canada in 1776 was designed to let “all moderate Men in the Colonies [understand] the way to mercy is not yet shut against them.” Some American officers later acknowledged that they had received good treatment overall. There was even the rare American Loyalist, typically vilified as the most spiteful of opponents, whom captive Patriots praised for his humanitarianism. However, overwhelmingly, the wartime testimony of American Patriots suggests not only that captives routinely suffered inhumane conditions but that they believed they did so as a result of premeditated and gratuitous British cruelty. Such understandings of abuse and violence shaped captives’ responses, helping explain, for instance, their steadfast resistance to British attempts to recruit them into their armed forces.¹⁸

The customary rations for prisoners of war in the eighteenth century were two-thirds of the weekly rations of a regular soldier on duty. In the British Army, that amounted to seven pounds each of bread and beef, four ounces of butter or cheese, eight ounces of oatmeal, three pints of peas, and a few ounces of rice if available, for a total of just under 2,500 calories per day. Prisoners should therefore have received around 1,600 daily calories. Even if they did, a sedentary prisoner weighing 160 pounds would lose 1 pound per week. But the same problems that beset the provisioning of British troops also dogged British prison sites. The challenges of acquiring, storing, shipping, preserving, and distributing rations meant that prisoners rarely received the official allocations.¹⁹

The quality of the foodstuffs they did receive was often dismally poor. A Lieutenant Catlin from Connecticut alleged that he was not given anything to eat for the first two days of his captivity, a common complaint that in other testimony extended to three, four, or even five days. Catlin then had to survive on “scraps of spoiled pork, wormy bread, and brackish water.” After a demanding march to New York City, John Adlum received but meager quantities of “broken biscuit,” which “appeared to me to have been the refuse and the bottoms of the casks out of which the army or navy had been supplied, they had yellow and green streaks of mould in them.” Captives sometimes were reduced to eating old shoes, bones, and even garbage that their cruel captors sold to them. They turned to grass, wood, and bricks as food; some scraped the bran from the hogs’ troughs and boiled it on the fire; one account even has men gnawing on the flesh of their own limbs.

Many captives also lacked adequate clothing and bedding, and the official allocations were rarely sufficient. Prisoners might obtain supplementary clothing through paroled officers and sometimes from local citizens; there was also a prison market for the clothes of deceased inmates and those who had been granted freedom through exchange. Even after Congress assumed responsibility for providing clothing directly to American captives in British hands, problems persisted. In a vicious circle of deprivation and degradation, a prisoner who somehow managed to buy a decent item of clothing, such as a warm coat, often had to trade it for a piece of bread to survive the day.²⁰

Conditions in the prisons—foul air heavy with the stench of ill and decaying bodies, putrid water, the men “overrun with lice from head to foot,” sometimes having to lie down “upon the excrements of the prisoners”—inevitably bred disease. In theory, wounded and sick captives were supposed to receive care as British soldiers did in field, army, and prison hospitals. In practice, though, medical inspections in military prisons were at best infrequent. Infected patients were not isolated. Inoculation or other preventive measures—by then increasingly common in the British armed forces—were hardly ever implemented. The hospitals that did exist for the treatment of captives were often as crowded as the prisons themselves, and not necessarily any healthier. One young Connecticut militiaman wrote to his father that, despite being ill, he “would not go to the Hospital, for all manner of diseases prevail there.”²¹

New York City, the primary British garrison throughout the war, housed the imperial army’s main prison system. American and other captives were kept in the Provost (in the Old Jail), “Liberty House” on Broadway, old sugar refineries, and at least half a dozen churches as well as the Quaker Meeting House, the City Hall on Nassau and Wall Streets, and, briefly, King’s College (today’s Columbia University).²²

Particularly rough conditions prevailed at the Provost, a municipal jail with twelve cells and three basement dungeons that had been turned into a prison for high-ranking American officers and “state prisoners”—civilians charged with helping the rebellion. A dozen officers were crowded into each room. They received limited and meager rations, such as raw salt beef and what one inmate described as “a little Damaged sea bread—as soon as the bread fell on the floor it Took legs and Ran in all Directions—so full of life—the flower was Very Filthy—more like Hog sty than anything else.” The secret prison diary of John Fell, a notorious Tory hunter whom Loyalists had snatched from his New Jersey bed and delivered to the Provost, records the agonies of captivity. The temperatures fluctuated wildly depending on the weather outside. Men were arbitrarily confined in isolation in the dungeons below. There were “[h]orrid scenes of whipping.” The entry for November 16, 1777: “Jail exceedingly disagreeable—many miserable and shocking objects [i.e., prisoners] nearly starved with cold and hunger—miserable prospect before us.”²³

The Provost, built in 1759, housed prisoners of war during the Seven Years’ War, and American military and civilian prisoners during the Revolution. Credit 31

The site was run by the notorious provost marshal, Captain William Cunningham. The son of a British dragoon, Cunningham had arrived in New York City in 1774. After a violent and humiliating altercation with the Sons of Liberty in the spring of 1775, when he had publicly avowed his loyalty to King George, Cunningham fled to the protection of the British Army at Boston. General Gage appointed Cunningham provost marshal in charge of rebel prisoners as well as of military discipline and executions. Before long, he was transferred to oversee prisoner administration in British-occupied New York and then Philadelphia. Contemporaries ascribed his brutality towards rebel prisoners directly to his earlier violent treatment, which “he never forgot or forgave.”²⁴

Following complaints by George Washington about Cunningham’s abusive regime in Philadelphia, Howe simply had him transferred back to New York. In the city of prisons, stories abounded of Cunningham’s cruel behavior. He took sadistic pleasure in kicking over the bowls of soup that charitable townsfolk left outside cells. He ran his sword through the shoulder of one prisoner who dared ask for a pen and paper to write to his family. He threatened prisoners with hanging. There were even allegations that Cunningham tortured captives with searing irons. With such a provost marshal embodying the worst of the imperial oppressors, the reports and rumors surrounding Cunningham seeped into the Patriot consciousness, underscoring the deeper meaning of their struggle for independence.

Almost every church in New York City that was not Church of England was soon commandeered as a prison, as if the British were taking revenge for the Patriots’ earlier desecration of Anglican churches across the colonies. Seven or eight hundred men were crammed into the Old North Dutch Church on William Street without adequate food, clothing, bedding, or heating fuel. One man reported that for ten days he and fellow prisoners lived only on green apples and water from old pork barrels. A Pennsylvanian named Thomas Boyd, captured at Fort Washington, endured three days without food, followed by several more on scant provisions. The bread was “wormy and tasted bitter, and seemed of a poisonous rather than of a nourishing quality.” Only those graced with an “iron constitution,” like Boyd, stood a chance of surviving.²⁵

Other captives were locked up in massive sugar refineries, called sugarhouses, where the conditions were at least as bad as in the churches. The sugarhouses were overcrowded, dirty, stiflingly hot in the summer, and unbearably frigid in the winter, as some lacked windowpanes, allowing the snow to blow right in. Widespread malnutrition and rampant illness quickly weakened prisoners.²⁶

In such an atmosphere of fear, abuse, and suffering, wild rumors flourished. In 1777, a mysterious “French doctor” was accused of murdering American captives in New York with poisonous powders, although one prisoner, Andrew Sherburne, pointedly remarked: “No—there was no such mercy there. Nothing was employed which could blunt the susceptibility to anguish, or which, by hastening death, could rob its agonies of a single pang.” In 1781, the seaman Willis Wilson claimed that the British deliberately infected with smallpox some one hundred prisoners at the provost in Portsmouth, Virginia, by purposefully bringing them into contact with contagious black men. This was not the first time that charges of biological warfare had been leveled at the British. General Thomas Gage had been among those British officers who had sanctioned the deliberate infection of Native Americans with smallpox during the siege of Fort Pitt on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1763. In 1775, Washington had taken allegations of a British germ plot in and around Boston seriously enough to warn local authorities and the Continental Congress, describing the spread of smallpox in the besieged town as “a weapon of Defence, they Are useing against us.” Rumors of germ warfare resurfaced, as we have seen, around Dunmore’s black troops in Virginia in 1775 and again in the shape of a Loyalist plot in New Hampshire in 1777. In the Portsmouth case, at least, these fears remained unsubstantiated: prisoners most likely caught the disease from fellow inmates who had been infected before they were imprisoned. Black men who had been inoculated were not kept in strict quarantine due to an acute labor shortage, and they were deployed as nurses even while they were still infectious. But the veracity of specific allegations did not necessarily determine their impact on an audience already primed to be receptive to stories of the enemy’s callousness.²⁷

Van Cortlandt’s Sugar House. Credit 32

Prisoners weren’t only concerned about threats to their physical well-being, however. American officers in particular felt uncomfortable when their captors ignored the hierarchies of rank and even race, keeping “all Crouded promiscuously togeather without Distinction or Respect, to person office or Colour,” locking up American officers alongside “Indians, Mullattoes, Negroes, &c.” John Barrett objected to being held in a sugarhouse with “common Soldiers, Sailors & even Negroes [who] were all treated alike both as to Provisions & other Matters & indiscriminate Insolence & Cruelty.” White American prisoners in Philadelphia wrote of their outrage not only that they were held alongside black captives, but that the British even refused to punish a black man who had struck a white officer. When their social standing was undermined, Americans could protest as vociferously as any officer of the Crown.²⁸

Congress in 1777 identified one other highly sensitive issue—namely, the surprising and nearly complete absence of charitable support from private American citizens in the surrounding population. Such neglect “was never known to happen in any similar case in a Christian country,” admitted an embarrassed committee. The exceptional local who did act charitably risked suffering repercussions. In spring 1778, for instance, Patriot officials sent five barrels of flour to “a poor Woman [who] had saved the Lives of a number of our Prisoners by exerting herself in serving them far beyond her Abilities, and [who] was now in a suffering Condition for want of Provission.” And when a New York tavern keeper took leftovers to prisoners in the sugarhouse on Crown Street, he sometimes observed British guards taunting starving prisoners with pieces of meat: “[T]he commonest Acts of Humanity was at that time Considered as a Crime of the deepest Dye.”²⁹

Common soldiers typically had to endure the insalubrious conditions of their captivity until the end of the war, unless they belonged to the minority who were exchanged—or died first. By contrast, most captive American officers were eventually granted parole, in line with the customary practice in European wars at that time. A paroled officer might enjoy freedom of movement within a delineated area of enemy territory, or be allowed to return within his army’s lines, or even be permitted to go home. If the latter, he gave his word of honor not to take up arms again until he was formally exchanged for a British counterpart. Most officers captured in the New York campaign at the start of the war were paroled and moved to areas just outside New York City. Assigned to local families in pairs or three men per house, each man paid for his room and board and hoped to be reimbursed by Congress. Some men spent more than half of the war living under these circumstances. Major Abraham Leggett, for instance, was released from the Provost on parole on November 1, 1777; he was finally exchanged four years later, when he rejoined the Revolutionary army and saw further action in New Jersey and Long Island. Other paroled officers had the run of the occupied city. The conventions of gentlemanly warfare trumped concerns for secrecy and safety, although American officers paroled in New York City had to promise not to jeopardize the British war effort. An officer violating the conditions of his parole risked having his privileges revoked and being put into close confinement.³⁰

Officers on parole often received medical attention, sometimes including inoculation against smallpox; as far as we can tell, most seemed to stay in reasonably good health. Surviving diaries show that officers enjoyed a leisurely life, with the freedom to read, swim, go on fishing expeditions, and attend local races; many formed relationships with local women, and some later married them. Others had their wives and families visit or live with them. When, occasionally, paroled officers complained about their uncomfortable conditions, they admitted that a poor diet of salt beef and pork was especially hard on those brought up “in the Lap of Luxury.” American officers visiting their paroled colleagues sometimes thought that their conditions were, if anything, too comfortable. Of 235 paroled officers in the country villages of Long Island in February 1778, one high-ranking American official noted privately: “Was sorry to find many of the officers had been very extravagant in their Clothes, getting Laces &c.”³¹

When confronted with the miserable conditions their men experienced in the city’s prisons, some of their paroled officers delivered what supplementary supplies they could; others would visit their starving troops and then return to dine on beefsteak and roast pig. After one of his dinners at a local home, Lieutenant Jabez Fitch took some soup to the prisoners in the Old Church. The following day he visited again and described how the sick prisoners were in a “very Pityfull Cituation”; later he saw three prisoners buried in one grave. One paroled prisoner, Ethan Allen, found on his visits

several of the prisoners in the agonies of death, in consequence of very hunger, and other[s] speechless and very near death, biting pieces of chips…Hollow groans saluted my ears, and despair seemed to be imprinted on every of their countenances. The filth…was almost beyond description. The floors were covered with excrements. I have carefully sought to direct my steps to avoid it, but could not….I have seen…seven dead at the same time, lying among the excrements of their bodies.

Allen soon discontinued his visits, as it “was too much for me to bear as a spectator.”³²

Inadequate burial was the final indignity of captivity. “Twenty or thirty die every day,” wrote one released prisoner. “They lie in heaps unburied.” The corpses of American soldiers were mistreated by both Loyalists and the British, remembered another: “I have seen whole gangs of tories making derision, and exulting over the dead.” In New York City, frozen corpses were dragged out from the churches and sugarhouses every morning, “thrown into wagons like logs, carted away, and then pitched into a large hole or trench to be covered up like dead animals. In a brief time, the naked bodies would be exposed because of the weather conditions.” Other bodies were said to have simply been thrown on the ground outdoors, where they were “[e]xpos’d to the unnatural Devouring of Swine & other greedy Animals” before being buried, mostly naked, in shallow mass graves, where their remains might again be defiled by swine or feral animals. There even were stories of men being buried alive. Whether such tales were true or apocryphal, they certainly added to captivity’s horrors.³³

Worrying Myself off My Legs

By April 1777, as evidence of abuse and very high death rates among American captives was accumulating, Congress indicted the British for maltreating American prisoners, concluding, perhaps surprisingly, that the rank and file among the enemy were, if anything, more sympathetic towards their prisoners’ plight than their officers were, and—echoing comments in prisoners’ narratives—the Hessians more than the British. As Washington protested again, his obstinate counterpart, General Howe, replied with increasingly absurd denials of responsibility. All prisoners had received “sufficient and wholesome food” and medical attention in “the most airy Buildings” or the largest transports, “the very healthiest Places of Reception, that could possibly be provided for them.” How so many could have died so fast, “I cannot determine.” With Howe shrugging his shoulders, Washington dismissed any hopes for a cartel. Sarcastically he added, “[H]owever successful, ingenious miscolourings may be in some instances, to perplex the Understanding in matters of Speculation, Yet, it is difficult to persuade Mankind to doubt the Evidence of their Senses, & the reality of those facts for which they can appeal to them.” Airy buildings might not be beneficial in wintertime, and the provisions could not have been adequate in quantity or quality, given the captives’ appearance and testimony. Washington’s British prisoners, by contrast, “were not stinted to a scanty pittance” but received the same rations as American soldiers in the field. Howe’s refusal to allow an American procuring agent to provision their captives, along with the lack of a formalized agreement, required the two commanders to rely on each other’s generosity: he, Washington, had exercised that generosity, but he had been wrong to expect Howe to reciprocate.³⁴

It was not until spring 1777 that Congress appointed officials with responsibility for prisoners of war. Elias Boudinot now served as commissary general of prisoners. Lewis Pintard, a forty-five-year-old East India merchant from New York, became the resident agent to prisoners in New York. Deputies were also appointed in other states and at specific prison sites. In addition to caring for enemy captives in American hands, these officials were to provide American captives of the British with money, food, clothing, and other items. The Board of War instructed the new commissary to clamp down on malpractice by local committees, which were variously “unneccesarily rigorous” or “culpably lax” in their care of enemy prisoners. The tall, handsome, religious Boudinot, a well-to-do lawyer from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, confessed to his wife that by accepting his appointment he had allowed himself to be drawn into “the boisterous noisy, fatiguing unnatural and disrelishing state of War and slaughter.”³⁵

As Boudinot built up his staff and made initial inquiries, his work was being severely impeded. Howe would at first not admit Pintard to New York City, and later allowed him to visit only in an unofficial capacity lest his mission be construed as British recognition of American independence. Congress had also resolved that each state appoint a commissary of prisoners to negotiate the release of its captives. Boudinot and Washington urged that control be centralized, but those states that negotiated directly with the British, including New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, rarely cooperated as fully as Boudinot would have liked.³⁶

Boudinot’s efforts were further hampered by a lack of resources, so that from the summer of 1777 onward he paid very large sums from his private funds and borrowed from friends. In the winter of 1777–78, for instance, Pintard thus issued 796 pairs of shoes, 1,310 stockings, 787 coats, 1,253 shirts, 549 vests, 376 pairs of trousers, 184 hats, 616 blankets, and 8 mattresses to American officers and soldiers held captive in New York City. In the first half of 1778, Boudinot sent 857 barrels of flour to British-occupied Philadelphia to raise cash, as well as 117 head of cattle and 4 hogs to provide American captives with fresh meat.³⁷

It was only in February 1778 that Boudinot was permitted to visit American captives in New York City, where the more accommodating General Clinton was now in charge. Boudinot found the two hospitals with their 211 prisoners “in tollerable good Order, neat and clean and the Sick much better taken care off than I expected.” Even in the sugarhouse that he visited, 191 captives had sufficient clothing and blankets to see them through the winter. However, those prisoners told Boudinot that their conditions had only improved over the previous couple of months, possibly as a result of the British defeat at Saratoga, where an army of nearly 6,000 went into American captivity. As for the conditions at the Provost, Boudinot wrote, “I was greatly distressed, with the wretched Situation of so many of the human Species.” After his first visit, Boudinot received an anonymous note describing the corrupt and brutal prison regime. On a return visit to the Provost, Boudinot found American officers and soldiers as well as some political prisoners in a “wretched Situation.” They shared that William Cunningham had killed two prisoners with the jail key. He beat officers and sent them to the dungeon for weeks at a time for the most trivial of “offenses,” visiting them periodically only to administer more sadistic beatings. However, as Boudinot concluded with remarkable frankness, the captives also included “a sett of sad Villains, who rob each other of their Cloaths and Blanketts, and many of them sell their own Shoes, Blanketts, and even Shirts for Rum.” When Boudinot confronted the city commandant, General James Robertson, he obfuscated, like Howe before him, and denied any wrongdoing.³⁸

Boudinot eventually borrowed some $30,000 to purchase clothing and blankets for 300 officers and 1,100 men and to ensure that they would receive daily supplemental rations of bread and beef for fifteen months. He also oversaw some limited prisoner exchanges. But the constant stress had taken its toll. After a year of “worrying myself off my Legs,” and perilously close to bankruptcy, Boudinot resigned in April 1778. He threatened to declare himself insolvent, and a letter from his successor was recited in the congressional chamber, warning that the closure of Boudinot’s accounts had prompted an alarming rise in the mortality rate of American prisoners. Congress eventually voted the very significant sum of £20,000 to compensate, at least partially, their former commissary general. Boudinot’s frustrating experiences with inadequate resources and poor coordination between Continental and state authorities had highlighted the limits of the nascent American state. But despite those constraints, the fledgling state and the nation’s leaders by and large committed the resources required to treat their own prisoners comparatively well.³⁹

A Sordid Set of Creatures in Human Figure

The fact that British and German prisoners of war fared better overall than American rebel captives was due to practical circumstances as much as principle. Washington and the Congress were committed to honor the laws of war, and Revolutionary leaders sometimes modeled magnanimity. When a prisoner was known to have been kind to American captives, as was the case with one Francis Dorrel, the Board of War ordered he be put on parole and duly exchanged, “for we wish to embrace every opportunity of shewing kindness to such of our enemies as have given proofs of their humanity to the Americans.” But American captors were greatly helped in their mission by the simple fact that they operated on home ground, with much more space to house prisoners, which meant fewer large, overcrowded facilities where epidemic diseases could wreak havoc. Shorter supply lines and lower costs facilitated supporting prisoners. In addition, larger numbers of British prisoners of war were able to escape, as prisoner marches and detention sites were less closely guarded than British garrison cities or prison ships.⁴⁰

Nevertheless, for the individual British or German prisoners of war, captivity in American hands was often a harrowing experience. Like American prisoners, they experienced inadequate accommodations and shortages of provisions and clothing immediately after capture, and endured exhausting and occasionally fatal marches to permanent detention sites. Moreover, the gentlemen officers’ sense of honor was challenged when they were held in close confinement or alongside their men or common felons.⁴¹

The British Army was quick to complain when they felt that Americans violated the codes of war. At one point, the United States proposed that the British send supplies to their captive soldiers in American hands, the standard European practice. To the British, though, this amounted to violence by logistical stratagem. Howe protested that the American proposal would mean starvation for many Anglo-German prisoners who simply were too widely dispersed, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest British lines. When the United States agreed instead to have their own commissaries provision prisoners of war, and demanded that the British pay in coin within thirty days, they thus exacted a costly arrangement; this helped the Americans both to fund the needs of their own captives held in New York and to redress a national shortage of coins.⁴²

One way to alleviate the hardships of German (and some British) prisoners was the semi-privatization of the prison regime. Such an effort apparently started up spontaneously in the partially German-speaking Lancaster area of Pennsylvania in the winter of 1775. By the summer of 1777, when an additional 1,000 prisoners were stretching accommodation and provisions to the limits, both Pennsylvania authorities and private citizens routinely hired German prisoners of war at Lancaster as laborers. Most worked as farmhands or helped in craftsmen’s shops. Some German sergeants and ensigns became temporary servants in farmers’ homes in exchange for food and cider. Significant numbers worked in their skilled trades, especially as weavers, tailors, and shoemakers, as well as smiths, carpenters, joiners, and masons. Some made clothing and even shot and shells for militias and the Continental Army. At one stage, the Board of War set up an entire shoe factory with prisoner-laborers. One soldier, originally from Berlin and conversant in both German and French, advertised himself as a schoolmaster and secretary to German immigrants. A Hessian military band captured at Trenton famously played for the Congress at the celebratory dinner on the first anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and at Revolutionary feasts subsequently.⁴³

Most employers took on just one or two prisoners at a time, although furnaces, ironworks, and mills demanded larger numbers. Civilian employers usually made a deposit with the authorities to ensure the prisoners’ return. As part of the contract, they provided the prisoner-laborers with meals and housing and paid them wages. Men who worked near the barracks had to return twice daily for roll call; those who worked farther afield reported twice weekly. Such arrangements had obvious appeal for the captives, who gained respite from crowded quarters plagued by vermin and disease, and for their captors, as small prisoner-laborer detachments were easier to control and required fewer guards than larger groups of enemy soldiers. What had begun as a pragmatic exercise thus yielded a humanitarian dividend. Still, conditions were far from universally rosy. And, ironically, the group of enemy prisoners promised the best conditions ended up enduring some of the worst.⁴⁴

In March 1777, the British government appointed General John Burgoyne as commander of the northern army. His mission that fall called for two other British armies to converge with his combined British-Loyalist and Canadian–Native American force to capture the strategically vital Hudson Valley. As he moved south from Quebec towards Saratoga, New York, Burgoyne took the fortresses at Crown Point and Ticonderoga. But supply shortages and an unexpectedly strong Patriot resistance slowed his progress along the Hudson. The additional British armies he had been counting on never arrived, largely due to inadequate communication and coordination. By October, Burgoyne’s hungry troops faced American forces outnumbering them four to one. The surrender of a field army at Saratoga—close to 6,000 British and German troops—marked the first major British defeat of the war. It triggered vicious attacks on Lord Germain by the opposition in Parliament and hastened the conclusion of a formal Franco-American alliance.⁴⁵

For our purposes, it is the aftermath of Saratoga that is illuminating, especially the unexpectedly epic journey of the so-called Convention Army. The fate of those 5,700 to 5,900 British, German, and Canadian troops surrendered by Burgoyne helps us understand how—humanitarian principles notwithstanding—limited resources, the pressures of war, and human frailty could produce punishing conditions for captives.⁴⁶

The liberal terms of surrender agreed upon between the American and British commanders under the Convention of Saratoga provided for Britain’s Canadian and Loyalist auxiliary troops to go to Canada, and for all others to be taken to Boston and then shipped to Europe. No baggage was to be searched. The men were to have the same provisions as soldiers in the American army, not the two-thirds ration that prisoners of war usually received. However, when the British Crown refused to ratify the Convention in order to avoid acknowledging the Congress—and hence American independence—Congress likewise refused to honor the agreement. American leaders had by then realized that releasing thousands of soldiers to fight elsewhere in the Empire meant that Britain would be able to replace them in America.

Unable to leave for Europe, more than 5,000 “conventioners” were forced upon American states ill prepared to cope with these additional captives (plus their minders) on top of existing prisoners, their own populations, and American forces. As a result, substantial numbers of British and German prisoners suffered from intermittent if sometimes severe food shortages, lack of firewood, inadequate winter shelter, and disease, as well as physical violence at the hands of their overstretched guards.

The Convention Army’s ordeal started with a march from Saratoga to Cambridge, Massachusetts—some twelve miles a day through mountainous terrain in the rain- and snowstorms of late October and November. At least two men froze to death; a dozen more died en route from disease, exhaustion, and hypothermia. Hannah Winthrop witnessed the exhausted survivors march into Cambridge: “I never had the least idea that the creation produced such a sordid set of creatures in human figure—poor, dirty, emaciated men.” Winthrop commented on the large number of women accompanying the captive army, also “barefoot, clothed in dirty rags. Such effluvia filled the air while they were passing, that had they not been smoking all the time, I should have been apprehensive of being contaminated.”⁴⁷

In Cambridge, the troops, along with the women and children who arrived with them, were held in poorly built barracks on Winter Hill and Prospect Hill, the snow drifting through the holes that served as windows. Each room, thirteen by thirteen feet at most, accommodated three or four officers, or alternatively sixteen to twenty soldiers. Lieutenant Jacob Heerwagen wrote to his parents in Hanau, Hesse, that initially he and his fellow captives had to lie on the bare ground in the poorly heated cabins, although eventually they built themselves makeshift beds. As the British Army considered the Convention violated, they refused to send clothing and blankets even though winter was fast approaching. Hessian sources suggest that the American captors took adequate care of the sick. But by the spring of 1778, foodstuffs were so scarce that Congress requested Pennsylvania as well as states farther south to send victuals to Boston, where the local population was now petitioning to have the prisoners removed. By then, Congress had suspended the Convention entirely.⁴⁸

Yet the conventioners’ odyssey continued. Those German prisoners who had remained at Cambridge, along with British captives who had been moved to Rutland, were later marched in six columns to Charlottesville, Virginia. Trekking hundreds of miles, through snow that sometimes reached their knees, the men regularly had to sleep in the open: “[O]ne night upon the green Mountains,” remembered Corporal George Fox of the 7th Foot, “there was snow upon us ½ yd deep.” British officials protested the dispersal of the Convention prisoners across more than two dozen settlements in multiple states, where they were “so secreted as to be lost, which may properly be deemed a positive Slavery.”⁴⁹

Arriving at Charlottesville, the British ensign Thomas Anburey experienced the encampment, larger than any city in the state, as truly horrific. The barracks lacked doors, windows, and roofs, and were filled high with snow. The men and even their officers had to complete their own quarters. They built themselves huts, dug wells, and constructed toilets, in addition to erecting a hospital, church, and even coffee rooms; they laid out vegetable gardens and a graveyard. Major General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, the Brunswick officer who had commanded all German and Native American forces at Saratoga, described conditions in Virginia as even worse than they had been in Boston, where he had alleged that the Americans were swapping good prisoner provisions for codfish and “still poorer articles.” The men adjusted with difficulty to the new diet: “Animal food and maize were chiefly used; vegatables were scarcely known.” Since quarters and food were in short supply, officers were eventually given a parole area one hundred miles in radius. Some, such as Riedesel and his entire family, enjoyed Thomas Jefferson’s hospitality and musical company at Monticello and surrounding estates.⁵⁰

By the time Congress classified the conventioners as standard prisoners of war in 1781, they had marched to far-flung locations such as Winchester, Virginia; Fort Frederick, Maryland; and various towns in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the Patriots’ limited resources hampered their ability to guard captives, facilitating escape. In the first year in Massachusetts alone, more than 1,000 British and some 330 German soldiers fled during marches and at various stops; only some 3,000 prisoners made the journey to Maryland in late 1780. It has been estimated that about half the British deserters made for British enclaves and eventually rejoined their army. Many others would blend into the local population and stay in America permanently. By the time the remaining prisoners were released in 1782, the group had shrunk to just 470.⁵¹

The conventioners’ odyssey is a sobering reminder of how much prisoners might suffer when resources were limited, even without any official policy of abuse or systematic neglect. Anglo-German prisoner populations enjoyed significantly better overall conditions than did Americans, but these were as much the result of greater space, fewer logistical challenges, and prisoner-labor schemes as they were proof of the higher humanitarian standards of their captors.

As for Britain’s treatment of American prisoners, it is unlikely that any eighteenth-century state could have provided adequate conditions for such a large number in such small areas of a very partially occupied land, thousands of miles from the captors’ main supply bases. The failure of both powers to negotiate large-scale exchanges compounded this structural problem. Then, too, the patchwork of responsibilities shared between British military and civilian authorities, and the limitations of the fledgling American state, kept both countries from implementing even the basic quality of prisoner treatment they had agreed upon. Wherever large numbers of captives were crowded in substandard conditions, disease was endemic and squalor, discomfort, and suffering inevitable. Neglect and a lack of compassion on the part of captors, human frailty among desperate prisoners, and the absence of charitable support from the surrounding American population further reduced a captive’s chances of surviving, let alone staying healthy.⁵²

The British surrender of a field army at Saratoga in late 1777, which led to the conventioners’ travails, also had geostrategic implications. As early as the summer of independence, the rebellious colonies had begun wooing Britain’s European archenemy, France. At first, the French court had provided only secret support, using a shell company run by the inventor and author of The Marriage of Figaro, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, to supply the United States with cannons, muskets, explosives, tents, and uniforms. On behalf of Congress, Benjamin Franklin subsequently negotiated a preferential trade agreement with France and nudged the foreign secretary, Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, to commit further loans and war matériel to the American cause. In the fall and winter of 1777–78, the French government completed the war preparations it considered a precondition for an official alliance with the United States. By December 1777, news of the first major American military success—the capture of Burgoyne’s army—accelerated the move towards French intervention in the war.⁵³

On February 6, 1778, representatives of the French monarchy and the American republic signed in secrecy (or so they thought) the treaties of commerce and of alliance. The two countries granted each other most-favored-nation status in trade and guaranteed each other’s possessions in North America forever. Most importantly, France promised to support America’s war until independence was secured. America would, in return, give France free rein in the West Indies, the lucrative sugar islands perennially subject to Anglo-French rivalry. Franklin had turned France’s desire to use the Anglo-American conflict to humiliate Britain into an advantage. But what Franklin perhaps did not foresee was how this realignment might affect Britain’s conduct of the war, including her treatment of American captives.

At the same time as he was negotiating treaties with France, Franklin was using his diplomatic perch to help alleviate the suffering of American prisoners held across the English Channel and draw attention to the appalling conditions under which American captives were kept in Britain’s Asian and African empire. But one of the war’s greatest humanitarian disasters in fact played itself out much closer to home. For if the prisons in New York were the slaughterhouses of America’s soldiers, as Congress once put it, British prison ships anchored offshore and holding thousands of seamen were far, far worse.⁵⁴

Carington Bowles, Bowles’s New and Accurate Map of the World, or Terrestrial Globe (London, [1780]). Credit 33