In an essay that circulated widely in the transatlantic press in early 1777, an anonymous author signing as “Miserecors” described the shipboard transfer of captured American soldiers to prisons in New York. “[T]hrust down into the hold,” Miserecors wrote, “they were nearly suffocated for want of air.” Their treatment was not only “more murderous, more blood-thirsty” than Americans had ever experienced at the hands of the Indian savages, but this “murder…by inches” was so heinous that even “the famous instance of Calcutta is not to be compared with this.”¹

Evoking the same comparison, “Humanitas” had earlier described the arrival of the first American maritime prisoners in England in similar tones. The condition of American captives was “truly shocking and…barbarous and miserable.” On one ship moored in the Thames, twenty-five men were “inhumanly shut close down, like wild beasts, in a small stinking apartment, in the hold…without a breath of air, in this sultry season, but what they receive from a small grating overhead.” With such openings just two inches square, the sun beating down, and “putrid streams issuing from the hold…so hot and offensive that one cannot, without the utmost danger, breathe over it,” the writer concluded, “the resemblance that this barbarity bears to the memorable Black Hole at Calcutta…strikes every eye to the sight.”²

Eighteenth-century Britons, and many literate Americans, too, required no explanation of the “famous instance of Calcutta” in 1756, when soldiers of Siraj ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, had imprisoned some 150 Europeans overnight in an eighteen-by-fourteen-foot cell in the city’s Fort William. The only two airholes were barricaded with iron bars. By the following morning some fifty captives had died from heat, dehydration, and lack of oxygen. Many had been trampled to death by panicking fellow captives. As one survivor later testified in the House of Commons, some had perished quickly, “others grew mad, and having lost their Senses, died in a high Delirium.” Publicized in the print media and commemorated in a monument to the victims of “Tyrannic Violence,” the incident epitomized the cruelty of the colonized.³

Throughout the American Revolutionary War, British and American writers of both fiction and nonfiction routinely evoked the Black Hole of Calcutta as a setting for tales of horror and a metaphor for individuals’ unimaginable sufferings in captivity. War critics on both sides appropriated the myth for their own purposes. Donning the humanitarian mantle, writers such as Miserecors and Humanitas, and soon American officials and captives, too, used the image of Britain’s earlier humiliation at the hands of inhumane colonials in India to accuse the rulers of the British Empire of having descended to the level of savage barbarity.⁴

The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta was scary and unsettling in part because the truth about that dark night in Bengal was very difficult to ascertain. The discrepancy between rumored and actual casualty figures; disagreement over whether the deaths were intentional or accidental; the absence of any visual depictions—in other words, the very unknown of the black hole—allowed contemporaries to conjure the worst. America, of course, had its own black holes during its first civil war. Contemporaries imagined the most horrific of them as floating dungeons, at once reminiscent of the Simsbury mines and of slave ships.

This Floating Pandemonium

However dismal and brutal the conditions in New York or Philadelphia, American Patriot captives endured far worse on the prison ships anchored just off New York City. These “shifting ‘black holes’ ” held the majority of American prisoners throughout the war—initially soldiers captured in the Battle of Long Island and elsewhere in the New York campaign, as well as political prisoners, and soon large numbers of seamen, too. The first prison ships were former cattle transports and other store ships located in New York’s Gravesend Bay, then moved to the Hudson and East Rivers and, in 1778, to Wallabout Bay, along the northwest shore of Brooklyn. Over the course of the war, Britain used some two dozen vessels as floating prisons in New York, most of them former warships; sloops; depot, hospital, and fire ships; and transports, plus another half a dozen in Charleston and one in Saint Lucia. To American captives the ships symbolized British cruelty at its extreme. One seaman, who was seventeen at the time of his imprisonment, recalled that the “very idea of being incarcerated in this floating Pandemonium filled us with horror.”⁵

As he was being rowed towards his place of confinement, a new captive would have noticed the nauseating smell pouring out of the few air ports on the side of a ship, “a strong current of foul vapor” common also on slave ships. Captain John Van Dyke remembered that when he boarded one of the prison ships, “her stench was so great, and my breathing this putrid air—I thought it would kill me.” Of his first night one seaman recollected “dismal sounds meeting my ears from every direction; a nauseous and putrid atmosphere filling my lungs at every breath; and a stifled and suffocating heat, which almost deprived me of sense, and even of life.” Ichabod Perry from Fairfield, Connecticut, then a seventeen-year-old private, later told his children about the utter darkness of his first night aboard another prison ship, when a third of the prisoners “suffocated from want of space.” Others called to mind the

continual noises during the night. The groans of the sick and the dying; the curses poured out by the weary and exhausted upon our inhuman keepers; the restlessness caused by the suffocating heat and the confined and poisoned air; mingled with the wild and incoherent ravings of delirium, were the sounds, which, every night, were raised around us, in all directions.

The smells onboard became so overpowering that men sent ashore on burial duty would bring back clods of soil and patches of turf for those shipbound to smell, the earth “being passed…from hand to hand, and its smell inhaled, as if it had been a fragrant rose.” The experience of captivity also diminished individuals’ sensory perception, more so even than in the Simsbury mines, as some lost their voice and others their hearing. An unknown number of captives became mentally unstable, as happened to the man, recalled by one Thomas Andros, who stalked through the ship at night carrying a knife.⁶

Prison hulks, as such ships were known, had been in use in Britain throughout much of the eighteenth century. They housed Jacobite rebels after 1745, French prisoners of war during the Seven Years’ War, and British civilians when terrestrial prisons became overcrowded. Even into the Victorian era, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations featured those terrifying black prison ships moored on the Thames. Although conditions on these ships were dire—a recent scholar catalogues poor rations, hard labor, widespread disease, and a mortality rate of one-third—the prison ships on which Britain held Americans captive were worse.⁷

As was the case for prisoners on land, food was a constant worry. Even if the official rations were issued, which they were often not, they were frequently of poor quality. Malnutrition and dangerous weight loss were common. The steward of each six-man mess prepared food in a common copper boiling vat that held half freshwater and half salt water for peas and oatmeal and for meat, respectively. As the teenage seaman Ebenezer Fox remembered, in addition to the typically wormy bread,

[a]s for the pork, we were cheated out of it more than half the time, and when it was obtained one would have judged from its…exhibiting the consistence and appearance of variegated soap, that it was the flesh of the porpoise or sea hog, and had been the inhabitant of the ocean, rather than a sty….The provisions were generally damaged, and from the imperfect manner in which they were cooked were about as indigestible as grape shot. The flour and oatmeal was often sour, and when the suet was mixed with the flour it might be nosed half the length of the ship. The first view of the beef would excite an idea of veneration for its antiquity…[I]ts color was a dark mahagony, and its solidity would have set the keenest edge of a broad axe at defiance to cut across the grain…It was so completely saturated with salt that after having been boiled in water taken from the sea, it was found to be considerably freshened by the process.

The salt water used for boiling the meat corroded the copper boiler in which oats and peas were also prepared. The freshwater brought by tankers from New York was often foul on arrival, giving rise to the suspicion of a deliberate ploy, as water could in theory have been fetched from much closer Long Island. Junior and privateer officers enjoyed the privilege of admission to the gun room, where they prepared their food in freshwater on little fires in the galley. Yet everyone’s diet lacked fresh produce, and scurvy was predictably widespread: “Among the emaciated crowd of living skeletons who had remained on board for any length of time, the cook was the only person who appeared to have much flesh on his bones.”⁸

One of the most notorious ships of the Revolutionary era (and one of the best documented) was the Jersey, a decommissioned, 64-gun British ship of the line, on whom a crew of 450 had served in the Mediterranean since the 1730s. By the time she started service as a prison ship no later than 1779, now anchored with massive chain cables in the channel between the mudflats some one hundred yards off the Long Island shore, the British apparently considered her capable of holding up to 1,000 prisoners. Her skeleton crew consisted of the captain, two mates, a dozen seamen, two or three dozen marines sheltered by an awning aft on the quarterdeck, and some thirty soldiers. The hulk of the Jersey became infamous as a dirty, disease-ridden, deadly place. Visual depictions helped feed the Patriot imagination, as did Philip Freneau’s epic poem The British Prison-Ship. Freneau accused the “ungenerous Britons” of conspiring “to murder whom you can’t subdue,” and evoked “The dreadful secrets of these prison caves, / Half sunk, half floating on my Hudson’s waves.” Even well after the war, terrifying tales from the Jersey still found a wide audience. The posthumous narrative of Thomas Dring, a master’s mate from Newport, Rhode Island, who had been a captive on the Jersey for two months, portrayed “unspeakable sufferings.”⁹

Jersey prison ship, moored in Wallabout Bay, New York. There are no known contemporary depictions of the Jersey. This illustration accompanies the 1829 edition of Thomas Dring’s Recollections of the Jersey prison-ship. Credit 34

The Jersey featured two tiers of ports fore and aft, air ports, and large hatchways, which should have allowed for a relatively free circulation of air. However, the gun ports and portholes had been sealed with timber and replaced with two rows of twenty-inch-square glazed air ports secured with iron bars. No lamps or candles were allowed belowdecks, where the only light came through the lattice of the hatchway grill or the air ports. Much like on a slave ship, a ten-foot-high barricade extending several feet beyond the sides of the ship near the aft hatch was manned by armed sentries who would rake the hatchway or deck with gunfire in the event of an insurrection:

At evry hatch a group of centries stands,

Cull’d from the Scottish or the English bands;

As tigers fierce for human blood they thirst,

Rejoice in slaughter, as in slaughter nursed.¹⁰

David Sproat, the British commissary general of naval prisoners from 1779, was said to run a brutal regime on the Jersey, much like William Cunningham onshore. A Scottish-born Loyalist merchant in Philadelphia whose house Patriots had ransacked before converting it into an army hospital, the commissary seemed out for revenge. While Sproat was in charge, on the first two days after their arrival, new prisoners could not get or prepare any food. The commissaries also frequently reduced rations or substituted poor ones to make a profit for themselves. Forced to seize any opportunity to augment their meals, captives took on work, such as water detail or the hoisting of provisions. Those who had held on to some money were allowed to buy supplementary foods from outside sources, such as merchants or the entrepreneurial women who rowed up along the side of the hulk, but these were unreliable channels.¹¹

The lack of clothing, too, could spell serious illness if not death. There was no regular British policy for issuing garments and bedding. The American commissary general and his New York agent could procure some items, which did make a difference, but were rarely enough. Some captives were lucky to keep what they had on when captured; others depended on donations by a few caring locals onshore. Men with previous experience of captivity wore their clothes in layers and hid their money and other belongings in linings or boots. Several prison hulks were uncaulked, so that in winter snow blew through the seams—although at least that allowed prisoners to quench their thirst.

Onboard hygiene was appalling, disease rampant. The captives, who spent most of their time belowdecks, had hardly any facilities for washing, and the odors of their own excrement and urine were pervasive. In such conditions, infection spread easily. The salt water for cooking meat was usually procured from the same spot where the waste tubs were emptied over the ship’s side. Vermin crept up on sleeping prisoners at night. Scurvy and dysentery were common. So were yellow fever, pneumonia, typhoid, influenza, and that feared mass killer of civilian and military populations, smallpox. As one British medical official warned, it was almost impossible to eradicate contagious diseases, such as smallpox, once they had taken hold on a prison ship, which endangered the lives not just of prisoners but of their guards, too.¹²

Smallpox is transmitted through airborne droplets. Crowded conditions in towns, army camps, and prisons are thus ideal breeding grounds for the disease, which can be carried in the clothing and bedding of those infected. After an incubation period of ten to twelve days, as the historian of medicine Erica Charters describes, “sufferers experience back, muscle, and head pains, high fever, and the characteristic rash.” The rash can cause “septic skin infections and massive hemorrhages of the skin, lungs, and other organs.” Survivors might suffer permanent “blindness, skin infections, infertility, and a horrifically ravaged appearance.” Smallpox cannot be cured, but those who survive the disease are immune to future infection.¹³

Smallpox was endemic in eighteenth-century British towns, and since most British Army recruits came from urban population centers, many recruits had survived smallpox in childhood and thus entered the army already immune. But the disease was far less widespread in America, and, as a consequence, rates of immunity among Continental recruits were low. American soldiers, including Loyalists among British forces, therefore remained at greater risk of epidemic outbreaks compared to the British.

The Continental Army began inoculating thousands of soldiers against smallpox in 1777. Some American prisoners also inoculated themselves. Inoculation had been practiced much earlier in parts of Africa and Asia, but was only introduced to Europe in the early eighteenth century and in America a generation later. The procedure, in the words of the author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82, Elizabeth A. Fenn, was “both frightening and fascinating.” As John Adams had experienced during a smallpox outbreak in Boston in 1764, it “consisted of deliberately implanting live Variola in an incision, usually on the patient’s hand or arm.” Thomas Dring on the Jersey used a pin to infect himself, taking the disease from a patient whose smallpox had advanced to the right stage. Dring experienced a mild form of the disease and recovered; other captives followed his example.¹⁴

Most sick prisoners appear to have received no attention from British doctors. Since the Americans’ own surgeons were typically on parole, they were usually not available, either. When on occasion an American doctor was permitted to board a ship to care for the ill, he was quickly overwhelmed; one doctor who attempted to do so at Charleston in 1780 said that in his professional judgment only death could improve the sickly conditions caused by human miasma and putrid fevers ravaging overcrowded ships. The prisoner George Ballerman testified that the sick were only allowed to go to a hospital when they were already so weak that they often did not survive the transfer. On the rare occasions when a full-scale disinfection of a ship was attempted, many weakened prisoners died of exposure during their temporary evacuation, especially if the weather turned severe.¹⁵

The psychological impact of being held captive on these moored ships was as stark as the physical suffering: “[T]he prisoners had lost almost every feeling of humanity for each other;…self-preservation appeared to be their only wish.” Monotony and the sheer uncertainty of their fate weighed on captives. William Slade of New Canaan, when he was transferred from the North Dutch Church to the Grosvenor, found men sinking into a state of unresponsive stupor:

Sunday, 8th. This day we were almost discouraged, but considered that would not do. Cast off such thoughts. We drawd our bread and eat with sadness…Spent the day reading and in meditation, hoping for good news.

Wednesday, 11th. Still in hopes.

Friday, 13th. We now see nothing but the mercy of God to intercede for us. Sorrowful times, all faces look pale, discouraged, discouraged.

Saturday, 14th. Times look dark. Death prevails among us…At night suffer with cold and hunger.

Sunday, 15th. Paleness attends all faces, the melancholyst day I ever saw.

Tuesday, 17th. We are treated worse than cattle and hogs.

Wednesday, 18th. Hunger prevails. Sorrow comes on.

Friday, 20th. Prisoners hang their heads and look pale. No comfort. All sorrow.

Sunday, 22nd. Last night nothing but grones all night of sick and dying. Men amazeing to behold. Such hardness, sickness prevails fast. Deaths multiple…All faces sad.

Monday, 23rd. One dies almost every day.

Friday, 27th. Three men of our battalion died last night.¹⁶

This sketch has long been thought to depict American prisoners on board a British prison ship. It has been attributed to Jonathan Trumbull, whose grand scenes of the Revolutionary War adorn the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. More recently, it has been suggested that the apathetic figures with gaunt features and ragged clothing might instead represent inmates of a mental asylum—the uncertainty perhaps a telling commentary on the perceived conditions of American captives. Credit 35

Death was one way captivity could end for American prisoners. The other three were exchange, escape, or enlistment with the enemy. As we have seen, the codes of war prevalent among Europe’s armies forbade recruiting prisoners into one’s own forces. This, however, did not stop British officers from attempting to do so. Congress alleged that the British commonly deprived new captives of food for three, four, even five days, then tempted them with enlistment to save their lives. George Ballerman would testify in 1780 that when British recruiting officers on New York prison ships found that American officers had told their men not to enlist, the American officers were removed to the Provost; when the recruiting officers still failed to enlist American soldiers, they deprived the captives of water. Despite the effort, British recruitment among American prisoners, which disproportionately attracted British-born colonists, does not appear to have been particularly successful.¹⁷

Instead, many prisoners attempted to escape. Christopher Hawkins slipped through an open gunport on the Jersey after only three days of captivity and swam for two hours until—evading Hessian sentries—he reached the relative safety of Long Island. James Forten, a fifteen-year-old African-American from Philadelphia, and described as tall, literate, and a determined Patriot, first chose captivity on the Jersey over being sent to England. He later forsook a chance of escaping by ceding his place in a “chest of old clothes” lowered down the side to his thirteen-year-old, white “companion in suffering,” Daniel Brewton. Forten was eventually exchanged and lived to become a wealthy Philadelphia citizen and prominent abolitionist.¹⁸

Joseph Bartlett’s memoranda tell of his captivity among hundreds of prisoners on the Scorpion on the North River. Every morning, fifteen men were found dead, including many “that was not sick at all only from weakness & Stagnated air.” When petitions for improvements remained unanswered, an escape bid resulted in casualties on both sides: “[T]he Capt. of the P. Ship was a savage fellow & they all much exasperated to see some of the guard lay dead & many Missing & wounded they pointed their Muskets down the Ships hatchways and fired for half an hour the Ships hold was all of a blaze we cryed out for quarters.” The carnage, which left a dozen men dead and two dozen wounded, was stopped only when a senior naval officer boarded the ship and reprimanded its captain. None of the wounded, Bartlett reports, were seen to until the following day, by which point several had bled to death.¹⁹

Many of those who did not escape or enlist, and who were not exchanged, died on the prison ships—altogether more than half the captives. Precise mortality rates and the total number of deaths are impossible to establish for any of the war’s prisoner populations. But even the fragmentary if fairly consistent evidence that historians have been able to gather is dramatic: the death rate on the New York prison ships was rarely if ever below 50 percent and may have been as high as 70 percent during the hot summers. Mortality rates in the city’s prisons were lower but perhaps not by very much. By the end of 1776, at least half of the captives taken at Long Island and two-thirds of those captured at Fort Washington had died of starvation, disease, and untended wounds—a total of some 2,000 to 2,500 in just a few months. Of 69 men captured from one company in December 1776, just 16 were still alive the following May, half of whom were too weak to walk. Thomas Dring estimated that there were an average of 5 deaths per day on the Jersey prison ship, more on some days. Among his own crew, the mortality rate was well over 40 percent, mostly from disease. By comparison, during World War II, 11 percent of American POWs died in prison camps (although in Japanese camps much higher proportions did not survive), and 38 percent during the Korean War, the highest rate by far since the Revolutionary War.²⁰

Adding the very substantial number of deaths of prisoners in the Southern theater to what we know about New York and Philadelphia, and not even including the unknown number of deaths among captives held in other locations—Detroit, a St. Lawrence River island, the disease-ridden West Indies, India, and possibly Senegambia—between 16,500 and 19,000 American prisoners are estimated to have died in British captivity during the war. Given that between 6,800 and 8,000 American Patriots were killed in action and that some 10,000 more died of their wounds or of disease in camp, it is safe to assume that roughly half of all the Patriots under arms who died in the Revolutionary War died in British prisons and on prison ships.²¹

Robert Smirke, Cruelty Presiding over the Prison Ship (Cruelty holding the Register of Death). An early-nineteenth-century British vision of the deadly horrors of “the black Prison Ship’s expanding womb Impested thousands, quick and dead, entomb.” Credit 36

Burying the dead from the prison ships was a daily ritual. Each morning, a working party on the Jersey carried the bodies to the upper deck, where they were laid on the gratings. If they could find any, the captives were allowed to sew blankets around the corpses before strapping them onto boards. Onshore, the sailors would dig a trench in the sand wide enough to receive the day’s bodies; they were permitted no ceremony and were only allowed to shovel a slight cover of sand over the corpses. All around them was evidence of previous burials. A teenage farmworker, who lived near where the shallow mass graves were being dug, remembered: “The atmosphere seemed to be charged with foul air from the prison ships and with the effluvia of dead bodies washed out of their graves by the tides….The bodies of the dead lay exposed along the beach, drying and bleaching in the sun, and whitening the shores.”²²

Death or Liberty

Charles Herbert joined the privateering brig Dolton at Newburyport, Massachusetts, in November 1776, just shy of his nineteenth birthday. After only six weeks at sea, however, Herbert and his comrades were captured by the British 64-gun HMS Reasonable. The Dolton’s crew was transferred to Plymouth on England’s southern coast, crowded in the Reasonable’s cable tier, the area where cables and spare rigging were stowed and where they “almost suffocated with heat.” Over the course of the war, perhaps some 3,000 American captives—sailors of the Continental Navy, American merchantmen, and rebel privateersmen like Herbert—made a similar passage to be imprisoned in Britain. Unless the capturing vessel was already en route to the British Isles, American maritime prisoners were often held for a few weeks or months at temporary sites such as disused sugarhouses in Halifax where prisoners were described as being kept like “Herrings salted in Casks.”²³

Just like the conditions at these sites, the transatlantic passages that ensued were extremely trying. Typically, the capturing vessels were already crowded, and resources were scarce. Prisoners were confined to the holds, sometimes “under five decks,” as one American lieutenant described it, “and consequently under at least thirty feet of water—in a dungeon the area of which was twelve feet by twenty, and its height three feet—without light, and almost without air—where they were necessarily compelled to remain always in a bent or a recumbent posture.” In this marine version of Simsbury, the victuals were generally of limited quantity and poor quality. The little water they had was “thick with animacules” and had to be drunk “through closed teeth.” Captains used threats of hanging and condoned the theft of clothes to encourage defections.²⁴

When Charles Herbert’s prisoner transport arrived off the English coast, he and his fellow captives underwent several more transfers between ships. Herbert spent nineteen days on the cable tier of the Bellisle, where planks and boards laid over the cable chains provided a bare modicum of comfort. A few days in an overcrowded area between the decks of HMS Torbay exposed Herbert’s crew to the wintry conditions: “[W]e begin to grow very sickly.” Herbert described the visit of local British sailors’ wives who came to inspect the Americans, their ignorant reactions encapsulating the confusing nature of Anglo-American relations: “Are they white? Can they talk?…Why, they look like our people and they talk English.”²⁵

Herbert and the other men from the Dolton’s crew were moved on to HMS Burford, where the sleeping arrangements were finally more comfortable. They were now also allowed to walk on deck in groups of twenty. But their lengthy oceanic passage and subsequent confinement had taken a toll. By mid-April, Herbert and several other men from the Burford were transferred to the Royal Hospital at Plymouth; they had contracted smallpox, and for the next few weeks it was unclear whether Herbert would live.

While Herbert was convalescing in Plymouth, politicians in London were about to introduce a fundamental change to his status. Earlier that year, around the same time that the Continental Congress started investigating British prisoner abuse in America, the British Parliament revisited the legal standing of American captives. Prime Minister Lord North’s government had increasingly found itself in a practical and legal dilemma. General Washington demanded that Britain acknowledge the United States as “an independent State, at least so far as respects prisoners of war.” Otherwise, he warned, the treatment of British captives might reflect exactly that of Americans by the British. After Howe had failed to deliver a knockout blow in New York, and Washington had triumphed at Trenton and Princeton, the British government was preparing for another campaign season. It could not grant American captives prisoner-of-war status, since that would acknowledge American independence. But neither could it keep rising numbers of captives that had been moved to Britain on prison ships offshore or, by bringing them ashore, risk them applying for writs of habeas corpus, a legal action through which civil prisoners as Englishmen could claim the right to be released on bail while awaiting trial.²⁶

In February 1777, Lord George Germain, the government’s chief hard-liner, introduced a bill to suspend habeas corpus for American captives. Eventually known as North’s Act and renewed every year through 1783, the law allowed American captives to be confined “like other prisoners of war.” At the same time, however, it kept them in the legal category of rebels and traitors, as agents of a rebellion “traitorously levied…in certain of his majesty’s colonies and plantations in America.” Specifically, the law permitted the imprisonment “without bail or mainprise” of those taken up for high treason or piracy in America or on the high seas on the order of “any magistrate of competent authority.” It applied only to those “as shall have been out of the realm” when committing their alleged offense. Herein lay the law’s chief and, for its opponents, most dangerous innovation: it distinguished subjects by the location of their arrest. In essence, the 1777 act redrew the zones of law within the British Empire. It ended the subjecthood of certain individuals in colonial British America and on the high seas. At a time when the British were still confused about Americans’ identity, Anglo-American difference had now been legally codified in one crucial respect.²⁷

Even in Britain, opponents of the law denounced the measure as cruel and unconstitutional, a dangerous assault on English liberties that was “shocking to humanity.” The lawyer John Dunning, MP, mocked the measure. Traditionally, only necessity in the case of domestic rebellion or the threat of invasion had justified suspensions: “Are we afraid that the people of America will pass the Atlantic on a bridge, and come over and conquer us?” The premise of British (and American) critics of the measure was that habeas corpus represented a fundamental right of the king’s subjects, wherever on the globe they might be. The opposition leader, Charles James Fox, called the law “nothing less than robbing America of her franchises…and, in fine, of spreading arbitrary dominion over all the territories belonging to the British crown.”²⁸

One of the most devastating critiques of the suspension law came from the same man who had previously warned of the inherently violent nature of revolution and of the disastrous consequences of a war of desolation. Edmund Burke decried illegitimate or ill-advised violence wherever and whenever he saw it. In his Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, a publication that was widely excerpted in the American press, Burke acknowledged that all were “heartily agreed in our detestation of a civil war…we feel exactly the same emotions of grief and shame on all its miserable consequences,” including any “legislative regulations which subvert the liberties of our brethren, or which undermine our own.” The government’s argument from necessity, however, was both dangerous and flawed: “All the ancient, honest juridical principles, and institutions of England, are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression.” Above all, Burke opposed the distinction that the law made between subjects: “Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But, unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery the most easily committed in times of civil discord.” If there was to be any suspension of habeas corpus, it had to apply to all. All subjects on both sides of the Atlantic must live under the same regime of both liberty and security. In Burke’s analysis, then, the prime minister’s new law undermined time-honored English constitutional checks on oppression and violence.²⁹

Before long, news of the ripples that North’s Act had caused at home reached the other side of the Atlantic. General Sir Henry Clinton’s mailbag contained letters that described the legislation as an example of how the “spirit of the Nation [was] fully against America,” although American newspapers had been assiduous in covering the controversy the measure had sparked in Britain. In the eyes of George Washington, who denounced the suspension as “arbitrary imprisonment [that] has received the sanction of British laws,” it was yet another wrong that Britain inflicted upon North Americans. Those directly affected referred to North’s Act as “the execrable act of parliament.” Being denied habeas corpus became a badge of honor that steeled Revolutionary resolve.³⁰

Before falling ill, Charles Herbert had read in a newspaper of the Act of Parliament that found him and his fellow captives “guilty of high treason.” After his pox had spread, accompanied by high fever, vomiting, and severe headaches for several weeks—“[M]y flesh feels as if I was raked up in a bed of embers”—Herbert gradually recovered under good medical care and full rations; he was finally released in early June. Six of his comrades had succumbed to the smallpox, including one who “in a most shocking manner” had had to be “jammed” into a coffin six inches too short. Shortly thereafter, Herbert and several other captives were brought up before a board of Admiralty judges. In response to questions, they confirmed that they were Americans and had been sailing with a congressional commission. As Herbert told the judges, “[W]e were out to fight the enemies of the thirteen United States.” When the magistrates were reassured of a prisoner’s identity as an American rebel, and they had established that a captive was not a British deserter, they pronounced that he was committed to prison “for Rebellion, Piracy, and High Treason on his Britannic Majesty’s High Seas, there to lay during His Majesty’s pleasure, until he pardons or otherwise disposes of you.”³¹

After their committal hearing, captives like Herbert were issued with warrants charging them with treason and escorted under guard to one of a dozen or more facilities. By far the largest of these were Forton Prison in Portsmouth and Mill Prison in Plymouth, both holdovers from the Seven Years’ War. Run by the Commissioners for Sick and Wounded Seamen (also known as the Sick and Hurt Board), a small committee that reported to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, they held a total of about 2,500 American captives over the course of the war.³²

Herbert was transferred to the Mill Prison, a purpose-built facility located on an exposed tidal headland between Plymouth and Plymouth Dock, or Devonport, and surrounded by fourteen- to twenty-foot-high double stone walls topped with broken glass. Forton Prison, which stood across Portsmouth Harbor in Alverstoke, Hampshire, bordered on a lake, farms, meadows, and woodlands. It did not boast as much security and was enclosed only with an eight-foot-high picket fence. Prison guards were recruited from the local militia, companies of invalids, and regional army garrisons; at first, eleven and ten sentinels, respectively, were on guard duty at Mill and Forton; by the following summer, that number had risen to two officers and sixty men at Forton, and at Mill to forty-five armed men inside and outside the perimeter. Smaller numbers of prisoners were also kept at Kinsale in Ireland, in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, in Pembroke in Wales, and in Liverpool, Shrewsbury, Bristol, Weymouth, and Falmouth.³³

Examining the treatment of rebel captives held in Britain helps us put the experiences of American captives kept in America in proper perspective, illuminating the extent to which resource limitations and logistical difficulties—rather than policies of cruelty or some deep flaw of national character—were responsible for the suffering that prisoners endured. All in all, conditions at Forton and Mill Prisons were significantly better than at British prison sites in America. Although some captives, like John Haskins, described Mill as a “shocking place,” others compared exchanging prison ships for these new sites with “coming out of hell and going into paradise.” To be sure, American prisoners in England, too, suffered at least intermittently from lack of clothing; poor meat, bread, or water; overcrowding; bad health; and abusive guards. However, the only ways in which the American captives were officially treated differently from legitimate prisoners of war, such as the French captives who soon arrived, were that they received only two-thirds of the full naval ration, that their clothing was provided by the British government and not their own, and that they could be put in irons as a disciplinary measure.³⁴

Regulations allowed the prisoners’ delegates to observe the weighing and preparation of foodstuffs, to verify that provisions corresponded with the officially agreed-upon diet. That victualing scheme prescribed, per week, seven quarts of beer, seven pounds of bread, four and a half pounds of beef, four ounces of butter and six of cheese, two pints of peas, and, according to some sources, salt as well. In addition, most mornings, prisoners with surplus money could buy fruit and other refreshments at the private market that had sprung up at the prison gates; they could also pay an agent or the keeper to procure such items for them, much like civilian prisoners at the time. Some keepers took an interest in ensuring their charges received their proper rations, but others were suspected of shorting them and pocketing the difference. Indeed, captives’ journals and diaries describe guards and staff as petty, corrupt, and inhumane, often arbitrarily so. Samuel Cutler considered William Cowdry (or Coudray), the supervisor at the Mill, “as great a tyrant as any in England, [who] uses us with the greatest severity.” Cowdry was accused of watering down the beer, short-weighing rations, and giving prisoners’ food to the pigs, as well as condoning brutalities. In the summer of 1777, starving captives were reported to be eating grass and the snails in the yard, or sucking on old bones; others rooted in the yard rubbish for cabbage stumps that one prisoner felt hogs in America would scarcely eat. But then, by Christmas of that year, they had more pudding than they could eat, as well as bread donated by visitors and outside benefactors.³⁵

The navy’s medical authorities were also in charge of the captives, meaning that American maritime prisoners benefited from a regime of naval hygiene, medical expertise, and hospital organization of which captives on the prison ships in America could only have dreamed. There were tubs, water, and soap for prisoners to wash themselves as well as their linen and clothes. “In general,” Herbert observed, “we are tolerably clean.” The captives were given tools to sweep the prison; other hygienic measures included the spreading of oil of tar, to which “powerful antiseptic virtues” were ascribed. Regular fresh-air exercise was mandated, and in December 1777 the Admiralty invested £98 to build a covered walkway at Forton to allow the captives to exercise even in inclement weather. Staff regularly fumigated the prisons with charcoal and sulfur; when infections were diagnosed, clothing and bedding was burned and contagious prisoners were quarantined. During a smallpox outbreak at Forton, the surgeon inoculated those who wished to undergo the procedure. Comparatively low death rates confirm that Americans in English prisons were being held under much better conditions than their counterparts in America. At the Mill, 52 of 1,101 Americans are reported to have died from 1777 to 1782. From June 1777 to November 1782, 69 deaths are recorded to have occurred among the roughly 1,200 American prisoners at Forton. At less than 5 percent and less than 6 percent, respectively, these mortality rates were less than one-tenth of those that likely occurred on New York prison ships.³⁶

Prison discipline was often capricious. The Admiralty’s instructions did not permit guards to beat prisoners, but captives could end up in solitary confinement for serious offenses such as disobeying orders or attempting to escape. Yet others suffered the same fate for merely selling their clothes, complaining about bad meat, burning a candle after curfew, or not answering to their names. Captives thrown into the “Black Hole” for up to forty days had to survive alone, on the bare ground, on half rations. So harsh was this punishment that a private British lawyer warned the keeper at Forton in December 1777 that he would have him indicted for murder if any prisoner were to die in the confining hold. The Admiralty recommended that coroners’ inquests be conducted as demanded by the attorney—even though there was no precedent for this with regard to wartime prisoners—in order to prevent the expense of possible prosecutions.³⁷

There is impressionistic evidence that American prisoners of British ancestry and especially those of African heritage were singled out for physically violent treatment. African captives also seem to have been handed the hardest and sometimes lethal tasks, such as nursing smallpox patients. Discriminated against on account of their origin and supposedly fickle loyalties, and on racial grounds, respectively, both these groups of prisoners suffered disproportionately.³⁸

American captives also ran their own disciplinary regime, not least to counter British recruitment drives. In both Forton and Mill Prisons, large numbers of American captives signed an anti-defection agreement with harsh penalties: “[W]e are fully determined to stand loyal to our Congress, our country, our wives, children and friends, and never to petition to enter on board any of His Britannic Majesty’s ships or vessels, or into any of his services whatsoever.” Fellow captives harassed, threatened, and physically abused those among them who toyed with the idea, which, along with patriotic fervor—or perhaps an appreciation of the very tough conditions on the king’s ships—meant few opted to enlist. Allegations of physical force or whippings to make captives sign up, as the U.S. commissioners in Paris alleged in a letter to Prime Minister North in December 1777, have not been verified. In 1780, however, Americans claimed more credibly that the British used psychological harassment to encourage recruitment. American prisoners at Forton informed Benjamin Franklin that their captors had the bodies of dead fellow captives carried through the prison en route to the burial grounds: “[T]heir Corpse is brought through the Midst of us sometimes nine or ten of a day quite Contrary to all Humanity.”³⁹

We rightly think of captivity as an experience of violence and suffering. But during the Revolutionary War, one could also find evidence of compassion in the captors’ broader society. Civilian Britons had been sensitized to the plight of rebel prisoners early on when writers like Miserecors and Humanitas reminded them of the Black Hole of Calcutta. By 1777, North’s Act served as a further rallying point for British humanitarians and those critical of the war. In addition to violence by law, the sight or reports of suffering American captives on English soil moved sympathetic Britons to send them donations. Others put money in the charity boxes that prisoners had constructed and left at the prison gates. The newspapers printed thank-you notes from prisoners who promised to inform their fellow Americans that there were “gentlemen in England whose breasts are open to the feelings of humanity.”⁴⁰

By late 1777, news of the severe punishments meted out to recaptured escapees, and the arrogant response of British officials to American pleas for improved conditions, helped prompt more systematic relief efforts. An “Englishman” writing in the Public Advertiser pointed out that the magnanimous treatment of British prisoners in America, in the face of “the wanton Cruelty which has marked the Progress of our Arms,” demanded a reciprocal “Display of that Humanity which has ever distinguished the British Empire.” Prominent City of London merchants led a fund-raising drive, to which opposition MPs and peers—including the Earl of Shelburne, later the home secretary who would negotiate the exchange of prisoners at the end of the war—were early and substantial contributors. Humanitarianism could make good politics: by donating to enemy soldiers, the government’s critics highlighted the calamities of an unnatural civil war. But the subscription attracted donors from a wide social spectrum. A “Mr. Robert Goodwin, out of gratitude for the very generous and kind manner in which he was treated when a prisoner among the Americans,” donated £50. More humble individuals contributed what they could: “A laboring Man, said his Name was Lawson desired to give his Mite to the poor Sufferers, being all he could spare”: five shillings. The subscription raised the very sizable sum of £4,647 in the first two months. Similar if smaller subscription schemes operated in other cities. As a result, between early 1778 and mid-1779, common sailors received one shilling and two pennies per week, and officers double that.⁴¹

One other source of hope for American captives held on England’s southern coast came in the person of the diplomat negotiating the Franco-American alliance, Benjamin Franklin. As one of three American commissioners in Paris, Franklin involved himself heavily in the welfare of American prisoners. Without orders or congressional permission, Franklin committed substantial time, energy, and private money, not to mention scarce embassy funds, to tend to the prisoners’ needs.⁴²

From late 1777 onward, Franklin helped organize a humanitarian relief program for Americans at Mill and Forton Prisons. On the one hand, his response was deeply pragmatic: to reduce desertion rates and avoid jeopardizing naval recruitment in America, the United States needed to assure seamen they would receive minimal standards in captivity. On the other hand, Franklin and his main British political contact, the MP and war critic David Hartley, a fellow scientist, agreed that prisoner relief could be a step towards Anglo-American reconciliation: “Some considerable Act of Kindness in England towards our People,” wrote Franklin, “would take off the Reproach of Inhumanity, in that Respect from the Nation,” as distinct from the British Army in America. Hartley, too, believed in “[a]cts of national kindness and generosity,” and wanted to “civilize even the laws of war where the case will admit.” Franklin immediately made £300 in public funds available for distribution. He dispatched as an American envoy John Thornton to inspect the prisons; distribute tea, tobacco, and money; and make arrangements for supplementary food rations. By the spring of 1778, local priests helped allocate weekly cash allowances among American prisoners.⁴³

Franklin never achieved his primary objective, which was to orchestrate a general exchange of American for British prisoners. After protracted negotiations, and only after the Franco-American alliance of 1778 made detention facilities available in France for captured British prisoners, a total of perhaps some three hundred American prisoners were exchanged. When a general prisoner exchange scheme collapsed in the spring of 1780, Franklin shifted his efforts towards helping American captives escape. A network of local sympathizers and American expatriates in Portsmouth, Plymouth, and London assisted fugitives with immediate needs, including shelter, clothing, and money. They then facilitated transport to the Continent, where Franklin set up a network of agents in French and Dutch ports.⁴⁴

Most captives at one time or another probably considered escaping. “Mining for elopement,” some dug tunnels under the fences and perimeter walls. Others climbed the pickets, scaled the walls, or broke out of a privy. By pretending they were grievously ill, some men had themselves transferred from Forton Prison to a lower-security hospital nearby and then tried their luck there. Officers with access to money bribed the guards (the going tariff appeared to be half a guinea); others masqueraded as clerics or even as British officers. None of the recorded escape attempts involved physical violence by prisoners, which probably reflects a risk-benefit calculus: prisoners were guarded by armed sentries, and violent breakouts would likely result in more severe treatment of recaptured escapees and those they left behind. The majority of escapees appear to have been recaptured, and recapture carried serious risk: from forty days’ confinement on half rations in the black hole to being placed at the bottom of the exchange list. Still, a number of captives tried their luck repeatedly; one man was recaptured fifteen times after absconding from Forton. Those escapees who made it to the coast signed on with British merchantmen, privateers, or warships. Others crossed the Channel as paying or clandestine passengers, or stole vessels, often to join American privateers in France.⁴⁵

Just after Christmas 1778, Charles Herbert escaped from the Mill as part of a mass breakout. Herbert himself was recaptured the next day, and over the following week 87 of the 109 escapees were returned to the prison. But 11 men managed to make their way to a port in Devon, where they joined the armed lugger Dolphin. When they were far enough out in the Atlantic, the escapees took over the Dolphin by force, making the officers evacuate the ship and row themselves to a nearby English vessel, and set course for Martinique. In an ironic twist that points to the identity muddle created by the civil war in the British Empire, the escaped Americans were arrested by the French authorities upon arrival: they had mistaken them for Englishmen. Herbert was eventually exchanged alongside ninety-six other captives in February 1779. Shipped initially to France, he reentered the service of the United States; by August 1780, Herbert was back in his native Newburyport. Herbert and his fellow captives had moved exclusively within the Atlantic—the U.S., Canada, Britain, the West Indies. But other rebel prisoners were by then already experiencing the truly global scale of Britain’s empire at war.⁴⁶

Beyond

A few years after the war, Americans would read about the trials of a young sailor whose capture in 1777 sent him halfway around the world. John Blatchford, aged fourteen, and described as being of medium height, with broad shoulders, dark eyes, and curly black hair, had joined the U.S. frigate Hancock as a cabin boy. His ship was captured after just six weeks by HMS Rainbow. From the time he was taken to a makeshift detention facility in Halifax to his eventual return home six years later, Blatchford’s story was one of repeated escape and recapture as he crisscrossed the world’s oceans from Nova Scotia to Antigua to Nova Scotia to England, and on to Saint Helena, Batavia, Sumatra, then to Brazil and back to Saint Helena, on to England again, and via Antigua to New York, before returning once more to Europe and, finally, home to Massachusetts. When he was first taken to England, Blatchford escaped imprisonment under North’s Act on account of his youth and was sent back to North America to await a prisoner exchange. By mistake, however, he was instead put on a ship bound for the East Indies.

From early on in the war, American officials alleged that the British government was plotting to send American captives via Gibraltar to stations in British India. And indeed there appears to have been a plan to offset the East India Company’s recruitment problems in the wake of the British Army’s mobilization for war in America. Dispatches from London to various East India Company stations called for a dozen ships to take on up to a hundred captives each at Gibraltar. The scheme—another instance of captives deployed as servile labor, like German prisoners in North America—seems to have been scrapped for practical reasons; it remains unclear precisely how many captives were sent to India. What we do know is that the conditions that would have awaited them there were often dire.⁴⁷

In summer 1780, John Blatchford arrived alongside some eighty other American rebel captives on Sumatra. Most of the prisoners were now drafted into the East India Company army for a term of five years. For many of them, this amounted to a death sentence, given the disease-ridden climate. But Blatchford and a few others proved (deliberately) rebellious and were transferred to a pepper plantation, where their servile labor in the fields benefited the Company. As other Americans were dying from the heat and inadequate food, Blatchford attempted to escape, but his plan was foiled, resulting in eight hundred debilitating lashes for the teenager (and in the execution of his older collaborator). In a second escape bid, Blatchford braved hazardous conditions to trek several hundred miles across the island. While his companion on that journey died, Blatchford somehow made it back via Batavia, Brazil, Saint Helena (where he served in the British garrison), and Antigua, then on to a French vessel bound for the United States, when he was again captured by the British, this time to be imprisoned on the Jersey in New York. After just one week, though, he was transferred as a French sailor to be exchanged in France. He subsequently traveled from the French port of Saint-Malo to Lorient, and, finally, via Lisbon, made his way home to Massachusetts.

In his quest for survival, Blatchford had sailed and worked in various capacities under six flags—American, British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French—a global odyssey that he may well have embellished in the telling after the war. What he did not fail to foreground, alongside the colorful details about his repeated injuries and close encounters with tigers, was the “most barbarous treatment” he had received by the British. The preface to the 1865 edition of the narrative still offered it “as a record of malignant spite and savage brutality on the part of the British” while reassuring the readers of its veracity not least by pointing out the author’s scars as “proof.” As Blatchford’s captors had removed him so far beyond the sphere of the knowable, his tall tale would have rung plausible enough for Americans who were hard to surprise about the lengths to which Britain would go in punishing rebels.⁴⁸

Perhaps the most astonishing and serious allegation Americans leveled at the British was that they transported American captives to slavery in Africa. While the full details may be impossible to establish, the evidence suggests that the charges were grounded in a degree of truth. In 1777, the American commissioners in Paris repeatedly accused Britain of sending “American Prisoners of War to Africa…remote from all Probability of Exchange, and where they can scarce hope ever to hear from their Families, even if the Unwholesomeness of the Climate does not put a speedy End to their Lives.” It was an approach to “treating Captives that you can justify by no Precedent or Custom, except that of the black Savages of Guinea.” Indeed, as they put it in one letter to the British prime minister that was excerpted in the London press: “Numbers are now groaning in bondage in Africa…to which they were compelled by menaces of an immediate ignominious death; as contrary to every rule of war among civilized nations, as to every dictate of humanity.” By 1778, the commissioners had received “authentic Information, that numbers of such Prisoners, some of them Fathers of Families in America, having been sent to Africa, are now in the Fort of Senegal, condemned, in that unwholesome Climate, to the hardest labour, and most inhuman Treatment.” Unless the men were returned and exchanged, “retaliation will be the inevitable consequence in Europe as well as in America.”⁴⁹

Then, in May 1779, the American mariner John Paul Jones alerted Benjamin Franklin in Paris about sixteen Americans who had petitioned to serve under him. They had been made prisoners by the British at Quebec in January 1777, Jones reported, and were now among the prisoners the French had taken when they seized the British garrison at Senegal in January 1779; the terms of surrender apparently obligated them to repatriate all prisoners to England. The petitioners, signing as “your Well Wis[h]ers,” stated that “some” had been captured at Quebec, and “there is 2 or 3 Seamen With us and the rest is Willing to Due the Best they Can.” By the time Franklin intervened on behalf of the petitioners, he characterized them as having “been sent as slaves to Africa.”⁵⁰

Enslavement in the literal sense seems unlikely here, but it is conceivable that the sixteen men captured by the French at the British garrison at Senegal and wishing to serve under Jones were indeed American prisoners who had ended up performing coerced labor at the fort. The British had been trying to expand their Crown colony in Senegambia since the mid-eighteenth century, but their attempts had been frustrated by deadly diseases that were said to have killed at least one of every two men sent there between 1755 and 1776. To stem the drain, in 1769 George III had directed that British “[c]onvicts should be pardoned upon Condition of serving in Africa.” This was part of a broader trend to commute sentences in exchange for service in the most deadly imperial outposts, from the Caribbean to the East Indies. One British deserter during the American Revolutionary War received a gallows pardon and had his sentence commuted to life service in Senegal. These were postings, then, writes the historian Emma Christopher, that were “used as a threat to scare the disobedient, recalcitrant or unruly soldier, and the sentence no criminal wanted to serve.”⁵¹

If American prisoners were indeed sent to serve alongside the lowest of British felons and deserters in one of the least hospitable places in the Empire—and Jones’s report suggests that this was not simply a propaganda ploy on Franklin’s part—then, once again, Britain appeared to have deviated from the most basic codes of civilized war. Assuming that some of those sixteen men had been transported from Quebec to Senegal, and perhaps others from different places in North America, they could have been the surviving portion of a larger initial contingent of coerced laborers. The fact that no one would have known for certain where the men had been sent—cut off from their loved ones, from correspondence, and from any possibility of exchange—meant that, from the perspective of their commanders and comrades, their families and friends, they had disappeared into a black hole. And who was to say how many more Americans had been taken to Senegal, or to destinations equally dangerous and deadly, without anyone ever hearing from them again?

By 1780, Britain was no longer just shipping rebel captives to far-flung imperial outposts: the American Revolutionary War had become a truly global conflict fought on multiple continents and oceans. This was due to the dramatic geopolitical shift signaled by the alliance that the United States had concluded with France in 1778, and the subsequent entries of France, Spain, and the United Provinces (the Netherlands) in the war. But the implications of the Franco-American alliance went beyond altered geostrategic circumstances. When the new American republic tied itself to Britain’s traditional archenemy, it changed the tectonics of Anglo-American politics and the dynamics of war. In ways perhaps unexpected by its diplomatic architects, the alliance with France set the stage for the further escalation of violence in America.

Louis Denis, Carte du theatre de la guerre presente en Amerique (Paris, 1779). Credit 37