Chapter Six

1. The Jan. 1777 acrostic, spelling “Washington,” is quoted in Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 362. Although defeated early modern armies regularly lost an estimated 20 percent of their strength as prisoners (compared to 30 percent killed), the role of prisoners in early modern warfare remains under-researched. Peter H. Wilson, “Prisoners in Early Modern European Warfare,” in Prisoners in War, ed. Sibylle Scheipers (New York, 2010); Daniel Hohrath, “ ‘In Cartellen wird der Werth eines Gefangenen bestimmt.’ Kriegs­gefangen­schaft als Teil der Kriegspraxis des Ancien Régime,” in In der Hand des Feindes: Krieg­sgefang­enschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Rüdiger Overmans (Cologne, 1999); Barbara Donagan, “Prisoners in the English Civil War,” History Today 41:3 (1991): 31. Assessing the treatment of American captives is complicated by the lack of specific comparisons with other populations such as soldiers or captors. In certain cases it is possible to compare private notes with published versions of prisoners’ testimony. The very repetitiveness of specific claims across a wide range of sources lends them a degree of plausibility. That does not mean that prisoners necessarily offered the correct explanations for the horrific conditions they suffered, or fully understood their captors’ motivations. But as with narratives of raped women and mangled soldiers, the stories that prisoners and observers told about captivity mattered.

2. The best brief discussion of the contradictory reports on the Jumonville incident and perhaps the most plausible reading is Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000), 50–65.

3. Longmore, Invention of George Washington, 19, refers to the revival of the charges. On the “policy of humanity,” see Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 375–9. On Washington’s high standards for prisoner treatment, see ibid., 276; see also Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 15, 22–3. “sacred Cause”: GW to Gage, Aug. 19, 1775. For appeals to the codes of war, see also GW to WH, Jan. 13, 1777; WL to Benjamin Lincoln, Dec. 24, 1781, PWL, iv: 354–5. For the Lancaster county committee using similar language, see Ken Miller, Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence (Ithaca, NY, 2014), 73. For an early congressional recommendation of “Humane kind Treatment” of naval prisoners, see Marine Committee to commander of sloop Providence, Aug. 6, 1776, DLAR 295/1/31.

4. For the history of the law concerning prisoners of war since antiquity, see Overmans, ed., In der Hand des Feindes; Robert F. Grady, The Evolution of Ethical and Legal Concern for the Prisoner of War (Washington, D.C., 1971); Daniel Krebs, A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution (Norman, OK), 80–91.

5. Unlike in other conflicts in this era, the British, at least at the beginning, and the Americans from early 1778 onward, appear to have been expected to feed the captives they held in return for monetary compensation, whether prompt or deferred. Until early 1778, British agents indirectly supplied captives in American hands with food. The system eventually ceased to work, and their American captors provisioned Anglo-German prisoners directly for the remainder of the war, as they had been doing with respect to the Convention Army. Major General William Heath to GW, Oct. 25, 1777; WH to GW, Feb. 21, 1778.

6. Erica Charters, “The Administration of War and French Prisoners of War in Britain, 1756–1763,” in Civilians and War in Europe, ed. Charters, Rosenhaft, and Smith, 91; Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy, 91; Betsy Knight, “Prisoner Exchange and Parole in the American Revolution,” WMQ 48:2 (1991); JCC, ix: 1036–7, 1069; J. J. Boudinot, ed., The Life, Public Services, Addresses, and Letters of Elias Boudinot (Boston, 1896), i: 76; LDC, ix: 243–9; HL to GW, Mar. 15, 1778; AH to George Clinton, Mar. 12, 1778, PAH, i: 439–42; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 79, 153–4. It will be evident throughout this chapter and the next that I have relied much on Burrows, the most thoroughly researched and balanced treatment of American prisoners in the war to date.

7. Mackenzie: Allen French, ed., Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, giving a daily narrative of his military service as an officer of the regiment of Royal Welch fusiliers during the years 1775–1781 in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York (Cambridge, MA, 1930), i: 39, 111, entries for Sept. 5 and Nov. 17, 1776; see also De Lancey, ed., History of New York, ii: 27. It was only in March 1782, with the war effectively over, and four months before George III officially recognized America’s independence, that Parliament classified captured Americans as prisoners of war and underwrote general cartels. Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 213–14; GG to WH, Feb. 1, 1776, Am. Arch., 4th ser., IV: 902–3. 22 Geo. 3, c. 10 (Mar. 25, 1782). Some Americans who had been captured at Quebec and transported to England were indeed imprisoned as traitors at Pendennis Castle, Falmouth. Hard-liners in the British cabinet, above all Germain and Sandwich, were keen to see them executed, but in the end they were not put on trial, one suspects because of fear of reprisals against British prisoners and, perhaps, the potential of domestic repercussions. Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 212; John Chester Miller, Triumph of Freedom, 1775–1783 (Westport, CT, 1979), 166, n. 3; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 40.

8. GW to Gage, Aug. 11, 1775.

9. Gage to GW, Aug. 13, 1775.

10. GW to Gage, Aug. 19, 1775. Troy Bickham, “Sympathizing with Sedition? George Washington, the British Press, and British Attitudes during the American War of Independence,” WMQ 59:1 (2002).

11. WH to GW, July 16, 1776; Memorandum of interview with Lieutenant Colonel James Paterson, July 20, 1776; WH to GW, Aug. 19, 1776, at https://memory.loc.gov/​cgi-bin/​ampage?collId=mgw4&fileName=gwpage037.db&recNum=1026; GW to WH, Sept. 23, 1776; GW to WH, Nov. 9, 1776; WH to GW, Nov. 11, 1776. “render the situation”: GW to WH, Nov. 28, 1777, in Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Report on American Manuscripts in the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London, 1904–9), i: 137. See also GW, Orders to Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb, Jan. 8, 1777.

12. “Half he sent”: Freeman’s Journal, Jan. 19, 1777. Cf. Connecticut Journal, Jan. 30, 1777. A version of this was published in London Evening Post, Apr. 10, 1777. General Israel Putnam saw emaciated captives released from New York that same spring: “once lads of spirit,” they had “become babes and skilletons.” Putnam to Godfrey Marlbon, June 24, 1777, DLAR 444/72445. See also Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 200. “cool reflection”: “Miserecors,” Connecticut Journal, Jan. 30, 1777; see also Connecticut Gazette, Feb. 28, 1777; Boston Gazette, Mar. 17, 1777; New Hampshire Gazette, Mar. 22, 1777; Freeman’s Journal, Mar. 22, 1777. David John Mays, ed., The Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 1734–1803 (Charlottesville, VA, 1967), i: 249.

13. Kemble et al., Kemble Papers, i: 100; Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners during the American Revolution (Athens, OH, 1976), 16; Connecticut Journal, Jan. 30, 1777; John Adlum Papers, Memoirs, ii: 86, WLCL; W. H. W. Sabine, ed., The New-York Diary of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch of the 17th (Connecticut) Regiment from August 22, 1776 to December 15, 1777 (New York, 1954), 63.

14. “the prisoners”: Bruce E. Burgoyne, trans., Eighteenth-Century America: A Hessian Report on the People, the Land, the War as Noted in the Diary of Chaplain Philipp Waldeck, 1776–1780 (Bowie, MD, 1995), 23–4, entry for Nov. 16, 1776. Inge Auerbach, “Die hessischen Soldaten und ihr Bild von Amerika, 1776–1783,” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 35 (1985): 145; Atwood, Hessians, 158; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 6–7.

15. Young: Am. Arch., 4th ser., III: 1234. A Hessian soldier captured at Trenton made a similar comparison with animal feeding time. Lt. Wiederhold, Tagebuch eines Kurhessischen Officiers, 1776–80 [d. 1803], entry for Dec. 28, 1776, Bancroft 41, Hessian 12, NYPL.

16. Bowman, Captive Americans, 8. The Connecticut soldier is quoted from RWPA: W8256 (widow’s pension application) in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 46. John Adlum Papers, Memoirs, ii: 90–91, WLCL. See also Ten Officers to “Gentlemen,” Aug. 1, 1776, Boudinot Papers, LOC.

17. Abraham Leggett, The Narrative of Abraham Leggett (New York, 1971), the quotations at 20. Deposition of George Ballerman, Boston, Dec. 19, 1780, NARA M246/53/66/145–7.

18. Ebenezer Fletcher, A narrative of the captivity and sufferings of Mr. Ebenezer Fletcher (Amherst, MA, 1798), 6. “all moderate Men”: quoted in Ranlet, New York Loyalists, 91, from Carleton to GG, Aug. 10, 1776, CO42/35/122–3, PAC. For examples of good treatment, see Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 202; Colonel Josiah Parker to David Jameson, Nov. 19, 1781, quoted in Philip Ranlet, “The British, Their Virginian Prisoners, and Prison Ships of the American Revolution,” American Neptune 60:3 (200): 261; Carleton to WH, Aug. 8, 1776, Add MS 21599.

19. For this and the next paragraph, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 19, and Appendix A for the calorific calculations; 24 for Catlin; see also 58. Sabine, ed., New-York Diary, 61; John Adlum Papers, Memoirs, ii: 91–2, WLCL; William R. Lindsey, “Treatment of American Prisoners of War during the Revolution,” Emporia State Research Studies 22:1 (1973): 11; Alexander Coffin, The destructive operation of foul air, tainted provisions, bad water, and personal filthiness, upon human constitutions; exemplified in the unparallelled Cruelty of the British to the American captives at New-York during the Revolutionary War, on Board their Prison and Hospital Ships (New York, 1865), 120.

20. Leggett, Narrative, 20–21; Bowman, Captive Americans, 19; Lindsey, “Treatment,” 11.

21. “overrun with lice”: Capt. Edward Boylston, whom Loyalists had delivered from his New Jersey house to a New York sugarhouse, quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 57. “upon the excrements”: Coffin, Destructive operation, 120. For a doctor’s statement regarding his limited access to prisoners, see McHenry to GW, June 21, 1777; Bernhard Christian Steiner, The Life and Correspondence of James McHenry, Secretary at War under Washington and Adams (Cleveland, 1907), 14. For medical care, see also Bowman, Captive Americans, 21. Hospitals: Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 22–9. “would not go”: quoted in Henry R. Stiles, ed., Letters from the prisons and prison-ships of the revolution (New York, 1865), 26.

22. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 18–21. The treatment of American prisoners elsewhere was fairly similar to conditions in New York. For Philadelphia, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 118–21; Lewis, ed., Mammoth Book, 11; Joseph Lloyd’s deposition, Nov. 16, 1777, BHQP 748; John W. Jackson, With the British Army in Philadelphia, 1777–1778 (San Rafael, CA, 1979), 117–24; Ezekiel Williams, Letters and Documents of Ezekiel Williams of Wethersfield, Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1976), 33–4; Frazer, General Persifor Frazer, 239–43; New-York Gazette, Jan. 24, 1780; Connecticut Gazette, June 30, 1780; Norwich Packet, July 6, 1780.

23. “a little Damaged”: Leggett, Narrative, 21. Fell: Henry Onderdonk, Revolutionary incidents of Suffolk and Kings Counties: with an account of the Battle of Long Island and the British prisons and prison-ships at New York (New York, 1849), 219–27.

24. “he never forgot”: John Pintard quoted in Ranlet, New York Loyalists, 109. See also deposition by John Barrett, NARA M246/53/66/159–62.

25. Ellis Franklin, History of Northampton County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1877), 240. The quotations in Pennsylvania Evening Post, May 3, 1777.

26. Affidavits and documents relating to the burial, in the northerly part of Trinity Church yard (New York, 1855); Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 96–8; Ranlet, New York Loyalists, 109; Jeremiah B. Fells Diary, MssCol 906, NYPL.

27. Sherburne is quoted in Robert H. Patton, Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution (New York, 2008), 241. For the various rumors, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 74–5; Ranlet, “The British, Their Virginian Prisoners,” 258–60; Danske Dandridge, American Prisoners of the Revolution (Baltimore, MD, 1967), 189–90; Robert C. Bray and Paul E. Bushnell, eds., Diary of a Common Soldier in the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (DeKalb, IL, 1978), 26. For germ warfare allegations around smallpox, see Fenn, Pox Americana, 88–95, with the quotation from GW at 90. For rumors and history writing, see Jean-Noël Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990); Anjan Ghosh, “Role of Rumour in History Writing,” History Compass 6:5 (2008); Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, 1966), 6; Hans-Joachim Neubauer, The Rumour: A Cultural History, trans. Christian Braun (London, 1999).

28. “all Crouded”: Connecticut captives on the Whitby to Gov. Trumbull, quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 56. “Indians, Mullattoes”: Pennsylvania Gazette, Apr. 29, 1777; Connecticut Gazette, May 30, 1777. Barrett: Deposition of Lt. John Barrett, Aug. 4, 1777, NDAR, ix: 705–6, and NARA M246/53/66/159–62. For the Philadelphia allegations, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 119.

29. “was never”: Journals of the American Congress (Washington, D.C., 1823), ii: 98. “a poor Woman”: Boudinot to GW, Mar. 2, 1778. “the commonest”: quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 59. Bowman, Captive Americans, 46–7; Connecticut Gazette, May 30, 1777. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Father Knickerbocker Rebels: New York City during the Revolution (New York, 1969), 170.

30. For the rules of and disputes over parole, see Clancy, “Rules of Land Warfare,” 310–14. For officers paroled in Manhattan and Long Island, see Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 77–85. Leggett, Narrative.

31. “in the Lap”: American prisoners to HC, Nov. 30, 1777, Clinton Papers, 27/44. “Was sorry”: Elias Boudinot, quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 124.

32. On paroled officers in New York City, see Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, ch. 3. Fitch: Sabine, ed., New-York Diary, 64, 75 (quotation), 180. On the diary’s credibility, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 267 n. 12. Allen: Charles A. Jellison, Ethan Allen: Frontier Rebel (Syracuse, NY, 1969), 171–2, quoted in Lindsey, “Treatment,” 21–2.

33. “Twenty”: Am. Arch., 5th ser., III: 1429–30, letter by released prisoner, quoted in Lindsey, “Treatment,” 10–11. “I have seen”: quoted in Dandridge, American Prisoners, 61. See also Thacher, Military Journal, 75–6. “thrown into wagons”: quoted in Lindsey, “Treatment,” 10. See also Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 231. “Expos’d to”: Fitch, unpublished “Narrative,” quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 58; George Taylor, Martyrs to the revolution in the British prison-ships in the Wallabout Bay (New York, 1855), 30–31. Live burial: Hulton, Letters, 86.

34. In prison narratives, the Loyalists were usually characterized as the most villainous, followed by the British (and Scots especially), then the Hessians. Albert G. Greene, Recollections of the Jersey Prison-Ship; taken and prepared for publication from the original manuscript of the late Captain Thomas Dring (Providence, RI, 1829), 67, 98, 104. Dring recorded his recollections just before his death, in seventy-nine closely written pages. They were edited for publication in 1829 by Albert G. Greene, whose version keeps Dring’s narrative, attitudes, and sentiments intact, while rearranging a repetitive manuscript. For the publication history, see David Swain, ed., Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey in 1782. Thomas Dring, A Revolutionary War-Era Manuscript (Yardley, PA, 2010), xvi–xvii. Allen in Dandridge, American Prisoners, 60; Lt. Robert Troup in Onderdonk, Revolutionary Incidents, 211. For the Washington-Howe exchange, see GW to WH, Apr. 9, 1777; WH to GW, Apr. 21, 1777. For a detailed refutation of Howe’s claims, see also James McHenry to GW, June 21, 1777. The quotations from Washington in GW to WH, June 10, 1777.

35. Formal responsibility for prisoner administration was shared by General Washington as commander in chief, the Congress, the Board of War and Ordnance, and individual states. Congress periodically allocated funds for the supply and relief of prisoners and sent foodstuffs and clothing. Virginia and Maryland sent food, tobacco, clothing, bedding, and medicine to their citizen-soldiers held in New York and Charleston: JPC, ii: 41–12; Pennsylvania Council of Safety to GW, Jan. 15, 1777; NDAR, vii: 997, 1003; GW to J. Trumbull Sr., Mar. 31, 1778. Address from Council to [?British commander], Mar. 4, 1783, Misc. Collections, Box 7, Maryland, NYPL. “unnecessarily rigorous” and “culpably lax”: Richard Peters to Elias Boudinot, Apr. 29, 1777, Boudinot Papers, LOC. “boisterous”: Boudinot to Mrs. Boudinot, July 22, 1777, in Boudinot, ed., Life, Public Services, 55. Joseph Lee Boyle, ed., “Their distress is almost intolerable”: The Elias Boudinot Letterbook, 1777–1778 (Bowie, MD, 2002), 16–19; Anna Catherine Pabst, ed., American Revolutionary War Manuscript Records: Elias Boudinot and General Haldimand Papers (Delaware, OH, 1969), 4; George Adams Boyd, Elias Boudinot, Patriot and Statesman, 1740–1821 (Princeton, 1952); Richard Peters, Secretary Board of War, to Elias Boudinot, Apr. 29, 1777, Boudinot Papers, LOC; Larry G. Bowman, “Lewis Pintard: Agent to American Prisoners, 1777–1780,” Journal of the Great Lakes History Conference 1 (1976).

36. Martha Williamson Dixon, “Divided Authority: The American Management of Prisoners in the Revolutionary War, 1775–1783” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1977), 29–30, 46–7, 91–4, 250–54, and passim; Boyd, Boudinot, 40–41; GW to Jonathan Trumbull Sr., July 2–4, 1777; GW to Major General Joseph Spencer, Sept. 2, 1777; Hugh Hastings and J. A. Holden, eds., Public Papers of George Clinton, First Governor of New York, 1777–1795, 1801–1804 (New York, 1899–1914), iv: 837, 844–5; v: 129–30, 387–8; vii: 319–20.

37. David L. Sterling, “American Prisoners of War in New York: A Report by Elias Boudinot,” WMQ 13:3 (1956) with Appendix B on clothing; Boyd, Boudinot.

38. Draft report Boudinot to GW, Mar. 2, 1778. The allegation of killing by jail key in Boudinot to [?], Apr. 20, 1778, in PMHB 43 (1919), 285. For Boudinot’s February 1778 visit to New York, see also Helen Jordan, “Colonel Elias Boudinot in New York City, February, 1778,” PMHB 24:4 (1900); Sterling, “American Prisoners of War,” 380–81. See also Boudinot to GW, Mar. 2, 1778; Loring to WH, Feb. 7, 1778, BHQP 930; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 122–3; Boyle, ed., Distress, 111. In July 1779, a prisoner at the Provost described his “Confinement, as Close as Locks, Barrs and Boalts can make it”; his wife ought not to visit as that would expose her to “Contimptable Insults.” Daniel Hendrickson to Mrs. Hendrickson, July 21, 1779, NYHS.

39. Boudinot’s undated estimate of expenditures in the papers of the Continental Congress, most likely collated in spring 1778, cited £22,583 spent by Pintard for provisions for New York prisoners. See also Jordan, “Colonel Elias Boudinot”; Sterling, “American Prisoners of War,” 385. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 130–32, with the quotation “worrying myself” at 130; Dixon, “Divided Authority,” 100. Boudinot was succeeded by the Pennsylvania physician and former prisoner John Beattie, who also sent flour, beef, pork, firewood, and clothing and was in turn succeeded in 1780 by Abraham Skinner.

40. Even less is known about the British and German prisoners of war in American hands during this conflict than about American prisoners. We do not have the total numbers of British soldiers and sailors taken captive, let alone of those who escaped, enlisted with the enemy, or died in captivity. However, a few surviving prisoner narratives and the extant official papers afford us glimpses of what being a prisoner of Revolutionary America entailed. For British captives, see Colley, Captives, 210–24. Partial exceptions are studies of the Convention Army, for which see n. 46 below. Knight, “Prisoner Exchange,” is a rare comparative approach. Hessian prisoners have recently been served better by a thorough study by Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy; see also Miller, Dangerous Guests. “for we wish”: War Office to Thomas Bradford, Nov. 13, 1779, Bradford Papers, Box 11/75, HSP; see ibid., Box 10/9.

41. See, e.g., Prisoners of War at Carlisle, Aug. 1, 1776, Boudinot Papers, LOC. See also Helga Doblin and Mary C. Lynn, eds., An Eyewitness Account of American Revolution and New England Life: The Journal of J.F. Wasmus, German Company Surgeon, 1776–1783 (New York, 1990), 72; Philip Schuyler to Committee of Kingston, Apr. 5, 1776, Philip Schuyler Papers, Box 18, NYPL; John Smythe to Congress, Feb. 22, 1776, Boudinot Papers, LOC; Allen Cameron to Congress, Feb. 27, 1776. See also complaints cited in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 187. GG to WH, Mar. 5, 1777, Clinton Papers 18/369. Thomas Wileman, 17th Dragoons, deposition, Feb. 18, 1778, enclosed with WH to GW, Feb. 21, 1778, BHQP 948; Gerald O. Haffner, “A British Prisoner of War in the American Revolution: The Experiences of Jacob Schieffelin from Vincennes to Williamsburg, 1779–1780,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 86:1 (Jan. 1978); Clinton Papers 14/10 and 159/30; Tagebuch des hessischen Lieutenants Piel von 1776 bis 1783, entries for Dec. 26, Jan. 9, 1777, Bancroft 40, Hessian 4, NYPL. Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy, 78. Lt. Wiederhold, Tagebuch eines Kurhessischen Officiers, 1776–80 [d. 1803], entry for Dec. 28, 1776, Bancroft 41, Hessian 12, NYPL.

42. WH to GW, Jan. 19, 1778, CO5/95/145–6. From 1779 onward, as the Congress and the states were increasingly less well resourced to meet the demands of growing prisoner populations, British and German captives suffered from more serious shortages of provisions and clothing; several detention sites lacked adequate accommodation; after Yorktown, insufficient state capacity to meet the demands of thousands of prisoners scattered in towns in five states worsened the situation. Dixon, “Divided Authority,” 52–3, 60–61, 182–3, 187.

43. Congress rubber-stamped the prisoner-labor practice retrospectively in May 1776. The best study so far is in Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy; see also Ray Waldron Pettengill, Letters from America, 1776–1779; Being Letters of Brunswick, Hessian, and Waldeck Officers with the British Armies during the Revolution (Port Washington, NY, 1964), 132–5; Thomas Bradford Papers, Box 21, p. 92; Box 22, vol. 2, p. 114; Box 23, vol. 3, p. 21, HSP. For Lancaster as a central detention site, see Miller, Dangerous Guests, with further details on prisoner-laborers at 113–16 and on Frederick at 153.

44. See Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy, 149–58, for an apparently exceptional case of abuse at 158. In addition to German captives, some British prisoners of war were also employed as laborers, e.g., in Virginia, Connecticut, and New Jersey, although they were considered a greater flight risk. See George G. Lewis and John Mewha, History of Prisoner of War Utilization by the United States Army, 1776–1945 (Washington, D.C., 1955), 15.

45. O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 111–14, 148–58; Mackesy, War for America, 113–18, 130–44; Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (New York, 1997); Gerald Saxon Brown, The American Secretary: The Colonial Policy of Lord George Germain, 1775–1778 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1963), 81–137; Conway, Short History, 84–6.

46. My discussion of the Convention Army draws on Richard Sampson, Escape in America: The British Convention Prisoners, 1777–1783 (Chippenham, 1995); George W. Knepper, “The Convention Army, 1777–1783” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1954); Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy, ch. 9.

47. Winthrop is quoted in Sampson, Escape in America, 55. Towns along the marching route provisioned the Convention Army as it passed through, expecting to be compensated later by the British: Brigadier General John Glover to GW, May 15, 1778.

48. Heerwagen: Manfred von Gall, ed., Hanauer Journale und Briefe aus dem Amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg, 1776–1783 (Hanau, 2005), 95, 111. The suspension rested on weak legal grounds, such as that descriptive lists of men and some colors had not been surrendered at Saratoga as promised; surrendered muskets had allegedly been damaged. New Jersey Gazette, Feb. 25, 1778.

49. “one night”: J. A. Houlding and G. Kenneth Yates, “Corporal Fox’s Memoir of Service, 1766–1783: Quebec, Saratoga, and the Convention Army,” JSAHR 68:275 (1990): 163. “so secreted”: William Phillips to Horatio Gates, Cambridge, Dec. 12, 1778, Clinton Papers 48/12.

50. Houlding and Yates, “Corporal Fox’s Memoir,” 163–4; William M. Dabney, ed., After Saratoga: The Story of the Convention Army (Albuquerque, NM, 1955), 56–8; Anburey, Travels, ii: 315–20, 438–9, 453. Max von Eelking, trans., Memoirs, Letters and Journals of Major General Riedesel during His Residence in America (New York, 1969), i: 282; ii: 31–2; Kranish, Flight from Monticello, 109–12; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 159; Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 28.

51. On the march to Virginia, some 300 British and 280 German prisoners, and from the Charlottesville camp in 1779 an additional 222 plus 86, disappeared. Houlding and Yates, “Corporal Fox’s Memoir,” 164; Frey, British Soldier, 72; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 159.

52. For the “want of space, as our territories were very contracted,” as a limitation on British treatment of American prisoners, see Richard Fitzpatrick to brother, Mar. 3, 1777, Richard Fitzpatrick Papers, LOC. Cf. Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 22.

53. Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York, 2005), 10–12, 68–9, 111, and passim. For the diplomatic history of the Franco-American alliance, see Jonathan R. Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (New Haven, CT, 1985), 75–103; Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1778 (Charlottesville, VA, 1981). For the general context, see also Middlekauff, Glorious Cause, ch. 17.

54. JCC, xii, 1080–82, Congressional Manifesto (Oct. 30, 1778).

Chapter Seven

1. “Miserecors”: first published in Connecticut Journal, Jan. 30, 1777.

2. “Humanitas”: London Gazette, Aug. 6, 1776. Throughout the war, in public and in private, Americans evoked imagery of prisoners being smothered and suffocated in stifling, hot, putrid air, especially on prison ships anchored offshore, to paint the inhumanity of their imperial captors. See, e.g., HL to John Burnet, Jul. 24, 1778, PHL, xiv: 65–7; J. Bartlett Reminiscences, MS S–27b, MHS.

3. “others grew mad”: John Cooke, who believed Siraj did not intend a “massacre,” in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 1715–1801, vol. 3, First report from the committee appointed to enquire into the nature, state, and condition of the East India Company (London, 1772), 144.

4. Recent historians have pointed out that the event only became part of the founding myth of British India in Victorian times. For the layered meanings of the Black Hole, see Kate Teltscher, “ ‘The Fearful Name of the Black Hole’: Fashioning an Imperial Myth,” in Writing India, 1757–1990, ed. Bart Moore-Gilbert (Manchester, 1996); Colley, Captives, 255–6. Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton, 2012), argues that the focus of the early published narratives was not so much on Indian cruelty as on the European captives’ disconcerting “descent…into mindless disorder” (21). For the American Revolutionary period, a search on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online shows dozens of references in a wide range of genres. Exemplary of very numerous references in newspapers and magazines: Freeman’s Magazine (1774), 113; London Review of English and Foreign Literature, Dec. 1778, 369; Weekly Miscellany, Nov. 16, 1778, 154–6; General Evening Post, Dec. 3–5, 1771; Public Advertiser, Apr. 26, 1773, May 6, 1774, May 18, 1776; London Evening Post, Apr. 5–8, 1777, Sept. 10–12, 1778; Morning Post, Oct. 1, 1777; Morning Chronicle, June 5, 1781; Morning Herald, Apr. 4, 1785; cf. Pennsylvania Magazine, Oct. 1775, 476–8.

5. “shifting ‘black holes’ ”: Pennsylvania Journal, Jan. 18, 1783. “very idea”: Ebenezer Fox, The Adventures of Ebenezer Fox (Boston, 1847), 94.

6. “a strong current,” “dismal sounds,” “continual noises,” and “being passed”: Greene, Recollections, 12, 14, 42, 63. Van Dyke is quoted in Dandridge, American Prisoners, 201. Perry: Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 55–6. Cf. Lt. Jonathan Gillet(t), quoted ibid., 59: “Their natures are brook and gone,” some virtually losing their voices or hearing, it becoming “shocking to human nature to behold them.” Thomas Andros, The old Jersey captive: or, A narrative of the captivity of Thomas Andros…on board the old Jersey prison ship at New York, 1781 (Boston, 1833), 13.

7. Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain’s Convicts after the American Revolution (New York, 2011), 31, 33, 66.

8. For this paragraph, see Swain, ed., Recollections, 28; Greene, Recollections, 23–4, 27, 29–35 (“Among the”: 30); Clive L. Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, 1756–1816: Hulk, Depot, and Parole (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2007), 127. Coffin, Destructive operation, 120, referred to “walking skeletons.” Fox is quoted in Dandridge, American Prisoners, 234. Cf. Karen Zeinert, ed., The Memoirs of Andrew Sherburne: Patriot and Privateer of the American Revolution (Hamden, CT, 1993), 85.

9. Lindsey, “Treatment,” 17; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 163–4. In August 1781, the Boston Gazette printed portions of a letter from an anonymous prisoner on the Jersey, who outlined death or enlistment as the only choices; daily there were 6 to 11 corpses and 200 men falling sick with “yellow fever, small pox.” Philip Freneau, The British Prison-Ship: A Poem in Four Cantos (Philadelphia, 1781), 8, 9, 12; Greene, Recollections, 6. Swain, ed., Recollections, 109 with note 71, dates the period of Dring’s confinement to c. May 19 to c. July 20, 1782. Dring later recounted his horrors to have lasted five months.

10. Freneau, British Prison-Ship, 13. For the ship’s anatomy, see Swain, ed., Recollections, 8–15, 27–8, 44–5; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 164; Lloyd, History, 124–7; Coffin, Destructive operation, 124. For the disputed subject matter of the image in this section, see http://www.library.fordham.edu/​trumbull/​trumbulldetail.asp?imageID=29.

11. Greene, Recollections, 9–10; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 148–52; AO12/42/345–54; James Lenox Banks, David Sproat and Naval Prisoners in the War of the Revolution (New York, 1909); Lloyd, History, 130; Andros, Old Jersey Captive.

12. WO1/12/537. For the links between overcrowding and epidemic disease in eighteenth-century medical theory, see Friedrich Prinzing and Harald Westergaard, Epidemics Resulting from Wars (London, 1916), chs. 4–5.

13. For this and the following paragraphs, see Erica Charters, Disease, War, and the Imperial State: The Welfare of the British Armed Forces during the Seven Years’ War (Chicago, 2014), 42–51 (quotations 43); Fenn, Pox Americana, 28, 31–2, and passim; Peter Razzell, The Conquest of Smallpox: The Impact of Inoculation on Smallpox Mortality in Eighteenth Century Britain (Firle, Sussex, 1977).

14. Fenn, Pox Americana, 32 (quotation), and 33–5 for Adams’s experience. Swain, ed., Recollections, 25–6; Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 228.

15. Greene, Recollections, 47–8, 50–56; Lloyd, History, 134–5; Bowman, Captive Americans, 44–5, 48–9; Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 227–30. Charleston: Peter Fayssoux to David Ramsay, Mar. 26, 1785, in Robert W. Gibbes, ed., Documentary History of the American Revolution (New York, 1853–7), ii: 119; Charles I. Bushnell, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Levi Hanford (New York, 1863), 13–15. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 56. For Ballerman, see NARA M246/53/66/145–7, deposition, Boston, Dec. 19, 1780. Zeinert, ed., Memoirs of Andrew Sherburne, 86, references lifelong health issues.

16. “the prisoners”: Greene, Recollections, 67. Slade: quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 56–7. Much less well-known and researched than the Jersey and her sister ships, Americans also held British captives on their own prison ships. Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts operated prison ships for reasons of security and cost, but also to retaliate for the appalling treatment of American captives on British prison ships. Conditions on American vessels appear mostly not to have been quite as bad as on British ones, although there is evidence here, too, of overcrowding, poor provisions, illness, and corrupt guards. See Dixon, “Divided Authority,” 152–7; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 189–90; JCC, xiv: 837; Thomas Hughes, A Journal by Thos. Hughes, for His Amusement (Port Washington, NY, 1970), 22–3.

17. GW to WH, Jan. 13, 1777; Congress, Dec. 19, 1777. Deposition of George Ballerman, Boston, Dec. 19, 1780, in NARA M246/53/66/145–7. On forced enlistment through starvation, see Connecticut Journal, Jan. 30, 1777.

18. For reports of successful escapes from prison ships, see Fox, Adventures, 147; Andros, Old Jersey Captive, 14. For Hawkins and Forten, see Emmy E. Werner, In Pursuit of Liberty: Coming of Age in the American Revolution (Westport, CT, 2006), 100–103.

19. J. Bartlett Reminiscences, MS S–27b, MHS.

20. Swain, ed., Recollections, 106 n. 68; Lindsey, “Treatment,” 13. For the devastating impact of such mortality rates on local communities, and for examples of local memory and family legend, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 64–5. For comparative statistics, see http://www1.va.gov/​vetdata/​docs/​specialreports/​powcy054-12-06jsmwrfinal2.doc.

21. Newspaper reports in 1782 estimated that between 4,000 and 8,000 captives had died on the New York prison hulks. However, in one of the most widely circulated news items of the war, on Apr. 17, 1783, the Continental Journal put the number of deaths on the “filthy and malignant” Jersey at 11,644. The number, which tallied with references to a register David Sproat had allegedly kept, presumably referred to the total number of dead in Wallabout Bay. At seven to eight deaths per day over just under four years, this would be within the range of contemporary reports of daily deaths. We do not know the total number of prisoners on the ships. Assuming a mortality rate of 50 percent, there would have had to be 22,000 captives in total, which seems too high in light of the anecdotal evidence available; the mortality rate may therefore well have been substantially higher than 50 percent. Assuming a similar mortality rate among the 9,000 to 10,000 prisoners in the city prisons, an additional 4,500 to 7,000 captives died there, and perhaps another 1,000 men in the makeshift prisons and on prison hulks in the Southern colonies and elsewhere. For these estimates, and the underlying sources and methods, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 197–201, 57, 278 n. 25, and passim. For the most skeptical review of Burrows’s calculations, see John Fabian Witt, “Ye Olde Gitmo: When Americans Were Unlawful Combatants,” Slate (Dec. 9, 2008).

22. “The atmosphere”: quoted in Lloyd, History, 140.

23. A British doctor at the site was concerned with prisoners’ health, the spread of infectious diseases on prison ships, and the risk to the British troops guarding the prisoners: WO11/659–61; 12/533, 537–48. Charles Herbert, A relic of the Revolution: containing a full and particular account of the sufferings and privations of all the American prisoners (Boston, 1847), with the quotation (“almost suffocated”) at 18; Francis D. Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War: The Captivity of William Russell (Annapolis, MD, 2001), 39, with reference to Pennsylvania Gazette, July 2, 1777, and Viscount Barrington to GG, Nov. 5, 1778 (“Herrings”). For other early captivity experiences on cable tiers and in holds, sometimes in chains, see ibid., 35–6. Other transitional holding areas included Quebec, Newfoundland, Rhode Island, Jamaica, and Gibraltar, as well as ports in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. In addition to Cogliano’s work, the key literature on American prisoners in Britain includes Sheldon S. Cohen, Yankee Sailors in British Gaols: Prisoners of War at Forton and Mill, 1777–1783 (Newark, DE, 1995), and a series of older articles: Olive Anderson, “The Treatment of Prisoners of War in Britain during the American War of Independence,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 28: 77 (1955); John K. Alexander, “Forton Prison during the American Revolution: A Case Study of British Prisoner of War Policy and the American Prisoner Response to that Policy,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 103:4 (1967); Lindsey, “Treatment”; Catherine M. Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin and the American Prisoners of War in England during the American Revolution,” WMQ 32:2 (1975); Jesse Lemisch, “Listening to the Inarticulate: William Widger’s Dream and the Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons,” Journal of Social History 3:1 (1969), and, as an important corrective, Paul A. Gilje, “Loyalty and Liberty: The Ambiguous Patriotism of Jack Tar in the American Revolution,” Pennsylvania History 67:2 (2000).

24. The quotation from Lt. Joshua Barney, about his passage from New York to Plymouth, in Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 41. Cf. Alexander, “Forton Prison,” 367–8.

25. For this and the following paragraph, see Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 17–26, 31–43; John Blatchford, The narrative of John Blatchford, detailing his sufferings in the revolutionary war, while a prisoner with the British (New York, 1865), 22; Colley, Captives, 217–18; Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy, 121–7; Forton Prison Journal of Thomas McKinney, Gov. Trumbull Papers, LOC. Compare Israel Potter’s experience on arriving as a captive in England: Israel Potter, Life and remarkable adventures of Israel R. Potter (Providence, RI, 1824), 19–20, and locals’ responses to Americans they had understood to be “of much less refinement than the ancient Britains, and possessing little more humanity than the Buccaniers” (22).

26. “an independent State”: GW to CC, May 11, 1776, Am. Arch., 4th ser., vi: 423–5.

27. The outstanding, revisionist treatment of habeas corpus is Paul D. Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2010); see esp. 251–3. See also Paul D. Halliday and G. Edward White, “The Suspension Clause: English Text, Imperial Contexts, and American Implications,” Virginia Law Review 94:3 (2008): 644–51. The law, 17 Geo III, c. 9, was renewed each year to Jan. 1, 1783.

28. “shocking”: Lord Abingdon quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 80. For the debate, see Parl. Hist., xix: 4–53; Dunning: col. 7; Fox: col. 11.

29. Edmund Burke, A Letter from Edmund Burke (London, 1777), 4, 8, 15. For American press, see, e.g., New-England Chronicle, Oct. 2, 1777; Pennsylvania Packet, Dec. 3, 1777; New Jersey Gazette, Jan. 21, 1778.

30. “spirit of the Nation”: Duncan Drummond to HC, Feb. 15, 1777, Clinton Papers 20/30. “arbitrary imprisonment”: Gentleman’s Magazine 47 (1778): 457. “execrable act”: Archibald Cary for the Virginia General Assembly to HL, Jan. 12, 1778, The correspondence, journals, committee reports, and records of the Continental Congress (1774–1789), 78, NARA M247. See also Virginia Gazette, Nov. 27, 1778. Badge of honor: Halliday and White, “Suspension Clause,” 253.

31. Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 28, 31–44, quotations 28, 43. Cf. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015), ch. 2.

32. The Sick and Hurt Board had been responsible for some 20,000 enemy prisoners stationed throughout the British Isles at the height of the Seven Years’ War. Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin,” 264; Anderson, “Treatment of Prisoners,” 63–7. For prisoners of war in the Seven Years’ War, see Charters, “The Administration of War.” For total numbers at Forton and Mill, see John Howard, The state of the prisons in England and Wales, with preliminary observations and an account of some foreign prisons and hospitals (London, 1792), 185, 187. The Pennsylvania Evening Post reported as early as July 12, 1777, on the choice of Forton and Mill under North’s Act.

33. At these smaller sites and at temporary prisons, captives in need of medical attention had to make do with the services of a local apothecary. Sheldon S. Cohen, British Supporters of the American Revolution, 1775–1783: The Role of the ‘Middling-Level’ Activists (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004), 59, 111; Lloyd, History, 232. ADM3/82/1; ADM98/11/96, 140; Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 88. Maritime prisoners were split between those who were sent to Britain and those kept on prison ships in America, Quebec, Halifax, St. John’s, and Jamaica, or under forced labor in coal pits in Cape Breton.

34. “shocking place” and “coming out of hell”: quoted in Cohen, Yankee Sailors, 55. It was only in spring 1782 that the bread ration for American prisoners was adjusted. ADM/M/405, June 23, 1781, Apr. 23, 1782.

35. Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 57–61; ADM97/127/1. Corrupt guards: Eunice H. Turner, “American Prisoners of War in Great Britain, 1777–83,” Mariner’s Mirror 45:3 (1959), 201; ADM/M/404, Mar. 13 and Apr. 19–26, 1777, NMM. William Hammond Bowden, ed., “Diary of William Widger of Marblehead, kept at Mill Prison, England, 1781,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 73 (1937): 335; George Thompson, “Diary of George Thompson of Newburyport, kept at Forton Prison, England, 1777–1781,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 76 (1940): 227; William Richard Cutter, “A Yankee Privateersman in Prison in England, 1777–1779,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register 32 (1878): 165. Cohen, British Supporters, 31; Cohen, Yankee Sailors, 65–7, with the quotation from Cutler at 66. The outcome of an investigation into Cowdry’s alleged abuses is not known: ADM/M/404, Aug. 29, Sept. 3, 1777, NMM. Food: Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 59–60, 75, 97, 83, 85, 140–41, 143, 165, 210, 212; Bowden, ed.,“Diary of William Widger,” 73:316, 320; Rev. Samuel Cutler, ed., “Prison Ships, and the ‘Old Mill Prison,’ Plymouth, England, 1777: Journal,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register 32 (1878): 396; “Humanitas” to Admiralty, Aug. 29, 1777, enclosed in ADM to CSHS, Sept. 3, 1777, ADM/M/404, NMM; William Richard Cutter, “A Yankee Privateersman in Prison in England, 1777–1779,” New-England Historical and Genealogical Register 30 (1876): 352; Zeinert, ed., Memoirs of Andrew Sherburne, 73. During the latter half of the war, there were apparently no acute food shortages, at least not for those who could afford to buy supplementary provisions at the gates.

36. “In general”: Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 93; see also 103. “powerful antispectic”: ADM97/127/1. William Hammond Bowden, ed., “Diary of William Widger of Marblehead, kept at Mill Prison, England, 1781,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 74 (1938): 143. ADM/M/404, July 12, Dec. 6, 1777, NMM; ADM98/11/118, NMM; Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 65–9. When Andrew Sherburne was ill at the Mill in 1781, a physician attended him: Zeinert, ed., Memoirs of Andrew Sherburne, 77. For a failed inoculation attempt, see Bowden, ed., “Diary of William Widger,” 73:315. For death rates at Mill and Forton, see Howard, State of the prisons, 22–3, 101–2. One American is known to have been killed by a guard, and that was apparently as a result of a personal altercation with a militia corporal. Anderson, “Treatment of Prisoners,” 73, 75, 83; Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 81, 90–92, 149–50; Lloyd, History, 232–3; CSHS to Admiralty, July 23, 1779, Feb. 11, 1783, ADM98/12/106–7, 14/301; General Advertiser, Apr. 2, 1779.

37. Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 50, 106, 125; Bowden, ed., “Diary of William Widger,” 73:319, 345. Lawyer: ADM98/11/150–51, Dec. 30, 1777, Jan. 2, 1778. Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 53, refers to a “small chamber under the prison building.”

38. Francis D. Cogliano, “ ‘We All Hoisted the American Flag’: National Identity among American Prisoners in Britain during the American Revolution,” Journal of American Studies 32:1 (1998): 25; Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 119; Jonathan Haskins and Marion S. Coan, “A Revolutionary Prison Diary: The Journal of Dr. Jonathan Haskins,” NEQ 17:2 (1944): 297, 299–300, 307; Cutter, “A Yankee Privateersman,” (1878): 165.

39. See Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 202, for the Mill pledge by over a hundred prisoners as cited; for a similar pledge at Forton, see Thompson, “Diary of George Thompson,” 225. For the ambiguity of motives to enlist or not, see Gilje, “Loyalty and Liberty.” American Commissioners to Lord North, Dec. 12, 1777, PBF, xxv: 275; also printed in London Evening Post, Jan. 24–27, 1778. Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin,” 275, 281; “their Corpse”: Prisoners at Forton to BF, Feb. 7, 1780, Franklin Papers, HSP, accessed Mar. 1, 2014, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Franklin/​01-31-02-0313. For enlistment statistics, see Cohen, British Supporters, 69; Howard Applegate, “American Privateersmen in the Mill Prison during 1777–82,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 97 (1961): 319; Anderson, “Treatment of Prisoners,” 72. See ADM/M/404–5, NMM, for data on some 325 American recruits from Forton and Mill for 1778 to 1782, with a low in 1779 (32) and a high in 1781 (156). Cogliano, “We All Hoisted the American Flag,” 33. See ADM/M/405, Feb. 21, 1781, NMM, for permission to Capt. Shaw, Royal American Regiment, to recruit Americans at the prison sites, but not French or Spanish subjects. Ibid., Jan. 29, 1782, for permission to release Forton prisoners in return for service in the East India Company.

40. For this section, see “Humanitas” to Lord Mayor of London, Aug. 5, 1776, NDAR, vi: 529; Anderson, “Treatment of Prisoners”; Alexander, “Forton Prison,” 368–9; Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 85–9. Petition of two hundred prisoners to the House of Lords, June 1781, ADM/M/405; ADM/M/404, Admiralty to CSHS, Dec. 11, 1777; Cutler, ed., “Prison Ships,” 187; Annual Register for 1778 (London, 1779): 78–9; Cohen, British Supporters, xi, 22–49 for Hodgson, 51–82 for Wren, and 115 for Heath; Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 62–3 [donations]; William Gordon, The history of the rise, progress, and establishment of the independence of the United States of America (London, 1788), ii: 99. For the subscription, see ADM99/49, Jan. 12, Apr. 3 and 8, 1777; Parl. Hist. xxii: 615; “Journal of Samuel Curwen,” Feb. 20, 1777, NDAR, viii: 599. “gentlemen in England”: General Advertiser, Jan. 26, 1778; also Morning Chronicle, Jan. 26, 1778. For local and other charitable initiatives, see also ADM/M/404, Dec. 11, 1777, NMM; ADM 98/11/146, NMM; Thompson, “Diary of George Thompson,” 234.

41. Arrogance: SP78/302, Stormont reporting to Lord Weymouth, Apr. 3, 1777. Public Advertiser, Dec. 26, 1777. Cohen, Yankee Sailors, 84; John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769–1782 (Kingston, Canada, 1987), 142. American Patriot press acknowledging British charity: Boston Gazette, May 28, 1781; Norwich Packet, May 31, 1781; Pennsylvania Packet, June 23, 1781; Boston Evening Post, Dec. 21, 1782. Sample donors: Gazetteer and New Daily Advertizer, Jan. 12, 1778. London Courant, Nov. 24, 1780. For the precedent of British charity for French prisoners of war during the Seven Years’ War, see Charters, “Administration of War.” From summer 1779 until 1781 or 1782, a less-well-endowed fund yielded decreasing sums, as the prospect of exchange grew and enthusiasm for the cause waned. For the self-help aspect of the prison economy at English sites, whereby prisoners such as Charles Herbert made and sold charity boxes, ladles, chairs, and miniature ship models to pay for a modicum of extra food, clothing, and small luxuries, see Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 29, 45, 47, 112.

42. This section mostly after the well-documented Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin.” For exchanges, see also Commissioners to the American Prisoners in Great Britain, Sept. 19, 1778, PJA vii: 54–5. See also Richard B. Morris, ed., John Jay: The Winning of the Peace, Unpublished Papers, 1780–84 (New York, 1980), 82–4; John Porter to BF, June 6, 1777, NDAR, ix: 381; Commissioners: Wickes and Samuel Nicholson to American Commissioners, Sept. 6, 1777, PBF, lx: 26.

43. Hartley: BF to Hartley, Oct. 14, 1777, with PS of Dec. 11, 1777 (1st quotation), and Hartley to BF, Dec. 25, 1777 (2nd quotation), PBF, xxv: 64–8 (quotation 66–7), 349–52 (quotations 350). American commissioners to Major John Thornton, [Dec. 11, 1777], in Albert Henry Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1905–7), vii: 75; BF to Sir Grey Cooper, Dec. 11, 1777; G. H. Guttridge, David Hartley, M.P., An Advocate of Conciliation, 1774–1783 (Berkeley, CA, 1926). Thornton: Thornton Memorandum, to American Commissioners, Jan. 5–7, 1778, Arthur Lee Papers, iv: 11, Harvard University Library. General Advertiser, June 10, 1778. On clothing as an intermittently serious issue, see also Alexander, “Forton Prison,” 377. On Rev. Thomas Wren and other priests, see Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin,” 270, 288–9. In the summer of 1781, prisoners reported having their back allowances distributed among them; for the winter of 1781–82, Franklin sent Hodgson another £400.

44. Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 122–7; Lloyd, History, 230–31; Cohen, British Supporters, 73–5; Francis Abell, Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815; A Record of Their Lives, Their Romance and Their Sufferings (London, 1914), 224; Prelinger, “Benjamin Franklin,” 282–5. Moses Young’s Account of Himself, Osborn c625, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

45. British records suggest that between June 1777 and April 1, 1782, 536 men ran away from Forton, and from June 1777 to March 1779, 102 escaped from the much-higher-security Mill prison. Security concerns and escapes loom large in official records throughout ADM/M/404–6, NMM. See, e.g., ADM/M/404, June 25, July 10, 1777; Feb. 26, Aug. 1, Sept. 11, 29, 30, Nov. 3, 1778; Jan. 5, 12, 22, 28, Feb. 1, 10, 1779. ADM/M/405, Feb. 16, 1782. For the inegalitarian nature of escape, see Gilje, “Loyalty and Liberty,” 177–8. For this paragraph, see also ADM/M/404, NMM; ADM1/5117/11; ADM98/11–14; Bowden, ed., “Diary of William Widger,” 73:338, 343; Caleb Foot, “Reminiscences of the Revolution: Prison Letters and Sea Journal of Caleb Foot,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 26 (1889): 11 (entry for Aug. 21, 1780); Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 103. Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 128, 215–16; the quotation at 136. London Evening Post, Aug. 9–12, 1777; London Evening Post, Dec. 11, 1777, July 25, 1778; General Evening Post, Jan. 1–3, 1778; St James’s Chronicle, Aug. 1, Sept. 8, 1778; General Advertiser, Dec. 22, 1778; Morning Post, Nov. 12, 1779. Massachussetts Spy, Jan. 7, 1779; Morning Herald, July 2, 1781; Boston Evening Post, Nov. 3, 1781, Apr. 13, 1782; Pennsylvania Packet, Nov. 24, 1778, Nov. 8, 1781; Providence Gazette, Apr. 18, 1778.

46. Herbert, Relic of the Revolution, 203–10, 227–42. Dolphin episode: Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners, 105–6 with n. 53.

47. American commissioners to Lord North, Dec. 12, 1777, in London Evening Post, Jan. 24–27, 1778; Arthur Lee to Committee of Secret Correspondence, Nantes, Feb. 14, 1777, RDC, i: 400–401; Dandridge, American Prisoners, 82–3. BL, IOR/E/4/623/148, 148; IOR/E/44/867/76–8, 349. JCC, xi: 477. Black, George III, 229, for George III’s proposal to send American prisoners to British India.

48. Blatchford, Narrative of John Blatchford, iv (“most barbarous treatment”), v (physical description and “as a record”), 46 on credibility, and passim.

49. American Commissioners to Lord Stormont, Apr. 2, 1777, TNA, SP 78/302/13. Commissioners to Lord North, Dec. 12, 1777, PBF, xxv: 275; also in London Evening Post, Jan. 24–27, 1778. Proposed letter to Lord North, June 1778, PBF, vii: 165.

50. John Paul Jones to BF, May 2, 1779, with enclosure, from “Well Wis[h]ers,” Papers of Benjamin Franklin, American Philosophical Society. (Box xiv: 79). BF to Sartine, May 8, 1779, in RDC, iii: 158. Also in May 1779, Franklin included a scene of “Americans put on board Ships in Irons to be carried to the East Indies, & Senegal, where they died with Misery & the unwholesomeness of the Climate” in a list of 26 prints for an illustrated American schoolbook detailing British atrocities: “Franklin and Lafayette’s List of Prints Illustrating British Cruelties,” PBF, xxix: 590–93. That spring, Franklin and Jones had been corresponding about America’s humanitarian obligations towards prisoners: e.g., DLAR 295/580; see ibid., 801, 836, 840, for Jones’s humanitarian concerns.

51. Christopher, Merciless Place, 89–92, quotations at 89 (George III) and 92 (“used as a threat”). For Senegambia’s role in the slave and gum trades, see Joseph E. Inikori, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and Imperialism in West Africa: Great Britain and Senegambia in the Eighteenth Century,” in Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins, ed. Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell (Durham, NC, 2011).

Chapter Eight

1. For the race of the ships, see Nathan R. Einhorn, “The Reception of the British Peace Offer of 1778,” Pennsylvania History 16:3 (1949): 192; Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris, 81–2. Morning Chronicle, Mar. 31, 1778.

2. GW to President of Congress, Apr. 18, 1778. Congressional committee reporting on Washington’s letter and the draft bill: JCC, ii: 521–4 (Apr. 22, 1778).

3. “express”: JCC, xi: 417. Congressional consideration, ratification, and address, May 2–6, 1778: ibid., 468, and at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/​18th_century/​fr1778r.asp. Valley Forge: Philip Van Cortlandt to father, May 10, 1778, Van Wyck Papers, Box 1, folder 1, NYPL.

4. Address: JCC, xi: 474–81 (quotations 476). Printed inter alia in Scots Magazine 40 (Aug. 1778): 421–4.

5. For the peace commission, see Charles R. Ritcheson, British Politics and the American Revolution (Norman, OK, 1954), 258–86; Weldon A. Brown, Empire or Independence: A Study in the Failure of Reconciliation, 1774–1783 (Port Washington, NY, 1966), 244–82; Reginald E. Rabb, “The Role of William Eden in the British Peace Commission of 1778,” Historian 20:2 (1958); Leonard J. Sadosky, “Reimagining the British Empire and America in an Age of Revolution: The Case of William Eden,” in Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, ed. Leonard J. Sadosky et al. (Charlottesville, VA, 2010); HMC, MSS of the Earl of Carlisle, 323, 377, and passim; Carl Van Doren, Secret History of the American Revolution (New York, 1941), chs. 3–4; Max M. Mintz, Gouverneur Morris and the American Revolution (Norman, OK, 1970), 104–5; Add MS 46491/1, 21–2; Bancroft 104/219–20, 105/101–3. Entries for the commissioners in the ODNB. For the commissioners’ instructions and work in America, see also Add MS 34415/199–230, 358–88, and passim; Add MS 34416/33. CO5/180–81. “the honor of”: RDC, vi: 35.

6. A draft of George III’s instructions in Add MS 34415/358–88. Leonard J. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville, VA, 2009), 109–13; Eugene Heath, ed., Adam Ferguson: Selected Philosophical Writings (Exeter, 2007), 77.

7. For Britain’s global war, see Stephen Conway, Short History; idem, The War of American Independence, 1775–1783 (London, 1995); Mackesy, War for America; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided. “Great Britain has its choice”: Lee to GW, May 6, 1778, in James Curtis Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (New York, 1911–14), i: 399.

8. Mintz, Gouverneur Morris, 110. “a deep sense”: Colonel Stuart to Lord Bute, Sept. 16, 1778, in Stuart-Wortley, Prime Minister and His Son, 130–33 (quotation 132). See also Carlisle to Eden, Sept. 9, [1778], Add MS 34416/33–4; Carlisle, Eden, and HC to GG, Sept. 21, 1778, DAR, xv: 204. Manifesto and Proclamation, Oct. 3, 1778: Yasuo Amoh, D. Lingley, and H. Aoki, eds., Proceedings of the British Commissioners at Philadelphia, 1778–1779, Partly in Ferguson’s Hand (Kyoto, 2007). Manifesto also printed in Scots Magazine 40 (Nov. 1778): 607–10. Distribution to each colony: Bancroft 105/145–91. Only after they had published the manifesto did Clinton and his co-authors justify their actions in a letter to the British government. For the broader strategic debate among British officers, see Conway, “To Subdue America.”

9. I have chosen to employ a detailed narrative to evoke the events as they transpired from the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and witnesses. The extant sources include the records of a congressional inquiry conducted in the weeks following the event; official correspondence of army officers on both sides; the private journals and correspondence of a few American and British participants; American Patriot, Loyalist, and British newspapers; and archaeological evidence brought to light in the late twentieth century. All of the material postdates the violent action, although almost all the responses I draw on were recorded within hours, days, and weeks. In considering this reconstruction, readers should bear in mind that all descriptions concerning specific actions carried out by, and specific utterances attributed to, both victims and perpetrators during the assault itself, are quoted from the victims’ depositions. To improve readability, unless otherwise noted, quotations in this section are from the congressional inquiry documented in The correspondence, journals, committee reports, and records of the Continental Congress (1774–1789), 53: “Papers and Affidavits Relating to the Plunderings, Burnings, and Ravages Committed by the British, 1775–84,” NARA M247. For Grey, see Rory T. Cornish, “Grey, Charles, first Earl Grey (1729–1807),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed., Jan. 2015, at http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/​view/​article/​11525 (accessed Aug. 21, 2016). Paul David Nelson, Sir Charles Grey, First Earl Grey: Royal Soldier, Family Patriarch (Madison, NJ, 1996). For the challenge of writing an anthropography of violence without becoming guilty of offering a pornography of violence, see E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, 1996), 4, and passim.

10. For Paoli, see Nelson, Sir Charles Grey, 43–5; Anthony Wayne et al., “The Massacre of Paoli,” PMHB 1:3 (1877): 311; Richard St. George, “The Actions at Brandywine and Paoli, Described by a British Officer,” PMHB 29:3 (1905): 368–9; Thomas J. McGuire, Battle of Paoli (Mechanicsburg, PA, 2000); Armstrong Starkey, “Paoli to Stony Point: Military Ethics and Weaponry during the American Revolution,” Journal of Military History 58:1 (1994); Donald Grey Brownlow, A Documentary History of the Paoli “Massacre” (West Chester, PA, 1952); Baurmeister, Revolution in America, 115. Casualty figures: Pennsylvania Ledger, Dec. 3, 1777; Morning Post, Dec. 29, 1777. Casualty figures are not precise, but the ratio of the numbers of killed to captured on the defeated side broadly indicates whether the normal restraints were or were not likely applied. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 182–3, collates rough figures for thirty combat incidents in 1777 in which British regulars in the Northern theater defeated or drew equal with American forces. This gives a ratio of killed to captured of 1:1.9. Removing the most extreme incidents (Paoli, Brandywine, Germantown) yields a ratio of 1:3.4. For Paoli, modern historians cite 112 to 200 killed, 40 to 100 wounded, 71 captured. Assuming either 110 to 150 or 150 to 200 killed to 71 captured, the ratio would have been between 1.5:1 and 2:1 or 2:1 and 3:1. Based on figures in Brownlow, Documentary History, 23; Hugh F. Rankin, “Anthony Wayne: Military Romanticist,” in George Washington’s Generals, ed. Billias, 266; Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 183; Peckham, Toll, 41; Paul David Nelson, Anthony Wayne, Soldier of the Early Republic (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 57; Nelson, Sir Charles Grey, 45; Tagebuch des Hauptmanns v. Dincklage beim Leibregiment, 1776–1784, Bancroft 42, Hessian 26/137. For the codes at nighttime, see Starkey, “Paoli to Stony Point,” 9; S. Paul Teamer and Franklin L. Burns, “One Hundred Sixtieth Anniversary of the Paoli Massacre Copies of Itinerary, Maps, and Address,” Tredyffrin Easttown History Society Quarterly 1:1 (1937); Glenn Tucker, Mad Anthony Wayne and the New Nation: The Story of Washington’s Front-Line General (Harrisburg, PA, 1973), ch. 7, n. 11; William Heath, Memoirs of Major General Heath: containing anecdotes, details of skirmishes, battles and other military events during the American war (Boston, 1798), 179–80. For Paoli’s terrifying effect on the Patriot militia and Continental Army, see Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., Washington: An Abridgement in One Volume by Richard Hardwell of the Seven-Volume George Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman (New York, 1992), 354; Flexner, George Washington, 229. For a mildly skeptical British voice, see Loftus Cliffe to Jack Cliffe, Oct. 24, 1777, Loftus Cliffe Papers, WLCL.

11. On bayonets, see Erik Goldstein, The Socket Bayonet in the British Army, 1687–1783 (Lincoln, RI, 2000). “in the hands”: Thomas Mante, The history of the late war in North-America (London, 1772), 215. J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army (Oxford, 1981), 261 n. 10, points out that bayonet drill was “curiously, rather neglected” until later in the century, and only first discussed in depth in Anthony Gordon, Treatise on the science of defense: For the sword, bayonet, and pike in close action (London, 1805).

12. See Conway, “ ‘The Great Mischief,’ ” for rank-and-file prejudice towards American soldiers. “respectable body”: Dr. John Berkenhout’s “Journal of an Excursion from New York to Philadelphia in the Year 1778,” Aug. 24, 1778, Germain Papers, vol. 8. But see Germain’s earlier warning to WH that “that very pusillanimity which prevents them from facing you in the open Fields, may occasionally operate like Courage itself, and instigate them to seek opportunities of attacking by Surprize.” GG to WH, Mar. 3, 1777, CO5/94, part I, fols. 105–6.

13. For contemporary comparisons between the bayonet and the tomahawk and scalping knife, see Parliamentary Register (1778), 80, 99.

14. The detail on Banta after Ward, Between the Lines, 77.

15. Royal Gazette, Oct. 3, 1778. “Then we”: New-York Gazette, Oct. 5, 1778.

16. Pension application of William Bassett, W9739 (Dec. 29, 1833).

17. “spitted”: a Hessian colonel quoted in Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 97.

18. The time of violence, explains the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, Traktat über die Gewalt, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt a.M., 1996), 37, 179, is fast, short, intense. But the time of massacre is diverse, as assailants attack, let go, recapture, even play—and then kill.

19. Pension application of William Bassett, W9739. For the theory of traumatic memories and the use of such historical evidence, see Caroline Cox, “Public Memories, Private Lives,” in Remembering the Revolution, ed. McDonnell et al., 113–14.

20. John Robert Shaw, A Narrative of the Life & Travels of John Robert Shaw (Lexington, KY, 1807), 20–21. De Lancey, ed., History of New York, i: 286. The word “massacre” has a complicated, somewhat uncertain etymology, with various derivations from post-classical Latin and Old French words for butcher, butcher’s shop, slaughterhouse, and a butcher’s implements, such as the chopping block. In early modern English, the word “massacre” referred to “the indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people,” “carnage, butchery, slaughter in numbers.” To distinguish “massacre” analytically from “atrocity,” scholars generally deem massacres to involve the killing, and often the especially cruel and wanton killing, and often the mutilation, of several or many unresisting or defenseless human beings by, typically, an overwhelming force, in an action that is specific to a particular place as well as limited in time. Mark Levene, “Introduction,” in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (New York, 1999); in the same collection, Mark Greengrass, “Hidden Transcripts: Secret Histories and Personal Testimonies of Religious Violence in the French Wars of Religion,” esp. 69; Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, eds., Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History (New York, 2012); Christine Vogel, ed., Bilder des Schreckens: Die mediale Inszenierung von Massakern seit dem 16 Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M., 2006), 7–14, esp. 10; Karl Heinz Metz, Geschichte der Gewalt: Krieg–Revolution–Terror (Darmstadt, 2010), 64–5; Humphrey, Politics of Atrocity. “massacre, n.,” OED Online, at http://www.oed.com; Möbius, “Kriegsgreuel”; idem, “ ‘Von Jast und Hitze wie vertaumelt’: Überlegungen zur Wahrnehmung von Gewalt durch preußische Soldaten im Siebenjährigen Krieg,” Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preußischen Geschichte 12 (2002).

21. Stewart to GW, Sept. 28, 1778; Williams to GW, Sept. 28, 1778; Putnam to GW, Sept. 28, 1778.

22. “horrible murders,” “give no quarter,” and “a considerable”: New-Jersey Gazette, Oct. 7, 1778; also in: Connecticut Journal, Oct. 21, 1778, under Trenton, Oct. 7; Massachusetts Spy, Oct. 22, 1778 (“By the Hartford Post”). “in the most”: Continental Journal, Oct. 8, 1778 (extract of a letter from HQ, Sept. 29, 1778). Cf. Pettit to NG, Oct. 1, 1778, PNG, ii: 531–6.

23. Baylor to GW, Oct. 19, 1778; GW to HL, Sept. 29, 1778; GW to Charles Scott, Sept. 29, 1778; GW to Horatio Gates, Sept. 30, 1778; GW to HL, Oct. 3, 1778 (read in Congress on Oct. 7, JCC, xii: 987). Connecticut Journal, Oct. 28, 1778: Extract of a letter GW to Congress, Oct. 3, 1778. Baylor declared dead: Royal Gazette, Oct. 3, 1778; New-York Gazette, Oct. 5, 1778, the same issue praising the British achievement in terms of enemy soldiers bayoneted, but also some receiving quarter.

24. Virginia Gazette, Oct. 13, 1778. “disagreeable suspense”: Mr. Pendleton, Caroline County, VA, to General Woodford, Oct. 17, 1778, quoted in C. F. William Maurer, Dragoon Diary: The History of the Third Continental Light Dragoons (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 162.

25. JCC, xii: 987. HL to WL, Oct. 6 [1778], LDC, xi: 34–5. WL to Stirling, Oct. 11, 1778. Stirling to GW, Sept. 30, 1778; WL to GW, Oct. 13, 1778; Stirling to GW, Oct. 14 and 16, 1778. Stirling to Griffith, Oct. 15, 1778, quoted in Thomas Demarest, “The Baylor Massacre—Some Assorted Notes and Information,” Bergen County History (1971): 39. For Griffiths, see also Maurer, Dragoon Diary, 143–7.

26. Maurer, Dragoon Diary, 141, 152. See Clancy, “Rules of Land Warfare,” 223–6, for Anglo-American belligerents working out how codes of war could function between them, e.g., with regard to the evacuation of noncombatants during sieges; safe conduct passes; the care of the wounded and recovery of the dead after battles; and so forth.

27. Livingston to Congress, Oct. 22, The correspondence, journals, committee reports, and records of the Continental Congress (1774–1789), 68/413, NARA M247. Stirling to HL, Oct. 21 (read in Congress on Oct. 26, JCC, xii: 1062), in PHL, xiv: 435–6; printed in extracts in, e.g., Pennsylvania Packet, Oct. 29, 1778.

28. Stirling’s report to Congress, with Griffith’s letter and the affidavits collected by him and Livingston, was published between late Oct. and mid-Dec. in, e.g., Pennsylvania Packet; Pennsylvania Evening Post; Boston Gazette; Norwich Packet; New-Hampshire Gazette; Independent Chronicle; Massachusetts Spy; South-Carolina and American General Gazette. For the Virginia Gazette, see the issue of Oct. 23, 1778. “burnt alive”: quoted in Conway, War of American Independence, 107–8. Congress also considered retaliatory action. Immediately after commissioning the inquiry from Livingston on Oct. 6, Congress voided recent agreements for prisoner exchanges with the British. See HL to John Beatty, Oct. 9, 1778, PHL, xi: 41–2.

29. “awareness”: Nelson, Sir Charles Grey, 69. Grey’s superiors: HC to GG, Oct. 8, 1778, and to Cornwallis, [Oct. 8, 1778], Clinton Papers 43/3–4. General Evening Post, Dec. 3, 1778, prints copy of Cornwallis to HC [?], Sept. 28, 1778; also in London Chronicle, Dec. 1–3, 1778; Morning Chronicle, Dec. 2, 1778.

30. London Chronicle, Nov. 26–28, 1778 (under date New York, Sept. 29); also in Daily Advertiser, Nov. 28, 1778; St James’s Chronicle, Nov. 26–28, 1778; Westminster Journal, Dec. 5, 1778.

31. Stuart to Lord Bute, Oct. 7, 1778, in Stuart-Wortley, Prime Minister and His Son, 136–7. For Kemble, see the Journal entry for Sept. 22–27, 1778. For the archaeological evidence discussed in the caption to the photograph of the skeletons, see Demarest, “Baylor Massacre,” 70–76, with further references. For the site in the twenty-first century, see http://www.co.bergen.nj.us/​Facilities/​Facility/​Details/​Baylor-Massacre-Burial-Site-6.

32. Ferguson to HC, Oct. 15, 1778: Royal Gazette, Oct. 24, 1778; Pennsylvania Packet, Nov. 5, 1778; Independent Ledger, Dec. 28, 1778; Adams Weekly Courant, Dec. 8, 1778; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Dec. 2, 1778; Public Advertiser, Dec. 2, 1778. Stedman, History, ii: 46–50. See also William S. Stryker, The Affair at Egg Harbor, New Jersey, October 15, 1778 (Trenton, NJ, 1894), 3–5, 11, 15, 23, 30–31, 34.

33. Virginia Gazette, Oct. 23, 1778.

34. JCC, x: 81–2; xi: 613–15, 621; xii: 1080–82 (Oct. 30, 1778, the text of the manifesto). For Morris, see Mintz, Gouverneur Morris, 105, 111; J. Jackson Barlow, ed., To Secure the Blessings of Liberty: Selected Writings of Gouverneur Morris (Indianapolis, 2012), 25. Gouverneur Morris, Observations on the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1779); JCC, xii: 1063, xiii: 421; Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations, 90–118.

35. Commons: Parl. Hist., xix: 1389–1401, with the quotations at 1400. Lords: Parl. Hist., xx: 1–13, with the quotation at 13.

36. Government: Parl. Hist., xx: 8–9, 15. Shelburne: Parl. Hist., xx: 30–33.

37. Parl. Hist., xix: 1397–8.

38. Parl. Hist., xx: 23.

39. Parl. Hist., xx: 43–6.

40. “Burn the sea coast”: John Adams to James Lovell, Dec. 19, 1778, PJA, vii: 290. “entirely changed”: JA’s draft of the commissioners [BF, Lee, Adams] to the Comte de Vergennes, 294–305, and actual letter as sent, Passy, ante Jan. 9, 1779, PJA, vii: 305–11 (quotations 305, 306). See also A. Lee to Schulenberg, Paris, Dec. 25, 1778, RDC, ii: 867–9. Donna T. Andrew, London Debating Societies, 1776–1799 (London, 1994), entry 248.

Chapter Nine

1. For this chapter, in addition to the journals and other documentary evidence cited in the notes, I have drawn especially on Barbara Alice Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (Lincoln, NE, 2008); Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, esp. 130–41 and ch. 8; Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, 1995); Albert Hazen Wright, The Sullivan Expedition of 1779: Contemporary Newspaper Comments and Letters (Ithaca, NY, 1943). Physical description of Sullivan: Max M. Mintz, Seeds of Empire: The American Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois (New York, 1999), 87–8. For the July 5, 1779, dinner and toasts, see Frederick Cook, ed., Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 (Auburn, NY, 1887), 39, 64, 182; Lloyd A. Brown, Howard Henry Peckham, and Hermon Dunlap Smith, eds., Revolutionary War Journals of Henry Dearborn, 1775–1783 (Freeport, NY, 1969), 159.

2. John W. Jordan, “Adam Hubley, Jr., Lt. Colo. Commandant 11th Penna. Regt. His Journal, Commencing at Wyoming, July 30th, 1779,” PMHB 33:2 (1909), 133–4.

3. Bones: Cook, ed., Journals. “[s]calped and inhumanly” and “Golgotha”: 225 (Major J. Norris). “shockingly gashed” and “that the poor creatures”: 250 (Rev. W. Rogers). “Here and there”: Nathan Davis, “History of the Expedition against the Five Nations, Commanded by General Sullivan, in 1779,” Historical Magazine 3:4 (1868): 199. All other quotations from Rogers in Cook, ed., Journals, at 251. See also Mintz, Seeds of Empire, 97–8.

4. On Wyoming, I follow Lee’s balanced appraisal in Barbarians and Brothers, 217–18. Only fairly recently have historians drawn attention to the fact that Native Americans were not just agents of terror but routinely also victims of white violence: Mann, George Washington’s War, 15–16.

5. Mann, George Washington’s War, 19–20, 56; Mintz, Seeds of Empire, 97, 102. See n. 1 for references to the dinner and toast.

6. “Most of”: Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 24. The simplified overview in this section is based on Calloway’s study of the Revolution’s impact on Indian communities, with a discussion of the complex allegiances of many Indian nations at 32–46, and the quotation “to excel them” from George R. Clark at 48; John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Cambridge, 2005), on the context of Indian, European, and American ways of war; Peter Rhoads Silver’s erudite, eloquent exploration of the pathology and rhetoric of the anti-Indian sublime in Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008); Lee’s innovative insights in the cultures of violence and restraint, especially in “Peace Chiefs and Blood Revenge,” Journal of Military History 71:3 (2007), and in Barbarians and Brothers, 119–41. See also Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York, 2007), for the American Revolution as a frontier war; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991), for a more broadly contextual history of European–Native American interactions, and accommodation in the Great Lakes region, for which see also the forum in WMQ 63:1 (2006), and Lepore, Name of War. The classic formulation of the frontier myth of regeneration through violence, and the taming of the wilderness linked with notions of American exceptionalism, is Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence; see also Tirman, Deaths of Others, 13–23.

7. Lee, “Peace Chiefs and Blood Revenge,” and Barbarians and Brothers, esp. 119–41. For “mourning war,” see Daniel Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” WMQ 40:4 (1983); Lepore, Name of War, 117. On scalping, see also Abler, “Scalping, Torture.”

8. For the Cherokee War of 1776, see Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War, 170. Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire, 218.

9. Bickham, Making Headlines, 210–18; idem, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 2005), ch. 7; Harold E. Selesky, “Colonial America,” in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, ed. Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos, and Mark R. Shulman (New Haven, CT, 1994), 80.

10. On Cherry Valley, see Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 219. DLAR 60, Draper MSS Collection, Brant MSS, 20F, contains correspondence and petitions, in English and German, mostly addressed to General Edward Hand, who would serve under Sullivan in 1779, that vividly evoke the fear in the surrounding regions in the wake of the Cherry Valley attack. GG to Haldimand, Aug. 3, 1779, Add MS 21703/177–80.

11. For the conflation of black, red, and Britain as a foreign enemy, see Parkinson, “Enemies of the People.” For Franklin and Lafayette’s print project, see Franklin and Lafayette, “List of British Cruelties, [May 1779],” LOC; PBF, xxix: 521–2, 590–93. The Revolutionaries were handed a propaganda gift when Native Americans in British pay captured, killed, and scalped Jane McCrea, a young, beautiful woman from a largely Loyalist family, who was engaged to be married to a Loyalist lieutenant. In newspaper articles, broadsides, poems, engravings, novels, and plays, the Patriots presented the incident as cold-blooded murder and incontrovertible proof of Britain’s indiscriminate savagery. See Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 245–8; Horatio Gates to Burgoyne, Sept. 2, 1777, and Burgoyne to Gates, Sept. 6, 1777, Horatio Gates Papers, DLAR 23.

12. JCC, xiii: 252.

13. For the planning of Sullivan’s campaign, see Mann, George Washington’s War, 55–67; Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse, NY, 1972), 193; Thomas S. Abler, Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the Allegheny Senecas (Syracuse, NY, 2007), 49; Glenn F. Williams, Year of the Hangman: George Washington’s Campaign against the Iroquois (Yardley, PA, 2005), chs. 10–11.

14. Orders: GW to Sullivan, May 31, 1779. For Washington’s awareness of deprivation hitting Indians, see GW to Sullivan, Aug. 1, 1779. “to extirpate”: Alexander C. Flick, ed., “New Sources on the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign in 1779,” Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association 10:4 (1929): 310. Fogg: Cook, ed., Journals, 98. See also Sullivan to Oneida, Sept. 1, Oct. 1, 1779, in Letters and Papers of Major General John Sullivan, Continental Army, ed. Otis Grant Hammond (Concord, 1939), iii: 114–5, 137. On the equation of Native Americans and wolves as species marked for extinction, see Peter Coates, “ ‘Unusually Cunning, Vicious and Treacherous’: The Extermination of the Wolf in United States History,” in The Massacre in History, ed. Levene and Roberts, 168; Mann, George Washington’s War, 48. The genocidal nature of the campaign is discussed in ibid., 52, 75, and passim. On the “feed fight,” see also Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 221–2; Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 47. One of the definitions of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) is deliberately inflicting on a (national, ethnic, racial, or religious) target group those “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The text of the 1951 CPPCG is at http://www1.umn.edu/​humanrts/​instree/​x1cppcg.htm.

15. “no light”: Charles P. Whittemore, “John Sullivan: Luckless Irishman,” in George Washington’s Generals, ed. Billias, 157. “rush on”: GW to Sullivan, May 31, 1779.

16. Diary of Barnardus Swartwout, Jr., 1777–83, entry for Aug. 26, 1779, Barnardus Swartwout Papers, NYHS; Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 209; Cook, ed., Journals, 6, 20.

17. R. W. G. Vail, ed., “Diary of Lieut. Obadiah Gore, Jr. in the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 33 (Oct. 1929): 735. For the symbolic and vengeful qualities of the destruction of things, see Zara Anishanslin, “ ‘This Is the Skin of a Whit[e] Man’: Material Memories of Violence in Sullivan’s Campaign,” unpubl. paper. Thanks to the author for sharing a copy of her suggestive paper.

18. For details of the spring campaigns, see Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 49; Mann, George Washington’s War, 27–50.

19. Capt. John Weidman, notes, entries for July 11 (quotation), Oct. 18, 1779, HSP. See also Samuel McNeil Orderly Book, entry for Aug. 27, 1779, NYHS.

20. Vail, ed., “Diary,” 732; Robert W. Venables, “ ‘Faithful Allies of the King’: The Crown’s Haudenosaunee Allies in the Revolutionary Struggle for New York,” in Other Loyalists, ed. Tiedemann, Fingerhut, and Venables, 135; Davis, “History of the Expedition,” 203. Diary of Barnardus Swartwout, Jr., 1777–83, entry for Sept. 6, 1779, Barnardus Swartwout Papers, NYHS, for an example of a detachment destroying smaller settlements.

21. For the connections between Iroquois narratives of origins, corn, and blood sacrifice, see William Engelbrecht, Iroquoia: The Development of a Native World (Syracuse, NY, 2003), 22, 37–8. For an overview and detailed examples of destruction, see Mann, George Washington’s War, 67–74, with the quotation from Hubley at 74. R. W. G. Vail, ed., “The Western Campaign of 1779: The Diary of Quartermaster Sergeant Moses Sproule of the Third New Jersey Regiment in the Sullivan Expedition of the Revolutionary War, May 17–October 17, 1779,” New-York Historical Association Quarterly 41 (1957): 63. For Brodhead’s extensive corn burning, see Wright, Sullivan Expedition, ii: 15, quoting Maryland Journal, Oct. 26, 1779. Van Campen: John N. Hubbard, Sketches of border adventures, in the life and times of Major Moses Van Campen, a surviving soldier of the revolution (Bath, NY, 1842), 177. “there was not”: quoted in Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 51.

22. Vattel, Kapossy, and Whatmore, Law of nations, book iii, ch. ix, pp. 570–71, para. 166–7. “degradation” and “Indians shall”: Gordon, History of the rise, iii: 311. See also Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 228. General William Stone (1838) is quoted in Mann, George Washington’s War, 76. Sullivan reported to Congress on the 1,500 trees in a single orchard: Wright, Sullivan Expedition, iii: 19. Joshia Bartlett to Colonel Langdon, July 17, 1778, HSP, Langdon Papers, critiques British destruction of fruit trees during the occupation of Philadelphia.

23. Beatty: Cook, ed., Journals, 30–35 (quotation 32); Hubley: ibid. 162–3. For other descriptions, see ibid., 11, 60, 99, 142, 281–2; Vail, ed., “Western Campaign,” 62; idem, ed., “Diary,” 736–7. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 225.

24. For Bucktooth, see Mintz, Seeds of Empire, 144–5. On beheading, skinning, and displaying body parts, see Lepore, Name of War, 81–2, 179–80 (quotation 180). The toast in Cook, ed., Journals, 165.

25. For earlier Pennsylvania bounties for Indian scalps, which especially endangered unsuspecting friendly Indians, see Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 100–103. See also Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 36. Skinning of legs to produce leggings: Barton in Cook, ed., Journals, 8; see also Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 213, with further details. Burning of woman and boy: ibid. 225–6. For a frequently retold story of an ancient Indian woman protected under Sullivan’s orders, and the murder of her young female companion, possibly in the context of attempted rape or rape, see Mann, George Washington’s War, 91–2.

26. The story of the Onondaga chief is referenced in Add MS 21779/109–10. Clinton is quoted in Venables, “ ‘Faithful Allies of the King,’ ” 148. For anthropological views, see Abler, “Scalping, Torture,” 13–15.

27. “found a good”: Graymont, Iroquois, 204. See also Mintz, Seeds of Empire, 106; Mann, George Washington’s War, 86–7; Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 53; Barbara Alice Mann, Native Americans, Archaeologists, & the Mounds (New York, 2003), ch. 1; Jordan, “Adam Hubley,” entry for Sept. 5, 1779. For Iroquois spirituality and grave goods, see also Engelbrecht, Iroquoia, ch. 3. For the connection between the British military and archaeology across the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century empire, see Hoock, Empires of the Imagination. For destroying things and hurting bodies as a proxy for assaulting people, see Anishanslin, “ ‘This Is the Skin of a Whit[e] Man.’ ”

28. “with considerable”: Diary of Barnardus Swartwout, Jr., 1777–83, entry for Sept. 15, 1779, Barnardus Swartwout Papers, NYHS. Mann, George Washington’s War, 107–8; Venables, “ ‘Faithful Allies of the King,’ ” 149–50. For a detailed discussion of the “politics of hunger” at Fort Niagara, see Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, ch. 5.

29. Sullivan Report to Congress, Sept. 30, 1779, published by Congress, reprinted in Wright, Sullivan Expedition, iii: 13–21; cf. Capt. John Weidman, Sept. 14, 1779, Misc. MSS, HSP. Congress and Virginia Gazette quoted in Mann, George Washington’s War, 107. Sullivan’s report and the congressional response were noted in orderly books on the campaign; see, e.g., Henry Dearborn Diary, entries for Sept. 14, 1779, Oct. 17, 1779, NYPL.

30. “His description”: quoted in Wright, Sullivan Expedition, 21. “The whole country”: e.g., in General Evening Post, Dec. 23–25. British press, on the beginnings of the campaign: Public Advertiser, Oct. 3; London Chronicle, Oct. 5; Gazetteer, Oct. 7; St James’s Chronicle, Oct. 7. Inflated casualty reports of several hundred Indians killed: General Evening Post, Oct. 16–19; London Evening Post, Nov. 20–23. Progress reports: London Evening Post, Oct. 16–19; end of campaign: General Evening Post, Nov. 27–30.

31. Smith is quoted in Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, 2005), 347. Indian raids in 1780: ibid., 348; Joseph R. Fischer, A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July–September 1779 (Columbia, SC, 1997), 193; Mann, George Washington’s War, 110; Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 329; Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 214. “The nests are”: Cook, ed., Journals, 101 (Fogg).

32. Davis, “History of the Expedition,” 203.

33. “I really feel”: quoted in Mintz, Seeds of Empire, 186. Mann, George Washington’s War, 109–10 (quotation “land-grabbing agenda” 109). Topographical and aesthetic appreciation: Samuel McNeil Orderly Book, entry for Aug. 3, 1779, NYHS. Israel Evans, A discourse, delivered at Easton, on the 17th of October, 1779, to the officers and soldiers of the Western Army (Philadelphia, 1779), 22; see also Venables, “ ‘Faithful Allies of the King,’ ” 133.

34. For GW’s 1783 tour, see Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War, 176; GW to Governor Clinton, Nov. 25, 1784, WGW xxvi: 501. Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire, 5, 17 (quotation). For an Indian perspective on early America, see Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2001). In Griffin, American Leviathan, Native Americans are at the center of the Revolutionary narrative. “Town-destroyer”: Seneca Chiefs to GW, Dec. 1, 1790.

35. P. du Simitière, American Museum (Philadelphia, 1782); Mairin Odle, “Buried in Plain Sight: Indian ‘Curiosities’ in Du Simitière’s American Museum,” PMHB 136:4 (2012); Ellen Fernandez-Sacco, “Framing ‘The Indian’: The Visual Culture of Conquest in the Museums of Pierre Eugene Du Simitière and Charles Willson Peale, 1779–96,” Social Identities 8:4 (2002); Paul Ginsburg Sifton, “Pierre Eugene du Simitière (1734–1784): Collector in Revolutionary America” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1960). See also Anishanslin, “ ‘This Is the Skin of a Whit[e] Man.’ ” For this paragraph and the caption to the illustration on this page, see also Library Company of Philadelphia, Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere: His American Museum 200 Years After (Philadelphia, 1985).

36. Quotation in William John Potts, “Du Simitière, Artist, Antiquary, and Naturalist, Projector of the First American Museum, with Some Extracts from His Note-Book,” PMHB 13:3 (1889): 366.

37. Fernandez-Sacco, “Framing ‘The Indian,’ ” 591.

38. Cf., ibid., 582.

Chapter Ten

1. For David George in this and the following paragraphs, see David George, “An Account of the Life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa; given by himself in a Conversation with Brother Rippon of London, and Brother [Samuel] Pierce of Birmingham,” in Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Expanded Edition, ed. Vincent Carretta (Lexington, KY, 2004), 333–41 (quotations 333, 336); Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 46–7; Pybus, Epic Journeys, 38–40, 210; Schama, Rough Crossings, 98–102.

2. For this and the following paragraph, see Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves & Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 246; Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 354–7; Ricardo A. Herrera, “The King’s Friends: Loyalists in British Strategy,” in Strategy in the American War of Independence: A Global Approach, ed. Donald Stoker, Kenneth J. Hagan, and Michael T. McMaster (London, 2010), 101–19; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 262–3, 271–2; McDonnell, Politics of War, 367; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 310–12; Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 329–31; Lee, “American Revolution,” 58. Philipsburg Proclamation, labeled after Clinton’s HQ at Philipsburg Manor, NY: PRO30/55/17.

3. Pybus, Epic Journeys, 37–8 (Prevost cited at 38), 209, 211–12; Gilbert, Black Patriots, 170; Piecuch, Three Peoples, 169–70. In this chapter, I focus on the civil war between white Patriots and Loyalists, and the role of blacks. See Piecuch, Three Peoples, for the interplay of white Loyalists, African-Americans, and Native Americans in the Southern war.

4. See references in n. 1 above. The pass is quoted in Pybus, Epic Journeys, 40.

5. On the global strategic contexts in this chapter, I follow Conway, Short History, ch. 3; for this and the following paragraphs, see esp. 87–101. For the Anglo-Spanish war over Central and Spanish America, see O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 178–85. In summer 1781, Germain sought to reassure Clinton in the face of changed global troop allocations: GG to HC, July 17, 1781, Shelburne Papers 68/59, WCLC.

6. Lord Germain had also ordered Clinton as early as the spring of 1778 to prioritize the naval war fought from the bases in New York and Nova Scotia. In preparation for the pivot south, British troops withdrew from Philadelphia in June 1778, with 3,000 Loyalists in tow.

7. Wayne E. Lee, “Restraint and Retaliation: The North Carolina Militias and the Backcountry War of 1780–82,” in War and Society, ed. Resch and Sargent, quotation at 171. On the South’s violent history, see Griffin, America’s Revolution, 176–7, and passim; Walter B. Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (New York, 2001), 122; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists.

8. For blacks using the war for their advantage, in both the North and the South, see Egerton, Death or Liberty, 88–9 (quotation 88).

9. For the regional and socioeconomic demographics of Loyalism, see Ward’s succinct summary in War for Independence, 36–7. Boost: Conway, Short History, 87. “bloody Rebellion” and “bound by”: Brigadier General Montfort Brown to [My Lord], Jan. 20, 1778, CO23/24/3–8 at 4.

10. Selesky, “Colonial America,” 81.

11. On Clinton’s unwillingness to wage “a full campaign of terrorism,” see John Shy, “Armed Loyalism: The Case of the Lower Hudson Valley,” in idem, People Numerous and Armed, 185–92, at 192. On the shift from a moderate to an aggressive majority, see Conway, “Subdue America.”

12. Pybus, Epic Journeys, 41; Mackesy, War for America, 252–6; Robert Middlekauf, Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader (New York, 2015), 222. “risked their”: Carl P. Borick, A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (Columbia, SC, 2003), 43.

13. Pybus, Epic Journeys, 40, 210, 217–18; Egerton, Death and Liberty, 86–7.

14. For King, see Pybus, Epic Journeys, 43, 213; Schama, Rough Crossings, 109. The quotation from “Memoirs of the Life of BOSTON KING, a Black preacher, Written by Himself, during his Residence at Kingswood-School,” in Unchained Voices, ed. Carretta, 353. For the spread of smallpox in the South in 1778–80, see Fenn, Pox Americana, 110–28.

15. On the numbers of slaves running away, see, for an overview, Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 351–2; Frey, Water, 211, for the high maximum; Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” WMQ 62:2 (2005), for the conservative figures based on a thorough examination of the extant documentary evidence. For this paragraph, see also Frey, Water, 113–16; Olwell, Masters, 248–51 (quotation 248), with reference to John Lewis Gervais to HL, Apr. 30, 1782; see 253 for army patrols suppressing slave unrest on plantations. Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 331. Slaves escaping from South Carolina in 1782: Egerton, Death or Liberty, 151. Slave trade: Piecuch, Three Peoples, 219; Frey, Water, 159.

16. Gilman, ed., Letters, quotations at 27–31, 46; see also Frey, Water, 116.

17. Ewald is quoted in Nash, “The African Americans’ Revolution,” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Gray and Kamensky, 260–61. “A stronger”: Jeffrey J. Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802,” WMQ 37:1 (1980): 88. For the inversion of racial hierarchy and the questioning of the plantation society order, see also Olwell, Masters, 258, with the quotation from Bull.

18. On the congressional proposals and state rejection: Schama, Rough Crossings, 104–6; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 82–4; Nadelhaft, Disorders, 62–3. “the Blessings”: William Whipple to Josiah Bartlett, Philadelphia, Mar. 28, 1779, DLAR 37. Patriots seizing slaves and evidence of British arming them in defense: Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 329–30; Piecuch, Three Peoples, 226; Olwell, Masters, 266–7. Black recruitment to Patriot forces: Nash, “African Americans’ Revolution,” 254–6.

19. This paragraph in part after O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 249–55 (quotation 254). For French reinforcements, and allied plans to attack New York City, see Middlekauf, Washington’s Revolution, 224–7.

20. For the domestic context, see the brief summaries in Conway, Short History, 101–2; idem, British Isles, 218–24, 233–8. American South: Ward, Between the Lines, 221, 230–34, and passim; Edgar, Partisans & Redcoats, 137.

21. For Tarleton, see Stephen Conway, “Tarleton, Sir Banastre, baronet (1754–1833),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online ed., Jan. 2012, at http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/​view/​article/26970 (accessed Aug. 21, 2016); Robert D. Bass, The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (New York, 1973), 12–17. Legion: Anthony J. Scotti, Brutal Virtue: The Myth and Reality of Banastre Tarleton (Bowie, MD, 2002), 33. “I proposed”: Tarleton to HC, July 2, 1779, quoted in Scots Magazine 41 (1779), 492.

22. “Upon the”: Banastre Tarleton, A history of the campaigns of 1780 and 1781, in the southern provinces of North America (London, 1787), 89–90. For the iconography and politics of Tarleton’s 1782 portraits, see John Bonehill, “Reynolds’ Portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton and the Fashion for War,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (2001). Cruden: Sketch by John Cruden to Lord Dunmore, Jan. 5, 1782 [endorsed in Lord Dunmore to HC, Feb. 2, 1782], Bancroft 118/49–52 (quotations 50–51); Frey, Water, 140; Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness,” 87–8. Gibson: Piecuch, Three Peoples, 225. Knight (McIntosh): National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, African American and American Indian Patriots of the Revolutionary War ([Washington, D.C.], 2001), 169–70.

23. “the blood”: Tarleton to Buford, May 29, 1780, Thomas Addis Emmet Collection, NYPL. “rage of the British”: first printed in the Patriot Alexander Garden’s Anecdotes of the American Revolution (Charleston, SC, 1828), 135–8 (quotation 138). “for fifteen minutes”: Dr. Brownfield, quoted in David K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775–1780 (Columbia, SC, 2005), 257.

24. Tarleton to Cornwallis, Aug. 5, 1780, Cornwallis Papers, PRO30/11/ 63/19–21; Tarleton, History, 100; Stedman, History, ii: 193. For detailed source criticism, see Jim Piecuch, The Blood Be Upon Your Head: Tarleton and the Myth of Buford’s Massacre (Charleston, SC, 2010), 23–40.

25. Rape at plantation: Clinton Papers 92/47; Tarleton to John Andre, [Apr. 1780], cited in Borick, Gallant Defense, 152–3; Stedman, History, ii: 183, quoted in Wilson, Southern Strategy, 248; see also 247; Lyman Copeland Draper, ed., Diary of Lieut. Anthony Allaire (New York, 1968), 12, entry for Apr. 14, 1780; p. 8, entry for Mar. 22, 1780. For other cases of rape in the South, see Simcoe, Military Journal, 212; PRO30/11/6/156–7. “the terror of”: Cornwallis to HC, Dec. 3, 1780, in Charles Ross, ed., Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis (London, 1859), i: 71. Richardson: Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 28–9; Nadelhaft, Disorders, 57; Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1775–1780 (New York, 1969), 816–17; Edgar, Partisans & Redcoats, 133–4. For Anglo-American criticism of Tarleton, see also Greene to Cornwallis, Dec. 17, 1780, PNG, vi: 591–2; Cornwallis to Rawdon, July 26, 1780, PRO30/11/78/48–9. “exercised more acts”: quoted in Scotti, Brutal Virtue, 93. For Tarleton’s reputation, see also James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1860), i: 82–5; Bass, Green Dragoon, 83; Hugh F. Rankin, “Cowpens: Prelude to Yorktown,” The North Carolina Historical Review 31:3 (1954); Calhoon, Loyalists, 491–2, 494–5; Christopher Ward, The War of the Revolution, ed. John Richard Alden (New York, 1952), ii: 701.

26. Frey, Water, 112; Cornwallis to Lieutenant Colonel Cruger, Sept. 24, 1780, PRO30/11/80/5–6; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 258; Conway, Short History, 104–5; John Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas (New York, 1997), 170, for the difficulty of estimating American losses at Camden.

27. Conway, “To Subdue America,” 405–6; Nadelhaft, Disorders, 57; Edgar, Partisans & Redcoats, 134; Conway, Short History, 104. For Wemyss advising a stricter treatment of rebels professing a newfound loyalty to the Crown, see Wemyss to Cornwallis, July 11, 1780, PRO30/11/269–70. For the counterproductive effect of such conduct, see Conway, Short History, 104.

28. After Lee, “Restraint and Retaliation,” and idem, Crowds, ch. 7.

29. On Ferguson, see Rankin, “An Officer out of his Time”; Buchanan, Road to Guilford Courthouse, 195–8; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 263. For the difficulty of assessing true loyalties, and a cautious approach to building up the militias, see PRO30/11/2/347–8 [March 1780].

30. Proclamation: Melissa Walker, The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens: The American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry (New York, 2013), 77. “pissed upon”: Hank Messick, King’s Mountain: The Epic of the Blue Ridge “Mountain Men” in the American Revolution (Boston, MA, 1976), 89. “butchering”: Piecuch, Three Peoples, 199. See also PNG, viii: 501; ix: 30; Robert M. Dunkerly, The Battle of Kings Mountain: Eyewitness Accounts (Charleston, SC, 2007), 38–40; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 264–5; John S. Pancake, This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780–1782 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1985), 117.

31. Dunkerly, Battle of Kings Mountain, 60, 83, 92–3, 126, 146; David J. Dameron, King’s Mountain: The Defeat of the Loyalists, October 7, 1780 (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 45–6 and maps at 54, 56, 62, 68. Collins’s Autobiography is quoted in Ed Southern, ed., Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas (Winston-Salem, NC, 2009), 163–4.

32. “but as”: Alexander Chesney’s Diary, quoted in Dunkerly, Battle of Kings Mountain, 132. See also Joseph Hughes’s Federal Pension Application S31764, 52–3; Leonard Hice’s Federal Pension Application, S8713, 49–50; Peter Starns’s pension application, quoted in Dunkerly, Battle of Kings Mountain, 88. “who had”: quoted in Southern, ed., Voices, 159–60; statement of Silas McBee, 64–5 (quotation 64), in Roy McBee Smith, Vardry McBee: Man of Reason in an Age of Extremes (Spartanburg, SC, 1997), 37–40. In Lee’s balanced assessment, the “need to excuse the crime says more about the underlying value system, and the demand for virtuous war, than it does about the merits of the defense.” Lee, Crowds, 186–7 (quotation 187), with nn. 48, 51. Official Patriot version without references to irregularities: Pennsylvania Evening Post, Nov. 18, 1780; Connecticut Journal, Nov. 30, 1780; Massachusetts Spy, Nov. 30, 1780. I have also consulted JCC, xviii: 1048–9; LDC, xvi: 458–9; New-Jersey Gazette, Oct. 25, 1780; Connecticut Journal, Nov. 2, 1780; Providence Gazette, Nov. 8, 1780; Pennsylvania Packet, Dec. 30, 1780.

33. Caroline Cox, “Public Memories, Private Lives,” in Remembering the Revolution, ed. McDonnell et al., 121. Bobby Gilmer Moss, Roster of the Loyalists in the Battle of Kings Mountain (Blacksburg, SC, 1998), 34. “The groans”: quoted in Dunkerly, Battle of Kings Mountain, 84. See also ibid., 132, for Alexander Chesney’s Diary. Injured Loyalist: Buchanan, Road to Guilford Courthouse, 235. See also Joseph Johnson, Traditions and Reminiscences Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South (Charleston, SC, 1851), 101–2, 583; Ward, Between the Lines, 225; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, 200–203. Collins quoted in Southern, ed., Voices, 165 (“husbands, fathers”).

34. Collins, Autobiography, quoted in Southern, ed., Voices, 164; Robert W. Blythe, Maureen A. Carroll, and Steven H. Moffson, Kings Mountain National Military Park: Historic Resource Study (Atlanta, GA, 1995), 43. Dogs and hogs: quotations from Collins in Dunkerly, Kings Mountain, 35.

35. “to restrain”: William Campbell’s General Orders, Oct. 11, 1780, quoted in Dunkerly, Battle of Kings Mountain, 28. Loyalist reporting orders: Walker, Battles of Kings Mountain, 85. Charges made against prisoners: statement of Silas McBee, 64–5, in McBee Smith, Vardry McBee, 37–40; Ensign Robert Campbell’s Account, in Dunkerly, Battle of Kings Mountain, 22; Buchanan, Road to Guilford Courthouse, 239–40. Mills’s wife: Bobby Gilmer Moss, ed., Uzal Johnson, Loyalist Surgeon: A Revolutionary War Diary (Blacksburg, SC, 2000), 77. Lee, “Restraint and Retaliation,” 169, stresses the attempt to give an “air of legality” to the proceedings by referencing North Carolina law authorizing magistrates to summon a jury; hanging “lent a judicial aspect to the killing, but also emphasized the supposed criminality of the victims.”

36. Cornwallis’s remonstrations: Cornwallis to Smallwood, Nov. 10, 1780, PRO30/11/91/9–10; cf. ibid., fols. 13–14 for Cornwallis to Major General Gates, Dec. 1, 1780 (referring to “inhumanity scarcely credible” in the treatment of captives); PRO30/11/3/261–2; PRO30/11/91/9–11, 13–14, 21–4. HC to GW, Oct. 9, 1780, PRO30/11/98/3–4; GW to HC, Oct. 16, 1780, PRO30/11/98/7–8; NG to Cornwallis, Dec. 6, 1780, PRO30/11/91/21–4.

37. O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 265; North Callahan, Royal Raiders: The Tories of the American Revolution (Indianapolis, 1963), 222. “put an end”: Klein et al., eds., Twilight of British Rule, 192; Mackesy, War for America, 345.

38. Theodore Thayer, “Nathanael Greene: Revolutionary War Strategist,” in George Washington’s Generals, ed. Billias, 109–36. “nothing but”: NG to AH, Jan. 10, 1781, PNG, vii: 88. “pursue[d] each other”: NG to President of Congress, Dec. 28, 1780, ibid., 9. “those private massacres” and “this Country”: NG to Colonel William Davies, May 23, 1781, PNG, viii: 298. “My dear”: NG to Catherine Greene, June 23, 1781, ibid., 443.

39. Ward, Between the Lines, 225; Buchanan, Road to Guilford Courthouse, 215–16 (“on a log” 215). See also, for General Henry Lee, Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 38–9; Ward, Between the Lines, 205, 225; for Levi Smith’s experiences: Piecuch, Three Peoples, 252–3. Lee, Crowds, 189, emphasizes that “Loyalists taken in arms were in danger of summary execution by shooting, but in general they were usually held for a more or less formal court-martial…superimposing appearances of legality on what were often acts of revenge.” See also idem, “Restraint and Retaliation,” 190; Ferguson to Cornwallis, Oct. 1, 1780, PRO30/11/160–61, LOC.

40. Piecuch, Three Peoples, 201; Ward, Between the Lines, 225–7; Cashin, King’s Ranger, 120. “found his”: Griffin, America’s Revolution, 176.

41. For modern assessments of Pyle’s Massacre, see George Troxler, Pyle’s Massacre: February 23, 1781 (Burlington, NC, 1973); Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 207.

42. For Hall in the previous and this paragraph, see Dann, ed., Revolution Remembered, 202–3. Cf. ibid., 185–9, and Lee, Crowds, 189, for William Gipson’s recollections of his mother’s abuse by Loyalists and his satisfaction at the later cruel treatment of those Loyalists.

43. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 375. “most cruel”: General D. Morgan to NG, Jan. 19, 1781, PNG, vii: 152–3 (quotation 153). “fear or intimidation”: Lord Rawdon to Cornwallis, Mar. 7, 1781, PRO30/11/69/7–11, at 8. War of attrition: O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 265; Thayer, “Nathanael Greene,” 134. Cowpens: Lawrence E. Babits, A Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Piecuch, Three Peoples, 240–41; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 266–7.

44. On British cause for optimism, see O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 247 (“widespread”). “more passive”: Cornwallis to HC, Apr. 18, 1781, CO5/239. “to occupy”: O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 273.

45. After Frey, Water, 150–59; Gilbert, Black Patriots, 168; Pybus, Epic Journeys, 79–80, on Furman, quoting from AO13/29/658; Sylvia R. Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution,” Journal of Southern History 49:3 (1983): 379–82.

46. Ewald is quoted in Frey, Water, 154. See Pybus, Epic Journeys, 46–9, for Washington’s and Jefferson’s defecting slaves. Savage: N. L. Savage Account Book, MssCol 3575, NYPL. See also Francis D. Cogliano, Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 2014), 15–25.

47. “I have marched”: quoted in Fenn, Pox Americana, 129.

48. Ibid., 382; Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 331 (quotation), 344. McDonnell, Politics of War, 367–477, details significant levels of disaffection in various parts of Virginia during the invasion.

49. Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 39–40, with reference to JCC, xxi: 977–8 (“to ashes” 978), 1017–18 (“immediately consigned” 1018), 1029–30. For proposals of retaliation against British cities in 1779, see LDC, xiii: 228, 236–7, 261–3; JCC, xiv: 851–3; 914–15. On retaliation, see also Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 192–3; LDC, xvii: 88, 481; Samuel Huntington to TJ, Jan. 9, 1781, DLAR 43. For Yorktown in strategic context, see O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 279–81.

50. Fenn, Pox Americana, 130–32.

51. “numbers”: quoted in Taylor, Internal Enemy, 27. Robert Donkin, Military Collections and Remarks (New York, 1777), 190; “valiant soldiers”: iii. Fenn, Pox Americana, 132 with n. 48, Leslie to Cornwallis, July 13, 1781, PRO30/11/6/280–81.

52. Fenn, Pox Americana, 132 with n. 48, Leslie to Cornwallis, July 13, 1781, PRO30/11/6/280–81.

53. See Frey, Water, 164–71, with the quotation from Tucker at 171. The estimates in Pybus, Epic Journeys, 53. Free blacks in the North: O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 277. Armistead: Nash, “African Americans’ Revolution,” 256.

54. Pybus, Epic Journeys, 41–2, 52, 55, 212–13. Brown, Moral Capital, 311.

55. Numbers: Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 352, 358; Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math.” For the mini-biographies, see Pybus, Epic Journeys, 209–18, and on George, Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 172–5, 276–82, 299–309, 349. Loyalists selling or freeing slaves: George Smith McCowen Jr., The British Occupation of Charleston, 1780–82 (Columbia, SC, 1972), 106. Sierra Leone: Pybus, Epic Journeys, chs. 9, 11; Schama, Rough Crossings; Walker, Black Loyalists; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 277, on street names.

56. O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 281, who also references congressmen demanding that Cornwallis be executed for war crimes. The quotation in Armstrong Starkey, War in the Age of Enlightenment, 1700–1789 (Westport, CT, 2003), 97.

57. Conway, Short History, 113–19; Prisoners: “Return of prisoners taken at the Surrender of York & Gloucester, 19th Oct. 1781,” Revolutionary War, Box I: British and Hessian Army, NYHS. News of Yorktown reached London in late November: Hillsborough to [Eden], Nov. 26, 1781, Add MS 34418/188. Britain’s post-Yorktown holdings and troop strength after O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 360.

58. On Admiral Sir George Rodney’s role in the American Revolutionary War, see O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, ch. 8.

59. Leslie in the South: Schama, Rough Crossings, 125; Olwell, Masters, 258–9; Gilbert, Black Patriots, 157–9; Piecuch, Three Peoples, 316–18; Walter Finney and Joseph Lee Boyle, “The Revolutionary War Diaries of Captain Walter Finney,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 98:2 (1997): 137. “abhorrence”: Lt.-Gov. Bull to GG, Mar. 25, 1782, Bancroft 118/267–79.

60. Gilbert, Black Patriots, 157; AO13/4/321, Jonathan McKinnon, deputy quartermaster general, certificate on the beheading of the slave Harry.

61. John Childs, “The Laws of War in Seventeenth-Century Europe and Their Application during the Jacobite War in Ireland, 1688–91,” in Age of Atrocity, ed. Edwards et al., 300.

62. O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 271; Frey, Water, 114.

Chapter Eleven

1. The placard is in George Washington Papers, microfilm, reel 84, n.d., LOC. For the tailor, see Skemp, William Franklin, 256–7. “mixed Company”: Independent Gazette, Apr. 20, 1782.

2. For this chapter I have drawn especially on L. Kinvin Wroth, “Vengeance: The Court-Martial of Captain Richard Lippincott, 1782,” in Sources of American Independence, ed. Peckham, vol. 2; Ward, Between the Lines, 63–8; A. S. Bolton, “Asgill, Sir Charles, second baronet (1762–1823),” rev. S. Kinross, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online ed., May 2006, at http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/​view/​article/​733 (accessed Aug. 21, 2016). See also Larry Bowman, “The Court-Martial of Captain Richard Lippincott,” New Jersey History 89:1 (1971).

3. On the lex talionis, see Lee, Crowds, ch. 7; Barbara Donagan, “Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War,” Past & Present 118 (1988).

4. Shy, People Numerous and Armed, 189. My section on armed Loyalism and the internecine war draws heavily on the amply documented Edward H. Tebbenhoff, “The Associated Loyalists: An Aspect of Militant Loyalism,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 63:2 (1979); Fowler, “ ‘Loyalty Is Now Bleeding in New Jersey’ ”; Michael S. Adelberg, “ ‘A Combination to Trample All Law Underfoot’: The Association for Retaliation and the American Revolution in Monmouth County,” New Jersey History 115:3–4 (1997). For Tye I have relied on Hodges, Slavery and Freedom, ch. 3, the quotation at 92. See also Schama, Rough Crossings, 116–17; Ward, Between the Lines, 61–4; Egerton, Death or Liberty, ch. 3.

5. The vigilante organization eventually had 463 signatories. “An eye for”: N. Scudder to HL, July 17, 1780, quoted in Fowler, “ ‘Loyalty Is Now Bleeding in New Jersey,’ ” 60. See also Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665–1865 (Madison, WI, 1997), 103–4.

6. For Franklin’s plans and negotiations with British leadership, see Skemp, William Franklin, 234–46, the character sketch at xi. For the British debate over the role of armed Loyalists, see also Shy, People Numerous and Armed, 181–92.

7. Largely after Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion, 194–5. “in no better”: CO5/175/231v. See also Clinton Papers 200/57; Bancroft 117/171–4. For Cornwallis, see O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 282.

8. For this and the next paragraph, see Deposition John North before David Forman, Apr. 15, 1782, Bancroft 119/145–7. For versions of White’s death, see Ward, Between the Lines, 65. John Covenhoven to GW, Apr. 14, 1782, PGW/EA.

9. GW to John Hanson, Apr. 20, 1782, with enclosures including affidavits and a copy of the placard. The quotations from GW to HC, Apr. 21, 1782, PGW/EA.

10. HC to GW, Apr. 25, 1782, PGW/EA.

11. Ibid.

12. Board of Inquiry to HC, Apr. 26, 1782, BHQP 4476. Larry G. Bowman, “The Court-Martial of Captain Richard Lippincott,” New Jersey History 89:1 (1971): 30, references street fights between Loyalists and British soldiers in New York City in early May. For the jurisdictional wrangles and Carleton’s review, see Wroth, “Vengeance,” 507–13, and Wiener, Civilians, 116–20. For American press, all in 1782: earliest references mid-April, e.g, Freeman’s Journal, Apr. 17, 24. Text of the placard reproduced in Freeman’s Journal, May 1; Pennsylvania Packet, May 2; Independence Gazetteer, May 4; Independent Chronicle, May 9; Norwich Packet, May 9; Salem Gazette, May 9; Boston Gazette, May 13; Connecticut Gazette, May 17; see also Gazette of Saint Jago de la Vega (Jamaica), Aug. 29, 1782. GW to HC, Apr. 21, in Pennsylvania Packet, May 4, 1782; Freeman’s Journal, May 8, 1782; Pennsylvania Journal, May 1, 1782; New Jersey Gazette, May 15, 1782. The late April exchange between GW and HC also in [George Washington,] Epistles domestic, confidential, and official from George Washington (New York, 1796), 106–9.

13. GW to WL, May 6, 1782, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Washington/​99-01-02-08344. Carleton to WL, May 7, 1782, PWL, iv: 405.

14. Wroth, “Vengeance,” has a transcript of WO71/95/321–408, City Hall, NY, May 3 to June 22, 1782, with an excellent introduction on which my summary of proceedings draws; the quotation, “a Prisoner,” at 536–7. American leaders were aware of Clinton risking the anger of British Army officers and Loyalists, respectively. See Robert Livingston to William Carmichael, May 1, 1782, RDC, ix: 120.

15. Wroth, “Vengeance,” 515, 560.

16. “label that was”: Affidavit Capt. William Cunningham, May 10, [1782], CO5/105/225, DAR, xxi: 68–9 (quotation 69).

17. “several of my”: Wroth, “Vengeance,” 582.

18. GW to Moses Hazen, May 3, 1782, WGW, xxiv: 217–18. Hazen to Benjamin Lincoln, May 27, 1782, Gilder Lehrman Collection, #GLC01147. Asgill to GW, May 30, 1782, PGW/EA. The boy is referenced in Clinton Papers 194/25, 26.

19. “has distressed me exceedingly”: GW to Lincoln, June 5, 1782, Lincoln Papers, MHS, at http://www.masshist.org/​database/​viewer.php?item_id=1706&img_step=1&pid=3&ft=Object%20of%20the%20Month&nodesc=1&mode=transcript#page1. The other quotations are from GW to Elias Dayton, June 4, 1782, PGW/EA. See also Flexner, George Washington, 479–82.

20. Paine, “A Supernumerary Crisis. To Sir Guy Carleton, Philadelphia, May 31, 1782,” Pennsylvania Packet, June 1, 1782 and Pennsylvania Gazette, June 5, 1782. Paine also advised Washington to use the captive to put moral pressure on Britain: Paine to GW, Sept. 7, 1782, PGW/EA.

21. British military legal authorities at the time did not allow the distinction between murder and manslaughter: Wroth, “Vengeance,” 525. Franklin to HC, Apr. 27, 1782, BHQP 4485 [abstract in Bancroft 119/209]; unknown to GW, May 1, 1782, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Washington/​99-01-02-08308.

22. Franklin to Carleton, Aug. 12, 1782, BHQP 5274, with enclosures at BHQP 5173, 5233. See also Bancroft 121/17–33.

23. With all dates in 1782, the quotations from Public Advertiser, June 17. General Evening Post, July 11; General Advertiser, July 15; Morning Herald, July 15, 30; English Chronicle, July 27; London Chronicle, July 11–13, 27–30, July 30–Aug. 1; Morning Chronicle, July 15, 29; Public Advertiser, July 30; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, July 20, Aug. 3; General Evening Post, July 11. See Clinton Papers 195/24, Peter Russell to Henry HC, July 25, 1782 [from London]: sent copies of Clinton’s, Robertson’s, and Carleton’s correspondence with Washington to the editor of the Morning Chronicle, who promised to publish the materials.

24. St James’s Chronicle, July 23, 1782; Whitehall Evening Post, July 23–25, 1782, for James Robertson to GW, May 1, 1782. “tenderness”: GW to James Robertson, May 4, 1782, PGW/EA. “impolitic”: London Chronicle, July 27–30, 1782; Public Advertiser, July 30, 1782. Grotius: Gazetteer, Aug. 7, 1782.

25. Shelburne to Carleton, July 8, 1782, Bancroft 120/197–9.

26. Paine: General Advertiser, Aug. 7, 1782; Morning Post, Aug. 7, 1782; Morning Herald, Aug. 8, 1782. Lippincott to be handed over to Americans: Morning Herald, Aug. 23, 1782; Craftsman, Aug. 24, 1782; Whitehall Evening Post, Aug. 31–Sept. 3, 1782; Morning Chronicle, Sept. 2, 1782; General Advertiser, Sept. 2; Public Advertiser, Sept. 4, 1782; London Chronicle, Sept. 19–21; Loyalists “in ferment”: St James’s Chronicle, Aug. 31; Morning Chronicle, Sept. 4, 1782. Guilty verdict: London Chronicle, Sept. 14–17, 1782. Verdict pending: London Chronicle, Sept. 24–26; London Packet, Sept. 23–25, 1782. Lippincott’s suspected acquittal: Morning Chronicle, Sept. 10, 1782; Morning Herald, Sept. 10, 1782. Washington’s “humane heart”: London Chronicle, July 13–16, 1782; General Advertiser, July 15, 1782. “detestation of all mankind”: Gazetteer, Aug. 7, 1782. “the first question”: cited in Thacher, Military Journal, footnote on p. 308. Livingston’s letter, May 29, 1782: London Evening Post, Sept. 19–21, 1782; Morning Chronicle, Sept. 20, 1782; Public Advertiser, Sept. 21, 1782.

27. Carleton to GW, August 13, 1782, CO5/106/241, DAR, xxi: 106–8. For the transfer of powers regarding prisoners, see BHQP 5128–9.

28. GW to President of Congress, Aug. 19, 1782, PGW/EA.

29. LDC, xix: 248–51, 331–2, 356–8, 367–9. James Madison’s notes on Congress, Nov. 7, 1782, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Madison/​0105-02-0108. Boyd, Boudinot, 104–5. JCC, xxiii: 716–20.

30. James Duane to GW, Oct. 12, 1782, LDC, xix: 248–50.

31. “an electrical shock”: William Wallace Atterbury, Elias Boudinot: Reminiscences of the American Revolution ([New York,] 1894), 34–5. “The President”: Elias Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections of American Events during the Revolutionary War (Philadelphia, 1894), 63. The following paragraphs are based on Lady Asgill to Vergennes, July 18, 1782, and Vergennes to GW, July 29, 1782 [trans.], both enclosed with GW to President of Congress, Oct. 25, 1782, PGW/EA (whence also the quotation, “a very pathetic”). For independent corroboration of the Asgill family’s situation, see Sir James Jay to GW, July 19, 1782, in Morris, ed., John Jay, 264–5. Lady Asgill’s and Vergennes’s letters were widely reprinted in newspapers in France and in the American Loyalist and Patriot press, e.g., all in 1782, Massachusetts Spy, Dec. 19; Boston Evening Post, Dec. 21; Pennsylvania Packet, Dec. 24; Freeman’s Journal, Dec. 25; Royal Gazette, Dec. 25; Connecticut Journal, Dec. 26; Independence Chronicle, Dec. 26; Salem Gazette, Dec. 26; Connecticut Gazette, Dec. 27; Newport Mercury, Dec. 28; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Dec. 28; New-York Gazette, Dec. 30; New-York Gazetteer, Dec. 30; Connecticut Courant, Dec. 31; and in 1783: New Jersey Gazette, Jan. 1; Connecticut Journal, Jan. 2; New Hampshire Gazette, Jan. 4. British papers carried Lady Asgill’s letter in 1783: London Chronicle, Feb. 8–11; Whitehall Evening Post, Feb. 8–11; Morning Herald, Feb. 12. George III’s order is quoted in Jayne E. Smith, “Vicarious Atonement: Revolutionary Justice and the Asgill Case” (MA diss., New Mexico State University, 2007), 79. See also Townshend to Carleton, Aug. 14, 1782, Bancroft 121/37 and 41. Cornwallis to Carleton, Aug. 4, 1782, BHQP 5205.

32. “with its emphasis”: Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), 29. For introductions to sentiment and sensibility, see John Brewer, “Sentiment and Sensibility,” in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, ed. James Chandler (Cambridge, 2009); G. J. Barker-Benfield, “Sensibility,” in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford, 1999); Knott, Sensibility, 185, distinguishes between Anglophone and French cults of sensibility.

33. “enough to move”: quoted in Boyd, Boudinot, 105. See also Knott, Sensibility, 186. JCC, xxiii: 691, 695 n., 715. James Madison’s notes on congressional deliberations, Nov. 7, 1782, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Madison/​01-05-02-0108. JA to Robert Livingston, Jan. 23, 1783, RDC, vi: 228. GW to Carleton, Nov. 20, PGW/EA; Adye to Maurice Morgann, Nov. 30, 1782, BHQP 6286. Carleton to GW, Dec. 11, 1782, PGW/EA. JCC, xxiii: 829 n. 1.

34. GW to Asgill, Nov. 13, 1782, PGW/EA. For Loyalist and Patriot papers carrying the letter, in 1782, see Royal Gazette, Nov. 23, New-York Gazette, Nov. 25; Pennsylvania Journal, Nov. 27; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Nov. 29; Providence Gazette, Dec. 7; New-York Gazetteer, Dec. 9; Salem Gazette, Dec. 12.

35. Pennsylvania Packet, Dec. 31, 1782.

36. “An American”: first in Pennsylvania Packet, Dec. 28, 1782, from where also in 1783 in Massachusetts Spy, Jan. 23, Independent Ledger, Jan. 27; New Hampshire Gazette, Feb. 1; see also Boston Evening Post, Jan. 25; Connecticut Gazette, Feb. 14. See Knott, Sensibility, 190: “Casting patriots as a community of sensibility apart from the British elaborated the wounded protests so fleetingly made in the Declaration of Independence.” Cf. petition from South Carolina Loyalists to the Crown, via Lord Germain, Apr. 19, 1782, in CO5/82. “melting arguments” and “national honor”: quoted in Charles H. Browning, ed., The American Historical Register (1895), 460. The committee considering Asgill’s fate was also looking into complaints concerning, among others, Hayne. For the Hayne affair, see Carl P. Borick, Relieve Us of This Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South, 1780–1782 (Columbia, SC, 2012), 102–5.

37. Morning Chronicle, Dec. 27, 1782; see also Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, Dec. 28, 1782. The Annual Register for 1783 (London, 1784), 243–4, printed the congressional resolution freeing Asgill, Nov. 7, 1782, and Washington’s letter to the captive, Nov. 13, 1782.

38. Quotations from GW to James Tilghman, June 5, 1786. See also De Lancey, ed., History of New York, ii: 232–3, and n. xxx at 484. The papers were published first in the Columbian Magazine for Jan. and Feb. 1787; they appeared in book form in David Humphreys, The Conduct of General Washington: respecting the confinement of Capt. Asgill (New York, 1859), complete also with Lady Asgill’s and Vergennes’s letters. For Clinton’s self-justification, see Willcox, ed., Clinton’s Narrative, 359–61.

39. Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and British from the Sun King to the Present (London, 2006), 174. On French literary resonances, see Schama, Citizens, 30. GW to Barbier, Sept. 25, 1785. J.-L. Le Barbier le jeune, Asgill: drame, en cinq actes, en prose; dédié a Madame Asgill (Paris, 1785). Between 1793 and 1815, at least three more plays about Asgill were performed on the Parisian stage.

40. AH to William Knox, June 7, 1782, PAH, iii: 91–3.

Chapter Twelve

1. To explore fully the aftermath of America’s foundational civil war, and the experiences of individuals and communities, requires a book of its own. For the vast majority of Loyalists, it is difficult to track the precise ways, speed, and extent of their political, economic, and social reintegration. For the limited historiography, see Roberta Tansman Jacobs, “The Treaty and the Tories: The Ideological Reaction to the Return of the Loyalists, 1783–1787” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1974); David Edward Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York, 1989); Oscar Zeichner, “The Rehabilitation of Loyalists in Connecticut,” NEQ 11:2 (1938). For Loyalist exiles, see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (London, 1972). For Chipman, see Phillip Buckner, “Chipman, Ward (1754–1824),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, at http://www.biographi.ca/​en/​bio/​chipman_ward_1754_1824_6E.html.

2. Morris, ed., John Jay; Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Peace and the Peacemakers: The Treaty of 1783 (Charlottesville, VA, 1986); Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 78–80; Dull, Diplomatic History, 137–60. For Franklin, see BF to Richard Oswald, Nov. 26, 1782, at http://franklinpapers.org/​franklin/​framedVolumes.jsp?vol=38&page=311; Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (Boston, 1983), 375; Jay is quoted ibid., 369. See also Richard Oswald to Shelburne, July 10, 1782, Shelburne Papers 70/40–48, WLCL; Richard Oswald to [?], Paris, Nov. 16, 1782, Richard Oswald Collection, WLCL.

3. For the preliminary articles of peace, see http://avalon.law.yale.edu/​18th_century/​prel1782.asp.

4. Charles R. Ritcheson, “ ‘Loyalist Influence’ on British Policy towards the United States after the American Revolution,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 7:1 (1973); Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 119. For Bootle, see Morning Chronicle, Feb. 24, 1783.

5. Abigail Adams to JA, Apr. 28–29, 1783, at http://www.masshist.org/​digitaladams/​archive/​doc?id=L17830428aa. Zabdiel Adams is quoted in Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2002), 68.

6. For the Coffins, see Conrad Edick Wright, Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (Amherst, MA, 2005), esp. 98–101, 107.

7. On Russell, see Cogliano, American Maritime Prisoners. For the final prisoners in New York, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 195. The preliminary treaty stipulated the release of all prisoners of war; GW and Lincoln ordered POWs freed in mid-April 1783. See Miller, Dangerous Guests, 181.

8. “declared Traitors”: Boston, Town Meeting, April 10, 1783 [Evans 44350]. See also Maas, Return, 445–6. The committees quoted after Boston Committee of Correspondence, Box 3, correspondence with town committees, May and June 1783, NYPL. “villains”: [Chandler] to [Samuel Thorne], Sept. 2, 1783, Misc. collections, MssCol 3754/1, NYPL.

9. “with a handspike”: Boston Gazette, May 5, 1783. See also Maas, Return, 445–6, 453–4.

10. Jouet: Jones, Loyalists of New Jersey, 108–17 (quotation 112); AO 12/ 13/161–79, 100/158. For collusion between an anti-Loyalist populace and officers of the law, see also BHQP 9138.

11. For the violent experiences of ex–Queens Rangers attempting to return to their former communities, see, e.g., BHQP 8036, 8089, 9584, 7940, 8100. For Thomas Crowell Jr., captain of a Loyalist regiment, and Elias Barron, who had supplied the British Army, see Jacobs, “Treaty,” 66. For Oliver, see Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed., The Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson (London, 1886), ii: 412. For the “Association of the inhabitants for united action opposing the return of Tories to the State,” see Misc. Collections, U.S. States and Territories, Box 21, Monmouth Co. folder, NYPL.

12. Prosper Brown to Carleton, June 4, 1783, BHQP 7878.

13. British officials reporting on the spirit of anti-Loyalist resentment, persecution, and violence throughout 1783 continued to hear civilian Loyalists testify to beatings, whippings, imprisonment followed by banishment, and threats of various forms of physical abuse, even to women. See BHQP 7489, 9047–8, 9132, 9584. Evidence in self-defense: Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 184–5 (widows and Bayley); Independent Gazette, Dec. 20, 1783.

14. “much affected”: quoted in Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 86. “Almost all” and “violent…associations”: Carleton to Townshend, May 27, 1783, BHQP 7783. “unless there is”: Chipman to Hodgson & Co., May 31, 1783, in W. O. Raymond, ed., Winslow Papers A.D. 1776–1826 (St. John, N.B., 1901), 86. See also Connecticut Journal, Sept. 24, 1783; John Williams to [?Francis Bailey], Apr. 20, 1783, American Loyalist Box, NYPL.

15. For manifestations of anti-Loyalist sentiment, see Jacobs, “Treaty,” 79; Pennsylvania Journal, June 4, 1783; Maryland Journal, June 20, July 8, 1783; South Carolina Gazette, July 8 and 26; Political Intelligencer, Aug. 10, 1784, Sept. 28, 1785. Henry Addison Papers, WLCL, Box 1, folders 1–6, esp. HA to J. Boucher, Apr. 14, July 12, Sept. 14, Oct. 29, 1783.

16. For Chipman and Coffin’s journey, and quotations in this section unless otherwise referenced, see Joseph B. Berry, “Ward Chipman Diary: A Loyalist’s Return to New England,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 87 (1951). DeLancey: BHQP 7727, deposition Oliver DeLancey, May 20, 1783. Cf. ibid., 8517, Carleton to Gov. George Clinton, NY, July 25, 1783. Foshay: BHQP 7623. For related cases, see ibid., 7727, 7735. For further instances of intimidation and physical violence, see ibid., 7489, 7738 (with reference to the beating of a woman), 8523. For physical violence towards Loyalists in New York see also Bancroft 122/285, 289; 123/141–9, 191–7. For militant grassroots anti-Loyalism elsewhere, see, e.g., Miscellaneous Collections: U.S. States and Territories, Box 21, folder Monmouth Co., Association of the inhabitants for united action opposing the return of Tories to the State [1783], NYPL.

17. Quoted from contemporary newspapers in Jacobs, “Treaty,” 72.

18. For further cases, see, e.g., BHQP 9506; Maas, Return, 455. “a bitter”: Independent Gazette, Dec. 13, 1783.

19. Maas, Return, 470–71, 476; Jacobs, “Treaty,” 104–5. New York’s alien bill prevented Loyalists from establishing citizenship; the assembly denied or tabled the citizenship petitions of over 20 Loyalists. A 1784 North Carolina law excluded from state citizenship non-jurors and those who had actively aided the British; see ibid., 94–5.

20. Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, 293, 300–301. Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, MA, 1997), 40–41. “Who can brook”: Gazette of the State of South-Carolina, Jan. 8, 1784, quoted in Purcell, Sealed with Blood, 68–9. In North Carolina, Loyalists who had joined the British, fled behind British lines, or been fined for refusing a loyalty oath were permanently banned from public office. Georgia’s executive council mandated that no Loyalists proscribed in any state could be admitted until the definitive treaty had been signed. Exclusionist legislative activity continued beyond 1784. See Jacobs, “Treaty,” 103–10; Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, 289–91; Robert M. Weir, “ ‘The Violent Spirit,’ the Reestablishment of Order, and the Continuity of Leadership in Post-Revolutionary South Carolina,” in An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA, 1985).

21. Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists, 296–8.

22. Leslie F. S. Upton, ed., Revolutionary versus Loyalist: The First American Civil War 1774–1784 (Waltham, Toronto, London, 1968), 134–6 (quotation 136).

23. For the section on Hamilton I have drawn epecially on Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), 187–99; see also Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York, 1999), 56–60; Lawrence S. Kaplan, Alexander Hamilton: Ambivalent Anglophile (Wilmington, DE, 2002), 57–62. For resentment and reconciliation in postwar New York, see also Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 186–93. George Washington considered it “of the utmost importance to stamp favorable impressions upon” America’s national character, “let justice then be one of its characteristics.” GW to Theodorick Bland, Apr. 4, 1783, PGW/EA. Evans’s Discourse, delivered in New-York, of 1783, published in 1784, is quoted in Purcell, Sealed with Blood, 70.

24. Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, iv: 886; Michael P. Federici, The Political Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton (Baltimore, 2012), 12–14; Kaplan, Alexander Hamilton, 19–20. “the passions”: AH to John Jay, Nov. 26, 1775, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Hamilton/​01-01-02-0060.

25. For this and the next paragraph, see Alexander Hamilton, A letter from Phocion to the considerate citizens of New-York: on the politics of the day (New York, 1784), 4, 16; idem, A Second Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New-York. Containing Remarks on Mentor’s Reply (New York, 1784), PAH, iii: 557. “Our state will feel”: AH to Robert Livingston, Aug. 13, 1783, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Hamilton/​01-03-02-0277. Other voices, too, from ordinary citizens to congressional delegates and state governors, urged tolerance in the name of Revolutionary values and America’s treaty-worthiness: Jacobs, “Treaty,” 143; South Carolina Gazette, July 15, 1783.

26. On postwar encounters generally, see Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 170–71. Livingston to AH, Aug. 30, 1783, cited in Julius Goebel Jr. and Joseph Henry Smith, eds., Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton; Documents and Commentary (New York, 1964–81), i: 216; AH to Morris, Feb. 21, 1784, cited ibid., 220.

27. For Rutgers v. Waddington, see Goebel and Smith, eds., Law Practice, i: 282–419. For related arguments, see Deposition Solomon Ferris, Oct. 11, 1783, BHQP 9338.

28. Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978).

29. For the raids, see “Papers and Affidavits,” fols. 223–6; Thomas J. Farnham, “ ‘The Day the Enemy Was in Town’: The British Raids on Connecticut, July, 1779,” Journal of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 24:2 (1976); Townshend, British Invasion; Paul David Nelson, William Tryon and the Course of Empire: A Life in British Imperial Service (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 168–72; Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut,” 341–3; Franklin B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles (New York, 1901), ii: 351–61; Kemble et al., eds., Kemble Papers, “Kemble’s Journal,” i: 180. Connecticut Journal, July 15, 1779. For sexual assault and the killing of unarmed men, see “Papers and Affidavits,” fols. 221–3, 226–38; Connecticut Journal, July 7, 1779; New-York Journal, July 19, 1779; Block, Rape, 234, 236–7. Goodrich, Hillhouse: Farnham, “ ‘The Day the Enemy Was in Town,’ ” 31–2. John Anthony Scott, ed., The Diary of the American Revolution. Compiled by Frank Moore (New York, 1968), 376.

30. Damage estimates: ibid., 38, 50–51; Connecticut Journal, July 7, 1779; Clinton Papers 63/10; Papers and Affidavits, fols. 165–219. The lost property advertisements are quoted in Farnham, “ ‘The Day the Enemy Was in Town,’ ” 39.

31. New Haven Colony Historical Society, “New Haven Town Records, 1769–1807,” unpubl. typescript, i: 95–9; 547–52, “Record of Militia Service, July 1779.” See also Franklin Bowditch Dexter, “Notes on Some of the New Haven Loyalists, Including Those Graduated at Yale,” Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 9 (1918): 41.

32. “Miscreants”: quoted in Charles H. Levermore, The Republic of New Haven: A History of Municipal Evolution (Baltimore, 1886), 222. Yale students debated amnesty in 1783 and 1784: Betsy McCaughey Ross, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson (New York, 1980), 194. “Flexibles” and “an Endeavor”: Dexter, ed., Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, iii: 111–12.

33. For this and the next paragraph, see “New Haven Town Records, 1769–1807,” i: 144–6.

34. Stiles is quoted in Levermore, Republic of New Haven, 226. That same winter, the town applied again to the state for assistance to citizens who had suffered as a result of the 1779 British-Loyalist invasion; by 1791, New Haven claimants received some 34,000 acres of the so-called Firelands in the Western Reserve of Ohio. Farnham, “ ‘The Day the Enemy Was in Town,’ ” 60–61.

35. David Daggett, An oration, pronounced in…New-Haven (New Haven, CT, 1787), 17–18. See also Benjamin Trumbull, God is to be praised for the glory, Dec. 11, 1783 (New Haven, CT, 1784).

36. Jacobs, “Treaty,” 146; Zeichner, “Rehabilitation of Loyalists in Connecticut”; Rebecca Starr, “ ‘Little Bermuda’: Loyalism on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, 1775–1783,” in Loyalists and Community, ed. Calhoon, Barnes, and Rawlyk, 55–65; Gerlach, ed., New Jersey in the American Revolution, 266–7. Stearns: Mass, Return, 497; John C. L. Clark, “ ‘The Famous Doctor Stearns’: A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Stearns with a Bibliography,” Papers of the American Antiquarian Society 45 (1935).

37. See also Benjamin Rush’s argument for the restoration of Pennsylvania citizenship rights, i.e., that non-jurors were responsible for paying two-thirds of tax revenues since 1779: Benjamin Rush, Considerations upon the present test-law of Pennsylvania: addressed to the legislature and freemen of the state (Philadelphia, 1784), 13–15. For William Franklin in exile, where he helped other Loyalists prepare their petitions to the claims commission, and the enduring split with his father, see Skemp, William Franklin, 266–73 (quotation 273).

38. Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 185; Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 199; Oscar Zeichner, “The Loyalist Problem in New York after the Revolution,” New York History, 21:3 (1940): 292, 302.

39. Robie: Maas, Return, 493. For merchants reintegrating in postwar New York City, see Zeichner, “Loyalist Problem,” 301. For Joseph Shoemaker, a Philadelphia Loyalist who by 1794 helped represent West Indian trading interests to the secretary of state, and his ardently Loyalist brother Samuel being successfully reintegrated, see Sabine, Biographical sketches, ii: 301–2.

40. Clark, “The Problem of Allegiance in Revolutionary Poughkeepsie,” 308–9. “prevent”: Fred. Weissenfels to Colonel Lamb, May 23, 1783, John Lamb Papers, NYHS.

41. Kenneth Shefsiek, “A Suspected Loyalist in the Rural Hudson Valley: The Revolutionary War Experience of Roeloff Josiah Eltinge,” in America’s First River: The History and Culture of the Hudson River Valley, ed. Thomas S. Wermuth, James M. Johnson, and Christopher Pryslopski (Poughkeepsie, 2009).

42. For this and the following paragraph, see Richard C. Haskett, “Prosecuting the Revolution,” AHR 59:3 (1954); J. Lawrence Boggs, “The Cornellia (Bell) Paterson Letters,” NJHSP 15 (1930): 508–17; 16 (1931): 56–67, 186–201, the quotations from the entries for April 7, May 2, and July 29 at 193, 195, 198. On miniature portraiture, representation, and absence, in the context of Loyalist displacement, see Katherine Rieder, “ ‘The Remainder of Our Effects We Must Leave Behind’: American Loyalists and the Meaning of Things, 1765–1800” (PhD diss., Harvard, 2009), 112–14, and, on the genre more generally, Marcia Pointon, “ ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England,” Art Bulletin 83:1 (Mar. 2001).

43. Henry C. Van Schaack, The Life of Peter van Schaack (New York, 1842); William Jay, The Life of John Jay (New York, 1833), i: 161; see also John Jay to Peter Van Schaack, June 16, 1783, in Morris, ed., John Jay, 542. Ronald W. Howard. “Van Schaack, Peter,” at http://www.anb.org.pitt.idm.oclc.org/​articles/​11/​11-00872.html (accessed Aug. 21, 2016); American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000. For ex-Loyalists assuming legal and political offices at state level, see also Zeichner, “Loyalist Problem,” 294, 296; Bradburn, Citizenship Revolution, 59; Calhoon, “Reintegration of the Loyalists.”

Epilogue

1. Berry, “Ward Chipman Diary,” 218 (“must have”), 237, 239–40; see also BHQP 8089. For the remains of prison ship captives, and commemorative efforts throughout the long nineteenth century, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 205–40 (quotation 205). For British and German troops wreaking havoc in collections of books and scientific instruments in New York, New Haven, and Princeton, see Charles Hervey Townshend, The British Invasion of New Haven, Connecticut (New Haven, CT, 1879), 51–2; Jones, History of New York (1879), i, 136–40; Thacher, Military Journal (1827), 71, 77; Collins, Brief Narrative, 50; McGuire, Philadelphia Campaign, 324.

2. The Papers of George Washington, Diaries, ed. Donald Jackson et al. (Charlottesville, VA, 1976–79), vi: 138. Native American lands: Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York, 1995), 62–3; idem, Divided Ground, 180; Hubbard, Sketches, 159. “trees, their limbs” and “unburied bones”: Winslow C. Watson, ed., Men and times of the revolution; or, Memoirs of Elkanah Watson, including journals of travels in Europe and America, from 1777 to 1842, with his correspondence with public men and reminiscences and incidents of the revolution (New York, 1856), 254, 259. Boyd: Anishanslin, “ ‘This Is the Skin of a Whit[e] Man,” 25, quoting Notices of Sullivan’s Campaign (1842), 102.

3. “blood still”: quoted in Frederick English, General Hugh Mercer, Forgotten Hero of the American Revolution (New York, 1975), 103. “some of”: quoted at “Baylor Massacre,” Bergen County Historical Society, at http://www.bergencountyhistory.org/​Pages/​baylormassacre.html. Baylor’s death on Barbados: Pension application of Lucy Burwell, Baylor’s widow, Mar. 21, 1837, W5966.

4. Boudinot is cited in the still-critical Charles Royster, “Founding a Nation in Blood: Military Conflict and American Nationality,” in Arms and Independence, ed. Hoffman and Albert, 34 with n. 20.

5. Troy Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812 (New York, 2012), 19 (“sovereignty”), 276, 279, 13 (“a people,” “served him”). “civil war”: Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York, 2010), 12. Baylor site: Democratic Press, Aug. 7, 1813. “our internal,” regarding Loyalist violence at Crooked Billet: Gregory T. Knouff, The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park, PA, 2004), 233–5; Collection of the Mercer Museum Library, MSC 39, Folder 1, Doylestown, PA.

6. “untarnished”: Benjamin Gleason, An oration, pronounced before the republican citizens of Charlestown: on the thirty-seventh anniversary of our national independence: Monday, July 5, 1813 (Boston, 1813), 7, quoted in Royster, “Founding a Nation in Blood,” 47 with n. 55. “Other revolutions”: Samuel Berrian, Oration before the Tammany Society (New York, 1815), quoted ibid., 48 with n. 57.

7. John P. Resch, Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic (Amherst, MA, 1999); idem, “Politics and Public Culture: The Revolutionary War Pension Act of 1818,” Journal of the Early Republic 8:2 (1988). R. E. Cray, “Major John Andre and the Three Captors: Class Dynamics and Revolutionary Memory Wars in the Early Republic, 1780–1831,” Journal of the Early Republic 17:3 (1997); Thomas A. Chambers, Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY, 2012), 91, 96, and passim; Sarah Purcell, “Martyred Blood and Avenging Spirits: Revolutionary Martyrs and Heroes as Inspiration for the U.S. Civil War,” in Remembering the Revolution, ed. McDonnell et al. Pension Applications: Noel Battles S12960 [1832]; Philip Lauman S40072 [1818]; William Whaley S37532 [1818]; Joseph Graham S6937; Reuben Plunkett S25752 [1824]; Samuel Johnson (widow Mary’s claim) W5012.

8. Chambers, Memories of War, 90, points out the three monuments’ associations with victimhood. See ibid., 76, for the Marquis de Lafayette meeting battle-scarred veterans at the Bunker Hill memorial site in 1825. Fort Griswold: Middlesex Gazette, Aug. 30, 1826; Norwich Courier, Sept. 13, 1826 (“the small”); Connecticut Courant, Sept. 20, 1825 (“perforated,” “numerous scars”), and Sept. 4, 1826; Sentinel and Witness, Sept. 13, 1826; New Hampshire Patriot, Sept. 18, 1826; Sun [Mass.], Sept. 21, 1826. See Hoock, “Mangled Bodies,” 135–6, for the history of atrocity allegations regarding Fort Griswold.

9. Chambers, Memories of War, 59, with reference to Army and Navy Chronicle, Aug. 10, 1837.

10. Eileen Ka-May Cheng, “American Historical Writers and the Loyalists, 1788–1856: Dissent, Consensus, and American Nationality,” Journal of the Early Republic 23:4 (2003); Billias, “The First Un-Americans”; Purcell, Sealed with Blood, 69–71; Cleves, Reign of Terror, 53–4. Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 345, on Arcadians, Jacobites, and post–Civil War Southerners.

11. For more detail, with full references, on Wragg’s story and monument, and a discussion of private versus official Loyalist monuments, see Hoock, Empires of the Imagination, 76–8.

12. “for the uncommon” and “he appears”: quoted in Hersey, “Tar and Feathers,” 469. On wartime pension payments of up to £70,000 in some years, see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 120.

13. For a reading of the claims commission in terms of paternalism, not rights, see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 120–23, 131 with n. 64 on the numbers of claims submitted. Bevins: AO13/26/45–7. Palmer: AO12/36/59–60. Smith: AO12/47/236–41. See also AO12/1/50, 310–11; 29/148–9, 321–3; AO13/14/235–52; 25/57–60; 30/581–8; 31/81–96, 358–401. Known or reputed Tory hunters were excluded from relief efforts. See, e.g., Abraham Cuyler to Capt. Mathews, n.d., Add MS 21825/50. Wartime fiscal statistics: Conway, British Isles, 54, 63–4, 76–7. British historians have argued that, at the same time as the British state thus looked after loyal subjects from overseas, the loss of the thirteen American colonies was a catalyst for British national identity to become more cohesive and geographically commensurate with the British Isles: Bickham, Making Headlines, 252; Colley, Britons, 143–5; Conway, British Isles, 315–25.

14. Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 89–90; Brown, Moral Capital, 311–12 (quotations 312).

15. For compensation claimed for slaves, see AO12/6/47–53; 13/279–82; 19/201v–208v; 47/226–34, 236–41; AO13/1, part 1, 40–42; 28/237–43. Handley: Norton, “Fate of Some Black Loyalists,” 404 n. 6. Anderson: Schama, Rough Crossings, 179–80. Furman: Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 127–8, 138; AO13/59/658–9.

16. This and the following paragraph largely after Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 293–5, and the quotation at 290; Taylor, Divided Ground, 111–15, 119–28; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 190–96, 320; Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York, 2001), 443; Gregory H. Nobles, “Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution,” in Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding, ed. Alfred F. Young and Gregory H. Nobles (New York, 2011), 185–92.

17. Knox is quoted in David C. Hendrickson, “Escaping Insecurity: The American Founding and the Control of Violence,” in Between Sovereignty and Anarchy, ed. Griffin, 225. Wallace is quoted in Engelbrecht, Iroquoia, 170. See also Taylor, American Colonies, 443; Stephen Aaron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 69–70, 75; Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York, 2015), 311–15.

18. Conway, British Isles, 128, 345. Brown, Moral Capital, explores the American Revolution’s impact on the timing, scope, and drive of anti-slavery in Britain; see 311–12 on Britain partially fulfilling its moral obligations towards black Loyalists. Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, esp. 139–42, builds on Brown’s notion of moral capital in discussing the reform impulses catalyzed by the “spirit of 1783.” See also her “Revolutionary Exiles,” 53; P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford, 2012), 130; Wahrman, “English Problem”; Seymour Drescher, “The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,” Slavery & Abolition 33:4 (2012). For Britain’s post–American Revolution empire, see Chris Bayly, Imperial Meridian; P. J. Marshall, “Britain without America—a Second Empire?,” in idem, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998).

19. O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 283 (“imperial troubleshooter”), 284. Antiwar sentiment and 1790s pacifism: Conway, British Isles, 315–25; Langford, Polite and Commercial People, 626–7; J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace (Cambridge, 1982).

20. For the expansion of the total black population in the U.S. from 1790 to 1800, with nearly steady proportions of blacks who were slaves in the Upper (more than 90 percent) and Lower South (more than 95 percent), but a dramatic drop in that proportion in New England (from about 23 to 7 percent) and the mid-Atlantic (72 to 54 percent), see U.S. census figures cited in Egerton, Death or Liberty, 173. On the historiography of slavery and the Revolution, see Nobles, “Historians Extend,” 145–55. Cynthia A. Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, 1776–1800: Personal and Political Narratives (Columbia, SC, 1998), 102, 101. On the Constitution and slavery, see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2009).

21. The text of the U.S.-Prussian treaty at “A Treaty of Amity and Commerce between His Majesty the King of Prussia, and the United States of America,” at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/​18th_century/prus1785.asp. See also “Draft of a Model Treaty,” PTJ, vii: 486–7, Article 24, and the quotation from Jefferson at 491. JA to De Thulemeier, Auteuil, 13 Feb. 1785, Founders Online, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Jefferson/​01-07-02-0356-0001. For discussion of the treaty, see also Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 47; Krebs, Generous and Merciful Enemy, 268–73; Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison, WI, 1993), 112. U.S. diplomats wrote similar clauses into subsequent treaties both with Prussia and other states, including Mexico in 1848.

22. Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Whiskey Chaser: Democracy and Violence in the Debate over the Democratic-Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion,” in Between Sovereignty and Anarchy, ed. Griffin et al., 192–5; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 210; Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville, VA, 2010).

23. Michael A. McDonnell, “Introduction,” in Remembering the Revolution, ed. McDonnell et al., esp. 6–7, 10; Purcell, “Martyred Blood,” in ibid., esp. 282–5, 290–91; Chambers, Memories of War, 167–9. Jacob Belville, Address at the inauguration of the Hatborough Monument (Doylestown, PA, 1862). For a deep history of the Lieber Code and its international impact, see Witt, Lincoln’s Code.

24. On Tyler, see the excellent essay in Michael Kammen, Selvages & Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 222–51, with the quotation (“to interpret”) at 225; Moses Coit Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York, 1897); see also Bailyn, Ordeal, 402–3. Cf. George Macaulay Trevelyan, Sir George Otto Trevelyan: A Memoir (London, 1932), 139, 141, and passim; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 242–3.

25. For cultural rapprochement, see Erik Goldstein, “Origins of the Anglo-American Special Relationship 1880–1914,” in Peacemaking, Peacemakers and Diplomacy, 1880–1939, ed. Gaynor Johnson (Newcastle, 2010), with a discussion of the 1914 plans at 12–13. On the Special Relationship, see also Keith Robbins, “The Special Relationship: An Overview,” Revue Francaise de Civilization Britannique 12:1 (2002); Kathleen Burk, “Great Britain in the United States, 1917–1918: The Turning Point,” International History Review 1:2 (1979).

26. For the Goldstein case, see Anthony Slide, ed., Robert Goldstein and “The Spirit of ’76” (Metuchen, NJ, 1993), with key materials, including press cuttings and court rulings. The quotations are from United States v. Motion Picture Film “The Spirit of ’76,” District Court S.D. California, Nov. 30, 1917, 252, Federal Reporter 946, at 209–11, reprinted also in David Holbrook Culbert and Richard E. Wood, eds., Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History (New York, 1990–91), i: 287–303. See also Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 244.

27. Times, Apr. 20, 1918. Churchill is quoted in Simon P. Newman, “Losing the Faith: British Historians and the Last Best Hope,” Comparative American Studies 6:2 (June 2008): 166.

28. For the 1920s war over textbooks that some U.S. patriotic societies and historians criticized as unpatriotically favorable towards Britain, and the Anglophiles’ response, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 246–7; George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War (Lexington, KY, 1970); Charles Altschul, The American Revolution in Our School Text-Books; An Attempt to Trace the Influence of Early School Education on the Feeling towards England in the United States (New York, 1917); Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003), ch. 5; Claude Halstead Van Tyne, “The Struggle for Truth about the American Revolution,” in idem, England & America: Rivals in the American Revolution (New York, 1927). For the persistence of Anglophobe currents in U.S. political discourse, see John E. Moser, Twisting the Lion’s Tail: American Anglophobia between the World Wars (New York, 1999).

29. Kings Mountain Celebration Committee, Official Progamme of Sesqui-Centennial Celebration of the Battle of Kings Mountain (S.I., 1930), n.p., 11, 24, 26–7. Hoover’s speech: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​ws/​?pid=22379. Ferguson monument: Kings Mountain Celebration Committee, Official Progamme, 10–11; “The Colonel Patrick Ferguson Memorial,” the Historical Marker Database: http://www.hmdb.org/​marker.asp?marker=17655. See, similarly, House Report No. 2565, 70th Congress, 2nd Session, Report of the Committee on Military Affairs, to accompany H.R. 14449, Feb. 16, 1929; House Report No. 1671, 71st Congress, 2nd Session, Report of the Committee on Military Affairs, to accompany H.R. 6128, May 27, 1930.

30. For historical fiction in the 1930s and ’40s, see Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York, 1978), 173–4. “In a fearful”: quoted in Michael Heale, “The British Discovery of American History: War, Liberalism and the Atlantic Connection,” JAS 39:3 (2005): 363. See also Newman, “Losing the Faith,” 169–70.

31. For counterprogressive historians, see Young and Nobles, eds., Whose American Revolution Was It?, 47–56; Novick, That Noble Dream, 333–6 (quotation 336).

32. This and the previous two paragraphs after Lepore, Whites of Their Eyes, 23–4 (the quotation from King 23), 64–83 (“so agitated” 64, “offer an answer” 69), 133–5; for the PBC, see also Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana-Champaign, IL, 1991), 40–43; Louis P. Masur, The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America (New York, 2008). See Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 247–8, for a “modest revival of interest” in Revolutionary-era prisoners but widespread dismissal of alleged British abuse.

33. Cf. Richard Middleton, “British Historians and the American Revolution,” Journal of American Studies, 5 (1971): 55.

34. U.S. Congress, Congressional Record, V. 152, Pt. 15, Sept. 26, 2006, to Sept. 28, 2006, 20295, printing into the record Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “America’s Anti-Torture Tradition,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 17, 2005, at http://articles.latimes.com/​2005/​dec/​17/​opinion/​oe-kennedy17. Scott Horton, “George Washington: No Torture on My Watch,” Dec. 24, 2007, at http://antiwar.com/​blog/​2007/​12/​24/​george-washington-no-torture-on-my-watch/. See Newman, “Losing the Faith,” 171–5; Simon P. Newman, “British Historians and the Changing Significance of the American Revolution,” in Europe’s American Revolution, ed. idem (Houndsmill, 2006), 83, on American imperialism changing international perceptions of the American Revolution’s legacies.

35. Cf. Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War, 424.