Forgotten Patriots

He was born in Dublin in 1738, he explained, the son of a trumpeter attached to a regiment of dragoons in the British Army. The end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 cut short his own career in the military, after which he spent a decade drifting from one Irish city to another, looking for work, fathering children, and trying to stay ahead of the law. At Newry, he became a “scowbanker,” a kind of con artist who enticed workingmen and country folk to emigrate to America as indentured servants. In the summer of 1774, he accompanied a number of his victims to New York, where he thought he might make a go of it as a riding instructor. That plan fell apart early the following year after he tangled with local patriots protesting Britain’s colonial policies. “Rendering myself obnoxious to the citizens in their infant struggles for freedom,” he told the chaplain, “I was obliged to fly . . . to Boston.” There, General Thomas Gage of the British Army made him provost marshal with the rank of captain, an appointment that “placed me in a situation to wreak my vengeance on the Americans.” And so he did. Over the next seven or eight years, Cunningham’s festering hatred led him to kill, by his own count, over 2,000 captured patriots, mainly in New York after the city was seized by British forces in 1776. The great majority were starved to death, “by stopping their rations, which I sold.” An additional 275 became the victims of “private executions” that he supervised under cover of darkness outside the Provost:

a guard was dispatched from the provost, about half after twelve at night, to Barrack-street, and the neighborhood of the Upper barracks, to order the people to shut their window shutters and put out their lights, forbidding them, at the same time, to presume to look out of their windows or doors, on pain of death; after which the unfortunate prisoners were conducted, gagged just behind the Upper Barracks, and hung without ceremony, and there buried by the black pioneer of the provost.²

This was the first public acknowledgment of something that Americans had already suspected for years—that the British deliberately killed prisoners in New York City during the Revolution. Not surprisingly, Cunningham’s “Confession” caught the eye of editors around the country, who reprinted it so often that it eventually become a fixture of patriotic lore and legend.³

Unfortunately, it was a hoax. For one thing, although William Cunningham (and his “black pioneer”) were real enough, the calendar of London’s Newgate Prison makes no reference to the hanging of anyone named Cunningham, in 1791 or any other year. The so-called Confession does not exactly say that Cunningham died at Newgate—only that he told his story to the Newgate ordinary—but it does imply he had left the army by this time, and as a civilian he would not have been hanged anywhere else in London. Nor do the records of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, show anyone named William Cunningham brought up on forgery charges during the eighteenth century. Also noteworthy is the complete absence of other contemporary testimony about midnight executions behind the Upper Barracks in New York. Even if area residents were too frightened to say anything, the late-night disappearance of so many prisoners from the Provost—prisoners never seen alive again—would hardly have gone unremarked by their fellow inmates, a number of whom left detailed descriptions of Cunningham’s brutality. And then there is the testimony of an old Irish revolutionary named John Binns, who happened to mention in his autobiography that when the British sent him to Gloucester Prison in 1799, the “governor,” or warden, there was none other than . . . William Cunningham, a retired army officer, “about fifty years of age, five feet seven inches high, well made and well mannered,” and still very much alive.⁴

The timing of the alleged “Confession” is suspect, too. A direct voyage from London to Philadelphia in 1792 could take eight to ten weeks as winter came on, meaning that if the “Confession” appeared in print by late August or early September 1791, it might well have reached Philadelphia by, say, the beginning of December, maybe earlier. It seems improbable, though, that two American editors would sit on such a juicy item for so long, then print it on the same day almost two months later. But what if the “Confession” had just arrived and the editors printed it within a day or two? That seems even less probable. Another Philadelphia paper, Claypool’s Daily Advertiser, revealed on January 27 (i.e., one day before the “Confession” appeared) that “navigation of the Delaware has been for some time past obstructed by ice.” So if the “Confession” did not arrive by sea, did it come by land from New York, which often got the news from Europe as much as a week ahead of Philadelphia? Alas, the port of New York, too, had been shut down by ice, apparently for weeks. On January 20, Dunlap’s General Advertiser reported that a brig had finally reached New York bearing London papers up to November 16 of the previous year. Judging by extracts printed in the New York papers, however, she appears to have brought no news of importance.⁵

In light of all this, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Cunningham’s “Confession” to the murder of American prisoners in New York was concocted by someone in ice-bound Philadelphia, who arranged for it to be published on the same date by two local papers. That someone clearly knew a good deal about Cunningham’s background, however, and was also well acquainted with events in both New York and Boston before the Revolution. For example, the “Confession” asserted that Cunningham brought indentured servants to New York from Newry on August 4, 1774, aboard the Needham. A ship of that name did arrive in New York on that date, and her master subsequently advertised that he still had “the times of a few [indentured] servants” for sale, along with Irish beef and butter.⁶

There is no reason to believe that the servants in question had been “kidnapped” in Ireland, as the “Confession” alleged, or that they were liberated in New York “on account of the bad usage they received from me during the passage [from Ireland].” But charges of fraud and violence were often levied against recruiters for colonial land developers, and the voyage of the Needham was connected with schemes to populate a Champlain Valley settlement owned by the rich and influential Beekman family. Whoever fabricated his “Confession” knew that Cunningham had been mixed up in some rather unsavory business.⁷

As for the contention that Cunningham went up to Boston in 1775 because he had become “obnoxious” to the patriots in New York, that too would appear to contain at least a germ of truth. On Thursday, March 9, 1775, Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer carried a statement, signed by Cunningham and one John Hill, complaining that the two of them had been roughed up the previous Monday by “a mob of above two hundred men” gathered near the Liberty Pole on the Common (now City Hall Park). “The leader of this mob brought Cunningham under the Liberty Pole, and told him to go down on his knees and damn his Popish King George; and they would then set him free, but on the contrary, he exclaimed, God Bless King George.” Hill did the same, and only the intervention of some passersby, the two men said, saved them from being killed. They had done nothing to deserve this savage treatment “except being on the King’s side of the question in the morning”—a reference to the fracas that had erupted a few hours earlier at a public meeting called to discuss the election of delegates to the Second Continental Congress.⁸

Partisan brawls were hardly unusual in pre-Revolutionary New York, but this one seems to have left especially bitter feelings. Eight years later, only months before the last redcoats left the city, papers in Pennsylvania and Connecticut ran an anonymous warning to wealthy and influential Tories that they should depart as well. The writer singled out a pair of New York merchants, the brothers Hugh and Alexander Wallace, for their relationship with the British provost marshal: “Do you imagine,” he asked, “that we have forgotten your sending to General Gage for that low-lived bloody-minded villain Cunningham, whom you sent as your gladiator to interrupt our peaceable associations in the commons, and who afterwards you procured to be a provost for the purpose of murdering, with impunity, such of your fellow-citizens as were the most obnoxious to you and your friends[?]” Later that same year, on the other hand, an attainted Tory named John Wetherhead recalled the attack on Cunningham and Hill as a perfect example of how law and order had already broken down in the city by 1775.⁹

Finally, Cunningham’s alleged promise to “wreak my vengeance” on patriots in Boston is entirely consistent with contemporary reports of his conduct there. The diary of a young patriot named Peter Edes is a running account of Cunningham’s sadistically abusive treatment of Americans confined in the Boston jail over the summer and fall of 1775. In addition to beating and starving the prisoners in his charge, Edes wrote, Cunningham liked to have them kneel in the yard and say, “God Bless the King”—a settling of scores if there ever was one. Of young Edes’s twenty-nine cellmates, only eleven survived.¹⁰

In short, somebody knew enough about Cunningham’s career, in Europe as well as in America, to fabricate a “Confession” plausible enough to fool more than a few people over the last 200 years. We will probably never discover his or her identity, but a prime suspect would have to be the man who initially placed it “by particular request” in the Independent Gazetteer: that paper’s colorful owner and editor, Colonel Eleazer Oswald.

Oswald emigrated to New York from England in 1770. He apprenticed himself to John Holt, printer of the New-York Journal, married Holt’s daughter, and built connections to printers in cities and towns from New England to Virginia. When the war began, he took part in the invasion of Canada and was captured outside Québec in December 1775. Exchanged a year later, Oswald returned to the army as an artillery officer and earned high marks in action at the Battle of Monmouth Court House and elsewhere before resigning his commission in a dispute over seniority. He knew and admired General Charles Lee, and in Philadelphia, where he moved toward the end of the war, Oswald was friendly with Tom Paine, Haym Salomon, and Philip Freneau, among others. As editor of the Independent Gazetteer, which he founded there in 1782, he also became renowned for a bare-knuckle style of journalism, including the publication of anonymous libels and off-color parodies, that entangled him in lawsuits, near duels, and a jail sentence. It would be difficult to find anyone else in Philadelphia better equipped, by experience or temperament, to cook up Cunningham’s dying “Confession.” Oswald had been a prisoner of the British himself, he was in New York when Cunningham had his run-in with the crowd at the Liberty Pole, and he knew people who had plenty to say about Cunningham’s career as provost marshal.¹¹

Supposing that Oswald did write Cunningham’s “Confession,” why he wrote it when he did and why he published it in 1792 all remain mysteries for which his subsequent career yields no clues. Six months after it appeared in the Independent Gazetteer, he left Philadelphia to volunteer his services to the government of revolutionary France. Through Tom Paine, then in London, he wangled a commission as a colonel of artillery in the French army and later that same year saw action at Jemappes and Liège. Impressed by his zeal, the French sent Oswald on a secret mission to Ireland to investigate the prospects of revolution there. He returned to the United States at the end of 1793 and plunged into the agitation against the Jay Treaty. Two years later he died in New York of yellow fever.¹²