Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  Chapter 1 - Brooklyn

  Chapter 2 - DESTINED TO the Cord

  Chapter 3 - THE STOOL OF Repentance

  Chapter 4 - A CRY OF Barbarity & Cruelty

  Chapter 5 - SWEET Liberty

  Chapter 6 - WAR ad Terrorem

  Chapter 7 - THE WAR OF Words

  Chapter 8 - DEAD Reckonings

  Chapter 9 - FORGOTTEN Patriots

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  APPENDIX A - Counting Calories

  APPENDIX B - Cunningham’s “Confession”

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND NOTE ON SOURCES

  NOTES

  WORKS CITED

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  For Pat, Matt, and Kate

  “Too many of us have been prisoners in New-York.”

  —“A STEADY WHIG,” 1783

  PREFACE

  Thorburn’s Lament

  The idea for this book began to spread its wings many years ago when I happened across the reminiscences of Grant Thorburn, a Scottish immigrant who came to New York City about a decade after the end of the Revolutionary War. Thorburn settled in a small frame house on Liberty Street, just east of Broadway—now deep in Manhattan’s downtown business district, but in those days a rather nondescript residential neighborhood of two- and three-story private homes, a few churches, and some modest shops. With one notable exception, that is: about halfway down the block, next to the Middle Dutch Church, rose a massive and mysterious five-story building, one of the largest in town, constructed of dark stone, with “small, deep windows, exhibiting a dungeon-like aspect.”

  This, Thorburn learned, was the infamous “Old Sugar House.” Built as a sugar refinery many years earlier on what was then called Crown Street, it served as a British prison for Americans captured during the Revolutionary War. Since then the building had become a shrine of sorts for the men who somehow managed to survive its horrors. Day after day, Thorburn watched war-worn veterans, many with wives and children in tow, coming to the Sugar House to meditate upon what they endured there in the cause of independence. Often they paused to tell him stories about appalling squalor and rampant disease, about brutal guards and bad food, about daring escapes. They wept for comrades taken away every morning by the dead-cart, corpses “piled up like sticks of wood.” But time passed. The visitors grew older and increasingly infirm. They came less frequently, then stopped coming altogether. In 1840, itself “grown gray and rusty with age,” the Old Sugar House on Liberty Street came down to make way for dull stores and commercial buildings.1

  Thorburn despaired. The loss of the Old Sugar House was rank historicide—a “foul deed,” he cried, born of “the leveling spirit of the day.” Such a place should have been preserved as “a monument to all generations of the pains, penalties, sufferings and deaths their fathers met in procuring the blessings they now inherit.” But now, alas, “it is probable that in the year two thousand and twenty-one there will not be found a man in New-York who can point out the site whereon stood a prison whose history is so feelingly connected with our revolutionary traditions.”

  Thorburn’s lament for the Old Sugar House comes to us from a windy and sentimental age, when Americans were fond of patriotic bombast and disconcerted by the passing of the Revolutionary generation. Still, he had a point. I had never heard of the place. Nor, for that matter, could I recall coming across much of anything about the broader subject of captivity during the war for independence. I knew the basics: that New York had been the nerve center of British operations in the colonies, that the great majority of Americans taken prisoner had been confined in and around the city, that appalling numbers of them had died. The rest was pretty hazy. A bit of digging turned up a couple of out-of-print monographs and a small handful of scholarly articles, but that was all. Thorburn, it seemed, got it right. The Old Sugar House had indeed slipped the bonds of memory, taking with it a piece of American history that we should have remembered.

  My curiosity about the Sugar House eventually blossomed into a study of all the prisons and prisoners of occupied New York. After four or five years of wandering through the sources—private correspondence, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, pension applications, and government records—I reached several conclusions that lie at the heart of Forgotten Patriots. First, the numbers involved are a lot bigger than I had anticipated. Before now, approximately 18,000 Americans were thought to have been captured by the British from 1775 to 1783, of whom 8,500 (47 percent) succumbed to disease and starvation. For reasons that will become clear, I think the number of captives may actually have exceeded 30,000 and that 18,000 (60 percent) or more of them did not survive—well over twice the number of American soldiers and seamen who fell in battle, now believed to have been around 6,800. It is a mean, ugly story. It is also a story that enlarges our understanding of how the United States was made—not merely by bewigged gentlemen who thought deeply, talked well, and wrote gracefully, but also by thousands upon thousands of mostly ordinary people who believed in something they considered worth dying for.

  My second conclusion was that with very few exceptions, contemporary accounts of the British prisons in New York are quite credible. One reason we lost track of this remarkable story, in fact, is that historians have been too quick in recent years to dismiss a handful of prominent witnesses (Ethan Allen, for example) as propagandists who grossly exaggerated conditions in the prisons to enflame public opinion against a cruel enemy. But there is simply too much testimony, from too many different sources and over too many years, to be disposed of so neatly. This does not mean that Americans were correct when they alleged that the British intended the deaths of so many captives. My reading of the evidence is that the thousands of Americans who perished in New York during the Revolution were the victims of something well beyond the usual brutalities and misfortunes of war, even eighteenth-century war—a lethal convergence, as it were, of obstinacy, condescension, corruption, mendacity, and indifference. Although the British did not deliberately kill American prisoners in New York, they might as well have done. Did Americans treat their prisoners any better? Not necessarily, though as we will see, circumstances were such that their capacity for inhumanity in this context was never fully tested. Some at least, if only to prove that they were not British, attempted to set higher, more humane standards for the treatment of prisoners of war.

  Third, it became apparent to me that the prisoners of New York have been forgotten more than once. On several occasions over the last 200 years, a variety of groups and individuals found reason to recall the story and tried to anchor it in public memory with appropriate memorials. That they did not succeed was partly due, as Grant Thorburn foresaw, to the feverish transformation of Manhattan’s built environment. Today, every tangible link with its Revolutionary past has been destroyed except for a chapel holding on bravely in the shadows of downtown skyscrapers, an old iron fence, and a former country house tucked into a corner of upper Manhattan. No wonder even native-born New Yorkers, let alone the millions of visitors who converge on the city every year, have trouble recalling the thousands of American prisoners of war who died there, under circumstances as dismal as any to be found in our history. Two obscure memorials to the prisoners—the Soldiers’ Monument in the yard of Trinity Church and the Prison Ship Martyrs’ monument in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park—are not enough to overcome the feelin
g that New York City, unlike Boston or Philadelphia, has no connection whatsoever to the American Revolution.2

  What Thorburn could not have predicted is that the story would also become a casualty of Anglo-American reconciliation. In the decades on either side of World War I, as we will discover, the death of thousands of captives during the Revolution was downgraded in American public opinion from an outrage to an embarrassment—a regrettable and minor breach in the friendship of two kindred peoples. Academic historians, eager to rescue the Revolution from flag-waving jingoism and personality cults, shelved the subject. By the 1920s it had disappeared all over again.

  Forgotten Patriots is my attempt to take the story down from the shelf, dust it off, and see how it looks now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I have refrained from drawing parallels to contemporary events, but I will not be sorry if readers find themselves thinking about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, about the evasion of habeas corpus, about official denials and cover-ups, about the arrogance and stupidity that can come with the exercise of great power. I hope they will also see that once upon a time, when the country was young, our own experience with prisoner abuse led us to believe that we are supposed to do better.

  Northport, New York

  July 4, 2008

  1

  Brooklyn

  THE BIGGEST BATTLE of the Revolutionary War began at the Red Lion Inn at around two o’clock in the morning of August 27, 1776. A passing cold front had put an unseasonable chill in the air, and the handful of American pickets posted nearby, sprigs of green tucked into their hats in lieu of proper uniforms, shivered and yawned while they watched for the enemy. Maybe they heard something beforehand—a muffled cough, horses blowing, the metallic ring of a sword being drawn from its scabbard—but nothing could have prepared them to see two or three hundred redcoats suddenly burst out of the shadows on the double quick, bayonets gleaming in the milky light of a gibbous moon. Mostly raw militia, and badly outnumbered, the Americans got off a few perfunctory rounds. Then, despite orders to hold their ground “at all hazards,” they ran for their lives. Their commander, Major Edward Burd, was taken prisoner along with a lieutenant and fifteen privates. More Americans—many more—were about to meet a similar fate.1

  Named after the public house where King Henry V rested after his great victory at Agincourt, the Red Lion was a small frame building close by the junction of three busy country roads on the western end of Long Island, a stone’s throw from Upper New York Bay. Martense Lane, looping through a gap in the hills that formed the island’s spine, brought travelers from Flatbush and other villages of Kings County. The Narrows Road came up the shore of the Lower Bay from Denyse’s Ferry, the link between Long Island and Staten Island. Finally, just behind the Red Lion, the Gowanus Road led back up to the village of Brooklyn, on the Heights above New York City, skirting the mill ponds and broad tidal marshes along Gowanus Creek. Five days earlier a mixed force of 20,000 British redcoats and green-coated Hessian jaegers—German mercenaries—had come ashore at Gravesend Bay, and General George Washington expected that the Gowanus Road would be one of the routes they would take to attack the American force occupying Brooklyn Heights. This morning, however, the road was full of Burd’s feckless militia.2

  About halfway to the Heights, a mile or so up from the Red Lion, the stampeding Americans were corralled by a pair of energetic officers, roused from sleep by messengers and the rattle of musket fire. One was Colonel Samuel Holden Parsons, a Connecticut lawyer and militia officer recently awarded a commission in the Continental Army; the other was Colonel Samuel Atlee of Pennsylvania, a veteran of the French and Indian War who had brought a battalion of musketry from his state to help Washington defend New York City. The moon would be down soon, so it must have been getting difficult to see, but Parsons and Atlee somehow formed the frightened men into a line to screen the road.3

  While they waited anxiously for the enemy to appear, General Lord Stirling, the ranking American officer in that part of Long Island, came down from the Heights with detachments of regulars from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. By sunup, a little after five o’clock, the total number of Americans on the scene had grown from a few score to 2,100 or more. Massed just down the road from them by now were two full brigades of redcoats and at least part of the kilted Forty-second Royal Highland Regiment (the fabled Black Watch), plus a detachment of Royal Artillery and two companies of local Tories—something like 7,000 men in all, with more on the way. At their head was Major General James Grant, a tough career officer who had famously assured Parliament only the year before that Americans would “never dare to face an English army, and didn’t possess any of the qualifications necessary to make a good soldier.”4

  The fighting resumed in earnest at around seven, as Grant funneled the first of his columns into the Gowanus Road by the Red Lion, drums beating the march step and regimental colors snapping in the bright morning air. Stirling, still getting his defenses set up, sent Atlee’s musketeers forward to delay the enemy at a spot where the road narrowed to cross a patch of marsh. Grant deployed for battle, but the Pennsylvanians held steady, braving a hail of grapeshot until Stirling pulled them back to a wooded slope near the road. For the next several hours both sides blazed away with muskets, rifles, mortars, and cannon, rarely more than 100 yards apart. “The balls and shells flew very fast, now and then taking off a head,” declared one Maryland soldier. “Our men stood it amazingly well, not even one shewed a Disposition to shrink.”

  When it looked as though Grant might try to circle behind the American positions, Stirling sent Parsons to occupy a prominent hill east of the Gowanus Road, on the left flank of the American line. Parsons took several hundred men, including a part of Atlee’s battalion, and held the hill despite three ferocious assaults that left the slopes littered with enemy dead and wounded. One of Atlee’s officers boasted that the Americans had “mowed them down like grass.”5

  It was now early afternoon, and although Atlee’s men had not slept or eaten in nearly twenty-four hours, they continued to fight tenaciously in the increasingly oppressive August heat. Then they discovered something worse than hunger or fatigue: they had fallen into a trap and were about to be surrounded. In Atlee’s words, the “Grand Body of the British Army” was not in front of them, as they originally believed, but at their backs.6

  Only later would the Americans tumble to the fact that Grant’s move up the Gowanus Road from the Red Lion had been a diversion. So was a second thrust, spearheaded by the jaegers, who had started up the road from Flatbush to Brooklyn around nine or ten in the morning, pushing back 800 defenders under General John Sullivan of New Hampshire. The main enemy force, perhaps 14,000 strong, had actually slipped out of their Flatlands camp the night before in a long column led by General William Howe, commander-in-chief of His Majesty’s forces. Completely undetected, the enemy swung east through New Lots and up to Jamaica. By daybreak on the twenty-seventh they had come down the road from Jamaica to Brooklyn as far as Bedford and proceeded to descend on the unsuspecting Americans from behind, cutting them down almost at will. “The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarters,” gloated a British officer. “It was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets, after we had surrounded them so they could not resist. Multitudes were drowned and suffocated in morasses—a proper punishment for all Rebels.” One report had American riflemen spitted to trees with bayonets.7

  From east to west, the American lines collapsed in waves of confusion and panic. Along the Gowanus Road, where Atlee and Parsons had managed to hold the British at bay for hours, organized combat degenerated into random clashes and running firefights. By early afternoon, the American army had broken into isolated parties of officers and men trying to reach the safety of the American camp in Brooklyn Heights, plunging through woods and fields to avoid enemy cavalry on the roads. A Pennsylvanian, Lieutenant James McMichael, recalled the slow destruction of his battalion as t
he men were driven from place to place, skirmishing with the enemy until they finally made it back to the lines at half past three, utterly spent. Eighteen-year-old Michael Graham, also from Pennsylvania, remembered “the confusion and horror of the scene. . . . Our men running in almost every direction, and run which way they would, they were almost sure to meet the British or Hessians.” Graham narrowly avoided capture by wading across a swamp. Colonel Parsons and a handful of his men fought their way past the enemy six or seven times, then hid out in heavy woods and returned to their lines at around three o’clock the following morning.8

  Many surrendered or, disoriented and demoralized, simply dropped their weapons. Frederick Nagel, a Pennsylvania soldier then only fifteen or sixteen years old, recalled that when the enemy captured his colonel after hours of fighting, “we all fled in confusion into some briars and high grass, along a pond. About sunset the British and Hessians came upon us and took us prisoners.” Jabez Fitch, a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant in Parsons’s Connecticut brigade, sought cover in a swamp with some companions—only to be surprised on the other side by Hessians, who let go with two heavy volleys that sent the Americans reeling back into the swamp again. Emerging a second time, close to where they had begun, they were engaged by yet another enemy force. Eventually recognizing that they were surrounded, they agreed to let every man fend for himself. Fitch went north and was soon captured by regulars of the Fifty-seventh Regiment. Later that afternoon, having survived “various Struggles, running thro’ the Fire of many of the Enemy’s detachments,” Colonel Atlee and several dozen weary men surrendered to soldiers of the Seventy-first Highland Regiment. Hessians found General Sullivan in a cornfield, waving a pistol in each hand. General Stirling, too, fell prisoner, but not before organizing a rear-guard action against redcoats now advancing down the Gowanus Road. His heroic stand at Nicholas Vechte’s stone farmhouse afforded many fleeing Americans time to reach their lines on the far side of Gowanus Creek.9