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American Revolutionary War POW's

Sometime that seismic spring of 1776, 16-year-old Levi Hanford of Norwalk, Connecticut, enrolled in his uncle's militia company and went to war against the British. He expected to make short work of the enemy. Everybody knew how simple farm boys like himself had just sent the redcoats reeling from Lexington and Concord, then cut them down at Bunker Hill. But Hanford's war got off to a slow start. Except for a brief stint building fortifications around New York City, his first year under arms consisted mostly of standing watch along the Connecticut coast of Long Island Sound and rounding up Tories. He missed the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, in which Gen. William Howe's redcoats captured a thousand American rebels. Neither was he present two weeks later, when the British swarmed across the East River onto Manhattan, seized the city, and rounded up several hundred more Americans. Hanford did not get his first real taste of action, in fact, until a cold, stormy night in March 1777, when he and a dozen other Connecticut men were surprised and taken prisoner by a Tory raiding party from Huntington, Long Island. What happened next would haunt him until the day he died, 77 years later.

Their captors marched Hanford and his comrades to occupied New York, now the nerve center of British operations in North America and the main holding point for rebel prisoners until the war ended in 1783. Several months before he arrived, more than 5,000 of his countrymen had been squeezed into several churches gutted for the purpose, plus a pair of sugar refineries, the municipal jail and almshouse, and even the King's College building (now Columbia University).

By all accounts, conditions in these makeshift prisons were frightful. The men never had enough clothing, blankets, or firewood. Their rations-when they received them-consisted mostly of rotten pork or beef and scraps of moldy bread. Some inmates ate rats, shoes, and even the lice that covered their bodies. All lost weight, and virtually all exhibited the bleeding gums, open sores, tooth loss, and listlessness characteristic of scurvy. Survivors told of floors slick with human excrement and of air so fetid that candles would not stay lit. Not surprisingly, typhus, dysentery, and other infectious diseases ran rampant, and men died so quickly that burial details could barely keep up. By January or February 1777, it appears that six or seven of every 10 American prisoners had perished - a mortality rate roughly twice that of the infamous Confederate stockade in Andersonville, Georgia. (In World War I, only 3.6 percent of U.S. prisoners died in POW camps. In World War II the figure rose to 11.3 percent, and in Korea to 37.8 percent.)

Hanford's destination was a five-story "sugar house" on Crown (now Liberty) Street, just east of Nassau, in what is today the lower Manhattan business district. It had been confiscated from the redoubtable Livingston family, who had built it in the early 1700s to manufacture loaf sugar and rum. The building's massive stone walls and small, dungeon- like windows made it serviceable as a prison. Although a sizable majority of the 800-odd Americans confined therein over the winter of 1776-77 were long dead by the time Hanford arrived, British operations in, New Jersey, Westchester, and Connecticut soon brought in hundreds to replace them. As spring turned to summer, he recalled, the stench became overpowering, and the air grew so oppressively thick it was hard to breathe. "Our allowance of provisions," he added, "was a scanty supply of pork and sea- biscuit"- too scanty to keep a man going for long. The moldy biscuits, wet from seawater, teemed with weevils. "It was our common practice to put water in our camp kettle, then break up the biscuit into it, and after skimming off the worms, to put in the pork, and then, if we had fuel, to boil the whole together."

In late October, after seven months in the sugar house, Hanford was transferred to the ill-named Good Intent, a transport recently converted into a prison ship, now riding at anchor in the Hudson. He was thrust among 200 more Americans crammed below decks, starving and dying like flies in the sepulchral gloom. "The air was exceedingly foul, close, and sickening," he would recall. "No wonder that pestilence in all its fury began to sweep us down." Within two months, half his prisonmates were dead.

Hanford's transfer from the sugar house to the Good Intent was an index of how the multiplying captive population in occupied New York was compelling the authorities to begin moving the overflow onto an assortment of vessels anchored in the waters around New York. Already there were prisoners aboard the Prince of Wales, a decrepit warship anchored in Wallabout Bay on the Brooklyn side of the East River, near the hospital ship Kitty. At some point in the course of that year, the Judith and the Myrtle, two transports anchored in the Hudson opposite Trinity Church, began to receive prisoners, as did the Jersey and the Good Hope, a pair of hospital ships hitherto reserved for the use of His Majesty's forces. American captives would also be confined in the brigs of at least nine other vessels not officially designated as prisons or hospitals: the Eagle, Felicity, Isis, Richmond, Otter, Dispatch, York, Vigilant, and Mercury.

Aboard the Good Intent, meanwhile, Hanford fell sick and was transferred again, this time to the military hospital in the Brick Presbyterian Church. The so-called hospital was no improvement, however. "Disease and death reigned there in all their terror," he remembered. "I have had men die by the side of me in the night, and have seen fifteen dead bodies sewed up in their blankets and laid in the corner of the yard at one time, the product of one twenty-four hours." And worse, horribly worse: "On one occasion, I was permitted to go with the guard to the place of interment, and never shall I forget the scene that I there beheld. They tumbled the bodies promiscuously into the ditch, sometimes even dumping them from the cart, then threw upon them a little dirt, and away they went. I could see a hand there, a foot there, and there again a part of a head, washed bare by the rain, and all swollen, blubbering, and falling to decay."

At any point in this ordeal, Hanford might have won his freedom by enlisting in King George's service. Yet he rebuffed every overture by recruiters, and when finally exchanged in May 1778 - one of the relatively few who lasted as long as 13 months in captivity - he went home, rejoined his old unit, and resumed the fight. Instead of weakening his resolve, his stint as a prisoner of war had made him more determined than ever to send the redcoats packing.

It was in the spring of 1780 that Americans woke to a new horror: the prison ship Jersey, easily the biggest and deadliest of its kind in the Revolutionary War, which claimed so many lives during her brief time in service as to serve for generations as the single most widely recognized symbol of British cruelty toward captured patriots.

Launched in 1736, the Jersey had seen decades of service in the Mediterranean as a fourth-rate frigate of 64 guns before the navy converted it to a hospital ship around 1771. (In the Royal Navy, such a rating implied a three-masted ship mounting 50 to 70 cannon on two decks below the main deck and carrying a crew of around 400.) It arrived in New York with the rest of the fleet in the summer of 1776 or shortly thereafter. As one of the largest vessels in port - 41 feet at the beam, 144 stem to stern - its great black hull would have been a familiar sight to the city's residents. For its conversion to prison duty, it was anchored permanently in Wallabout Bay and "hulked" - stripped of its masts, canvas, lines, ordnance, figurehead, rudder, and any other reusable equipment. The gun ports were then sealed and replaced by two rows of small, square air ports, barred with iron lattices, for the benefit of the prisoners confined on the lower decks. Aft, on the quarterdeck, a large awning or tent was erected to shelter the 30-odd marines assigned to guard the prisoners. Directly below lay the officers' cabins and various storerooms. Between the quarterdeck and forecastle lay an area of the gundeck known as the spar deck, much of this now occupied by the pens in which officers kept pigs for their own consumption. The forward gundeck was reserved for the galley. Below the gundeck lay the middle deck, a cavernous, vile-smelling, vermin-infested space where the prisoners passed time, ate, and slept shoulder to shoulder. Still more prisoners dwelled like troglodytes on the dank lower deck, at or near the waterline. The only way to reach topside from the holds was up a narrow companionway and through a heavy grated hatch, always dogged tight at sundown.

Exactly when the Jersey began to receive prisoners is unclear. It may have been when it was still in service as a hospital ship-a report reached Philadelphia as early as June 1779 that 512 captives were languishing in its holds-but once it formally became a prison hulk, the numbers soared and conditions rapidly deteriorated.

American newspapers frequently reprinted a deposition taken from George Batterman, who said that when he was sent aboard in the autumn of 1780, the Jersey held an astonishing 1,100 prisoners - almost three times its seagoing complement. To soften them up for Royal Navy recruiters, he added, their rations were reduced to a pint of water and eight ounces of "condemned bread" per day, plus only eight ounces of meat per week.

Numerous contemporary accounts confirm that prisoners on the Jersey were treated with unparalleled "severity and inhumanity," that they received only a few ounces of bad meat per week, that they fought "like wild beasts to get near the small air ports, that they might breathe," that "7 or 8 died every 24 hours," that hundreds had already enlisted in the Royal Navy in a desperate bid to save themselves. Christopher Vail's unpublished narrative, composed years later but based on a journal he kept during the war, corroborates the overcrowding, hunger, sickness, and hellish filth. "There was only one passage to go on deck in the night," he recalled, and the guards would only allow two men up at a time. "Many of the Prisoners were troubled with the disentary and would come to the steps and could not be permitted to go on deck, and was obliged to ease themselves on the spot, and the next morning for 12 feet around the hatches was nothing but excrement."

Christopher Hawkins, Vail's fellow prisoner, likewise wrote in his autobiography of the rampant dysentery that left him and others covered with "bloody and loathesome filth" by morning, of fisticuffs between demoralized prisoners, of savage whippings, of one man so hungry he ate the lice from his shirt. A third captive, Ebenezer Fox, a 17-year-old seaman, aptly described the Jersey in the late summer of 1781 as a "floating Pandemonium."

Edwin G. Burrows. Patriots or Terrorists: The Lost Story of Revolutionary War POW's. . Fall 2008.

Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons—more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crown’s military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed—those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence—and how much we have forgotten.

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