Home : For The People : One Leg Men At Ass Kickin's :

Law Of Arms

According to one recent estimate, of the approximately 200,000 Americans who bore arms against the Crown between 1775 and 1783, at least 18,200 were taken; and this figure represents only men wearing the uniform of the Continental forces or serving in one of the state militias. It does not include the thousands of seamen captured from the privateers that preyed on British shipping up and down the coast. Nor does it reflect the untold numbers of civilians rounded up for joining revolutionary committees or speaking out against the Crown. Taken all together, between 24,800 and 32,000 patriots probably fell into British hands during the Revolutionary War. Like Hanford, the great majority of them were held in and around New York City, under conditions so atrocious that as many as 18,000 (almost 60 percent) perished-or two and a half times the 6,800 thought to have fallen in battle. More Americans gave their lives for independence in New York than anywhere else in the country.

No evidence exists that the British explicitly intended the deaths of so many of their captives. Still, they had often threatened to hang every American taken in arms against the Crown. After the debacle at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, followed by their Pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill in June, His Majesty's forces in America were out for blood-impatient, as a captain in the King's Own Regiment put it, "to scourge the rebellion with rods of iron," even if it meant "almost extirpating the present rebellious race." The green light for a war of extirpation would come in August 1775, when the king issued a "Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition," which enjoined his loyal subjects throughout the realm to put down "all traitorous Conspiracies and Attempts against Us, Our Crown and Dignity." Parliament finished the job in March 1777 by adopting "North's Act," which suspended habeas corpus and authorized the prosecution of captured rebels for treason or piracy as circumstances required. Not surprisingly, the officials charged with the care and feeding of prisoners in New York-Joshua Loring, commissary of military prisoners, and David Sproat, commissary of naval prisoners-were at best indifferent to their charges' fate. Why pamper traitors on their way to the gallows? Every time Gen. George Washington protested, moreover, his British counterparts, especially generals Sir William Howe and Sir Henry Clinton, denied any wrongdoing, even when presented with irrefutable evidence that their provost marshal, Capt. William Cunningham, beat and starved prisoners for his own sadistic amusement.

The British were under no formal obligation to take better care of captured Americans. The growth of nation states in early modern Europe had brought a degree of predictability to the conduct of war and given rise to certain precepts and customs bearing on the treatment of prisoners: disarmed adversaries should not be executed, humiliated, tortured, or mutilated; prosecuted as criminals, or enslaved; or withheld the appropriate food, clothing, and shelter. More than a century would pass before these principles would be codified in multinational treaties or conventions. As explicated by classicists and jurists, the "rules of war" or "law of arms" were largely theoretical and essentially unenforceable- not actually rules or laws at all, strictly speaking, but only high-sounding guidelines for mitigating the severity of armed conflict between purportedly civilized princes. Whether they even applied in cases of domestic insurrection or rebellion was (and still is) open to question.

Officers were supposed to feel social constraints, because military rank remained intimately connected to inherited property and privilege everywhere in 18th-century Europe. Only someone entitled by birth to the deference of others was thought capable of leading men in war. Breeding, not expertise, constituted the foundation of an officer's authority. (This was no theoretical abstraction. In Britain army officers purchased their commissions at prices so steep that the service essentially belonged to the few thousand rich families who ran the country.) Officers thus tended to believe they had more in common with their counterparts across the firing line than with the men they led. Out of that belief had emerged an unwritten code of honor that precisely regulated their behavior toward one another in war and required them to behave with genteel "complaisance" toward prisoners of all social ranks.

The trouble was that the American armies seemed - especially at the beginning of the war - like undisciplined rabbles led by men without the standing in civil society to make them genuine officers. Opinions changed as the war developed, but it remained a question for the British as to whether men who in civilian life had been merchants and tradesmen, even plain farmers, deserved the courtesies automatically due real gentlemen in uniform - and if captured, whether it was appropriate to exchange them, rank for rank, as if they were social equals. Said one Hessian after the Battle of Brooklyn: "Among the prisoners are many so-called colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors, and other officers, who, however, are nothing but mechanics, tailors, shoemakers, wigmakers, barbers, etc. Some of them were soundly beaten by our people, who would by no means let such persons pass for officers." Another observed that "prisoners who knelt and sought to surrender were beaten . . . Most of their officers are no better dressed and until recently were ordinary manual laborers."

As bad as the physical abuse, though, was the humiliation. After the capitulation of Fort Washington in November 1776, for example, Capt. Alexander Graydon and other prisoners were herded into a Harlem barn where a British sergeant major was making a list of their names and ranks. Graydon never forgot what happened when the sergeant came to a "squat fellow" from Pennsylvania: "You are an officer, sir! said the sergeant. Yes, was the answer. Your rank sir! with a significant smile. I am a keppun, replied the little man in a chuff, firm tone. Upon this, there was an immoderate roar of laughter among the officers about the door." Decades later, Graydon could still remember the shame and embarrassment he felt at that moment.

Perhaps the best measure of the huge impact of these revelations on American opinion during the war was the acclaim showered on Philip Freneau's epic poem "The British Prison Ship," first printed in 1781, which tells the story of a patriot taken at sea and confined in two of the New York prison ships. The poem's celebration of unwavering allegiance to the new nation in the face of enemy brutality, and its sensational popularity laid the foundations of Freneau's fame as "the poet of the Revolution."

After graduating from Princeton in 1771, the scruffy, melancholic, poetically inclined youth drifted from one calling to another-teaching school, studying for the ministry, toying vaguely with the idea of careers in law or medicine - all the while jotting down innocuous poems imitating, by turns, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Goldsmith. Though managing to produce a few patriotic verses, he did not become fully committed to the Revolution until the summer of 1778, when he returned from a Caribbean voyage to his home in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and seeing how the British had savaged the people and countryside at the recent Battle of Monmouth. He enlisted with a New Jersey militia company assigned to shore patrol between South Amboy and Long Branch. He also published "America Independent," a poem that sang the praises of republican government, excoriated George III as a bloody despot, and lamented the many friends and neighbors consigned to the "sickly ships" and "dreary dungeons" of New York.

In the autumn of 1780 Freneau started work on "The British Prison Ship," which would appear as a pamphlet the following summer. Like the just published and arguably even more famous Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen's Captivity (1779), which he had obviously read with care, Freneau's poem represented a sharp departure from the captivity stories familiar to his readers, most notably the ordeal of the Puritan housewife Mary Rowlandson, taken prisoner by the Narragansett in 1675. Before now, falling into the hands of one's enemies was the shameful consequence of things gone wrong-a mark of failure, personal or collective or both, crying out for explanation and accountability. The captive's story was ultimately a quest for redemption.

Often excerpted and anthologized after its debut in 1781, "The British Prison Ship" anchored Freneau's reputation as a poet and remained a favorite of American readers well into the 19th century. The reasons are not hard to see. One, surely, is the poem's stirring reversal of the traditional captivity narrative. Freneau's prisoner triumphs precisely because he refuses to repent or knuckle under. Even if it means death, he never yields to his captors or abandons the cause: martyrdom is the ultimate expression of love of country ("to triumph was to die"). This was a new, irresistible twist on an old literary genre. But that was not all. As it happened, "The British Prison Ship" appeared just as Americans began to learn of the terrible suffering inflicted on their brethren confined. The poem's seething anger and bitterness - its resentment of a cruel enemy ("the race I hate") - perfectly captured the country's mood. Although scholars have wondered if Freneau was writing from personal experience as a British prisoner, it hardly matters one way or the other. The important thing is that he had given voice to what was in the hearts and minds of his compatriots, and long after the war officially ended in 1783, "The British Prison Ship" would serve as a reminder of how they had felt about the mistreatment and neglect of American prisoners in New York.

The story of New York's Revolutionary War prisons and prison ships dropped out of sight in the 20th century, a victim of (among other things) improved Anglo-American relations. It deserves to be revived, however, because it enlarges our understanding of how the United States was made - not merely by bewigged founding fathers, of whom we have heard so much in recent years, but also by thousands upon thousands of mostly ordinary people who believed in something they considered worth dying for.

Their suffering, moreover, left an enduring mark on international law. Between 1782 and 1787, American diplomats negotiated treaties of amity and commerce with foreign powers that took unprecedented steps toward mitigating the evils of war. Agreements struck with the Netherlands, Sweden, and Morocco, for example, required negotiation before the use of force, curbed privateering, and regulated the exercise of search and seizure on the high seas. The 1785 treaty with Prussia negotiated by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin even included provisions designed specifically "to prevent the destruction of prisoners of war." Among other things, the parties stipulated that in the event of armed conflict between them, captives taken by either:

shall not be confined in dungeons, prison-ships, nor prisons, nor be put into irons, nor bound, nor otherwise restrained in the use of their limbs; that the officers shall be enlarged on their paroles within convenient districts, & have comfortable quarters, & the common men be disposed in cantonments, open & extensive enough for air & exercise, and lodged in barracks as roomy & good as are provided by the party in whose power they are for their own troops; that the officers shall also be daily furnished by the party in whose power they are, with as many rations; & of the same articles & quality as are allowed by them, either in kind or by commutation, to officers of equal rank in their own army; & all others shall be daily furnished by them with such ration as they allow to a common soldier in their own service.

Even if the conduct of their own countrymen had sometimes fallen well short of acceptable, the three American negotiators understood that the new nation must pledge itself to treat future prisoners of war with the decency and humanity never accorded them by the British - that what set the United States apart from the former mother country and all the other tyrannies to come was only this commitment to basic human rights.

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

top of page

back a page