"Martyrdom of thirteen thousand American Patriots..." Topic

… aboard the monstrous Jersey and other British prison ships in New York Harbor.

"Certainly the truth can now be told without arousing animosity. The historian has a duty to narrate the facts, no matter how gruesome they may be. In this instance, it tells the story of unrivaled American heroism and also reveals the frightful horrors suffered by and American prisoners in the disease-infested prison ships in New York harbor. While many have portrayed these ships to be as nice as the cheap hotels, that was not the case. It was actually one of the most tragic, but little-known, events in American history. Actually, three times as many American Patriots were liquidated – 13,000 on the infamous British prison ships and in New York prisons-than the 4,300 killed in the American armed forces during the entire war. It is only right that the terrible fate of these early American Patriots and heroes, who preferred death to disloyalty, should be publicly known.
If there are still Americans influenced by the Revolutionary War propaganda emanating from New England, let them pause and read impartially the story of the martyrdom of I 3,000 American prisoners in the foul, overcrowded jails, in disease-infested, rotting hulks; in the loathsome warehouses and sugar factories in New York City during our War for Independence. New England was fortunate in knowing little of such horrors and atrocities, although many of their sailors died unknown in the British hell ships.
Last but not least were the densely crowded churches, and warehouses where Patriot American prisoners died like rats, of disease and hunger. In the summertime, they suffered from suffocation and, being without covering, froze to death or died of pneumonia in the winter. With little food and scanty water, the health of the prisoners was quickly undermined, which left them no power of resistance to the mass attack of dysentery, typhoid fever, smallpox, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and contagious diseases of all kinds. The food was not only insufficient to keep body and soul together, but was often putrid.
There was obviously a conspiracy among Provost Marshal William Cunningham, Commissary ]oshua Loring, and Naval Commissary David Sprout, down to the lowly prison guards, to decimate the rebel prisoners. "Decimate" is not the correct word, as it means taking the death toll of only one of every ten. The proper word should be "annihilation" or "extermination," for that is what it amounted to. It was one of the most horrible and awesome tragedies in American history. There is nothing to compare with it in military history since the religious wars 400 years ago, except the butchery of the Jews by the Nazis. The Black Hole of Calcutta, in which English soldiers in overcrowded prisons were suffocated to death, is the nearest resemblance to what occurred on the terrible prison ships and in other British prisons in New York City, Charleston, and Savannah. Ten thousand American Patriots, mostly in their early twenties or thirties, imprisoned on board the inhuman British prison ship Jersey, were given stinking food and literally starved to death or died of disease. This extermination policy now appears to have been a deliberate conspiracy not only among the prison commissaries, but actually by the British High Command.
These unfortunate victims of the Revolution were buried in the sands of the adjacent shore of Wallabout Bay, where the Navy Yard in Brooklyn was located. Twenty years after the war, in making walls and building sites, a vast quantity of the bones of these martyrs were dislodged and strewn over the shore. They were, however, collected by Captain John Jackson, the proprietor of the neighboring land, and re-interred at his expense. Later still, public ceremonies were held over this common grave, but even to this day these American Patriots, who preferred death at its worst rather than disloyalty to their country, are still the forgotten heroes of our War for Independence.
The Jersey was by far the largest prison hulk, but there were others, and several so-called hospital ships which were almost equally as bad. Captain Freneau, who was confined on board both hospital and prison ships, survived by being exchanged…"
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Amicalement
Armand

By the Standards of the time this treatment of rebels taken in arms against their lawful monarch is relatively mild. Hanging, drawing and Quartering was considered appropriate, if time allowed. If not then bayonetting on the spot was acceptable. Same treatment as Jacobites received after Culloden!

Old news. The horrors of the prison ships were known even DURING the war. And to attribute it to some fiendish plot is ridiculous. If the British wanted to get rid of the Rebels, they would simply have executed them.

And consider the source. I went to college with Hamilton Fish's second cousin back in the '60's – the old man was considered a nut case by his own family even then due to his avid search for conspiracies all over the place. He was, for example, one of the "FDR invited the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor" crowd.

I find it disgusting that a supposed educated man could compare British prison ship's (that were the normal method of holding prisoners for a long time) to the Holocaust.

Very silly. Arguably adding insult to injury.

"We Urgently need your Donations to stay online through 2015!" H'mm

Meh, as far as the British were concerned they were filthy traitors and deserved whatever happened to them and by the standards of the time that attitude was fully justified.

Certainly the truth can now be told without arousing animosity. The historian has a duty to narrate the facts, no matter how gruesome they may be.

Is it just me, or does that sound an awful lot like the beginning of a Cthulhu Mythos story?

The British were adept enough at letting their own troops die through dysentery, typhus (aka 'ship' or 'prison fever'), typhoid fever and other diseases of 'the camp' as well as losing them in droves to 'putrid fever,' yellow jack and malaria in the ‘sickly' south. There was a repeat in the 1790s in both the Netherlands and the Caribbean; not to forget Walcheren in 1809. At the end of the C19th century typhoid or 'enteric' fever killed more men than the Boers in South Africa.

The American authorities were equally successful almost a century later. To put the author's figures in context, 13,000 men were said to have died in the Confederate POW camp at Andersonville. The link here describes conditions at Libby Prison in Richmond:
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I don't have figures for Union prisons.

In 1860s no less than the 1770s, principles of sanitation and disease transmission were still imperfectly understood. Medical services were primitive so that survival rates were poor. Remember the anecdote from the Union army in camp about coffee tasting funny downstream from the 'sinks'? Even McLellan was knocked out by typhoid fever and in the film of ‘Gone with the Wind,' it was presented as a droll fact that Scarlett O'Hara's first husband died heroically of the measles.

Of course, complacency and incompetence played their part.

The biggest hole in the entire Prison Ship Martyr story is that during this period, PoWs remained the responsibility of their OWN government, not that of their captors. The only exception to this that I'm aware of was a treaty between France and Great Britain that each would treat captives as their own troops and the two sides would settle up expenses at the end of the war.

It was the job of Congress to feed, clothe and pay these men during this period, not that of the British (who were often on short rations in NYC during this period). It is difficult not to observe a level of cynicism on the part of Conrgess in that (a) these men were useless mouths and would divert resources from those still fighting, and (b) it made valuable propaganda (one thing Congress was really good at) to claim British ill-treatment.

Congress couldn't even be bothered to feed and equip the Continental army. So…

Another problem SM was that the British and the rebel colonies never got a good prisoner exchange cartel worked out. Exchanges were usually left to local military commanders, and on the American side even that was hampered by the practice of committing POWs to the custody of state forces. Even during the ACW things worked better until politics and policy got involved.

Also while the treatment of British prisoners by the rebels was generally fairly good, the treatment of captured loyalists could be a different matter.

Formatting. It's not an unknown concept.

While I realize that our esteemed poster only has so much time in the day to submit his quota of seventy nine items, a few moments to create paragraphs and check it would be appreciated.

"He was, for example, one of the "FDR invited the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor" crowd."

….. Fish was, of course, absolutely wrong on that point. Roosevelt did not invite them; he simply provoked them.

B

Why are you stirring this particular pot, Armand?

Cunningham was not hanged in England, according to this article, which suggests that his 'confessions' should be ignored as inventions for an American market eager to nurse its sense of grievance:

"In short, the "life, confession, and last dying words of captain William Cunningham" was a hoax, eagerly swallowed by resentful Americans but not credible in any detail. Even though its most basic statements can't be confirmed, however, American authors have continued to rely on what that document said about Cunningham's birth and background."

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The British and Spanish also used prison hulks for French POWs during 1792-1815.

I suspect more countries would have done so, had they had enough spare/old ships to use.

And the hulks on the Kentish Marshes remained in use into the 1830s as Charles Dickens recounted in 'Great Expectations.'

What about confining the Convention Army in copper mines in Connecticut instead of allowing them to return to Britain as agreed upon by Congress?

I think it was local Loyalists in the Simsbury copper mines, not the Convention prisoners.

However, the Saratoga Convention was reneged on by Congress and a lot of the prisoners (I've read up to half – Boatner, I think but I may be wrong) are believed to have died in captivity by the end of the war, as a result of poor rations, assaults by guards (including officers on occasion, which was most unusual), and being marched about during the winter to prevent rescue attempts.