Standards and Precedent

The American Revolution occurred on the heels of major changes in the treatment standards for prisoners in European warfare. The destruction and violence of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had caused thinkers to begin proposing such treatment standards for military prisoners and noncombatants for the first time.² Scholar Hugo Grotius contended that victors had obligations to protect prisoners of war. In 1625 Grotius argued that “prisoners of war cannot be made slaves . . . as it would be inconsistent with every precept of the law of charity.”³ In subsequent decades, other thinkers refined this position. In 1758 Emer de Vattel wrote in his Law of Nations that prisoners of war “are not to be treated harshly, unless personally guilty of some crime against him who has them in his power.”⁴ Vattel proposed paroling prisoners as an alternative to putting them to death when commanders could not feed great numbers of them. At the time of Vattel’s writing, powers exchanged prisoners as part of cartel, or agreements to exchange prisoners, which Vattel affirmed as a “humane and salutary” practice.⁵ Both the Patriots and the British had to contend with these new standards for the treatment of prisoners of war during the Revolutionary War.

Americans managed both European and Native American prisoners in the colonial period. Ian K. Steele has demonstrated that “race was a more fundamental category than gender in colonial views of prisoners.”⁶ Accordingly, French and Spanish prisoners were more likely to be exchanged in keeping with European standards, whereas colonists viewed Native Americans as “outside the bounds of civilized military conventions.”⁷ Indigenous prisoners of war could usually expect enslavement, ransom, or death rather than a period of captivity followed by exchange, as had become the custom for European prisoners during the Modern Era. Prior to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), governors and legislators tried to profit from the obligation to care for European prisoners of war. In The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century, Renaud Morieux argues that the British Crown relegated the cost of maintaining prisoners to the colonies.⁸ Colonies attempted to avoid the burden by transporting prisoners of war to neighboring colonies, using privateers to convey them. To offset the costs of maintaining prisoners, privateers began using captives to enable trade, otherwise prohibited by parliamentary regulations, with French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean islands. The “flags of truce” system cast prisoners as “living, breathing passports” whose presence onboard privateers lent an appearance of legitimate prisoner transportation to otherwise illegal trade voyages.⁹

The Seven Years’ War established precedents for managing prisoners of war that revolutionary authorities would later adopt and adapt. European standards of warfare maintained that belligerents should provide for the maintenance of their own prisoners. In line with this expectation, the French government initially provided a “Royal Bounty” allowance for prisoners of war in British captivity. This payment stopped when the state neared bankruptcy, making the British government financially responsible for French prisoners. The British provisioned French prisoners on the same terms as British soldiers and prohibited the recruitment of prisoners of war into the royal ranks. Since Britain held more enemy prisoners than the French, exchanges occurred infrequently.¹⁰ French prisoners were dispersed throughout Great Britain, with many going to England and Ireland under the stewardship of the Sick and Hurt Board.¹¹ The Board stationed prisoners in various towns and cities, including Portsmouth, Liverpool, and Deal. Enlisted men faced more restrictions on their mobility than officers, who could go out on parole so long as they remained within a few miles of their place of confinement.¹² The presence of prisoners and their guards angered local populations, who chafed under the occasional financial burdens of prisoner management. When the war ended, the British billed the French over one million pounds for costs associated with prisoner care.

The British and their American colonists entered into the American Revolution with a common knowledge of European standards for warfare but dissimilar experiences of managing prisoners. The Revolutionary War forced Americans to create management systems to accommodate military prisoners. Imperial wars gave the British more precedent from which to build a management system to accommodate the prisoners of the Revolutionary War. During the Seven Years’ War, the British had dispersed French military captives throughout their country for housing and provisioning. They implemented a similar strategy of dispersal during the Revolutionary War, but the nature of the conflict—a rebellion—called into question whether American captives were prisoners of war or traitors. The answer would have dramatic implications for their treatment.

Exchange and the Convention Army

Standard conventions in 18th-century European warfare held that belligerents should prioritize the immediate exchange of prisoners, rank for rank. The prioritization of exchange increased troop strength, lessened the financial burden of caring for enemy prisoners, and helped to ensure the good treatment of prisoners, who gained their freedom before enduring the hardships of extended captivity. Partial exchanges between commanders and prisoner commissaries freed British and American prisoners throughout the Revolutionary War, but King George III would not accept a general cartel, since to do so would be to grant legitimacy to the Patriot cause.¹³ American military considerations also hampered the regularity of exchanges.¹⁴ Exchanges bolstered one’s own forces, but also those of the enemy. Though Washington sought exchanges despite the boon that they offered to the British, Congress hesitated to oblige the general. At the Battle of Fort Washington in November 1776, the British captured 2,837 American prisoners of war.¹⁵ Commander-in-Chief of the British land forces General William Howe, already stretched thin in terms of the resources available for the maintenance of prisoners, showed a willingness to engage in a speedy exchange of the Fort Washington troops. The delays of Congress, despite Washington’s attempts to consolidate the British prisoners dispersed throughout the colonies, delayed the cartel. In December, when rampant disease began killing American prisoners in New York, British Commissary of Prisoners Joshua Loring released American prisoners in a shrewd ploy to regain captive British troops while giving Washington men too ill to stand, let alone fight.¹⁶

The most famous failed exchange of the Revolution came in the wake of the Battles of Saratoga, which produced a group of captives known to historians as the Convention Army (Figure 1). British General John Burgoyne surrendered his entire army, including over five thousand British and German soldiers, under the terms of a convention, an agreement between himself and Major General Horatio Gates.¹⁷ The convention stipulated that the whole force could return to Europe, “on the condition of not serving again in North America during the present contest.”¹⁸ The terms, generous to the British, did not meet with approval from Congress or General Washington. Washington warned General William Heath that expediting the return of the Convention troops to Europe would “be attended with most obvious & capital disadvantages to us.”¹⁹ Congressional delegates, including President Henry Laurens, shared Washington’s hesitation about the Convention, and when Burgoyne became evasive about producing a list of the officers among the captured men, Congress suspended the embarkation of the prisoners indefinitely.²⁰ The Convention Army spent the remainder of the Revolutionary War in captivity. Historian T. Cole Jones estimates that after enduring captivity in “overcrowded and rotting barracks, jails, and prison ships in eight different states,” the Convention troops had lost 85 percent of their total number to death and desertion.²¹

American Prisoners of War

The British considered the American Revolution to be a treasonous rebellion. Parliament and the king did not want to legitimize the revolution by treating American prisoners as prisoners of war deserving of the same treatment afforded to the captive troops of legitimate European opponents.²² Instead of enemy soldiers, the British considered American soldiers to be rebels, traitors to the British Empire. During the Jacobite rising of 1745, the British had used violence to suppress rebellious Scots on the charge of treason and executed the leaders of the rising, thus sending a clear message to the rest of the empire that traitors would face death.²³ This message echoed during the American Revolution, and American prisoners of war learned the seriousness of the threat firsthand.

Appointed British administrators oversaw the dispersal, provisioning, and exchange of American prisoners. In March 1776, General Howe appointed Joshua Loring to serve as Commissary of Prisoners. Loring corresponded with George Washington and other American officials in order to exchange prisoners and arrange for the provisioning of prisoners in British captivity. Food shortages caused by the exigencies of war, combined with British reluctance to provide provisions, caused some American prisoners to starve. American Colonel Ethan Allen, captured during a failed attempt on Montreal in 1775, wrote in his postwar account of his captivity of prisoners who had “starved to death.”²⁴ Though many prisoners suffered under such conditions, the treatment of prisoners often varied depending on the disposition of the officer in charge of a given camp or prison ship.²⁵

The majority of American prisoners stayed in North America during their captivity, but the British sent some prisoners of war to Great Britain and the West Indies. Most prisoners sent to Great Britain had been captured in naval engagements and endured their captivity in localities that already possessed the infrastructure for holding prisoners. In Liverpool, American prisoners of war lived alongside British debtors and gamblers in the Old Tower Prison. Two other common destinations for American prisoners of war were Old Mill Prison in Plymouth and Forten Prison in Hampshire. Prisoners of war achieved high rates of escape from these and other British prisons. In 1780, several prisoners escaped from Forten Prison, owing to its poor design and upkeep. Lieutenant Luke Matthewman from New York recorded the escape, which was achieved by digging through the soft dirt of the prison floor. Matthewman reported that after digging a tunnel of approximately forty-two feet, “we broke up in the cellar kitchen of an old woman, who, being frightened, fell backwards, but recovering, called ‘the guard! The guard!’, however, we soon gagged her, and about sixty got out of the hole.”²⁶

The experiences of American enlisted men and officers in British captivity differed greatly. Officers could expect to receive parole, the freedom to travel within a set distance of one’s place of confinement, along with other allowances.²⁷ High-ranking officers including Colonel Allen, General Charles Lee, and General John Sullivan all had varying experiences of captivity among the British. Allen both enjoyed parole and suffered solitary confinement for breaking the same during his captivity.²⁸ He spent the majority of his captivity onboard various prison ships off the coasts of North America and Great Britain, and he described being kept in irons and suffering “wretched circumstances.” In May 1778, Commissary General of Prisoners for the Continental Army Elias Boudinot arranged Allen’s exchange for captive British officer Colonel Archibald Campbell. General Lee enjoyed a far more comfortable captivity following his 1776 capture, enjoying fine food and the company of both a manservant and one of his dogs in New York’s British-controlled City Hall.²⁹ During his own captivity, General Sullivan suffered the loss of his personal possessions to his captors but also enjoyed a fine, if politically motivated, dinner with General Howe.³⁰ Officers could experience anything from poor to excellent treatment during their captivity depending on their political usefulness, whether their captors sought to uphold the standards of European warfare, and their places of confinement. In cities, officers dined and socialized with military and political leaders, whereas rural locations offered fewer such social opportunities. The treatment of captive enlisted men varied from place to place as well, but the rank-and-file generally found worse conditions than those of their superior officers.

While the British offered parole to captured militiamen, the unluckiest of captive American soldiers in the Continental Army endured their captivity in prison ships or “hulks” docked in British-held harbors, including New York and Boston. The British army intended these prison ships to intimidate the Americans, but more often the horrors that occurred within them heightened revolutionary fervor.³¹ The ships in New York’s Wallabout Bay included the warship Centurion as well as troop transports including the Whitby, the Good Hope, and the Grosvenor.³² Tales from inside the hulls of prison ships recount prisoners starving, living in their own filth, and being forced to endure illness and injury without medical attention. Writing in 1776 from the Grosvenor, American prisoner William Slade of Connecticut wrote that “we now see nothing but the mercy of God to intercede for us. Sorrowful times, all faces look pale, discouraged, discouraged.”³³ Most infamous among the New York hulks was HMS Jersey, in which the greatest number of American prisoners perished during the Revolution. The ship began receiving prisoners in 1779 and continued to hold prisoners until 1783 (Figure 2). One prisoner reported in a newspaper that the ship once held 1,100 American prisoners at one time, three times her normal capacity.³⁴ Editors printed such prisoner accounts from the Jersey for the consumption of an increasingly incensed reading public.

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Figure 2. Interior of the Old Jersey Prison Ship, Edward Bookhout and Felix Octavius Carr Darley, 1855, Library of Congress.

Source: Photograph in the public domain.

Following France’s entry into the war, the war itself and the locations of prison camps shifted southward. At the Siege of Charleston in 1780, the British captured nearly six thousand American and allied prisoners, the largest number captured at one time during the war. The mounting burden caused by these and other prisoners captured in southern battles compelled the British to enlist men from among the captive ranks. Though Lord Charles Cornwallis, commander of the British forces in the South, forbade the enlistment of American prisoners in the British Army, recruiters in South Carolina defied the order.³⁵ Many Americans seized this opportunity to avoid imprisonment on board disease-laden prison ships in Charleston harbor and in overcrowded barracks and other prisons on land. Some American prisoners captured in the southern campaigns were recruited to fight the Spanish in the Caribbean, where high death rates among British soldiers necessitated new recruits.³⁶ Other prisoners refused enlistment but reported still being “compelled to serve against [their] countrymen.”³⁷ The British permitted some prisoners to labor for their subsistence, constructing forts and other buildings for the British forces.

Retaliation

Americans could not ignore the plight of captive Americans in British captivity. Along with the reading public, who were exposed to printed accounts of Americans languishing in the hulls of prison hulks, Americans who lived near the hulks and prison camps also could not avoid evidence of British cruelties. Historian Erica Charters argues that, during the Revolutionary War, “the welfare of prisoners played a significant role in the shaping of public disapproval of British imperial authority.”³⁸ Contemporary readers did not scrutinize the veracity of well-publicized accounts of prisoners in British captivity, which served as fodder for the Patriot cause. Outrage from the public led Congress to appoint committees to investigate British treatment of American prisoners. One such committee, which included congressional delegates Samuel Chase and the Reverend John Witherspoon, reported that the British treated prisoners “with the greatest barbarity” and forced them to suffer “utmost distress from cold, nakedness and close confinement.”³⁹ In response to such findings and the outcry of the American public, General Washington and other commanders promised to exact vengeance upon British prisoners in American captivity.⁴⁰ Such promises went unfulfilled, since Congress’s desire to demonstrate compliance with European standards of warfare tempered the persistent calls for retribution.

But the lack of a continental policy of revenge did not prevent vengeance entirely .⁴¹ Among the more violent episodes of the Revolutionary War were retaliatory actions taken by Americans and Britons against enemy prisoners of war. The Huddy-Asgill Affair exemplifies the role of vengeance in fomenting violence during the Revolutionary War. In 1782, the British Associated Loyalists regiment executed Captain Joshua Huddy of the New Jersey militia as revenge for the death of Philip White, a Loyalist captured and killed by that same militia. Huddy was executed with a note pinned to his chest that read, in part, “we the refugees having long with grief beheld the cruel murders of our brethren . . . therefore determine not to suffer without taking vengeance.”⁴² The execution provoked outrage from British and American military leaders alike, as well as from noncombatants. Washington answered the event by declaring that a British prisoner, Captain Charles Asgill, would be executed in retaliation. Intervention by the French monarchy spared Asgill’s life, but the affair reflected the “eye for an eye” violence for which many Americans and Britons called during the Revolutionary War.

British Prisoners of War

The lack of congressional oversight of prisoners of war during the early years of the Revolution led to ad hoc systems of prisoner management. When colonies began receiving prisoners captured by their militias and the Continental Army, their legislatures asked Congress for its guidance. Legislators either requested that their colonies’ governors and representatives inquire about Congress’s position on prisoners, or else they inquired directly. In response to these inquiries, Congress released the October 1775 directive that captives should be treated “with humanity” and later that same year appointed congressional committees to find suitable places to confine prisoners captured in the 1775 Canadian campaign. Over the next several months, Congress passed resolutions outlining guidelines for the treatment of rank-and-file prisoners, who were allowed to “exercise their trades, and to labour, in order to support themselves and families,” and of officers, whom Congress authorized to draw two dollars per week on the congressional purse, to be repaid upon their eventual exchange. Congress also resolved to place prisoners of war in the care of “the supreme executive power in each Colony to which they are brought,” including the “Assemblies, Conventions, and Committees or Councils of Safety” scattered throughout the colonies.⁴³

In 1775–1776, states created systems and rules for prisoner management. In 1775, Massachusetts experienced the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Siege of Boston before Congress passed any guidance on the management of military prisoners. The colonial legislature and Council of Safety arranged for the provision and exchange of Massachusetts men in British captivity as well as for the management of British prisoners taken by the colonial militia.⁴⁴ In May, the Provincial Congress took the depositions of enemy prisoners in the state, assuming the task of intelligence procurement that the Continental Army would later prioritize within its own prisoner management system.⁴⁵ The New York Provincial Congress began electing commissaries to manage military prisoners in 1776, and the legislatures in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut also appointed officials to act as commissaries of prisoners of war within their colonies.⁴⁶ The men appointed often brought experience serving in their local and colonial governments with them into their new positions. Elisha Boudinot, who acted as Commissary for Prisoners in New Jersey, had served previously as the secretary of the state’s Council of Safety.⁴⁷ Connecticut commissaries Epaphras Bull and Ezekiel Williams had experience managing prisoners captured at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and Williams was the sheriff of Hartford when the General Assembly appointed him to replace Bull in 1777.⁴⁸

Appointed officials, local and colonial governments, militiamen, and civilians all provisioned, transported, and housed prisoners of war. In Connecticut, Governor Jonathan Trumbull and his advisory council facilitated prisoner exchanges during the recesses of the state’s General Assembly and corresponded with British authorities to secure financial support for prisoners in the state. When the number of military prisoners began to grow, the Assembly empowered a committee to manage the prisoners, secure provisions, and “take all such measures from time to time with regard to said prisoners as they in their discretion may find requisite.”⁴⁹ Civilians performed the daily tasks of prisoner management by doctoring, housing, and selling goods to prisoners of war. In December 1776, the New York Provincial Congress approved an account submitted by the state commissaries of prisoners to pay Doctor Benjamin Miller for medicines and his attendance to a sick prisoner. Colonial legislatures empowered local sheriffs and jail keepers to care for prisoners of war, which included the responsibility of recapturing the prisoners if they escaped. In 1777 Sheriff Michael Farley of Ipswich, Massachusetts, posted an advertisement for the recapture of three prisoners of war: “highland volunteer” Donnel McBean, Ewen Davis “of slim stature,” and Lile, another Highlander with a “dark complexion.”⁵⁰ Colonial governments also assigned militiamen to transport and guard prisoners.

After these early years characterized by state management of prisoners, Congress passed resolutions to establish a centralized system under the authority of the Continental Army. In April, George Washington chose Elias Boudinot to serve as Commissary General of Prisoners for the Continental Army. Having spent years asking that Congress standardize prisoner of war management, Washington expected Boudinot to begin immediately to “receive and distribute the Prisoners to places assign’d for their confinement” and to appoint deputies to assist him in the various localities.⁵¹ Boudinot began at once to gain an idea of the total number of prisoners in American captivity, writing to colonial governments to ask for lists of their military prisoners. Congress passed a resolution in December 1777 mandating a plan for the repayment of the debts incurred by the various states in caring for military prisoners since the start of the war. Congress also resolved in January 1778 that the states holding prisoners of war should “give every assistance in their power to the commissary general of prisoners or his deputies” as they worked to standardize the treatment of British-allied prisoners in America.⁵² Boudinot and his deputies worked with Continental Army officials and state governors, and took the lead in managing military prisoners for the remainder of the conflict.

The majority of British prisoners endured their captivity in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Detention centers included Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Rutland, Massachusetts; and Fort Frederick, Maryland. While in these various locations, enlisted prisoners could generally expect to be housed in barracks; officers were allowed to pay for more private accommodations in homes and taverns. Local governments and military commissaries provided provisions for prisoners, but the exigencies of war meant that prisoners were the first to be neglected during periods of food shortage. When authorities allowed prisoners to roam free on parole or as part of employment contracts, prisoners and locals clashed. Enlisted men and officers alike insulted local inhabitants and their own guards, occasionally leading to bloody brawls. In Massachusetts, a guard reported prisoners “fighting in the evening [and] insulting the inhabitants” and received “complaints da[i]ly from the inhabitant[s]” about enemy prisoners.⁵³ According to a 1776 congressional resolution, prisoners could work for additional subsistence, but military and civil officials prevented prisoners from leaving their barracks in response to successful escapes. Despite such measures, prisoners continued to escape. Meanwhile, George Washington and Congress tried to prevent the enlistment of prisoners in the Continental Army, but some prisoners still sought and gained their freedom by taking up arms for the Patriot cause.

The Americans captured their first German prisoners of war at the Battles of Trenton and Princeton in the winter of 1776–1777. In January 1777, 839 prisoners, along with seven women and four children arrived in Lancaster.⁵⁴ Americans saw German soldiers as more likely to waver in their loyalties, owing to their auxiliary status. Seeking to subvert their loyalty to the British, Congress allowed German prisoners greater mobility in American communities in the hope that they would come to sympathize with the American cause. Americans took advantage of the Germans’ additional freedom by employing the prisoners to work in return for pay and food. Many German prisoners were skilled weavers, smiths, and shoemakers, making their labor highly valuable to overtaxed wartime economies. Many German prisoners endured their captivity in Pennsylvania, including in the Moravian towns of Bethlehem, Lebanon, and Hebron, where prisoners integrated into the local communities. A diarist in Hebron reported that German prisoners attended religious services and often sang and danced in the evenings.⁵⁵ Outside of Pennsylvania, German prisoners also stayed in Winchester and Charlottesville, Virginia, and Frederick, Maryland.

Women experienced captivity as the wives of British-allied prisoners and as civilians offering supportive services. In December 1775, Congress appointed Loyalist David Franks of Philadelphia to supply prisoners of war in Pennsylvania at the expense of the crown. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Franks refused to provide food for the families of the prisoners. The prisoners’ wives petitioned the local Committee of Safety, writing that “they must inevitably perish, unless relieved from their present distress.”⁵⁶ Officers could expect to receive more generous allowances for themselves and their families. Congress and colonial governments often granted the requests of captive officers to live with their wives or families during captivity. American civilian women often provided supportive services to prisoners, including nursing prisoners stationed in their towns when they fell ill.⁵⁷ In May 1777, Timothy Bishop of Guildford, Connecticut, petitioned the state General Assembly for the costs associated with nursing his wife back to health after she tended “two of the prisoners from New York sick with the small-pox.”⁵⁸ Civilian women also housed and fed captive officers in their homes and taverns. In March 1776, Congress paid Rachel Stille for “boarding several officers, prisoners, to the 8th of March instant, the sum of 84 pounds 6 5 =224.7 dollars.”⁵⁹

Famous Captives: John André and Charles Lee

Among the thousands of British and American prisoners captured during the war, several stand out for their contemporary and enduring fame. Charles Lee and John André, officers in the American and British armies respectively, experienced captivity quite differently from enlisted men. They each commanded significant authority by virtue of their respective ranks, John André a major and Charles Lee a major general. Their treatment by enemy authorities while in captivity held even greater implications for British-American wartime diplomacy than did the treatment of the rank and file.

Born in 1751, John Andrè headed British intelligence operations starting in May 1779 (Figure 3).⁶⁰ In that year, André became Adjutant General of the British Army, gaining the rank of major. In this position, André began a correspondence with Continental Army Major gGeneral Benedict Arnold, commanding West Point. André encouraged Arnold’s treason, which resulted in the turncoat’s dramatic escape from New York in September 1780. Three American militiamen captured André with incriminating evidence on his person before he could return to the safety of the British lines. Since he had removed his military coat to disguise himself behind American lines, André did not, according to Washington, “stand upon the footing of a common prisoner of War and therefore he is not intitled [sic] to the usual indulgences they receive.” A jury of American generals, including Nathanael Greene and the Marquis de Lafayette, found the young officer guilty of being a spy and sentenced him to death. André suffered execution by hanging in October, just days after Arnold’s treachery came to light.

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Figure 3. Self-Portrait by John André, Pen and brown ink, 1780. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Source: In the public domain.

Major General Charles Lee experienced a comparatively long captivity (Figure 4). Early on December 13, 1776, British dragoons took the American commander captive at a tavern outside Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Lore maintains that Lee met his captors in his undergarments, but the general only neglected to don his hat and cloak before surrendering himself as a prisoner of war on that cold morning. Determination of Lee’s fate fell toBritish General Howe. Howe signaled his inclination to treat Lee as a traitor rather than a prisoner of war by referring to the general as a lieutenant colonel, his former rank while still serving in the British Army. With a status somewhere between prisoner of war and traitor to the British Empire, Lee had a better experience of captivity than enlisted men, but still felt cheated of his gentleman status. The American general endured his captivity on board HMS Centurion, the crew of which delighted in verbally tormenting him for his treason. Lee’s self-importance, which manifested itself in declarations of the superiority of the American cause and forces, did little to lessen the taunting. Despite these professions, however, Lee still attempted, from within his prison without bars, to facilitate peace talks between the Americans and the British. Though the negotiations never materialized, the attempt harmed Lee’s image within the Continental Army. When the American Commissary General of Prisoners Elias Boudinot secured his exchange in April 1778, Lee returned to an army suspicious of his loyalties.

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Figure 4. Charles Lee (1731–1782), major general of the Continental Army in America. Mezzotint by unknown artist, 1775. Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL.

Source: In the public domain.

Postwar Integrations and Publications

On September 3, 1783, British and American representatives signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War. In April, Congress resolved for “all the naval prisoners to be set at liberty” and that the “Secretary at War, in conjunction with the Commander in Chief, take proper arrangements for setting at liberty all land prisoners.”⁶¹ Stephan Popp, a German soldier captured at Yorktown and held in captivity in Virginia, wrote that he, upon learning of the peace, “could not at first believe the news told us by some of our men, until it was confirmed by people of the town.”⁶² Some German prisoners of war chose to stay in North America, marrying American women or finding long-term employment in their former places of confinement. American prisoners of war returned to their homes, where some reckoned with their experiences by publishing captivity narratives in newspapers and as books and pamphlets. Ethan Allen’s A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779) entertained the reading public in serial form before being reprinted eight times as a book before the end of the war. John Blatchford’s Narrative of Remarkable Occurrences (1788) similarly captivated readers through an artful mix of fact and fiction. In the early decades of the 19th century, prisoner narratives became more popular and more creative, spurred by nationalistic sentiment following the War of 1812 and an 1818 congressional pension act requiring proof of service if a pension was to be received.

British and American prisoners of war had faced a range of possible fates when they found themselves captured by the enemy. For some British-allied prisoners, captivity would mean employment, integration into a local community, and eventual exchange. American prisoners generally suffered worse fates, with the unluckiest meeting painful deaths in the hulls of British prison ships. The political motivations of British and American leaders influenced the treatment of prisoners, with many prisoners ending up in the space between rules and their enforcement. The experiences of prisoners of war during the American Revolution—including delayed exchanges, violence, and food shortages—highlight the logistical and human challenges that remain after the dust of battle settles.

Discussion of the Literature

Only in recent decades has the study of prisoners of war during the American Revolution been broadened to include British-allied captives. Daniel Krebs’s A Generous and Merciful Enemy: Life for German Prisoners of War during the American Revolution explores the experience of the war for conscripted German soldiers.⁶³ In Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence, Ken Miller argues that community-wide opposition to German prisoners of war created a common American identity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.⁶⁴ The most recent work on British-allied prisoners in the American Revolution is Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution. In the book, T. Cole Jones uses the captivity experiences of military prisoners to argue that, over the course of the conflict, Congress gradually lost its grip on the goal of fighting a restrained war.⁶⁵

Alongside the emergent focus on British-allied prisoners, historians have continued to uncover new details about the experience of captivity for American prisoners of war. In “‘We All Hoisted the American Flag’: National Identity among American Prisoners in Britain during the American Revolution,” Francis D. Cogliano investigates how Americans navigated their identity as Patriots in captivity.⁶⁶ In “Prisoners of War and American Self-Image during the American Revolution,” David Dzurec reverses Cogliano’s focus to consider how the letters and diaries of American prisoners inspired Patriot sentiments back home.⁶⁷ Carl P. Borick uses Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application files to illuminate the experiences of American captives in Relieve Us of This Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South, 1780–1782.⁶⁸

In addition to scholarly interest, American prisoners of war continue to capture popular attention. Edwin G. Burrows’s popular book Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War documents life in the “hell-holes” of British prisons.⁶⁹ Linda Colley puts American prisoners in a broader, comparative perspective in Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850.⁷⁰

Military historians seeking to contextualize the modern treatment of military prisoners have explored the 18th-century experiences of British-allied prisoners. Paul J. Springer’s America’s Captives: Treatment of POWs from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror and Robert C. Doyle’s The Enemy in Our Hands: America’s Treatment of Prisoners of War from the Revolution to the War on Terror trace the development of America’s prisoner of war policies from their earliest roots.⁷¹

Future work on prisoners of war might include a focus on the women and children who often accompanied British and American soldiers onto the battlefields and into captivity. These “camp followers” fared worse than captive men in some cases, owing to the inconsistency with which authorities provided provisions to prisoner populations. Distinctions in the treatment of white, indigenous, and Black prisoners of war by British and American authorities also merits further investigation. In The Negro in the American Revolution, Benjamin Quarles discusses several instances of African American prisoners in American and British captivity: in at least one instance, a captured enslaved person named David Mitchell was given his freedom by the Massachusetts Council after he was captured by Patriot forces on a British sloop.⁷² Investigating how civil and military authorities shared authority over prisoners could also yield insights into the development of America’s early federal system.