Devil's Island, New York

by Edwin G. Burrows, The New York Times Op-Ed page, July 3, 2006

NEW YORKERS are a famously restless, impatient sort of people, focused more on where they're going than where they've been. That's a real pity where the American Revolution is concerned, because the city played a key role in the resistance to King George III that led up to the Declaration of Independence. It's also the place where thousands of men died during the Revolutionary War that followed — not in combat, but in British prisons.

From 1775 to 1783, some 200,000 colonials took up arms against the crown. While the statistics are rough, it has been estimated that more than 6,800 died in battle. An additional 10,000 perished from wounds or disease. At least 18,200 became prisoners of war, most of whom were confined in New York City — along with perhaps as many as 1,500 civilian prisoners.

New York's little-known role as the jailhouse of the Revolution stemmed from a decision by the British to use the city as the nerve center of military operations in North America. An invasion in the summer of 1776 brushed aside General Washington's hastily arranged defenses and left the British with a bumper crop of American captives — and no place to put them.

The solution was to squeeze the men into an assortment of public and private buildings — including the new municipal almshouse and jail, a half-dozen churches, and two or three "sugar houses," or refineries. Broken-down warships and transports, stripped of masts and rigging, were soon pressed into service as well. Anchored in Wallabout Bay (now the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard), they became one of the most widely recognized and terrifying symbols of the British occupation.

These makeshift prisons, most of which remained in use throughout the Revolutionary War, were shockingly overcrowded — 20 men per cell in the city jail, 700 or more in one of the churches, as many as a thousand at a time in the steaming hold of a Wallabout hulk. The men never had enough to eat, and what they did have was barely edible. The water stank. Slop buckets ran over. Blankets and clothing were infested with lice. Typhus, smallpox and scurvy ran rampant.

Those who got out alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own shoes and clothes, of prison hulks whose decks were slippery with excrement, of wagons rumbling through cobblestone streets with corpses stacked like cordwood, of bodies hastily interred by the dozen on the beaches of Wallabout or in trenches on the outskirts of the city.

Communities around the country were directly touched by the catastrophe. Litchfield, Conn., sent 32 of its sons to war; 20 died in the prisons of New York and six more of malnutrition and disease on the way home. Fifty men from Danbury, Conn., were confined in one of the city's sugar houses; two survived. Of 130 prisoners from Northampton County in Pennsylvania only 40 made it out of the city. The final death toll will never be known, though a figure of 12,000 or more is consistent with the available evidence. During the Revolutionary War, in other words, more Americans lost their lives in the prisons and prison ships of New York than from any other cause — very nearly twice as many as those who died in combat. No one was surprised when the British provost marshal, William Cunningham, was reported to have claimed responsibility for killing more rebels in New York than the rest of His Majesty's forces combined.

The places where this happened vanished years ago, along with almost everything else in New York having to do with the Revolution. If the victims are remembered today, it is only thanks to the monuments in Trinity Churchyard and Fort Greene Park, plus a handful of little-read literary landmarks: Philip Freneau's epic poem "The British Prison Ship" (1781), for example, or the autobiographical "Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen's Captivity" (1779), one of the most popular American books before the Civil War.

Allen's account of the horrors he saw in the New York prisons still makes for difficult reading. But then you learn what happened when enemy recruiters offered to release anyone who agreed to join His Majesty's army. "The integrity of these suffering prisoners is hardly credible," Allen wrote. "Many hundreds, I am confident, submitted to death, rather than to enlist in the British service." [Was patriotism or suicide? Depends on which side you are on! -- Editor]

The prisoners of New York left their mark somewhere else, too — in international law. Almost to the bitter end, the British took the position that captured American insurgents weren't soldiers but "rebels" and that defining them as prisoners of war amounted to de facto recognition of American independence. Americans responded that by not according prisoner-of-war status to the captives, the British had opened the door to, perhaps even encouraged, prison abuses.

An additional complication was that rules and standards governing the treatment of prisoners of war had yet to be spelled out definitively in international law. This began to change in 1785, just two years after the British evacuated Manhattan, when the United States and Prussia concluded a treaty that included the first guidelines for the humane treatment of prisoners of war. They mustn't be denied adequate rations and basic "comforts," it declared, nor "be confined in dungeons, prison ships, nor prisons, nor be put into irons, nor bound, nor otherwise restrained in the use of their limbs."

This groundbreaking agreement — a direct result of the recent American experience — was a historic first step toward the multinational conventions that now protect prisoners of war.

Of course, even if such guidelines had been in effect during the Revolutionary War, there's no guarantee that they would have been followed. Britain was the world's superpower in those days, as the United States is now, and if King George didn't want to treat "rebel" prisoners humanely, only principle and conscience stood in his way.

Edwin G. Burrows, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the co-author of "Gotham: A History of New York to 1898," is the author of the forthcoming "The Prisoners of New York."

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