British prisoners, post-Saratoga

[wayward_shadows]

I have, lately, been catching up on reading and while (finally) finishing Urban's Fusiliers, I happened across mentions of a topic that has interested me for some time. This topic being the treatment and fate of redcoats who were captured by Americans over the course of the war, as this appears to be a subject that not much has been written about.

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[wayward_shadows]

Indeed. It would appear, if one relies solely on Urban's writing, that the Continentals were more willing to resort to executions - whether of deserters or 'cowards' - than were the British. It is fact that more often than not, courts-martial that returned capital sentences would usually grant clemency. Floggings, on the other hand, were employed by the British, but I'm not sure myself to what particular extent.

Some British courts-martial records can be found here, in fact.

By contrast, American prisoners were kept in deplorable conditions, whether aboard prison hulks or in warehouses or churches. From what I've read, it doesn't appear that any great planning went into the housing of captured Continentals, so they were simply put into the first convenient places the British in New York could find. The Hulks Act of 1776 (permitting convicted criminals to be held long-term aboard hulks in the Thames) helped in this respect. Sort of.

In the narrative he later ser to paper for his children, Ichabod Perry - then a seventeen-year-old private from Fairfield, Connecticut - described the "utter darkness" of his first night baoard one of the ships, when he and the other men were packed so tightly that as many as a third of them suffocated by morning. "It took us the better part of a Day to pull out the dead," he wrote. The survivors, fed rations "not fit for hogs," soon became delirious with hunger. Perry himself began to think "I could eat my own flesh without wincing." Because only a few prisoners were allowed on deck at a time, "we had no means for clenzing ourselves, our outside Clothes was glas'd over with besmear and our under Clothes was not much better, and not an hair was cut from our faces while [I] was there." One of those paroled around the first of February 1777, he somehow managed to make it home, "hardly able to Draw one foot after the other," yet eager to be exchanged "so that I cul'd be at them again."

(From E.G. Burrows' Forgotten Patriots.)