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.

Comments

[rosinarowantree]

That is very interesting. I wonder whether the prisoners' conditions, including brutality from officers, were much worse than those of soldiers - either in the Continental, or the British armies... It all sounds rather as if they did not expect to be hanged, shot, or even flogged.

I know far too little about that war - just snippets, and knowing that The Patriot Is Not History.

[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

[eglantine_br]

I live in Brooklyn, about half a mile from what was once Wallabout Bay. There, Americans were held on prison hulks. In the years after the war, bodies routinely washed up on the beach. They were the remains of those pitched over.

After the civil war, Walt Whitman collected money to have a monument and park made, the bones were reinterred there. We take our dog there now.

In my fiction, I recently had to write about the treatment of prisoners. I had an awful lot to draw on, and it all seemed the same. The accounts of petty cruelty did not vary much by nation or century. It made me very sad.