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Author: Edwin G. Burrows Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0786727047 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons—more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crown's military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed—those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence—and how much we have forgotten.
Author: Edwin G. Burrows Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0786727047 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 360
Book Description
Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons—more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crown's military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed—those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence—and how much we have forgotten.
Author: Danske Dandridge Publisher: ISBN: Category : Prisoners of war Languages : en Pages : 762
Book Description
Liberty Street Sugar House was a tall, narrow building five stories in height, and with dismal underground dungeons. In this gloomy abode jail fever was ever present. In the hot weather of July, 1777, companies of twenty at a time would be sent out for half an hour's outing, in the court yard. Inside groups of six stood for ten minutes at a time at the windows for a breath of air.
Author: T. Cole Jones Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812296559 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Contrary to popular belief, the American Revolutionary War was not a limited and restrained struggle for political self-determination. From the onset of hostilities, British authorities viewed their American foes as traitors to be punished, and British abuse of American prisoners, both tacitly condoned and at times officially sanctioned, proliferated. Meanwhile, more than seventeen thousand British and allied soldiers fell into American hands during the Revolution. For a fledgling nation that could barely afford to keep an army in the field, the issue of how to manage prisoners of war was daunting. Captives of Liberty examines how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, and how this influenced the wider social and political legacies of the Revolution. When the struggle began, according to T. Cole Jones, revolutionary leadership strove to conduct the war according to the prevailing European customs of military conduct, which emphasized restricting violence to the battlefield and treating prisoners humanely. However, this vision of restrained war did not last long. As the British denied customary protections to their American captives, the revolutionary leadership wasted no time in capitalizing on the prisoners' ordeals for propagandistic purposes. Enraged, ordinary Americans began to demand vengeance, and they viewed British soldiers and their German and Native American auxiliaries as appropriate targets. This cycle of violence spiraled out of control, transforming the struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war. In illuminating this history, Jones contends that the violence of the Revolutionary War had a profound impact on the character and consequences of the American Revolution. Captives of Liberty not only provides the first comprehensive analysis of revolutionary American treatment of enemy prisoners but also reveals the relationship between America's political revolution and the war waged to secure it.
Author: Daniel Krebs Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806189037 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
Some 37,000 soldiers from six German principalities, collectively remembered as Hessians, entered service as British auxiliaries in the American War of Independence. At times, they constituted a third of the British army in North America, and thousands of them were imprisoned by the Americans. Despite the importance of Germans in the British war effort, historians have largely overlooked these men. Drawing on research in German military records and common soldiers’ letters and diaries, Daniel Krebs places the prisoners on center stage in A Generous and Merciful Enemy, portraying them as individuals rather than simply as numbers in casualty lists. Setting his account in the context of British and European politics and warfare, Krebs explains the motivations of the German states that provided contract soldiers for the British army. We think of the Hessians as mercenaries, but, as he shows, many were conscripts. Some were new recruits; others, veterans. Some wanted to stay in the New World after the war. Krebs further describes how the Germans were made prisoners, either through capture or surrender, and brings to life their experiences in captivity from New England to Havana, Cuba. Krebs discusses prison conditions in detail, addressing both the American approach to war prisoners and the prisoners’ responses to their experience. He assesses American efforts as a “generous and merciful enemy” to use the prisoners as economic, military, and propagandistic assets. In the process, he never loses sight of the impact of imprisonment on the POWs themselves. Adding new dimensions to an important but often neglected topic in military history, Krebs probes the origins of the modern treatment of POWs. An epilogue describes an almost-forgotten 1785 treaty between the United States and Prussia, the first in western legal history to regulate the treatment of prisoners of war.
Author: Larry Lowenthal Publisher: ISBN: Category : East River (N.Y.) Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
"Far fewer people have heard of Wallabout Bay on the Brooklyn shore of the East River or know the terrible story of American sailors who were imprisoned there on wretched hulks like the Jersey. ... Hell on the East River uses the prisoners' own accounts to describe the agony of imprisonment, analyzes the number of deaths, examines the reasons for the tragedy, and describes the 100-year struggle to erect the present Prison Ship.
Author: Danske Dandridge Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand ISBN: 338731132X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 786
Book Description
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
Author: Carl P. Borick Publisher: ISBN: 9781611170399 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Relieve Us of This Burthen is the first book-length study of Continental soldiers, officers, and militiamen held as prisoners of war by the British in the South during the American Revolution. Carl P. Borick focuses his study on the period 1780-82, when British forces most actively campaigned in the South. He gives a detailed examination of the various hardships of imprisonment and efforts to assist and exchange prisoners while also chronicling events and military policies that affected prisoners during and after captivity. As have prisoners of any war, captives in the Revolution suffered both physical and mental adversities during their imprisonments, and the impact often stayed with them after their release. Many escaped their captors or broke paroles to fight again. Others were exchanged; still others enlisted in British forces sent to the West Indies; and many died in prison. Because of the intense combat in South Carolina, more Americans were taken prisoner there than elsewhere across the Southern Department. Borick concentrates much of his narrative on Charleston and the lowcountry. Some six thousand Continentals, militia, and seamen were captured when Charleston surrendered in May 1780. This was the largest number of prisoners taken during a single operation. Occupied Charleston became the key prisoner depot for the British in the South. Borick also explores British recruiting efforts among prisoners, particularly by the Duke of Cumberland's Regiment, raised from prisoners kept in Charleston for service in the West Indies against the French and Spanish. That regiment's experiences during and after the war were far different from those of other American soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Relieve Us of This Burthen makes groundbreaking use of the Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application files, which have been underutilized with regard to understanding the history of prisoners of war. Borick's careful reading of the pension files reveals much about what men went through and how they endured in captivity.
Author: Robert P. Watson Publisher: Da Capo Press ISBN: 0306825538 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
The most horrific struggle of the American Revolution occurred just 100 yards off New York, where more men died aboard a rotting prison ship than were lost to combat during the entirety of the war. Moored off the coast of Brooklyn until the end of the war, the derelict ship, the HMS Jersey, was a living hell for thousands of Americans either captured by the British or accused of disloyalty. Crammed below deck--a shocking one thousand at a time--without light or fresh air, the prisoners were scarcely fed food and water. Disease ran rampant and human waste fouled the air as prisoners suffered mightily at the hands of brutal British and Hessian guards. Throughout the colonies, the mere mention of the ship sparked fear and loathing of British troops. It also sparked a backlash of outrage as newspapers everywhere described the horrors onboard the ghostly ship. This shocking event, much like the better-known Boston Massacre before it, ended up rallying public support for the war. Revealing for the first time hundreds of accounts culled from old newspapers, diaries, and military reports, award-winning historian Robert P. Watson follows the lives and ordeals of the ship's few survivors to tell the astonishing story of the cursed ship that killed thousands of Americans and yet helped secure victory in the fight for independence.
Author: Edwin G. Burrows
Author: Edwin G. Burrows
Author: Danske Dandridge
Author: T. Cole Jones
Author: Daniel Krebs
Author: Larry Lowenthal
Author: Danske Dandridge
Author: Danske Dandridge
Author: DANSKE. DANDRIDGE
Author: Carl P. Borick
Author: Robert P. Watson