New York City was lost and the British could now isolate New England from Pennsylvania and the southern colonies. They also gained an important harbor and base from which to wage war both northward and southward. The signs of war were everywhere. Buildings were pockmarked by musket and cannon fire. Barricades, redoubts, and camps were being erected throughout the city and adjacent communities on Long Island. General Howe also declared martial law in the city, forcing residents to sign oaths of loyalty to the Crown or be arrested. Many chose to flee the city for nearby Connecticut.
But the Howe brothers had their own problems. A staggering thirty-two thousand soldiers needed housing, and there simply was not enough food to feed everyone. Consequently, British troops were quartered in any and all available homes and, because supplies were very slow to arrive from England and subject to attack from American privateers, royal quartermasters contracted with local farmers for cattle, eggs, and produce. When that proved inadequate to feed a hungry army, they simply stole what they needed. The result was that both the troops and local residents often went hungry. Prisoners starved.
The deteriorating conditions in the city and lack of housing were compounded when many hundreds of loyalists from surrounding villages and other states arrived in the city, announcing they were war “refugees.” The quality of life in the city further deteriorated as the British army confiscated essential materials. Civilians were forced to scavenge and loot the towns and countryside in order to live. All public services ceased to function, bringing about shortages of medicine and other essentials. Pools of waste soon accumulated and disease swept through the city. A grisly account of another factor was recorded by Ambrose Searle, an aide to Admiral Howe, who described “the Stench of the dead Bodies of the Rebels” in the woods and fields around the city.
The turmoil and carnage were made all the worse by a shortage of public buildings and homes. Around midnight on the evening of September 21, as the patriots were abandoning the city, a fire tore through the western part of the city and into the southern tip of Manhattan. The blaze burned hundreds of structures—nearly one-third of the city. General Howe attributed the inferno to anti-British arsonists or General Washington’s spies, and the resulting crackdown on the city’s residents was harsh. It set the tone for the military occupation of the city for the remainder of the war. Many residents were intimidated into saying they were loyalists or simply had to keep quiet in order to be spared.
The entire campaign to seize New York City had lasted less than five months and cost the British only a few dozen dead and a few hundred wounded, whereas the Americans suffered thousands dead, wounded, or captured, including three generals, seven colonels, two majors, and nineteen captains.
As for General Washington, he finally managed to elude the Howe brothers. His army, greatly diminished in number, fled south through New Jersey and crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, where they would camp during the cold winter of 1776–77.* Coming just weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the inglorious loss of New York City dealt a severe blow to the war effort. The city would remain in Redcoat hands for the remainder of the conflict.
The seizure of New York City and deterioration of the conditions in the area were observed by the crew of the HMS Jersey, an old British warship anchored not far from the fighting. The converted hospital and supply ship was about to enter the war… but in a vastly different way.
3
City of Prisons
If in this wreck or ruin, they
Can yet be thought to claim a tear,
O smite your gentle breast, and say
The friends of freedom slumber here!
—Philip Freneau, “The British Prison-Ship” (1781)
Few prisoners had been captured by either side prior to the Battle of Brooklyn. But after a summer and fall of fighting in and around New York City, General Howe found himself in possession of roughly four thousand American prisoners and did not know what to do with them. To put the growing prisoner dilemma in context, the British had captured only about thirty men at Bunker Hill the year prior. Most of the four thousand now in British possession were captured at Brooklyn and after the fall of Fort Washington. In the weeks to come, another one thousand private citizens of New York were arrested by the British on suspicion of supporting the patriots’ cause. The numbers continued to rise, and New York soon became a “city of prisons.”
British commanders were not prepared for so many prisoners; nor was New York City. In the year 1770, census numbers put the population of Brooklyn at only about thirty-six hundred people. It was a village of single-story, wooden homes and much of the surrounding area was made up of fields farmed by Dutch settlers. There was also a sizable slave population in King’s County. In fact, the area had the highest slaves-per-capita ratio in the northern half of America. Under British rule, any attempts to abolish slavery and any slave uprisings in the region were suppressed, leaving the Dutch farmers to benefit from the shameful institution. As a result, most of the region’s farmers remained steadfastly loyal to the British.
There were now far more people in New York City than available housing, especially after the destructive fire that swept through parts of the city. The region had only two proper jails—New Bridewell Jail and the New Jail, which was popularly known as “the Provost.” The British were disinterested in devoting precious resources and personnel to building prisons, and after the decisive victories in and around New York City, it appeared the war would soon be over. Thus the decision was made by British officials to confiscate large buildings for use as temporary detention facilities for prisoners. This included the cavernous “sugar houses” of the region, such as Livingston’s Sugar House on Liberty Street (formerly Crown Street), Van Cortland’s Sugar House near Trinity Church, and the Rhinelander Sugar House on Duane Street. Unfortunately, many of these warehouses were demolished in the 1840s and 1850s, but descriptions of the deplorable conditions remain.
Even with the reallocation of the two jails and sugar houses there were still far too many prisoners without housing. The British were so in need of space that they even used King’s College and City Hall on Wall Street as prisons.* Of course, none of the buildings were designed in a way that was conducive to housing a prison population, from the perspective of either security or adequate lodging for the inmates. But the situation was desperate; additional facilities were needed.
The first buildings in the city to be used as prisons were the Presbyterian Church on Cedar and Wall Streets and the Dutch Reformed churches in the city, including the Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street and the Old North Dutch Church on William Street. The latter church was forced to accommodate eight hundred prisoners even though it was designed for a fraction of that amount of parishioners. Pews were removed to make room for the swelling prison population and were later used as firewood that winter. But there was still inadequate space for the prisoners. Additional churches were commandeered, including the French Church on Pine and Nassau Streets, the Quaker Meeting House, the venerable Trinity Church, the Scotch Church on Cedar Street, and one known as the “Brick Church” on Park. Prisoners were crammed into these houses of worship with little regard for the well-being of either the churches or the prisoners.
It was war, and the British had been shocked by the determined opposition at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775. For instance, on the march back to Boston after the fighting at Concord on April 19, the long line of British troops came under constant assault by American farmers and townsfolk, who fired at them from behind trees and out of barn doors as they passed by. Therefore, contrary to images in popular culture of British forces conducting the war by genteel means, they now intended to inflict massive hardships on the upstart Americans. This included prisoners in New York City. The temporary detention facilities would not simply house but punish colonials considered to be disloyal to the Crown.
The British had long since run out of patience and were now playing for keep
s. Case in point: Admiral Samuel Graves, the Royal Navy officer commanding forces in Boston, advocated “burning and laying waste the whole country!” Graves attacked civilians and, in October 1775, destroyed the town of Falmouth, Maine. British commanders did not consider the Americans to be honorable foes. Therefore, the men suffering in squalor in old sugar houses and cramped churches were not classified as prisoners of war; they were seen as “rebels.”
The same bitter feelings were present in England, where public sentiment soured on their brethren in America. The result was twofold: as stated by a British officer who captured Americans at Brooklyn, “Rebels taken in arms forfeit their lives by the laws of all Countries. The keeping of all the Rebel prisoners taken in arms, without any immediate hope of release, and in a state of uncertainty with respect to their fate, would certainly strike great terror into their army.” Indeed, the British began to see imprisonment as a psychological weapon of terror, and as the war dragged on and on, the brutal treatment of prisoners worsened, especially on an old, rotting prison ship.
When the prisoners were first processed at the sugar houses, churches, and other makeshift prisons, they were stripped of their clothing and possessions and given old garments to wear. One such instance involved Alexander Graydon, who described the Hessians stealing his belongings and those of his comrades. He also recalled the taunts, complaining, “The term rebel, with the epithet damned before it, was the mildest we received.” They were also threatened with hangings and subjected to beatings. Graydon expected to die.
A Pennsylvanian named Isaac van Horne shared a similar story: “[Our] side arms, watches, shoe-buckles, and even the clothes on our backs were wrestled from us.” A fellow Keystone Stater, Lieutenant Samuel Lindsay, had been shot in the leg during the defense of Brooklyn but, despite his injury, was brutally beaten by the Hessians with blows to the head from the “butt end of a musket.” He was nearly blinded and almost died.
With little planning and less concern, the British incarcerated soldiers by the hundreds in these cramped spaces. The American prisoners had no room to sleep, little food, and brackish water. The result was that they were soon afflicted by disease and the facilities overrun by pests. Prisoners started dying in alarming numbers. One eyewitness referred to the makeshift prisons as “dreadful.” A British report admitted as much: “A number of people… crowded together in so small a compass almost like herrings in a barrel, most of them very dirty and not a small number sick of some disease, the Itch, Pox, Fever, or Flux.” It went on to note that everywhere could be found “a complication of stinks enough to drive a person whose sense of smelling was very delicate and his lungs of the finest contexture, into a consumption in the space of twenty-four hours.” Indeed, every horror plagued the prisoners—putrid food, polluted water, disease, lice, no hygiene or fresh air, and no proper burial.
The worst was the starvation. With food and supplies inadequate for His Majesty’s army, American prisoners at the beginning of the war received rations only twice a week, consisting of one-half pound of biscuit, one-half pound of pork, one-half pint of peas, one-half cup of rice, and half an ounce of butter. Under such conditions, some prisoners resorted to eating old shoes. A prisoner named Samuel Young, captured at the beginning of the fighting in New York, remembered being incarcerated in a large stable in the city with five hundred other men. He described having food literally thrown at them, “in a confused manner, as if to so many hogs.” The food consisted of “a quantity of old biscuit, broken, and in crumbs, mostly molded, and some of it crawling with maggots, which they were obliged to scramble for.” They had no choice but to eat the rotten food if they wanted to live and, Young recalled, “they were obliged to eat [it] raw.”
The allowance of water was such that it was barely enough to keep a man alive, and the prisoners were not provided with soap for bathing. The prisoners were also subjected to public humiliation, paraded through the streets of New York as a spectacle. Curious spectators lined the streets to hurl insults and rotten food at the men.
Yet another hardship was the weather. The heat of summer was difficult but, with a lack of blankets and coats, many prisoners froze during the abnormally cold winter of 1776–77. Snow accumulated inside the churches, sugar houses, and hulked ships through broken windows, covering those prisoners too weak or ill to move. Survivors of that first winter remembered the outcome: “Each morning, several frozen corpses were dragged out, thrown into wagons like logs, carted away, and then pitched into a large hole or trench to be covered up like dead animals.” Another prisoner recalled, “The distress of the prisoners cannot be communicated by words. Twenty or thirty die every day. They lie in heaps unburied.” Adding insult to injury, the naked bodies were often eaten by hungry swine. “What numbers of my countrymen have died by cold and hunger,” a prisoner bemoaned, or “perished for want of the common necessities of life!” For him, the treatment by the British was such that he decided, “Rather than experience again their barbarity and insults, may I fall by the sword of the Hessians.”
Not only was General Howe responsible for the atrocities committed under his command, but he was present for much of it and even condoned the violent treatment of prisoners. But Howe impacted the fate of American prisoners, including those eventually housed on the most notorious prison ship in history, in another way. He appointed as prison commissaries men with a lust for blood. These commissaries were in charge of overseeing the prisons, ordering food and supplies, and negotiating prisoner exchanges. A few of them would soon become infamous throughout the former colonies for their barbarity.
Howe selected Joshua Loring, a Tory from Boston, to be the head commissary. Loring approached his job with dispassionate efficiency and shared his general’s view that any royal subject who challenged the Crown was a rebel, not a soldier, and therefore not deserving of humane treatment. He cared not as to where and how the prisoners would be housed. But Loring faced the immediate problem of a lack of prisons in New York City. He opposed confiscating barns and other such facilities because they were needed for agriculture. The massive British army, after all, needed to eat. Believing the war would end quickly, he also failed to plan for the long-term housing of prisoners.
Howe, it seems, permitted Loring much discretion, preferring instead to devote his attention to the commissary’s attractive blond wife. A number of theories exist, but many of them suggest Howe and Elizabeth “Betsey” Loring were having an affair and that Joshua Loring turned a blind eye to the romance in order to keep his job, which he used to line his pockets.
Loring’s scheme was simple: funds for a prisoner’s rations, albeit minimal, continued until the prisoner was deceased. Loring appears to have delayed and underreported incidents of prisoner deaths in order to skim money from the prison accounts. He was getting rich; Howe could do as he pleased with Mrs. Loring, and it seems he did. For instance, when the general went to Philadelphia, he took Mrs. Loring with him, and the two were highly visible and affectionate at public social events. The joke back in London soon became, “Loring fingered the cash, while the general enjoyed the madam.” There were similar jokes in America, including a well-known poem by Francis Hopkins, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence:
Sir William he,
smug as a flea.
Lay all this time a snoring,
nor dreamed of harm
as he lay warm,
in bed with Mrs. Loring.
Judge Thomas Jones, a royalist who blamed Howe for the loss of the American colonies, went so far as to level the poetic charge, “As Cleopatra of old lost Marc Antony the world, so did this illustrious courtesan lose Sir William Howe, the honour, the laurels, and the glory, of putting an end to one of the most obstinate rebellions that ever existed.”*
Irrespective of the affair, Loring treated the prisoners in New York City horribly. Yet, as bad as Loring was, the warden of the Provost was worse. His name was William Cunningham. Born in Ireland, Cunningham came to America in 1774 a
board the ship Needham as part of a business venture, which involved luring the Irish to New York with false promises and then selling his countrymen as indentured servants. However, Cunningham’s racket caught up with him. His passengers were discovered to be so malnourished and ill that the authorities seized the ship in New York harbor and freed them. The corrupt Cunningham managed to flee to Boston, where he met General Thomas Gage, the British commander, at the outset of the war. Apparently impressed by Cunningham’s sadistic ways, Gage appointed him as the warden of the Provost. Once back in New York City, Cunningham seemed only too happy to exact revenge on the people who had chased him out of the city.
The notorious, multiple-story prison was made of dark stone and located on the common by Chatham Street. It held a half dozen cells on each floor, and large rooms in the cellar contained “necessary tubs” overflowing with human waste. The prison, like others, was severely overcrowded. Because it served as a detention center for spies, officers, and other high-value inmates, Cunningham installed extra security measures such as posting British and Hessian guards throughout the facility and at the door at all times, putting iron grates over the deep-set windows, erecting a high wooden fence around the grounds, and using extra chains on his inmates.
Each prisoner brought to the Provost was personally processed by Cunningham, who noted the man’s name, age, height, and rank. Officers were, as was the custom of the time, housed separately from enlisted men. The warden had an array of bizarre policies designed to inflict more cruelty on the inmates, including a rule that prisoners could turn over only once at night and it had to be “from right to left.” That such a rule was unenforceable was irrelevant. It was another form of control and abuse. Like Loring, Cunningham made money off the prisoners, selling the rations of already deplorable prison food for money. He would then buy a fraction of the rations for his inmates. When families sent food and clothing to their loved ones, the “ignorant, drunken Irish master,” as one prisoner called him, would delight in selling it or destroying it. The warden was also known for forcing his prisoners to parade in chains in public, bellowing in a drunken stupor to crowds of loyalists, “This is the damned rebel, so-and-so!”
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Page 4
