A number of other accounts from the war are equally disturbing. One said of Cunningham that his “cruelty and wickedness are almost inconceivable.” Another described him in the following way: “His hatred of the Americans found vent in torture by searing irons and secret scourges to those who fell under the bane of his displeasure. The prisoners were crowded together so closely that many fell ill from partial asphyxiation, and starved to death for want of the food which he sold to enrich himself.”
One of the prisoners in particularly dire straits was an old man from the city named Elias Baylis. Baylis was blind and had been transferred from one of the churches being used as a temporary prison to the Provost, where Cunningham beat him repeatedly and savagely. After two months there the old man was very close to death. Cunningham finally agreed to release Baylis, knowing the old man would not survive. Sure enough, Baylis died while being rowed across the East River on his way to freedom.
Another story of Cunningham’s inhumanity comes from a colonial officer named Birdsall. During the Battle of Brooklyn the British captured an American ship filled with flour intended for George Washington’s army. It was Birdsall who devised the plan to recapture the ship and requested permission to lead the mission. After handpicking a few reliable volunteers to join him, Captain Birdsall snuck onto the ship and managed to free it. But after liberating the ship, Birdsall and his men were caught by the British and sent to the Provost.
There Birdsall met Cunningham, whom he called the “monster in human shape.” The monster would walk the hallways of the infamous prison at all hours with his black servant threatening “to hang and kill prisoners.” To curses of “sons of bitches, god-damned ye,” he would beat and flail them with his whip. At mealtimes Cunningham “threw food at them and kicked over the water and food bowls.” Once when Captain Birdsall requested paper and ink to write to his family, Cunningham screamed, “Damned rebel!” then drew his sword and stabbed Birdsall through the shoulder. As punishment for making the request, Birdsall was put in solitary confinement with no medical attention. Birdsall ended up spending several months in the Provost until, half dead from starvation, he was exchanged.
Baylis and Birdsall were not unique in being singled out by Cunningham for punishment. Once when the warden discovered that a guard had let a teenager from Boston named Peter Edes out of prison because he was a civilian and not a soldier, Cunningham exploded in rage. He screamed at the guard, “Damn them, let them die and rot; you have no authority to let them out,” and ordered that the guard be punished. Cunningham’s cruelty extended beyond his own guards to the wives and family members of dying prisoners, whom he turned away when they asked permission to see their loved ones. On one occasion when the wife of a prisoner arrived at the Provost in tears, begging to see her husband, Cunningham had her stripped and punished “unmercifully.”
It was the dastardly Cunningham, on orders from General Howe, who put to death George Washington’s famous spy Nathan Hale, executing him on September 22, 1776, in New York City. The story is well known: Hale had volunteered on September 10 to gather intelligence behind enemy lines in advance of the Battle of Harlem Heights. But after the massive fire in the city, the British were on the watch for sympathizers and spies. The young officer was captured while sailing back across Long Island Sound. Later, when secret documents were found on his person, the British discovered the purpose of his mission. After being interrogated by General Howe, Hale was sent to Cunningham to be put to death.
From the gallows the twenty-one-year-old allegedly declared, “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”* Little is known about the spy’s final days because the cruel prison warden burned many of the letters Hale had written for loved ones, saying, “The rebels should not know that they had a man in their army who could die with such firmness.”
Cunningham’s reign of terror included murdering prisoners in his care in New York City. These private executions, without trial, were conducted for his pleasure and with him in attendance. At such gruesome spectacles, Cunningham would order prisoners gagged and dragged out of their cells “under the cover of midnight darkness” to the grounds behind the Provost. One prisoner estimated that the warden hanged 260 men from the prison, while other accounts suggest his bloodlust resulted in five or six prisoners a night being hanged.
Tragically, even more prisoners died of neglect and abuse. One witness claimed that as many as a dozen dead bodies a day were carried out of the building, most having succumbed to hunger, disease, or the cold. During summer, temperatures inside the prison soared and there was little fresh air. A prisoner named Dunlap wrote, “In the suffocating heat of summer, I saw every aperture of those strong walls filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a portion of the external air.” Despite the dire situation, prisoners were allowed out into the fenced-in courtyard for only thirty minutes a day. The hot, crowded, unsanitary conditions of the Provost were also a breeding ground for maladies of every kind. Such was the case during the summer of 1777, when a particularly deadly fever tore through the prison, killing many.
George Washington was so disturbed by the reports of prisoners dying that he wrote to the Continental Congress with a request that they establish commissaries charged with inspecting British prisons, securing food for the American prisoners, and negotiating prisoner exchanges. His request was approved and funding was allocated from a “Secret Committee” of the Continental Congress. Washington appointed several capable men, including John Beaty, Thomas Franklin, Lewis Pintard, and Abraham Skinner, as his commissaries.
One of them, Elias Boudinot, was appointed in April 1777. Like his peers, Boudinot was continually frustrated by the behavior of Loring, Cunningham, and other British wardens who often refused to provide access to the prisons and ships, exchange prisoners, or provide adequate food and clothing to those in their charge. Boudinot supplemented the meager funds available for prisoners with his own money and even collected donations from friends. Though his army was poorly provisioned and starving, General Washington also set aside clothing and rations for the prisoners. This was the case in spring of 1777, shortly after Boudinot was appointed commissary general of prisoners, when Washington noted in his journal, “I began to afford them some supplies of Provisions over and above what the Enemy afforded them, which was very small and very indifferent.” These efforts, however, only pertained to prisoners from the Continental Army, not prisoners from militias or privateers; each state took care of their militiamen, and the privateers were often left to fend for themselves.
The efforts by Washington and Boudinot helped, but only a little, and only as Loring and Cunningham would allow. Boudinot recalled, “The Complaints of the very cruel treatment our Prisoners met with in the Enemy’s lines rose to such a Height that in the Fall of this Year, 1777, the General [Washington] wrote to General Howe or Clinton reciting their complaints and proposing to send an Officer into New York to examine into the truth of them. This was agreed to, and a regular pass-port returned accordingly. The General ordered me on this service.” Boudinot traveled on his own boat to visit the prisons and floating dungeons around the city on February 3, 1778. What he saw was appalling.
Accompanied at all times by a British officer, Boudinot toured the Provost, sugar houses, churches, and even the prison ships. He requested access to American prisoners, saying, “I therefore hoped they would each of them in their turn report to me faithfully and candidly the Treatment they severally had received,—that my design was to obtain them the proper redress.” But he discovered that the prisoners were fearful of the guards and wardens, and therefore hesitant to come forward with complaints.
It took several efforts, but Boudinot eventually learned that what he had suspected was true: “That they had received the most cruel Treatment from the Provost Marshal, being locked up in the Dungeon on the most trifling pretenses, such as asking for more water to drink on a hot day than usual.” The American commissary was particularly alarmed to find
that “a Captain Vandyke had been confined eighteen months for being concerned in setting fire to the City.” Vandyke was locked in the cellar dungeon on charges of setting the fire, despite the fact that Boudinot discovered he had been incarcerated before the fire was set. This detail did not change Cunningham’s mind.
General Washington read Boudinot’s reports with concern and repeatedly requested that he check on the condition of prisoners. Washington also sent letters to General Howe complaining that “many of the cruelties exercised towards prisoners, are said to proceed from the inhumanity of Mr. Cunningham.” Howe replied to the grievances of Washington and the Continental Congress by denying the incidents of abuse, the crowded conditions, and the high death toll. Not only was Howe disinterested in improving the conditions, but he expanded Cunningham’s powers. The brutality worsened.
Using churches, sugar houses, and other public buildings in New York City as prisons did not solve the problem. There were simply too many prisoners for the available spaces. Additional prisons were established at Flatbush, Flatlands, Gravesend, and New Utrecht. As the war continued, more prisoners were brought to the city from battlefields in New York, Pennsylvania, and New England; from fighting in the South; and from the West Indies and French ships seized by the Royal Navy. At the same time, civilians continued to be arrested and accused of disloyalty to the Crown.
The Royal Navy also started to capture American merchant vessels, fishing boats, and the privateers that harassed British ships. Because the Royal Navy needed more sailors, it planned to press these seamen into joining their ranks. But those refusing to fight for the enemy were sent to prison in New York. The British were using every available space, but the prisoners kept coming. The prisoner dilemma had long before reached crisis levels, but Howe still refused to build proper facilities.
General Howe and Commissary Loring chose another approach. Prisoners were transferred to large transport vessels. After sailing to America at the beginning of the war, several old ships such as the Pacific, Lord Rochford, Mentor, and Argo remained anchored off Staten Island, Gravesend Bay, and other waterways around the city. Ultimately, the decision was made to sail or tow them to Wallabout Bay on the shores of Brooklyn.* There they would be hulked and used as floating dungeons.
Though it seemed as if conditions in the prisons could not get worse, they did. According to an old report on the prison ships, “Great, however, as were the sufferings of those incarcerated within the prisons of the city, they were exceeded, if possible, by those of the unfortunate naval prisoners who languished in the prison ships of the ‘Wallebought.’” The inmates placed aboard the prison ships were about to meet a commissary who would make their time aboard the Jersey a living hell. His name was David Sproat.
4
Privateers
Americans, a just resentment show,
And let your minds with indignation glow;
While the warm blood shall swell each glowing vein,
Let fierce resentment in your bosoms reign;
Can you forget the vengeful Briton’s ire,
Your fields in ruin and your domes on fire.
—Philip Freneau, “The British Prison-Ship” (1781)
The Royal Navy was the undisputed “Mistress of the Seas.” And because of that, British leaders and commanders again greatly underestimated the colonists—this time on the high seas. Britain’s supremacy in naval warfare extended across the Atlantic to America, where, even though the land war against her rebellious colonies was off to a sluggish start in 1775, the Royal Navy intended to quickly and easily subdue the colonials. This was surprising given the fact that at the start of the war Britain had only twenty-four warships in all of North America, a number wholly insufficient for securing the long eastern seaboard. Even though Admiral Samuel Graves received five additional warships after the difficulties at Bunker Hill, the Royal Navy simultaneously ordered three vessels in its North American squadron back home.
The small fleet under Admiral Graves patrolled from Maine to East Florida and operated out of a number of ports including Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, and Providence at the beginning of the war. Remarkably, Admiral Graves also left New York’s numerous waterways undefended, guarded only by the ten-gun Kingfisher. While such overconfidence and folly may not have mattered at the start of the war—the Continental Navy was almost nonexistent—things were about to change.
At the outset of the war, individual colonies outfitted their own ships and crews. These vessels were too small to engage large British warships, so the prudent decision was made by the Americans to avoid direct one-on-one engagements with the powerful Royal Navy whenever possible. Meanwhile, a Continental Navy was being built. A “Committee of Three” was organized in the Continental Congress on October 13, 1775, for the purpose of ordering two small warships (ten and fourteen guns). A week later, four additional members of Congress joined the committee and began work to launch two larger ships (twenty and thirty-six guns). Momentum built, and by December the Congress was appropriating funds for thirteen warships including larger, more powerful frigates. A Marine Committee was finally organized to develop and oversee the new and growing navy; it consisted of one member from each of the colonies. This was followed in November 1776 by the establishment of a Continental Navy Board. The result was that the Americans managed to launch several ships in the first two years of the war.
But even with the growing navy, American warships were not able to challenge British control of the seas. American ships were generally unsuccessful in breaking British naval blockades and striking their naval bases in New York and Halifax. One of the consequences of America’s limited naval might would soon prove to be very costly: they were unable to penetrate the waters off Brooklyn to liberate the thousands of men incarcerated on British prison ships in Wallabout Bay.
There were some noteworthy naval successes, however. The lighter American warships were fast and able to both intercept transports and harass merchant shipping. One such example occurred in June 1776 when American warships captured several British transports and roughly five hundred soldiers and sailors. While it did not strike a major blow to British shipping, it did slow the resupply effort. Having prisoners also gave the Americans the means to promote prisoner exchanges or threaten retaliation for the abysmal conditions in the British prisons and aboard the hulks.
But Britain would eventually dispatch roughly seventy massive men-of-war, the largest and most powerful warships on the seas, to prowl the American coastline, blockade ports, enforce their rule, and attack defenseless merchant craft. These warships wreaked havoc on American coastal communities and shipping. American military and political leaders wisely decided to respond with privateers. It was a strategy born of necessity.
Privateering had a long history dating to medieval times and had been used by nearly every European power. It seemed a natural fit for the colonies—America had very few experienced naval officers, but it did have an abundance of skilled mariners and an inexhaustible supply of small merchant and fishing vessels. Accordingly, patriotic citizens were encouraged to arm small merchant vessels and take to the seas to harass British commercial and transport ships. The government in effect “licensed” private ships to wage war on the British.
Congress established formal legislation on privateering on March 23, 1776, to give some legitimacy to the unsavory endeavor. Privateers were commissioned through the issuance of letters of marque and given uniform rules of conduct. For instance, the owners of privateers were required to post bonds and guarantee their proper conduct and adherence to rules established by the government. Several states followed suit with their own licensure by marque. The result was that roughly a hundred privateers were commissioned in the first two years of war, mostly in New England.
The privateers were enticed by the promise of keeping the treasures they plundered from British merchant ships, and the pay for privateers was often better than that in the navy. Numerous ship owners and crew members became qu
ite wealthy during the war by selling their prize for profit to fellow citizens who, because of British blockades, were suffering from severe shortages of most everything.
Most privateers were small, fast schooners with only a handful of guns, but their ranks also included the formidable twenty-six-gun Caesar, which operated out of Boston. While these ships were typically not able to confront a Royal Navy man-of-war or frigate, they inflicted serious damage to British shipping by attacking unarmed or lightly armed merchant and resupply ships. For example, according to the English publication Remembrancer, in 1776 alone an astonishing 342 British ships were seized by the Americans, of which only 18 were released and just 44 were recaptured. During the war, privateers captured a remarkable 2,283 ships and seized millions of pounds of gunpowder and ammunition. Records are incomplete, but one estimate of the total number of privateers to fight in the war put the number at 1,697, sailing with a total of 14,872 guns. Ultimately, privateers disrupted Britain’s ability to ship supplies by sea and thereby helped to win the war.*
Another consequence of privateering was that the Royal Navy was forced to reallocate warships to escort and protect merchant convoys sailing the Atlantic. The price of the war soon became unacceptably high for many ship owners and merchants back in England.
Even though Britain had long used privateers in their wars against Spain and France, principally to undermine their foes’ trade and shipping in the West Indies, the Royal Navy viewed American privateers as no better than pirates. As one early account of the war noted, “Nearly all wars carried on by [Britain] were based upon the principle that England must rule the seas, and whoever interferes with that principle is their bitter foe.” As a result, the British were not just fighting the privateers; they took pride in their navy and sought to severely punish anyone daring to challenge their supremacy on the seas. The Royal Navy began aggressively hunting American privateers, who stood little chance of eluding powerful British warships.
The Ghost Ship of Brooklyn Page 5
