Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [205]
Not since the days of Governor Fletcher had official cynicism and venality bedded down so amiably together. One royal investigator reported “peculation in every profitable branch of the service.” According to Jones, army quartermasters, barrackmasters, and commissaries—“blood-sucking harpies” to a man—made away with no less than five million pounds by the end of the war. Even the royal chimney sweep saw his opportunities and took them. “He keeps a half-dozen negroes,” said an irate German officer, “each of whom can sweep at least twenty chimneys a day, and often must clean more; and for each chimney his master, who sits quietly at home, is paid two shillings. . . . The negroes get nothing out of it save coarse food and rags.” General Howe pocketed money intended for farmers whose cattle had been taken by the army. Admiral Arbuthnot sold blank warrants allowing merchants to conduct illegal trade. Proving that civilians could feed at the same trough, Mayor Mathews embezzled money, stole provisions intended for the poor, charged excessive fees, and ran protection rackets.
“KENNEL, YE SONS OF BITCHES!”
The most chilling stories to come out of occupied New York, however, concerned the thousands of American prisoners of war held in and around the city. Captured officers were permitted to find private accommodations in boardinghouses and taverns, but not common soldiers. As many as eight hundred at a time were jammed into the New Gaol, now called the Provost’s Guard or Prison, on the northeast corner of City Hall Park. Hundreds of others languished in Livingstons’ Liberty Street “sugar house”—a cavernous building formerly used for refining and storing sugar. Sugar houses owned by the Van Cortlandts (near the northwest corner of Trinity churchyard) and by the Rhinelanders (at the corner of Rose and Duane) were also used to hold prisoners, as were the Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street and the North Dutch Church on William.
Conditions in the sugar houses and the Provost’s Guard dismayed even the most unyielding Tories. Hungry, half-naked prisoners huddled together in appalling squalor, racked by waves of smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera. Many starved or froze to death after scratching out final messages on the walls with their fingernails, and every morning the “dead cart” rumbled up to remove the bodies of those who had succumbed the night before. Abraham Leggett, confined in a room of the Provost’s with a dozen other rebels, remembered being thrown some raw salt beef and spoiled bread. “As soon as the bread fell on the floor it Took legs and Ran in all Directions,” he wrote.
Two men bore special responsibility for these horrors: Commissary Joshua Loring, who made a fortune selling off provisions meant for the prisoners, and the sadistic Provost Marshal William Cunningham, who had once been roughed up by the Sons of Liberty and now took his revenge in merciless brutality. Every evening, Alexander Graydon recalled, “he would traverse his domain with a whip in his hand, sending his prisoners to bed, with the ruffian like Tattoo of Kennel ye sons of bitches! Kennel, G— ddamn ye!” Some years after the war, on his way to the gallows for forgery, Cunningham confessed to murdering as many as two thousand American prisoners by starvation, hanging, or poisoning their flour rations with arsenic. Typically, he said, inmates were hustled out at midnight, bound and gagged, to be hanged from a hastily erected gallows on Barrack (now Chambers) Street. Area residents were under strict orders to shutter their windows and say nothing.
The suffering inflicted on the inmates of the sugar houses and