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By Root 7594 0

Provost’s Guard paled, even so, by comparison with the agonies of rebel prisoners confined to prison ships anchored across the East River in Wallabout Bay. All told, the British employed at least twenty of these ships in the course of the war, using them first for captives taken during the Battle of Long Island and then exclusively for seamen taken on the high seas. The conditions on board were atrocious—hundreds of men packed together in squalid, reeking holds without adequate food or water and brutalized by their guards. Alexander Coffin remembered that his eleven hundred fellow captives on the Jersey, most infamous of the prison ships, were “mere walking skeletons. . . overrun with lice from head to foot.” Dysentery was rampant, said Christopher Hawkins, and because only two prisoners at a time were allowed to relieve themselves on the upper deck, he and the others below spent many nights smeared with “bloody and loathsome filth.” Every morning

The prison ship Jersey, by James Ryder van Brunt, 1876. (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

the ships awakened to the call “Prisoners, turn out your dead!” Before the war ended 11,500 men had perished, their bodies simply cast overboard or buried in mass graves on the shore. Bones littered the beach for years.

“ONE GENERAL SCENE OF RAVAGE AND DESOLATION”

Military oppression and corruption also weighed heavily on the areas immediately adjacent to the city. Hessians and redcoats ran amok after the American retreat from Long Island, assaulting civilians and pillaging at will. The Tory Philip Van Cortlandt heard “many frightful accounts” of “cruel unnatural & inhuman” acts committed by His Majesty’s troops on friend and foe alike. Soldiers murdered several persons “in cold blood, plunging bayonets in their bodys & then trampling them under their horses feet, women without distinction taken into the lascivious embraces of Officers & then turned over to the Soldiery, torn from the arms of husbands & parents by Brutal force.” Colonel Stephen Kemble reported that rampaging redcoats had destroyed “all the fruits of the Earth without regard to Loyalists or Rebels, the property of both being equaly a prey to them.”

Little of this havoc was accidental. From the very beginning of the war it was taken for granted, especially among the subordinate officers responsible for day-to-day discipline, that the Americans were a cowardly, contemptible rabble—either descended (like the third- and fourth-generation Dutch of Long Island) from Europe’s most benighted and boorish classes or (as in the case of New York’s burgeoning Irish population) the genuine article, fresh off the boat. Rebel and Tory alike would benefit from a dose of Britannic wrath, wrote Lord Francis Rawdon, Sir Henry Clinton’s aide-de-camp, in September 1776. Only by giving “free liberty to the soldiers to ravage at will” could “these infatuated wretches” be made to realize “what a calamity war is.” “At heart they are all rebels,” agreed a high-ranking Hessian.

The yearning to bayonet and torch reached new heights in 1780 when William Franklin, Benjamin’s Tory son and former royal governor of New Jersey, organized the Board of Associated Loyalists in New York. Franklin’s plan was to unite supporters of the crown for self-preservation and revenge, and until Generals Clinton and Carleton put them on a short leash, the four hundred armed Associators compiled a record of atrocities unrivaled on either side. They plundered the country around New York, Jones wrote tersely, “without distinction of Whigs or Tories, Loyalists or rebels.”

Besides Associators, residents of Westchester County had to contend with a vicious little civil war between De Lancey’s “Refugees” and irregular “Cowboys,” who pillaged indiscriminately while pursuing rebel “Skinners” through the Neutral Ground. On Staten Island, said Lord Rawdon, “a girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished” by soldiers “as riotous as Satyrs.” On Long Island, hundreds,