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Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War Hardcover – November 11, 2008
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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 underfedthose 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 independenceand how much we have forgotten.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateNovember 11, 2008
- Grade level11 and up
- Reading age13 years and up
- Dimensions6.25 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
- ISBN-100465008356
- ISBN-13978-0465008353
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“[A] pathbreaking examination of the treatment of American prisoners during the Revolutionary War… Burrows's book is a landmark whose significance far outweighs recent, popular biographies of the Founding Fathers. His sparkling prose, meticulous research and surprising findings recast our understanding of how the new nation was brought forth… Burrows masterfully explores a subject that had been left nearly untouched for more than two centuries.”
Seattle Times
“[Burrows] offers riveting accounts of what prison life was like in New York…It is as if, more than 200 years later, fitting tribute has finally been paid.”
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Product details
- Publisher : Basic Books; 1st edition (November 11, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0465008356
- ISBN-13 : 978-0465008353
- Reading age : 13 years and up
- Grade level : 11 and up
- Item Weight : 1.5 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,378,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,932 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
- #35,131 in Military History (Books)
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Author Burrows deserves the highest praise for this book. Most often the Revolutionary War is dismissed as one with relatively few casualties since the "official" killed in action number is only 4,435, a number that woefully understates the sacrifice in the war. Burrows gives 6,824 based on recent scholarship, but that number still misses the some forty percent of the wounded that later died from their wounds. The official number for wounded is 6,188, but since the wounded to killed ratio was likely around five to one, the wounded was more likely 20,000 of whom probably 8,000 died of their wounds and were permanently lost to the Continental Army and patriot cause.
The author estimates that up to 32,000 American prisoners were held around New York at some point during the war of which up to 18,000 died in captivity. But those released or exchanged were greatly enfeebled and often died within a few months after release. Combining these estimates with those deaths in captivity elsewhere by the British and adding the deaths from sickness while in service estimated at 10,000, and one arrives at deaths from all causes to be over 40,000. Out of a white male population over sixteen estimated at 551,000 of which somewhat more than a third were patriots (say 200,000), then approximately one in five patriots gave his life for his country. Wow, and double wow!
If those numbers seem high, then read Burrow's book. In any case, rebellion was truly a serious business. Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were improverished or worse as a result of their actions and the war, and the ordinary patriots also paid a very high price for independence. (I need not even think about the willingness of Americans today to make such sacrifices.) In my Great-great-great-grandfather's company that went with Arnold to Quebec in 1775, only 37% returned, and some of those were enfeebled for life (notably John Joseph Henry.)
Getting into the meat of the author's work, he focuses on the imprisonment of thousands of patriots in and around New York City, in the Sugar House on Manhattan, and in the prison hulks of the Royal Navy. He makes supurb use of contemporaneous sources and accounts, mostly highly credible and descriptive. These accounts have been submerged on purpose by politicians who sought a rapprochement with Great Britain and academic historians attempting to downplay the revolution and the sacrifice of patriots lest such knowledge enhance patriotism in a population they wish to move into a global community governed in a large part by foreigners and foreign interests.
Author Burrows makes use of many ancedotal accounts to illustrate the horrors of British captivity. The activities of David Sproat as commissary for naval prisoners comes in for particular condemnation, and although he favored treating prisoners especially brutally, most of the deaths under his watch were due to simple indifference to their plight. He did not even ease up on the prisoners after Yorktown.
The patriot efforts to bring relief to the captives were ineffective, too little and too late. In 1782, long after Yorktown, the British captured 57 men from the American privateer, "The Chance", and within weeks, "seventeen lay dead and three others were dying..." Of the twenty-five eventually released, one died immediately, and three others could not walk unaided. Even for the survivors, they faced a long and uncertain path to normalcy.
There is so much good in this book that I could write volumes just to make sure that everyone knows what seminal accounts are there. The author even refutes "Cunningham's Confession", proves the best rations the captives were alloted would reduce them to skeletons over time, and discusses events in the 20th century to downplay this story for political purposes. One is struck by the comparison between the Jersey or Good Hope and Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. Our wartime prisons today are accommodations in the Ritz Carleton in comparison with those experienced in the Revolutionary War yet ignite storms of protests and anti-American feeling. Obviously, we have short memories. They are jolted extremely well by author Burrows, and New York City should be ashamed of itself for forgetting its history.
Purchase and read this book!
One reviewer called this book "path-breaking". I think "heart-breaking" is more like it. Like some others who have reviewed this book, I was also aware of this event but I had never realized the magnitude, duration and horror of it. And while the bulk of the text focuses on the abuse suffered by these patriots, the book takes great pains to discuss the denials, accusations, cover-ups, reprisals and repercussions surrounding it. The political wrangling among Congress, George Washington and concerned citizens is infuriating, as one reads about their bickering while their fellow countrymen died by the dozens weekly. And if they weren't dying, they were tortured by disease, madness, starvation and beatings.
Another terrifying aspect of the event is its almost inevitability. How were the British to treat American captives? As Burrows explains, Great Britain couldn't treat them as prisoners-of-war; that would acknowledge the United States' sovereignty. Instead, they were treated as "D--n rebels" and traitors, and the British administered the cruel punishments and neglect that was usually reserved for the most hated of criminals and enemies. The other contributor to this inevitability was the frothy, rabid anti-American sentiment among the British during the years leading up to the war. This frenzied hatred was carried across the Atlantic before many Englishmen laid eyes on an American.
Finally, the book discusses the often frustrated attempts of New Yorkers to respect the memory of these patriots in the years after the war. For decades, and then over a century, plans to erect a suitable monument were contested, blocked, and hog-tied by petty local and, sometimes, national considerations. The ambivalent attitudes that the City and the Nation held towards Great Britain shifted constantly. This not only affected the plans for a memorial but actually created a rewrite of history and history books, to the point where the deaths of over 10,000 prisoners-of-war was "determined" to be exaggerated or understandable or brought about by the prisoners themselves. The perceptions were so distorted that there was even doubt the deaths even happened, in spite of the bones that continually washed up on the shores of Brooklyn.
When it came to the calculus involved in determining the number of casualties, well... in all honesty, the numbers-crunching was an unnecessarily long distraction: something that could have been relegated to an appendix. It gave me a headache. (Then again, math was never one of my strengths. So maybe it's just me.) However, this should not detract from all of the positives of the book.
As an undergraduate major of History, and as President of the Brooklyn College Historical Society from 1973-75, it was my high honor to invite Professor Burrows to address the society during his very first year of teaching as a then untenured Professor of American history.
The finest qualities of his scholarship are very much in evidence in this outstanding work. Painstaking documentation and expert narrative provides a hallmark for Forgotten Patriots. The book provides a heartbreaking and indispensable guide to the unspeakable hardships and horrors endured by patriots during the American Revolution as they worked heroically and indefatigably on behalf of the attainment of American freedom.
At a time when the sovereignty of our Republic has been challenged as never before by a wide range of traitorous mercenaries and depraved criminals operating within and without America’s borders, a careful reading of Professor Burrows’ extremely sensitive and erudite book will elucidate for the reader, a disturbing sense of immediacy for the terrible dangers involved for all Americans to maintain US internal and external sovereignty. Against seemingly impossible circumstances patriotic heroes forged independence from the British and ultimately established the most powerful country the world has ever known.