Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British crown. Just
over 6,800 of those men died in battle.About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined
in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands.
Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons—more than
twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most
Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. In Forgotten Patriots, Edwin G. Burrows, Pulitzer
Prize-winning co-author of Gotham, tells the forgotten story of New York's British prison camps and the
thousands of patriots who lost their lives there.
Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten
Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hellholes. 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, prison ships, and other
structures—most notorious among them the infamous “Old Sugar House,” a place whose squalor became
legend.
Wherever they were held, prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed. Those
who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes.
Beyond telling the story
of the prison camps themselves, Burrows asks why this horrific episode was virtually lost to history until
now. Historians, he contends, have been too quick to dismiss a number of prominent witnesses (Ethan Allen,
for example) as propagandists who exaggerated conditions in the prisons to inflame public opinion against
the British (although their reports did convince manyAmericans that reconciliation with Britain was impossible,
and may very well have prolonged the war).
He explores the reasons for the mistreatment of the prisoners,
which he attributes not to cruel intent but to such equally odious factors as obstinacy, condescension,
corruption, and indifference. And he asks whether or not the Americans treated their enemy prisoners any
better.
While circumstances were such that their capacity for gross inhumanity was never tested, Burrows
holds that Washington—unlike his British and Hessian counterparts—always insisted on the importance of
handling enemy prisoners as humanely as possible. As moving as it is shocking, Forgotten Patriots offers a
unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have
remembered our struggle for independence—and howmuch we have forgotten.
Hardback, 364 pages, #PAT.