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This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
PRISON NARRATIVES OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION

presented by

Robert John Denn

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for

Ph.D. degree in English

 

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PRISON NARRATIVES
OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION

By

Robert John Denn

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1980

<0) Copyright by
ROBERT JOHN DENN
1980

ABSTRACT

PRISON NARRATIVES OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION

By

Robert John Denn

Among the memoirs and military journals published after the
Revolution and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century
are a number of narratives which detail the experiences of men who
had been held by the British as prisoners of war. These narratives
enjoyed a certain degree of popularity, and most of them were reprinted
at least once. After the Civil War, when the tastes and tempo of
American life were changing, these books disappeared from the bookstalls
and seemed destined for oblivion.

In the early part of the twentieth century, however, historians
began serious investigations of the whole prisoner of war issue, and
the prison narratives began to appear in footnotes as documentary
sources for conclusions about prison conditions. By the l940's, the
narratives were being examined by literary critics in the context of

the more familiar Indian captivity narratives. Recent studies have

Robert John Denn

continued, when they mention the Revolutionary War prison narratives
at all, to group all captivity narratives under the umbrella of the
Indian captivity formula. Until the present study, there has been no
attempt to examine the prisoner of war narratives on their own terms.

Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons for doing so. In
the first place, the narratives have only limited usefulness as
historical documents; for the most part, they were written long after
the fact by men whose memories were influenced by age, bias, and strong
temptations to exaggeration. In the second place, the Revolutionary War
narratives have little in common with the Indian captivities except for
the fact that the heroes of both were writing about theaexperience of
being held captive. This necessarily involves a distortion because
it affords the Revolutionary context in which the prison narratives
were written only secondary consideration. To the men who wrote the
narratives, however, the Revolution and the myth of republican virtue
were of paramount importance.

An examination of the Revolutionary War prison narrative in terms
of the Indian captivity formula reveals that, indeed, the prison narrative
does not conform and that it has a formula of its own. Instead of the
monomythic pattern of separation-transformation-return.which characterizes
the Indian tale, a formula emphasizing stability and growth governs the
prison narrative. The key to the formula is the republican virtue
myth, the notion that the uncorrupted patriot is willing to sacrifice
his personal interests for the public good. Captivity for the American
Revolutionary soldier or seaman, then, was portrayed, not as a

transforming experience, but as a test and tempering of the virtue which

Robert John Denn

enables the prisoner to resist being transformed by his captors.

One result is that the prison narrative does not descend into sensa-
tionalism, as the Indian narrative often does. Another is that we

are forced to seek the significance of the prison narrative in what it
can tell us of how nineteenth-century Americans felt about themselves,
of the their history, and of their apparent need to recast the period

of the Revolution into a kind of golden age of the American character.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professors Donald M. Rosenberg and Gordon

T. Stewart of my guidance committee for their sound advice at each
stage of the preparation of the manuscript. I owe a special debt
of gratitude to Professor Russell B. Nye, who started me thinking
about prison narratives in the first place, and to Professor James
H. Pickering, whOse careful reading led to the elimination of a
number of errors and to the recasting of much of my often unwieldy

prose.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page
INTRODUCTION ................................................... l
NOTES: INTRODUCTION ...................................... 8
ONE: THE VARIETIES OF REVOLUTIONARY WAR
PRISON WRITING ........................................... lO
NOTES: CHAPTER ONE ....................................... 36
TWO: THE POSTWAR CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE .......................... 39
NOTES: CHAPTER TWO ....................................... 53
THREE: REVOLUTIONARY WAR PRISON WRITING
AND SCHOLARSHIP ........................................ 55
NOTES: CHAPTER THREE .................................... . 72
FOUR: REVOLUTIONARY VIRTUE AND THE
CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE PERSONA ............................. 76
NOTES: CHAPTER FOUR ...................................... lOl
FIVE: THE PRISON NARRATIVE FORMULA ............................ lO3
NOTES: CHAPTER FIVE ...................................... 122
CONCLUSION ..................................................... l23
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................... 126

iv

INTRODUCTION

On September 25, l775, Ethan Allen was taken prisoner by the
British after leading an ill-advised and premature attempt to capture
Montreal. The Boston Gazette and Country Journal for 30 October l775

took notice of the fact in a published letter which complained,

The expedition was a thing of Col. Allen's own head,
without orders from the General; and from whom (as
well as others) he receives much censure. --If they
had been apprised of it, they could have put him in
a situation to have succeeded without much danger.
--But Allen is a high flying genius, pursues every
scheme on its first impression, without considera-
tion, and much less judgment. It is with the utmost
difficulty, and through the greatest entreaty, that
Gen. Schuyler permitted him to go with the army,
knowing his natural disposition; and indeed his
fears proved not groundless; and tho' trifling our
loss, and the detachment, yet it has given a check
to our progress.

The nature of that check was perhaps more moral than material; only
about forty of Allen's men were captured with him, and three months
later, on December 31, the death of Montgomery and the defeat of the
army eclipsed the significance of Allen's misadventure. The campaign
closed, a complete failure.

Allen did not, however, slip quietly into obscurity. Shortly
after his exchange and return home in May, I778, he began the serial
publication of A Narrative gf_Col. Ethan Allen's Captivity in Ihg_
Pennsylvania Packet. The memoir was extremely popular, and it was
reprinted eight times during the war and numerous times thereafter.1

In the book, readers found, not simply a "high flying genius," but a

persona transformed into a Yankee hero who defies English tyranny to its
face while remaining true to republican principles. Brooke Hindle, in
his introduction to the most recent reissue of the Narrative (1961),
links Allen's contemporary popularity specifically to the characteri-
zation of the hero returning from captivity to assure the reader "that
American resolution, courage, and virtue could, in the end, triumph
over British arrogance and cruelty."2
Ethan Allen, however, was not alone in creating the myth of the
virtuous hero held captive by arrogant Englishmen in the War of
Independence. Throughout the final years of the war and well into
the nineteenth century, the memoirs of ex-prisoners began appearing
in the bookstalls. There were not very many at first. Before 1800,
most of the published prison writing appeared in newspapers and tended
to be very propagandistic in tone. The most notable narratives which

enjoyed separate publication in the eighteenth century were A_Narrative

gf_the Capture gf_John Dodge (Philadelphia, 1779) and John Blatchford's
3

 

 

Narrative 9f Remarkable Occurrences (New London, 1788). From the

 

beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the 1840's, however,
a new prison narrative appeared approximately every five or six years.
Fanning's Narrative, for example, came out in 1806, and it was followed

shortly by Memoirs gf_Captain Lemuel Roberts in 1809 and The Narrative

 

 

.9: Ebenezer Fletcher in 1813. Later came the Life and Remarkable

 

 

Adventures g: Israel RL_Potter (1824), Recollections gf_the Jersey

 

 

 

Prison Ship from the Manuscript gf_Capt. Thomas Dring (1829), Thomas

 

Andros' The Old Jersey Captive (1833), The Revolutionary Adventures of

 

 

Ebenezer Fox (1838), and Charles Herbert's A_Relic gf_the Revolution
4

 

 

(1847).

There was, apparently, a market for these narratives in the years
following the War of 1812. Richard M. Dorson, writing not simply about
prison narratives but about all the Revolutionary War memoirs that
appeared then, attributes the "rising market" to nationalistic feeling:
”American character types had begun to emerge in newspapers, almanacs,
farces, and public house stories, the frontier boaster and the cunning
Yankee, and the Revolutionary chronicles amplified these homespun
heroes, giving them actual dimensions and proven triumphs."5 Americans
of the time felt a need to discover and celebrate their own history and
traditions, and the war narratives achieved popularity for many of the
same reasons which underscored the success of professional writers
like Irving or Cooper. Alongside of this popular market there arose a
more serious antiquarian interest in the narratives as the raw material
of national history. It is probably no coincidence that during the
Civil War, when national unity was a fragmenting ideal and the American
experiment was in real danger of failure, the antiquarian Charles Ira
Bushnell published or reissued at least seven of the prison narratives.6
Bushnell was motivated by national pride. A similar sentiment later
led Danske Dandridge to reprint lengthy excerpts from the narratives

in her American Prisoners 9f the Revolution (1911).

 

Despite the fact that there has been a continuing interest in these
narratives, at least through World War I, there has nevertheless been no
study which has examined them critically. That this should be true of
the nineteenth century is not really surprising because scholars then
viewed the narratives more as historical documents than as works which

themselves required examination and interpretation. Bushnell, for

example, allowed the material he published to speak for itself, and in

his introduction to The Adventures 9f Christopher Hawkins (New York,

 

 

1864) he treats the book as a finished interpretation in its own right,
”a valuable contribution to the Revolutionary history of our country”
(p. vii). In the twentieth century there has been some movement toward
viewing the narratives as texts rather than documents, but until about
ten years ago, most commentators relegated the Revolutionary War
captivity narratives to footnotes and focused their attention instead
upon British prisoner of war policy. Others have attempted to define
the prison narrative of the Revolution as a small and not particularly
important offshoot of the more familiar Indian captivity narrative, but
again the effect has been more to pass over these narratives than to
scrutinize them.

It would seem then, that none of the existing interpretations of
the significance of the Revolutionary War prison narratives is completely
satisfactory. First, the narratives cannot provide reliable historical
evidence. Many were written long after the fact from sketchy notes or
from memory, and so the accuracy of many of the details contained in the
narratives is open to question unless there is strong corroborating
evidence from other sources. Even where there apparently is corrobora-
tion, the investigator must be careful because in some cases one version
of an event is the source for the other and not an independent statement.
There is cause, also, to question the author's motivation as well as his
accuracy. Many narrative writers claimed in their prefaces that they had
been prevailed upon by friends and family to publish the truth of their

Revolutionary experiences, and to a certain extent this provided part

of the motivation to write. It is also true, however, that most of
these men were in some financial difficulty when they brought out their
memoirs. Some were applying for pensions, and these men hoped that
their memoirs would create interest in and generally enhance their
petitions. Others had been denied pensions and sought to turn a small
profit from the publication of their stories. Not one, however, made
any attempt to present himself primarily as a historian.

Second, the Revolutionary War captivity narrative simply is not an
Indian captivity narrative. There are few, if any, Indians in most of
them, and those that do appear are entirely under the control of the
British. A more important distinction between the two types, however, is
that the mythic content is different. Richard Van Der Beets has written
of the Indian captivity memoir in terms of the Monomyth, in which the
initiation ritual "consists of three stages or phases: separation,
transformation, and enlightened return. The pattern of the Indian
captivity experience, in its unfolding narrative of abduction,
detention/adoption, and return, closely follows this fundamental

configuration."7

The ”fundamental configuration” is, of course, similar
in the prison narrative, but with significant differences in the content.
The prisoner of war goes into captivity as an indirect but not unfore-
seeable consequence of his signing aboard a privateer or joining the
army, but the Indian captive is more often simply abducted. The trans-
formation which the prisoner of war undergoes is internal--he struggles
to remain loyal to the cause despite terrible conditions and frequent
betrayal; but the Indian captive is transformed externally-~he is forced

to share the ritual of a savage captor, to eat entrails or to drink

blood, before he can return. The return of the respective captives

differs also: the Indian captive who.has undergone a trial or ritual
ordeal sees the end of his struggle and of the threat to his identity
when he returns to his home and family, but the Revolutionary prisoner
returns to put the virtue which has recently been tested into action.
The returning prisoner of war in the narratives rejoins not his family
but his regiment.

The drama, then, of the prisoner of war narrative takes place within
the character of the narrator, and the point at issue is not really the
cruelty of the captor so much as it is the virtue of the captive. About
this virtue, Gordon S. Wood has observed that, "The sacrifice of
individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence
of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of

the Revolution."8

The Indian captivity narrative, before it completed
its descent into pure sensationalism in the nineteenth century, presented
the reader with an Augustinian sense of virtue: the whole experience of
captivity was viewed as a test ordained by providence, and the suffering
captive could console himself not only with the conviction that his
virtue would see him through, but with the expectation that it would be
rewarded. The prisoner of war, on the other hand, found himself in a
much more existential situation; self-sacrifice and republican virtue
are symptoms of a more Roman outlook whereby ultimate reward or punish-
ment are less important than the action itself. The prisoners portray
themselves as men who remained loyal, despite great temptation, simply
because it was the correct thing to do. There is a serious divergence,

then, between the two types of captivity narrative. As Roy Harvey

Pearce has suggested, the ultimate significance of the Indian narrative

lies in its contribution to the development of the dime novel,9 but the
prison narrative comes closer to becoming actual autobiography. The ex—
prisoner, whether he is writing to justify a pension claim or to
entertain and enlighten his grandchildren, is at the same time present-
ing an interpretation of his own life and motives.

In the first two chapters of the work that follows, I examine the
extent and variety of Revolutionary War prison writing and discuss the
complex motivations which underlie the writing and publishing of the
prison narratives. The third chapter surveys the uses to which prison
writing has been put by historians and literary critics. Chapter four
demonstrates that an appeal to republican virtue lies at the center of
the persona's characterization in the prison narrative, and it provides
the basis for the final chapter, which establishes the Revolutionary
War captivity narrative as a distinct sub-genre through an examination

of its defining characteristics.

 

NOTES: INTRODUCTION

1There were five issues in 1779, three in 1780, two in 1849, and
one each in 1805, 1807, 1814, 1834, 1838, 1845, 1846, 1852, 1854, and 1930.

2
p. VI.
3

The Narrative gjLColonel Ethan Allen (New York: Corinth, 1961),

 

Dodge's book went into a second edition in 1780: Mr. Dodge's

 

"w_#

and Barbarous Treatment and Extreme Sufferings gf_Mr. John Dodge during
His Captivity gf_Many Months among the British at_Detroit, in_Which Is_
Also Contained a_Particu1ar Detail 9f_the Sufferings 9f;a_Virginian, Who
Died ig_Their Hands. Written by_Himself; and Now Published tg_Satisfy

the Curiosity gf_Everyone throughout the United States (Danvers and Salem,
1780). Blatchfordﬁsfull title is Narrative gf_Remarkab1e Occurrences, iﬂ_
th§_Life gf_John Blatchford, gf_Cape Ann, Commonwealth Qf_Massachusetts,
Containing, His Treatment ig_Nova-Scotia--the West Indies—-Great Britain--
France, and the East-Indies, §§_a_Prisoner ig_the Late War. Taken from
His Own Mouth (New London, 1788). Danske Dandridge, American Prisoners
gf_the Revolution (1911; rpt. Baltimore: Genealogical PubTishing, 1967),
p. 139, reports that Blatchford's Narrative first appeared serially in
newspapers. For examples of newspaper propaganda, see The Boston Gazette
for 16 June 1777 and 17 December 1778, or The Connecticut Courant for 23
June 1777.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4Several of these have been reissued in the twentieth century: John
S. Barnes, ed., Fanning's Narrative (New York, 1912); The Narrative_gf
Ebenezer Fletcher (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970);
Leonard Kriegel, ed., Life and Remarkable Adventures 9: Israel 3;_Potter
(New York: Corinth, 1962); Lawrence H. Leder, ed., Recollections 9flthg_
Jersey Prison Ship from the Manuscript of Capt. Thomas Dring_(New York:
Corinth, 1961); and A Relic 9f the RevoTUtion (New York: New York Times
and Arno Press, 1968).

)SAmerica. Rebels: Narratives pf the Patriots (New York: Pantheon,
1953 , p. 4.

6Bushnell reprinted Blatchford's Narrative in 1865 and Fletcher's
in 1866. The following appeared for the first time under his aegis:
A_Memoir‘gf_Eli Bickford, a_Patriot 9f the Revolution (New York, 1865);
Alexander Coffin, The Destructive Operation gj;Fou1 Air, Tainted
Provisions, Bad Water and Personal Filthiness upon Human Constitutions;
Exemplified ip_the Unparalleled Cruelty pf the British t9_the American
Ca tives at_New York during the Revolutionary War, on Board Their Prison
anB Hospital Ships, ig_a_Communication tg_Dr, MitchéTl, dated—September 4,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1807. Also a Letter to the Tammany Society, upon the Same Subject, .by
Captain Alexander Coffin, Jun. , One of the Survivinngufferers, with an
Introduction, _y_Charles l_.Bushne11_TNew York, 1865); A Narrative Lf7
the Life and Adventures of Levi Hanford, a Soldier Lf the Revolution
(New York, 1863); The Adventures Lf Christgpher Hawkins, Containing
Details Lf His Captivity, a First 7nd Second T1me Ln the High Seas, in
the Revolutionary War, Agy.the British, and His Cons7quent Sufferings,
and Escape from the Jersey Prison Ship, then Lying in the Harbour Lf
New York, by_S wi ming. Now First Printed from the Original Manuscript.
Written b Himself. With an Introduction and Notes by Charles I.
Bushnell New York, 1864); 7nd The Narrative Lf Major Abraham Leggett,
Lf the Army Lf the Revolution, Now First Printed from the Original
Manuscript. Writtenb _y_Himself. With an Introduction and Notes _y_
Charles 1, Bushnell (New7 York, 1865 1.

7"The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual," American Literature,
43 (1972), 553.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8The Creation Lf the American Republic, 1 76-1787 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 53.

9"The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," American Literature,
19 (1947-48), 1-20.

 

 

ONE: THE VARIETIES OF REVOLUTIONARY WAR PRISON WRITING

An inevitable result of any war is the publication shortly thereafter
of the memoirs of many of its leading participants. The American
Revolution was no exception. It produced its own cr0p of explanations
and justifications of the military decisions that had made the American
victory finally possible. After John Burgoyne returned to England
stamped by the humiliation of Saratoga, for example, he attempted to

defend his reputation by publishing A State pf the Expedition from

 

Canada, e§_Laid before the House pf_Commons, py_Lieutenant-Genera1

 

 

Burgoyne, and Verified py_Evidence; with e_Collection pf_Authentic

 

 

 

Documents, and ep_Addition pj_Many Circumstances Which Were Prevented

 

 

from Appearing before the House py_the Prorogation pf_Par1iament (London,

 

 

1780). On the patriot side, Henry Lee brought out his two-volume Memoirs

pf tpe_Wer;ip_the Southern Department pf_the United States (Philadelphia,

 

 

1812), which Mark Boatner has called ”not only an essential historical
document for any study of war in the South, but . . . also one of the
finest military memoirs in the language.”1
Staff and field commanders, however, were not the only veterans of
the Revolutionary to keep journals or publish personal narratives. Many
of the junior officers, private soldiers, and common seamen of the
eighteenth century were literate, and a number of them committed their
experiences to writing. Some were published. For example, Joseph Plumb

Martin, a private in the Continental line, gives a lively and humorous

account of himself in A_Narrative ijSome pf_the Adventures, Dangers and

 

10

11

Sufferings pf p_Revolutionary Soldier; Interspersed with Anecdotes pf
Incidents That Occurred within His Own Observation (Hallowell [Mel ,

1830). There were loyalist memoirs as well, such as Lieut. James

 

Moody's Narrative pf His Exertions and Sufferings ip_tpe_Cause pf_

Government, Since the Year 1776; Authenticated py_Proper Certificates

 

(London, 1783).2

Revolutionary War prison writing is for the most part the work of
the same kind of relatively unknown veterans. Were it not for the
journals and memoirs they left behind, most of the prison writers would
have dissolved completely into anonymity within a few years of their
deaths. As it is, few of their names are recognized today except by a
very small group of scholars and antiquarians. Nonetheless, a fairly
large body of Revolutionary War prison writing has survived, and this
writing can be divided into three basic categories. First, there are the
diaries and journals which many of the prisoners kept during their confine-
ment. The second category consists of propaganda published in pamphlets
and newspapers during the war. Former prisoners often used exaggerated
accounts of their sufferings in prison to stir up anti-British and anti-
1oyalist feeling. Finally, there are a number of postwar narratives which
were written after the war when the harsh tone of propaganda was no longer
appropriate and when the writer had to address himself to an audience with
little or no first-hand knowledge of the Revolution. The present study
will be concerned mostly with the narratives of this third type which were
written and published between the end of the war and the 1840's.

An examination of the diaries and of the propaganda provides

important background information about the prisons and prisoners,

12

however, and we must turn our attention to them before we can fully
appreciate the context in which the published narratives were written.
The diaries and journals, for example, provide us with records of events
as they happened, and even though the writer of a prison diary is the
victim of his own perspective, it is still likely that the diary is a
more accurate reflection of the realities of captivity than the postwar
narrative or the propaganda piece. For one thing, diaries are less
subject to the effects of faulty memory than memoirs are, especially if
many years separate the events from the narration. For another, the
journals were kept for the writers themselves and were not intended to
reach a wider audience. As a result, the temptation to embellish the
truth was less pronounced than would have been the case if the authors
had intended to publish.3 In the diaries, then, we find not prison tales
but the raw materials for them.

Four important themes recur in these journals: the inadequacy of
the food, the oppressiveness of the boredom, the description of escapes
and escape attempts, and the power of patriotism as a sustaining influence.
Though these are left for the most part undeveloped, mentioned flatly
without comment or context, they emerge as the most important features in
the prisoners' perceptions of prison life.

Generally, British policy was to provide prisoners with two-thirds of
the rations issued to a soldier or seaman. In many cases, however, this
proved inadequate because of the poor quality of the food and because
even the full rations of an eighteenth—century private were barely
enough to keep a man in good health.4 The prisoners were, of course,
particularly upset by such treatment, and many devoted a great deal of

space in their diaries to detailing precisely what food they were given

13

and what condition they found it in. Dr. Elias Cornelius, for example,
was imprisoned in Livingston's Sugar House in New York City for a short
time in 1777. His journal records that he and twelve companions were

given only "4 pounds of poor Irish Pork and 4 pounds of mouldy bread

”5

for 4 days. Another diarist, Jeremiah Greenman, was captured at

Quebec, and his first entry as a prisoner describes what he got to eat.

On January 1, 1776,

we ware put all in to a french Covint ware they gave us a
gill of rum for a New years gift & sum biscuit / we ware
aloued by the genl: 1 pound of bread and a half a pound
of meat [,]6 ozenes of butter a weak [,] a half a pint

of boyled wrice in a day / we had a gask of porter gave
to us by sum jentel man of the town.

Food is indeed an abiding interest with Greenman. He writes on January
2 that ”most of ye prisoners had then sent in to very our provision Salt
meat. but don git half so much as is a lowed by the Genl" (p. 24). He
notes with pleasure the gift of two additional casks of porter in
February and March, but by April he is sure the prisoners are being

poisoned:

Such provision as thay give us thay give us warm
bisqu[jts] wich we think was poysined fOr the
doctors would cure us jest as thay pleased / Say or
do what you would thay would give such phisick as
thay thought . . . / Complain of ever so deferent

an ayl ment thay would serve us all a like and give
one sort of phisick wich proved that we was poysoned
but we soon got better. (PP. 26-27)

The situation did not really ever improve, for in July Greenman writes
that he received a gift of "Sum Sugar & tea wich I was very glad of for
we had Nothing but beef & bread & but little of that" (p. 29).
Lieutenant Jabez Fitch was another prisoner whose journal contains
numerous references to food. Because Fitch was an officer when he was

taken at the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, he expected

14

better treatment than that afforded to private soldiers like Greenman.
In the matter of food, however, there were very few differences. Six
weeks after his capture, Fitch devoted an entire paragraph to the poor

quality of the provisions:

During the 39 Days which I was confind on Board the Ships,7

I never Tasted any kind of Saus, except a very few Pease,
nor Did I Tast any kind of fresh Meat or fish Except four
Meals of Quawhogs, while we lay down below the Narrows;
nor any Butter, or other kind of provision Except a very
Scanty allowance of Salt Meat & Bread, with a small matter
of Cheese & Chocalet, which we have purchas'd; We have
also gived about as Scant on acct: of Drink as Victuals
also. ~

Food is a continuing concern of Fitch's. On January 22, 1777, he was
removed to New Lots, Long Island and billeted in the farm household of
George Rapelye; his entry the next day begins with Scripture and a menu.
”In the Morning I Read several Chapters in the Book of Luke, and at about
1/2 after 8 had a good Breakfast on Roasted Clams Bread & Butter &
Suppaun [torn meal boiled in milk] & Milk” (p. 105). He found, however,
that clams and suppaun had drawbacks as a steady diet, and on April 5

he noted ironically that he had not only to endure his meals but to

reimburse Mr. Rapelye for them:

But one thing more is yet to be taken Notice of, which is
that we are Expected to pay no more than 2 Dollars pr:
Week for all the Suppaun & Clams that we Eat; & alth'o
we could have lived in N. York, among our Friends

Cheeper than that, yet we could not have Expected to be
furnish'd with half so large a Quantity of these two

very valuable Articles. (p. 160)

There is ample support in the pages of the prison diaries for the con-
clusion of one recent study of Revolutionary War prison conditions:
"While the food was alloted regularly, it was often of poor quality and
it certainly was a monotonous fare at best. . . . The American captives
were not starved, but they were forced, without outside help, to endure

upon a diet that was meager and not very healthful.”9

15

If the prisoners were hungry, they were also bored. Even though
words like "tedious" or ”sedentary" recur frequently, the greatest
indication of the prisoners' boredom to be found in the journals is the
fact that very often they found nothing to record. When Jeremiah
Greenman was captured for the second time on May 14, 1781, he had just
been made an officer, and so he was paroled to Gravesend in Long Island.
A week later he made the following entry do for the 20th and the 21st:
“Continuing at my quarters all these days sedantaryly & Condoleing my
Misfortune of being a prisoner, it being the first since my being
captured, of having an oppertunity to reflect on My Misfortune" (p. 209).
In the months of June and July there are a total of ten days covered by
the entry, "Nothing Worthy Remark," and the month of August presented
Greenman with thirteen unremarkable days. On those days when he does
make longer entries, their subjects tend to be gossip about events of the
war or speculations about the possibility of being exchanged. His

entries for the two-week period from August 6 to August 20 are typical:

M 6. this day went to Flatt Bush were continued till
Evening / then came to my Quaters.

T 7 to F 10. Continuing at my Quaters sedentary &
Nothing Worthy Remark.

S 11. this after Noon 25 Sail of Shipping went up
to New York--

S 12 to W 15. Continuing at my Quaters / Implying
myself in Drawing Several Ships &C--Nothing WR--

T 16. Adml. Graves return'd with his Fleet--

F 17 to S 19. Nothing Worthy remar.

M 20. went as far as Graves End Neck, in the
Evening return'd to my quaters. (p. 214)

Besides drawing and walking about, Jeremiah Greenman found himself with
very little to do.
Other journals note the boredom of prison life. Dr. Jonathan

Haskins was the junior surgeon aboard the privateer sloop Charming Sally

 

16

when he was captured in 1777 and confined in Mill Prison in England.

Marion Coan, who published Haskins' prison diary in the New England

 

Quarterly in 1944, cautioned in the headnote that the tedious entries
had been omitted: "The transcript which follows constitutes about
three-fourths of the journal, omitting only such entries as mention
merely the weather, the arrival and sailing of ships, and commonplace

occurrences which are often repeated.”1O

One-fourth of the journal,
then, consists of entries born of tedium, and there is ample evidence
in the entries which Coan does include that Haskins had a great deal of
free time. On July 19, 1777, he "Made a calculation and it cost govern-
ment 5 pence per diem for everyone confoned here" (p. 298). The
implication, of course, is that he had little better to do than concoct
and solve arithmetical problems. On January 23, 1778, when for the
first time the prisoners were allowed to burn a candle at their own
expense, Haskins termed it ”a great indulgence" (p. 304).

Another journal writer was Captain Samuel Thayer, who left behind
a record of his adventures in the Quebec expedition from his setting out
from Cambridge in September through his capture on December 31 and his

11

parole the following August. Even though Thayer's entries are often

circumstantial, they still reflect the tedium of prison life. Indeed
the decision to keep a prison diary at all can be taken as evidence that
men like Thayer were bored. The following entries are typical of the

tone of his journal:

July Q. Last night we were lock'd up in our Rooms, for
what reason I don't know. This morning 6 vessels arrived,
I believe loaded with provisions.

July 7, Several officers of the Garrison came and looked
round in our apartments, but said nothing to us. We were
ignorant of the reason until some Sea Captains came into

17

the Garden and told us there was a report in town that we
intended to set the SeminaryILWhere they were being held]
on fire, but they are false reports, & I don't imagine
there is not one amongst us that would perform such an
action.

July 8. Different reports. Some say that the
Provincials took about 5000 British Prisoners. Others
say that the British have taken New York, & that the
Pennsylvania & Virginia troops laid down their arms.
But the reports are so numerous and various that we
can hardly credit the least; next Evening a Sloop of
war sail'd down the river.

July 12. We hear that Major Mgégs and Capt. Dearborn
are exchanged by Admiral Howe.

July.lZ. Nothing remarkable until the 17th, when we
hear of a Skirmish take place at Point-au-faire, the
Provincials seeing them in their boats, which they
stove to Pieces, Killed, wounded and took 400; at
4 o'clock a Brig sail' d up the River.

July 18. Locked up close in our rooms all night;
the re7son we are ignorant of. (PP. 291 -92)

Because little happened around them, and because what did happen
happened for reasons they were ignorant of, the prison diarists devoted
much of their attention to recording minutia, gossip, and hearsay.

A final example of the effect of boredom on the diaries of
Revolutionary War prisoners can be found in the account of Joseph Ware,
who, like Thayer, also accompanied Benedict Arnold to Quebec. The

entries for part of January, 1776, are typical:

gtp_tp_12th
Very snowy. The storm very heavy. Three men were stifled
to death in the night on duty.

12th to 16th
This morning 60 men went to the hospital with the smallpox.
The men have it very favorably.

16th tp_20th
Six of the old countrymen, that listed out deserted, and
the remainder of them put into prison again, because those
deserted.

 

20th to 24th
Five men died with the sm7ll7 pox. 7The enemy made an
attempt to go out after our people's cannon, and got
drove back. There was a continual firing after them.
24th §p_31st

Nothing remarkable. 13

18

Here death, disease, and desertion are worthy of remark, but only barely
so. The entries are blandly stated, and the events excite no particular
reaction in Ware himself. The men who wrote the prison journals were,
in a word, bored.

Escape and escape attempts provided prison diarists with one subject
about which they might write with Vigor and enthusiasm, and indeed the
pages of the journals abound with accounts of tunnels dug and guards

bribed.]4

Even when talking of escape, however, the prisoners often
related events in a matter-of-fact way, as if escapes were normal occur-
rences which did but little to relieve the tedium of those not directly
involved. A seaman named William Widger, for example, kept a diary at

Mill Prison at Plymouth, England; his entry for April 13, 1781, is

typical of the way in which he recorded escape attempts:

Last Night Mr. Kitts & Hackett with Several more attempted
to make their Escape Kitts & Hackett Got into the yard the
Centinel discovered them & Fird which alarmd the Guard.
they were obligd to take Shellter into the HOSpital, and
were let into the prison this Morning by Sawing a barr off
in the Window, the Guard came into the prison last night
but very Sivil.-- 5

Jonathan Haskins adopted a similar tone when treating escape attempts in
his journal. "About 2 minutes past 9 p.m.," he noted on January 31, 1778,
"Capt. Henry, and Johnson, Boardman, Dale, and Treadwell eloped from this
prison and took two centinels with them who were discovered before they
got 10 rods off. A great stir to no purpose" (p. 304). Such entries are
not at all rare in the prison diaries.

It is not really surprising that the prisoners should treat escape
attempts so cavalierly in their journals. For one thing, escape attempts
were commonplace, not only in the makeshift jails of New York but also in

regular prisons in England. "During the War of American Independence,”

19

notes British historian Francis Abell, "many prisoners of that nation-
ality were at Forton [the prison at Portsmouth, England], and appear to
have been ceaselessly engaged in trying to escape. In 1777 thirty broke
out, of whom nineteen were recaptured and were so harshly punished that
they complained in a letter which somehow found its way into the London
papers.“16 Most commonly, harsh punishment consisted of a stay in the
“black hole" with half rations, and it was not unusual for a prisoner
emerging from the black hole to begin contemplating his next attempt at
freedom right away. Prison breaks and recaptures, then, simply came to
be viewed as ordinary and recurring features of tedious prison life. The
case, however, was somewhat different when a man came to write down the
particulars of his own attempt to run away. For reasons that are obvious,
the tone of these accounts is a good deal less lethargic than the tone of
the third-person reports, and there is quite a bit more detail. Dr. Elias
Cornelius' record of his escape serves as a typical example of how such
events were portrayed in the diaries.

On January 16, 1778, Cornelius, who had been a patient at the prison

hospital in New York, was told he was to attend to the other sick prison-

ers despite his own "cough and fever":

I was now determined to make my escape, although hardly able
to undertake it. Just at the dusk of the evening, before
the lamps were lighted (having made the Sentinel intoxi-
cated) I with others went out into the back yard to
endeavor to make our escape over the fence, the others

being backward about going first, I climbed upon a tomb-
stone and gave a spring and went over safely, and then

gave orders for the others to do likewise. (p. 10)

One of the party made too much noise; the guards were alerted and
Cornelius became separated from the others. By 9:00 p.m. he was down by
the river looking for a way to cross to Long Island when he was challenged

by a sentinel.

20

He bade me advance and give the counter sign, upon which I
fancied I was drunk and advancing in a staggering manner,
and after falling to the ground, he asked me where I was
going, home I told him, but had got lost, and having been
to New York, had taken rather too much liquor, and become
somewhat intoxicated. He then asked my name which I told
him was Marther Hopper (Mr. Hopper lived not far distant).
And solicited him to put me in the right road, but told
me that I must not go till the Sargent of the Guards dis-
missed me from him, unless I could give him the counter
sign. I still entreated him to let me go knowing the
situation I was in. Soon, however, he consented and
directed my course which I thanked him for. (p. ll)

In these passages we find a typical feature of the escape story as it was
originally recorded in the diaries, and as it later came to be portrayed
in propaganda and postwar narratives. The escaping prisoner's tactics
most often involve outwitting the enemy rather than physically overcoming
him. Cornelius, then, makes one guard drunk, and he pretends he is drunk
himself in order to deceive another. Throughout the journals and
narratives there are numerous other episodes supporting the notion that
Yankee cleverness is more than a match for superior weapons and numbers.17
Another feature to be found in Cornelius' account of his escape is
the detailing of the hardships he faced while he was on the road. His
difficulties were fewer and less severe than those of some others, but
their inclusion in the diary serves the usual purpose of describing the

writer's dedication to his cause. Soon after he left the sentinel

mentioned above, he began to experience new problems-

At this time the tumor in my lungs broke, and being
afraid to cough for fear of being heard, prevented

me from relieving myself of the puss that was lodged
there. I had now to cross lots that were cleared and
covered with snow, the houses being thick on the road,
which I was to cross, and for fear of being heard, I
lay myself flat on my stomach and crept along on the
frozen snow. When I came to the fence, I climbed
over, and walked down the road, near a house where
there were music and dancing. At this time one of

21

the guards came out. I immediately fell down upon my
face. Soon the man went into the house, I rose again

and crossed the fence into the field and proceeded toward
the river, there being no trees or rocks in the field to
hinder my being seen, and not being able to walk without
being heard as the snow crust was hard enough to permit
my walking on it, and the dogs beginning to bark, I lay
myself flat again and crept across the field, which took
me half an hour. (pp. 11-12)

Soon, Cornelius fell in with "friends of America," who conveyed him to
Long Island and finally to Connecticut. In the spring he rejoined the
army at Valley Forge.
It is with the treatment of escape that the diaries begin to be
something more than tedious accounts of meager menus and calculations
of the numbers of nameless sick, dying, and dead. In the escape story
we find some of the fOrmulaic elements which become more significant in
other forms of prison writing. Elias Cornelius, as we have seen, fell
back on his wits in order to get away, and he was willing to endure hard-
ship to insure the success of his attempt. In some of the other journals
we find a different element of the emerging formula, and one which will
be of particular importance in the discussion of the published narratives;
there is evidence in the diaries that prisoners used patriotism and a
belief in the virtue of their cause to help them get through the difficul-
ties of captivity.18
To some extent, of course, patriotism was the result of group
pressure. George Thompson, who was a prisoner at Forton in England from
1777 to 1781, shows concern in his diary that some are accepting offers to
enlist in the British service. On January 21, 1779, he records that
"this day an Agrement was Mead between the Officers and Seamen and others
if enny Mane officer our Mane ofer to Enter on bord of the Britanik

Ships of war after the 24 of this present Month Should Sofer the

22

punishment of 39 Strips and to heave one of his Ears Cut of” (p. 225).
Coercion was not always necessary, however; some diarists like William
Widger were genuinely patriotic and so, fOr example, made note of
significant dates in their journals. On April 19, 1781, he observed
that "this day 6 yers Lexington Battle was fought" (p. 335).

Some diaries record full blown patriotic demonstrations. Jonathan

Haskins writes of July 4, 1778:

This morning when we were turned out, we fixed our badges
in our hats, which caUsed a surprise. The Agent desired
to see one of them, which was sent him, and it happened
to be one that on the top was wrote in capitals Independ-
ence, and on the bottom Liberty or Death, and he not
knowing the meaning thereof, was surprised, and concluded
we were a going to force the guards, in order to regain
our liberty, therefore ordered a double centry at the
gate, and immediately sent an express to the Genl. and
Adml. Shouldham, and made a great stir, and to his dis-
grace, as it caused much laughter. It passed on till

one o'clock, when we formed in 13 divisions. Each gave

3 cheers till it came to the 13th, when each division
joined the 13th and gave a general huzza, which was

done with the greatest regularity and order that could

be expected. We kept our colours flying while the sun
set, then hauled them down; thus ended the day. (p. 426)

Such ritualized celebrations helped the prisoners tolerate the boredom
and trying conditions that characterized their everyday experiences, and
it helped them to collectively resist the efforts of the British recruit-

EY‘S.]9

For one of the most telling displays of patriotism in the diaries,
we must turn again to that of Dr. Elias Cornelius. While he was being
held in New York, his father, a staunch Tory, came in from Long Island
to visit and remonstrate with him. As they first came into sight of

each other, Cornelius writes,

My heart at first was troubled within me, I burst into
tears and did not speak fbr some minutes. I put my hand
through the grates and took my fathers, and held it fast.

23

The poor old gentleman shed many tears and seemed quite
troubled to see me in so woeful a place. He asked me how
I did I told him poorly but as well as could be expected
in such a hideous place, I then asked after the health of
Mother Brother & Sisters, he told me they were well. I
was filled with joy at hearing this as it was the first
time I had heard from them since I entered the service.
He asked me "what I thought of myself now and why I could
not have been ruled by him, he said he had forewarned me
of the cost, and that I had been led away by a bad man
(Dr. Latham[)] and that Washington's whole crew would
soon be in the same situation" and says he, "did not you
never see his excellency's proclamation, whare in was set
forth a free race and pardon to all who would come in
voluntarely" (Meaning Sir Wm Hows Proclamation) I told
him I had seen it, says he "why then did you not come in
then, voluntarely withoUt being brought in by force of
arms" Says I, Father what made you think so, did I not
tell you my mind before I left your house, and did not
you know my disposition? Have not I been faithful in

all the duties of a child, to a parent? But, Father

you, and every other man must know that it was a very
trying thing to me, to leave all my dear friends and

turn myself out into the world naked, Does this seem to
you, to show a rebellious disposition of temper and

mind? When at that time I had not a relative or acquaint-
ance in the Army, not a relative in the world but what
were enemies to this once happy country. Believe me

dear Father, I was not led away by any man as you
supposed. But on the contrary I weighed the matter
seriously before I came into the service, the more I
meditated the more I was led to believe that the cause

in which my countrymen were engaged was a just one, and
loudly called for the assistance of every well wisher of
his bleeding country. (pp. 9-10)

I have quoted Cornelius at large here to illustrate the depths of the ‘
pressures that could operate against the patriotic feelings of a soldier
or prisoner. The dedication to the patriot cause that we find in the
journals, then, was most probably a sincere reflection of the diarists'
beliefs, especially when we consider that the offer of a pardon was
always present to any who would renounce that cause. It is probable
also that the act of recording patriotic sentiments in the diaries

helped reinforce those sentiments. On July 4, 1777, Jonathan Haskins

24

had been sitting in Old Mill Prison and making daily notations about

the weather for approximately a month. From such a vantage point, his
own prospects and those of the new United States must have looked grim,
but he remarked in his diary: "This day 12 months the United States of
America declared independent which they've supported one year. God send
they ever may” (p. 298).

A number of prisoners either were not satisfied with a simple
journal of events for their own use or perhaps never bothered to produce
a record at all until they were released or exchanged or until after they
had escaped; in either case, anti-British propaganda in the form of
prison narratives began to appear throughout the later years of the war.
In these pamphlets and newspaper articles, former prisoners molded and
manipulated their prison experiences to create a picture of their British
captors as tools of tyranny, men without conscience or humanity. While
in the diaries we find that provisions were both scarce and of low
quality, in the propaganda pieces we are told by an enraged ex-prisoner
that callous profiteering by the commissaries and deliberate efforts by
British recruiters to force prisoners to enlist in His Majesty's service
lurk behind the problem of inadequate rations. The bored diarist notes
everyday events like the changing of the guard or the burial of the dead
listlessly, but the propagandist finds in such events the evidence of
gratuitous cruelty. The escape stories of the journals are generally
flat even when they are fairly well detailed, but escapes in the
propaganda literature emphasize disproportionately such elements as the
cleverness of the escapee, the delight Tories take in betraying escape

attempts or in recapturing fleeing prisoners, and the brutality with

25

which the British punish returned captives. Finally, patriotism, which
is a sustaining force in the diaries, becomes equated with common
decency in the propaganda. The Tory or the British soldier are not
simply the enemy; instead, their inability to see the inherent righteous-
ness of the patriot cause is taken as evidence that they teeter on the
brink of depravity.

Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, who kept a journal not only as a prisoner

but for most of his life, wrote A_Narative gf_the Treatment with Which

 

the American Prisoners Were Used Who Were Taken by_the British §_Hessian

 

 

Irggp§_gg_Long Island, York Island, §g,, 1776. With Some Occasional

 

 

 

Observations Thereon while he was a prisoner on parole at New Lots on

 

Long Island in 1777. A letter to his brother which serves as an intro-
duction to the "narative" makes it clear that Fitch desired to smuggle
the manuscript out and have it published. The contrast between Fitch's
diary and the 1777 propaganda narrative provides us with an interesting

illustration of the ways in which some prisoners transfonned their

experiences or their records of them into potent political material.20

Fitch sets the tone for his piece in the first paragraph by
juxtaposing the virtuous against the "Hessian Butcher" or the "American

Savage”:

It appears by the various Usage, with which we have been
treated during the course of our tedious Imprisonment,
that Divine Providence hath not been more particular, in
forming the different Features, & various Statures of
Mankind, than it hath been in the fonnation of the various
Dispositions & capacitys of the mind; Nor doth there
appear to ocular view, a greater Distinction between the
well proportion'd Courtier or Citizen, in a Deacent &
Beautifull dress & the most deform'd Hessian Butcher, or
American Savage, in their murdering or hunting Unifbrms,
than an attentive Observer may Discover, betwixt the

26

Person whose mind is annimated with Sentements of Virtue,
Humanity and Friendship to Mankind in Genllz, and the
Insolent Clown who knows no satisfaction, but in Acts of
Cruelty, Slaughter & Rapine. (p. 137)

Fitch goes on to say that "It would be impossible to Reherse the many
Instances of Insult, with which we have been treated," and the reader
knows he will soon be introduced to captors who are unfamiliar with
"Virtue, Humanity and Friendship to Mankind."

In order to make his point, Fitch indulges in numerous half-truths
and embellishments of fact, the marks of the true propagandist. Two
examples will serve.21 First, there is the question of the burial of
those prisoners who died while in custody in New York. On November 24,
1776, Fitch's diary contains an almost parenthetical entry on burial:

“I then came up to the Burying place, where I see some people Burying
two of the Prisoners" (p. 73). Four days later we come upon this note:
”In the Afternoon I went onto the Burying Ground & see four of the
Prisoners Buryed in one Grave; About 3 oClock I took a very good Dinner
with the Frenchmen, soon after which I came home, & went to Mr: Giles's
where I had an agreable Conference with him & his Wife" (p. 75). Speak-
ing of the same period of his captivity in the narrative, however, Fitch

finds cause for outrage at the way the dead are mishandled:

Nor was there any more Solemnity or Ceremony bestow'd on
those miserable Sufferers, after they were dead, than
while living, for their Bodys were thrown out on the
ground, where they lay almost naked, Expos'd to the
Weather (th'o never so Stormy &c) Indeed 't was said
that some of them were Expos'd to the unnatural De-
vouring of Swine & other greedy Annimals, in a most
Inhuman & Ridiculous manner; however this might be,
they were most of them Buried, alth'o it was in a
manner very unconnnn for the Interment of human Bodys,
many of them being thrown into the ground in a heep,
almost naked, where they were Slightly cover'd over
with Earth. (p. 149)

27

Here Fitch goes beyond reporting facts; even if it is true that upon one
occasion or other some animal did eat human flesh, it would still be in-
sufficient to justify the implication that bodies were left exposed to
the "unnatural Devouring of Swine” almost as a matter of course. What
might or might not be the truth is not at issue here, because Fitch's
purpose is to paint a picture of an unnatural enemy.

Another part of that picture has to do with the treatment of the
enlisted men among the prisoners. These men were incarcerated under -
unpleasant conditions in the church basements and sugar houses in New
York, and they were ineligible for the parole enjoyed by Fitch and other
officers. In December, 1776, Fitch visited some of these unfortunates
on a couple of occasions, and the entries in his diary, while they make
no attempt to hide the hardship that the prisoners endured, are free of
the bitter venom that informs propaganda. After a good dinner of "French
Friggazie & Fry'd Oysters . . . I went down to the Dutch Church to see
the Prisoners, but the Hessian Guard were grown so very Insolent that
they would not suffer me to Talk with them through the Fence; I here
lit of Doctr: Mix & went with him to a House on Maiden Lane where we

made some stop & warm'd us.” The following day,

About 11 oClock I went down to the Dutch Church again, &
Visited the poor Prisoners, whom I found in a very
miserable Condition, 4 of em lay dead in the Yard, &
several others Dieing in the House; Sargt: Graves appears
to have but little Time to Live, as well as several others
of our Regt:. & Indeed the whole of em appear Compleet
Objects of Pity, & alth'o they may be Depriv'd of that
favour, from the powers of Earth & Hell, yet it is to be
hope'd that a Superior Power may soon Interpose in their
favours Heav'n grant the happy Period may be Hastened.

p. 89

The tone here is not at all one of rage. For one thing, Fitch is much

too concerned with his own comfort and the company of Dr. Mix to be a

28

credible spokesman against the cruelty and neglect of the Hessians. For
another, we find that the sight of the dead and dying spurs Fitch to a
formulaic prayer which implies, but does not directly state, that the
”powers of Earth" are incapable of sufficient humanity to pity the
victims.

In the "Narrative,” however, we find more direct treatment of "the
unnatural, the savage & Inhuman Disposition of the Enemy into whose
hands we are fallen; & whose Charecter (notwithstanding all their boasts
of Lenity & humanity) will bear a Just comparison to those whose tender
mercies are Cruelty." The refusal of the guards to allow Fitch to
visit the men in prison receives revised treatment in light of this

definition of the "unnatural” enemy:

When we attempted to Visit the Prisoners at the Churches,
in their miserable Situation, we were frequently Repuls'd
& deny'd Admittance by the Guard, who often treated us
with the greatest Insolence, driving us back with their
Bayonets, Swords or Canes; Indeed I have often been in
danger of being stabb'd, for attempting to speak with a
Prisoner in the Yard. (p. 149)

We know this last to be an exaggeration, because Fitch tells us in the
diary that he did not go to visit the prisoners very often, and from
reading the accounts of those occasions when he did go we discover that
he did not try very hard to gain admittance once a member of the guard
barred the door. There is a marked difference between Fitch the diarist
and Fitch the writer of propaganda.22
Much of the propaganda during the war appeared, naturally enough, in
the newspapers where it would be likely to reach the broadest possible
audience. The dominant theme of these accounts is the unrelenting

cruelty of the British and Tories. Philip Jones told his story in The_

Boston GaZette and Country Journal, which devoted the entire front page

 

29

of its June 16, 1777, edition to sworn depositions made by former prison-

ers. A British Colonel, Jones writes,

inquired where that damned rebel son of a bitch was, on
which the owner of the house [where Jones was hiding]
said there was a stranger here, he knew not who he was.
The Col. then discharged his pistol loaded with two buck
shot into my thigh, and then commanded me to mount a
horse which he had with him, and being not able to mount
briskly, he struck me over the head with a sword, which
dropt my hat, on which the Colonel struck me to the bone
on the leg with his sword, then we rode to headquarters,
where I was laid on a lock of hay. Being examined by
the Colonel what we did to the Irishmen that made them
rebel, I answered that I knew no reason excepting they
lived better here than at home, upon which he struck me
with his sword again on the leg to the bone, on which I
lay from Monday to Saturday without being dressed, by
which treatment I am likely to be ever a cripple.

Jones here is describing extreme behavior if it ever took place, but the
degree to which the story is exaggerated is a good deal less important

than the fact that many of the readers of The Boston Gazette would never

 

question its accuracy. The intent of Jones's statement is clearly to re-
confirm for the reader the justice of opposing an enemy capable of such
cruelty.

Jones's narrative was reprinted by The Connecticut Courant and

 

Hartford Weekly Intelligencer two weeks after its initial appearance in

 

Boston. Indeed, the Courant had been printing a number of prison prop—
aganda pieces throughout June, 1777. On the 16th, "A Justhccount of
the Treatment Which Mr. Josiah, First Lieutenant of the Continental Brig
Ana Doria, Received while a Prisoner" appeared and provided the readers
with the usual exaggerations. A week later, a deposition entitled "A
Just Account of the Usage the American Prisoners Received from Lord Howe“
and signed by William Gamble, Thomas Boyd, and William Darlington com-

plained about cruel treatment, the looting of possessions, short rations,

/

/

30

and the cold and crowded conditions of the provost gaol in New York. In
addition to Jones's narrative on the 30th, the Courant printed similar
depositions by James Stuart, Samuel Young, and John Caryl. Prison
narratives and lists of prisoners became regular features in the news-
papers by mid-1777, and they continued to appear throughout the war.
Indeed, the notion that cruelty was deliberate in British prisoner of

war policy became such a commonplace that in 1781 the New York Gazette

 

could run a satiric piece in which James Rivington offers for sale a

book entitled A_New and Complete System pf_Cruelty: Containing a

 

Variety pf_Modern ImprOvements ip_the Art, Embellished with ap_Elegant
23

 

Frontispiece, Representing the Inside View pf_a_Prison Ship.

 

The poet Philip Freneau was a passenger aboard the Agypra out of
Philadelphia when she was captured by the British in 1779. Before his
release, Freneau was held for a time aboard the prison ship Scorpion; he
later detailed his experiences in his well known poem, "The Prison-Ship,"
which is scathing in its indictment of the British. Less well known is
a prose manuscript written in 1780 which is an excellent example of the
kind of pr0paganda that fbrmer prisoners were producing. One particular

section of Some Account pf the Capture pf the Ship Aurora contains all

 

 

 

the elements of the form and is worth quoting at length. After a number
of the prisoners had managed to make their escape in the ship's boat, the

sentries, who had been temporarily overcome, initiated reprisals:

As soon as the sentries got possession of the vessel again,
which they had no difficulty in doing, as there was no
resistance made, they posted themselves at each hatchway,
and most basely and cowardly fired fore and aft among us,
pistols and marquets for a full quarter of one hour with-
out intermission. By the mercy of God, they touched but
four, one mortally; another had his great toe shot off,

the other two slightly.24

31

Again we are given the picture of captors behaving with indiscriminate
cruelty toward their captives. Freneau takes care, however, to make
sure that we cannot dismiss the incident as an isolated event: "I
believe they meant by this piece of cruelty to atone to their masters
for their being disarmed in the manner they were" (p. 39). The suggest-
ion that policy condoned and required the inhumanity of prison guards is

explicit in this sentence.

Freneau goes on to report the aftermath of the affair:

The next morning the Deputy Commissary came on board
to muster the company to see who was missing. All
that were found wounded were put in irons and ordered
to be upon deck, exposed to the burning sun. About
four o'clock P.M., one of the poor fellows who had
been wounded the night before died. They then took
him out of irons, sent him on shore, and buried him.
After this no usage seemed to them severe enough for
us. We had water given us to drink that a dog could
scarcely relish; it was thick and clammy and had a
dismal smell. They withdrew our allowance of rum,
and drove us down every night strictly at sunset,
where we suffered inexpressibly till seven o'clock
in the morning, the gratings being rarely reopened
before that time. (p. 39)

The inhumanity here is systematic. Clammy water and the foul air below
decks from dusk to dawn become, according to Freneau, common means of
punishment, and the cruelty is gratuitous because its victims are not
those who escaped but those who stayed behind.

By far the most famous of the propaganda narratives is The Narrative

 

pf_Colonel Ethan Allen (1779). This little book contains all the examples
of cruelty that are the mainstays of the form, but in the creation of a
narrator Allen goes beyond anything we have seen thus far. The character
which emerges from the book is self-assertive, witty, clever, and boast-

ful; the introduction is characteristic in its irony and bravado.

32

I have been very generous with the British in giving them
full and ample credit for all their good usage, of any
considerable consequence, which I met with among them
during my captivity; which was easily done, as I met with
but little, in comparison with the bad, which, by reason
of the great plurality of it, could not be contained in
so concise a narrative; so that I am certain that I have
more fully enumerated the favours which I received, than
the abuses I suffered. (PP. 2-3)

It is clear in the voice of such a passage that its writer thinks himself
quite a good fellow, and one who has been abused by people he considers
worthy of sarcasm but not respect. In Allen's Narrative, in fact, we
find that the rage which is so prominent in much of the propaganda is
often subsumed in the creation of a persona who is able to transcend the
mean or the petty in the interests of America's cause.

He expresses the dedication directly when he describes his feelings

as he awaited hanging in Falmouth:

I reasoned thus, that nothing was more comnon than for men
to die, with their friends round them, weeping and lament-
ing over them, but not able to help them, which was in
reality not different in the consequence of it from such a
death as I was apprehensive of; and as death was the
natural consequence of animal life to which the laws of
nature subject mankind, to be timorous and uneasy as to
the event or manner of it, was inconsistent with the
character of a philOSOpher or soldier. The cause I was
engaged in, I ever viewed worthy hazarding my life fbr.
(pp. 41-42)

We see stoic virtue in such sentiments. Allen presents himself here as
a noble citizen-soldier who, like a latter day Cincinnatus, subordinates
his own interests to those of the higher good. That these sentiments
most probably represent what Allen would like to have felt at Falmouth
rather than what he actually did feel when faced with imminent execution
is less important in this context than the fact that when he came to
write his narrative, he chose to portray his persona as a stoic hero.

This is significant because Allen the propagandist knows that if he can

33

establish himself as a philosopher as well as a soldier, and if he can
rise above the personal concerns echoed in many of the pamphlets and
newspaper pieces of the day, he can then identify the patriot position
with virtue and self—sacrifice, and the British position with corruption
and self-interest.

Throughout the narrative, then, we often come upon Allen's attempts
to paint himself as a superior man and to draw the proper political
conclusions from the self-portrait. Perhaps the most direct example of
this comes out in his description of a strategem he used upon first
arriving in England to keep from being summarily hanged. "I requested

of the commander of the castle,” he writes,

the privilege of writing to Congress, who, after con-
sulting with an officer that lived in town, of a
superior rank, permitted me to write. I wrote in the
fore part of the letter, a short narrative of my ill-
treatment; but withal let them know that, though I
was treated as a criminal in England, and continued
in irons, together with those taken with me, yet it
was in consequence of the orders which the commander
of the castle received from General Carleton; and
therefore I desired Congress to desist from matters
of retaliation, till they should know the result of
the government in England, respecting their treat-
ment towards me, and the prisoners with me, and
govern themselves accordingly, with a particular
request, that if retaliation should be found nec-
essary, it might be exercised not according to the
smallness of my character in America, but in pro-
portion to the importance of the cause for which I
suffered--That is, according to my present re-
collection, the substance of the letter, inscribed
"Ip_the Illustrious Continental Congress.” This
letter was written with a view that it should be

sent to the ministry at London rather than to
Congress, with a design to intimidate the haughty
English government, and screen my neck from the
halter.

The next day the officer, from whom I obtained
license to write, came to see me, and frowned on
me on account of the impudence of the letter, as

34

he phrased it, and further added, "Do you think that we
are fools in England, and would send your letter to
Congress, with instructions to retaliate on our own
people? I have sent your letter to Lord North." This
gave me inward satisfaction . . . for I found I had
come Yankee over him, and that the letter had gone to
the identical person I had designed it for. (pp. 38-39)

Allen's picture of the Yankee is not simply someone more clever than his
captors, but someone who is capable of using ministerial intrigue and
deceit against those very ministers who practice it. The boastful self-
satisfaction of this passage is obvious and the attack against the
British position subtle, but the two complement one another. If the
reader accepts Allen's persona in the Narrative, he accepts a Yankee hero
who is stronger and more virtuous than his enemy, the product of a corrupt
system of government; there is also the indication that the Yankee's
superior virtue and wit will be enough to see him through.

The diaries and the propaganda pieces of the war years, then, pro-
vide the background for the narratives which appeared throughout the
first half of the nineteenth century. The journals give us an insight
into what day-to-day prison life might have been like, and the propaganda
defines for us the contemporary response to prison conditions and the
plight of the prisoners. Both forms also introduce a notion that later
became a major feature of the narratives: that virtue and the public
good were the principal motivating concerns of the American soldiers and
seamen.

As we shall see in the next chapter, however, a devotion to virtue
and the cause of liberty is insufficient to explain the motives of the
narrative writers satisfactorily. Pressing concerns like poverty and
combat disability influenced the decisions of many to publish their

memoirs because the years after the War of 1812 were times of rising

35

nationalistic feeling and a growing market for patriotic literature.
Others wrote to support their claims for military pensions or to wonder
in print why those claims were denied. They all to some degree were
indulging themselves by looking back on their own roles in the war in

which the thirteen colonies had "come Yankee" over the British empire.

NOTES: CHAPTER ONE

1Encyclopedia pf the American Revolution (New York: McKay, 1966),
p. 610.

2Martin' '5 Narrative has been reissued as Private Yankee Doodle,

Being a Narrative of Some Lf the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings Lf

a Revolutionary Soldier, ed. George F. Scheer (Boston: Little, Brown,
1962), and Moody' s was reprinted in 1968 by the New York Times and Arno
Press. Numerous other such accounts appeared throughout the nineteenth
century; see, for example, The Diary Lf Lieut. Anthopy Allaire, Lf
Ferguson's Corps (1881; rpt. New York. New York Times and Arno Press,
1968); ”The Journal of Lieut. William Feltman, of the First Pennsylvania
Regiment, from May 26, 1781 to April 15, 1782, Embracing the Siege of
Yorktown and the Southern Campaign,” Pennsylvania Historical Society
Collections,l (1853), 303-48; Journal of M ior Jeremiah Fogg, during
the Expedition of Gen. Sullivan in 1779, _gainst the Western Indians
(Exeter, N. H. ,1879); Diary Lf Ezra Green, M. D. Surgeon Ln Board the
Continental Ship- of- War "Ranger," under John Paul Jones, from November 1,
1777, to September 27,1778 (Boston, 1875); Caleb Haskell' 5 Diary.
May_5, l775-May_30, 1776, A Revolutionary_Soldier' 5 Record before Boston
and with Arnold's Quebec Expedition, ed. Lothrop Withington (Newburyport,
1881); or Narrative Lf JOnathan Rathbun, with Accurate Accounts Lf the

Capture of Groton Fort, the Massacre That Followed, and the Sacking and

Burning of New London, September 6,1781, the British Forces, under
the Command Lf the Traitor Benedict Arnold [New London], 1840). In
addition, memoirs and journals written by ordinary soldiers and seamen
can be found in a number of anthologies: Henry S. Commager and Richard
Morris, eds. , The Spirit of Seventy75ix, 2 vols. (Indianapolis and New
York: Bobbs Merrill, 1958); Richard M. Dorson, ed., America Rebels:
Narratives Lf the Patriots (New York: Pantheon, 1953); Kenneth Roberts,
ed., March to Quebec: Journals Lf the Members Lf Arnold's Expedition
(New York: Doubleday, 1938); and James Talmon, ed., Loyalist Narratives
from Upper Canada (Toronto. Champlain Society, 1946).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3Beverly Verloris Baxter, "The American Revolutionary Experience: A
Critical Study of Diaries and Journals of American Prisoners during the
Revolutionary Period," Diss. University of Delaware, 1976, is a full
length study of the diaries and makes a similar point on p. 4; see also
Olive Anderson, "The Treatment of Prisoners of War in Britain during the
American War of Independence," Bulletin pf the Institute pj_Historical
Research, 28 (1955), 76p,

4See Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners during_the
American ReVolution (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 18,
45.

 

 

36

37

5Journal Lf Dr. Elias Cornelius, A Revolutionary_Surgeon. Graphic
Descriptions Lf_ His Sufferings while a Prisoner in Provost Jail, New
York, 1777 and 1778, with Biographical Sketch (Washington, D. C, 1903),
p. 6.

6Robert C. Bray and Paul E. Bushnell, Diary Lf a Common Soldier in
the American Revolution, 1775- 1783. An Annotated Edition Lf the Military
Journal Lf Jeremiah Greenman (Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois
University Press, 1978), p. 24.

7On August 29, Fitch and those taken with him were imprisoned on
board the merchantman Pacific; from then until his parole on October 7,
Fitch was held temporarily aboard a number of ships.

 

 

 

 

 

 

8W. H. W. Sabine, The New-York Diary_Lf Lieutenant Jabez Fitch Lf
the 17th (COnneCticut) Regiment from Apgust_ 22, 1776 to December 15,
1777 (1954; rpt. New York: New York Times and Arno Press ,1971), p. 54.

 

 

9Bowman, p. 74.

10"A Revolutionary Prison Diary: The Journal of Dr. Jonathan Haskins,"
New Epgland Quarterly, 17 (1944), 292.

H"Journal of Capt. Simeon Thayer's March through the Wilderness to
Quebec,” in Roberts, March §p_Quebec, pp. 243-94.

12Meigs and Dearborn were not exchanged until January 10, 1777, and
March 10, 1777, respectively.

13"Expedition against Quebec. Journal Kept by Joseph Ware, of
Needham, Mass. , with a Short Genealogy of the Ware Family Annexed. A
Journal Lf a March from Cambridge Ln an Expedition against Q_ebec, jp_
Col. Benedict Arnold's Detachment, Sept. 13, 1775, " New England Historical
and Genealogical Register, 6 (1852),137.

14Two diaries with unusually frequent entries detailing escape
attempts are Samuel Cutler' s journal published in "Prison Ships, and the
Old Mill Prison, Plymouth, England, 1777, " New England Historical and
Genealogical Register, 32 (1878), 42- 4, 184- 8, 305- 8, 395- 8; and "Diary
of George Thompson of Newburyport, Kept at Forton Prison, England, 1777-
1781, Essex Institute Historical Collections, 76 (1940), 221-42.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15"Diary of William Widger of Marblehead, Kept at Mill Prison, England,
1781," Essex Institute Historical Collections, 73 (1937), 334.

16BIl§2£§E§.°f_ War 1" Br1ta1n, 1756 to 1815: A Record Lf Their
Lives, Their Romance, and Their Suffering§_(London: Oxford University
Press, 1914), p. 215

 

 

 

 

38

17For two other examp1es of prisoners re1ying on wit, see Hind1e,
The Narrative of Co1one1 Ethan A11en, pp. 38- 9; and Leonard Kr1ege1,
ed., Life and Remarkab1e Adventures of Israe1 R. Potter (New York:
Corinth, 1962), pp. 19- 22.

 

18This phenomenon is more start11ng than it wou1d appear at first
g1ance. From the British point of view, the war was a c1v11 contest
and the patriots rebe1s and traitors. Throughout the war the British
tried di1igent1y to en1ist so1d1ers and seamen from among the prison-
ers, and they offered "pardons'l as enticements. But as Larry Bowman
has noted, "It shou1d be emphasized . . . that the majority of American
captives refused to desert to the British armed forces. The prospect
of escaping a prison simp1y by signing an enTistment paper must have
been an inviting temptation to a man who had no reason to expect a
speedy re1ease from prison. Neverthe1ess, the great majority of the
captives remained constant to their p1edge of 1oya1ty to the cause"
p 96

19See George G. Carey, ”Songs of Jack Tar in the Darbies,” Journa1
of American Fo1k1ore, 85 (1972), 167- 80, for an ana1ysis of the use of
patriotic songs to re1ieve boredom and maintain so1idarity. Carey 1ater
pub1ished a co11ection of these songs in A SaiTor' s Songb_g_: Ag_Amer1can
Rebe1 in an Eng1ish Prison, 1777- 1779 (Amherst: University of Massa-
chusetts Press, 1976).

20The Narative is reprinted in Sabine, pp. 132-58, a1ong with a brief
comparison between it and events as recorded in the diary. Baxter a1so
compares the narrative to the diary in the third chapter of her disser-
tation.

21Both Sabine and Baxter cite a number of examp1es, different from
those cited here, to make the same point.

22Fitch's Narative never was pub1ished during his 1ifetime, but it
is c1ear that he intended it shou1d be, and so it is proper to speak of
it as propaganda. For its pub1ication history, see Sabine, pp. 132-5.

23

 

 

 

Reprinted in The Connecticut Courant, November 27, 1781.

 

24(1899; rpt. New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1971),
pp. 37-39. Mary Neatherspoon Bowden, "In Search of Freneau's Prison
Ships," Ear1y American Literature, 14 (1979), 174- 92, questions Freneau' s
authorship of Some Account of the Capture of the Ship Aurora and suggests
the possibiTity that Freneau never was he1d aboard a pr1son ship: "From
the appearance of 'Some Account' in the notebook, its spaciousTy regu1ated
11nes, the absence of immediate revision, the neatness of the handwriting,
the repeating of the same word on the bottom of one page and the top of
its verso, I can on1y conc1ude that Freneau very carefu11y c0pied this
account into his 109 book from some other source" (p. 182). Regard1ess
of authorship, however, the propagandistic intentions of the man who
wrote Some Account are c1ear.

 

 

 

 

 

TWO: THE POSTWAR CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE

The pub1ished narratives of the postwar years occupy a p1ace some-
where between the diaries on the one hand and the propaganda pieces on
the other. They are not simp1y records of events, but neither do they
go to the propagandist's extreme of de1ight1ng in graphic portraya1s of
enemy inhumanity. The diarist, for examp1e, might mere1y note that
rations were inadequate in both quantity and qua1ity, but in the
"Narrative of Confinement in the Jersey Prison Ship, by John Van Dyke,
Captain in Lamb's Regiment, N. Y. S. A.," we find background and comment-

ary about the scarcity of food:

An agreement was entered into between the British commander-
in-chief and the American government, that a11 the British
prisoners in the American 1ines shou1d be supp1ied with fu11
rations--as we had supp1y of the country, the British to
furnish the American prisoners with two-thirds a11owance;
that is, six American prisoners to receive and to 11ve on
four British prioners' rations. But on board the Jersey
Prison Ship it was short a11owance--so short, a person wou1d
think it was not possibie for a man to 11ve on. They
starved the American prisoners, to make them enTist in their
serv1ce.

Van Dyke here provides more than what we might expect from the diarists,
but his tone is not at a11 1nf1ammatory. Indeed, even though he is
describing a situation which he be11eves to resu1t from a crue1 and
cynica1 expediency, he does not a110w a sense of outrage to take controi
of his voice. If we compare his tone to that of "a gent1eman of honor
and distinction, a prisoner in New York,‘I whose Tetter appeared in Ih§_
Boston Gazette on January 27, 1777, we can easi1y perceive one of the

differences between the postwar narrative and wartime propaganda. The

39

4O

"gent1eman" writes:

The distress of the prisoners cannot be communicated by
words, 20 or 30 die every day, they 11e 1n heaps unburied,
what numbers of my countrymen have died by c01d and hunger,
perished for want of the common necessaries of 1ife, I
have seen it. This sir, is the boasted British c1emengy,
(I myse1f had we11 nigh perished under it.) The New
Eng1and peop1e can have no idea of such barbarous po1icy,
nothing can stop such treatment but retaIiation. I ever
despised private revenge, but that of the puinc must be
in this case just and necessary, it is due to the manes

of our murdered countrymen, and that a1one can protect

the survivors, in the Tike situation, rather than experi-
ence again their barbarity and insu1ts, may I fa11 by

the sword of the Hessians.

From this we can see that the gent1eman is using facts which a diarist

 

might on1y have recorded to stir a popu1ation to action (perhaps the
gent1eman himse1f kept a diary), but the narrative writer, steering his
way through the midd1e ground between the diarist's boredom and the
propagandist's rage, cou1d have no such we11-defined purpose. In this
chapter we w111 1ook at some of the motives that 1ed former prisoners
to sit down and write out their memoirs after the war.

One very common motivation, of course, was the desire to te11 one's
story for the benefit of chi1dren and grandchi1dren. Christopher Hawkins,

writing in 1834, exp1ains:

My intention in pub1ishing this narative is confined to the
attention of my chiIdren, grandchi1dren, and their descend-
ants, with the hope that they w111 du1y appreciate not on1y
my own sufferings, but those of my contemporaries in the
arduous strugg1e of my country for independence, in which,
success crowned the efforts of those who embarked in the
American cause. To my descendants and those of my fe11ows
I dedicate this 11mited narative, at the same time in the
hope that their generosity w111 pardon anything which can
be construed as arrogant in this production. . . My
pr1ncipa1 design is to amuse and inform my friends and
descendants with the sufferings of my youth. If any one
sha11 be so 1ncredu1ous as to disbe1ieve this narative, I
hope that some of my ear1y contemporaries are st111 a1ive,
and if they are, I refer to them the truth or fa1$hood of
this narative, and fee1 confident that thay w111 sustain me
in ev'ry particuIar, c1aiming importance.

41

Under1ying such an intention, of course, is the desire to be remembered
by one's fami1y and to communicate the important events of one's Iife
to 1ater generations. Such a 11mited attempt at immorta1ity is not at
a11 difficu1t to understand, and it is therefore not very surprising
that a number of the fOrmer prisoners were motivated by just such
considerations.

Char1es I. Bushne11, who puinshed The Narrative gf_Major Abraham

 

 

Leggett, of_thg_Army gf_the Revo1ution (New York, 1865), exp1ains that

 

Leggett wrote for exact1y these reasons: "At the request of his chi1d-
ren, Major Leggett, in the Tatter part of his Iife, commenced writing
out a narrative of his revoTutionary services. This, however, he did
not 11ve to comp1ete" (p. vii). In 1835, O1iver Woodruff, a pensioner
and former prisoner of war in the Revo1ution, addressed a Tetter to
”My Dear ChiIdren and Grandchi1dren," in which he re1ates his adventures
as a so1dier and prisoner. His motive for doing so is c1ear in his
first sentence: "Tet it be remembered after I am dead that I was born
on the 1ast day of Apr11 in the year seventeen hundred and fifty-five,
in the town of LitchfieId, and State of Connecticut."3 This eighty-year-
on man simp1y did not want to be forgotten, and so he wrote down the
most significant and interesting events that he had taken part in.
Ebenezer Fox a1$o wrote in 01d age for the amusement of his grand-
chiIdren, but when he had finished he decided to have his book printed.
"Shou1d it be thought," he exp1ains, "that my simp1e narrative does not
contain matter of importance sufficient to interest the reader, I can
on1y say, that the partia1 judgment of friends, and my be11ef that any

circumstances re1at1ng to the most interesting period of our history

42

wou1d prove interesting to the young, must be my excuse for presenting

it to the pub11c."4

Fox here is making his own bid fOr a sma11 portion
of immortaIity, and this is one of the features which separate Fox and
the other postwar writers from the diarists and propagandists. There
are other features as we11.

In a number of cases the former prisoners intended their narratives
to provide their ch11dren with something more than a memoria1. Some
obvioust pub1ished in the hope of profit. The printer Peter Edes was
imprisoned by the British in Boston in 1775, and he kept a diary during
his captivity. This diary was puinshed some sixty years 1ater in 1837
"in the hope," according to the editor, "that the same feeiing which
prompted former efforts, may be again so far excited in his beha1f as

"5 Andrew

to bring fruits that may cheer and g1adden his evening sun.
Sherburne was equa11y direct in the preface to his 1828 Memoirs: "With
reference to his chi1dren, he is not ashamed to confess that the avaiIs
which may arise from the sa1e of this humb1e performance must be their
on1y inheritance."6
Not a11 narrative writers hoped to reap gains from sa1es; some had
their eyes on acts of Congress. During the war, Congress and the
various state assembTies were forced to re1y on a system of bounties in
order to meet the manpower needs of the Continenta1 Army. Congress had
no authority to conscript recruits, and as it became c1ear that the war
wou1d 1ast for some time, the prob1em of attracting enIistments became
more serious. Bounties inc1uded payments of money and, increasing1y as

inf1ation eroded the va1ue of Continenta1 currency, grants of 1and to

those who wou1d en1ist in a regiment for a specified period of time or

43

for the duration of the war.7 No such bounties were offered to the
officers and men in the nava1 service, however, and this prompted
Lieutenant Luke Matthewman to puinsh his ”Narrative” in the Ngw_York

Packet shortIy after the war. He is quite specific about his motives:

The intention of puinshing the foregoing narrative is,
to convey an idea of the sufferings of those who engaged
in the nava1 department during the Tate war; and I wou1d
be understood as considering myse1f one of the 1east of
those sufferers. This narrative may Iikewise serve to
shew some pecuTiar disadvantages the Navy Officers
1aboured under; which, it is conceived, entitIe them to
a participation of the emo1uments granted to their
brethren in the 1and service: such as the a11otments

of 1and, and commutation monies, as it is common1y
termed. The exc1usion of the Navy Officers from these
priviTeges is certain1y unfair.8

After the war, Matthewman had found himse1f "destitute of emp10y," and

so it is not surprising that he wou1d think the situation unfair. His
narrative is a raucous story of adventures, captures, and escapes design-
ed to estab1ish his own credentiaIs and those of other nava1 officers as
deserving former participants in the Revqution.

The pension 1aws passed by Congress aISo provided a motivation for
narrative writers and their fami11es. Unt11 1818, the government pro-
vided assistance on1y for those who had been disab1ed as a resu1t of
their m11itary service, but in that year the first service pension was

enacted. Under its provisions,

every commissioned officer, non-commissioned officer,
musician, and private so1d1er, and a11 officers in the
hospita1 department and medica1 staff, who served in
the war of the Revo1ution to the end thereof, or for
the term of nine months, or 1onger, at any period of
the war, on the Continenta1 estainshment, and every
commissioned officer, non-commissioned officer,
mariner, or marine, who served at the same time, and
for a 1ike term, in the nava1 service of the United
States, and who is, or hereafter, by reason of his
reduced circumstances in 1ife, sha11 be in need of
assistance of his country for support, and sha11 have

 

44

substantiated his c1aim to a pension in the manner herein-
after dgrected, sha11 receive a pension from the United
States.

Among the approximate1y eight thousand appTications which were made
short1y after the passage of the pension b111 was one from Israei R.
Potter of Rhode Is1and. On August 5, 1823, Potter appeared before the

district court in Providence and dec1ared,

that on the breaking out of the Revo1utionary war soon
after the battie of Lexington he en1isted as a private
in Capt. Edmund Johnson's company & C01. Varnum's
regiment & marched to Boston then in the possession of
British Troops, that he served in said Corps unti11 he
had permission to enIist as a marine on board the
Washington a pub1ic armed vesse1 in the service of the
United States under the command of Lion Martinda1e Esq--
that he entered on board this vesse1 in the month of
December AD 1775 that soon afterwards they sai1ed from
P1ymouth on a cruise, they had not cruised a great
wh11e before they were captured by the British ship
fgx_& carried to Boston first, afterwards to Eng1and
where he remained a prisoner of war unti11 the year
1783--And I do so1emn1y swear, that I was a citizen

of the United States on the eighteenth day of March,
one thousand eight hundred and eighteen; and that I
have not since that time, by gift, sa1e, or in any
manner whatever, disposed of my property, or any

part thereof, with intent thereby so to diminish it,
as to bring myse1f within the provisions of an Act

of Congress, entit1ed "An act to provide for certain
persons engaged in the 1and and nava1 service of the
United States in the Revqutionary war" . . . that I
have not, nor has any person in trust for me, any
property or securities, contracts or debts, due to

me; not have I any income other than what is con-
tained in the ScheduIe hereto annexed, & by me sub-
scribed.10

Potter's c1aim was denied, however. Because poverty had forced him to
remain in Eng1and after the war and because he was st111 there at the
time the pension 1aw here was passed, he cou1d not quaiify as a "resident
citizen of the United States." Finding himse1f without means of 11ve11-

hood, he pub1ished his Life and Remarkab1e Adventures the fo11owing year.

45

The printer, Henry Trumbu11, appended a preface exp1aining Potter's

situation and his motives:

As it yet remains doubtfuI whether (in consequence of his
1ong absence) he w111 be so fortunate as to be inc1uded
in that number to whom Government has granted pensions
for their Revqutionary services, it is to obtain if
possib1e a humb1e pittance as a remuneration, in part,
for the unprecedented privations and sufferings of

which he has been the unfortunate subject, that he is

now induced to present the pub1ic with the fo11owing
concise and simp1e narration of the most extraordinary
incidents of his 1ife.1

WhiTe Trumbu11 hoped for sa1es, there is an indication that Potter st111
be1ieved that his pension case might be reviewed. To the end of the
narrative is added the deposition of one John Via1 of North Providence,
Rhode IsIand, dated 6 August 1823; in it Via1 supports Potter's c1aim
to RevoTutionary service, and its presence in the narrative seems intend-
ed to arouse pub1ic interest in Potter's pTight (p. 109).

The diary of Char1es Herbert, who died in 1808, was puinshed by
his widow under circumstances simiiar to those which 1ed Potter to bring
out his Life and Remarkab1e Adventures. Mo11y Parker, Herbert's widow,
appeared in the Essex County, Massachusetts Probate Court on September 8,
1846, to app1y for a pension under the new 1aws passed in 1838 and 1842,
which extended eIigibi1ity to inc1ude the widows of former so1d1ers and
saiIors. In her deposition she cites Herbert's nava1 service and two
years' confinement at M111 prison, "for evidence of which she respect-
fu11y refers to a Copy of a journa1 kept by her Tate husband and which

is deposited in the Pension Office in Washington."12

This appIication
was unsuccessfu1, and in 1847, the diary appeared in print with a tit1e
designed to appea1 to as broad an audience as possib1e; it was ca11ed

A_Re1ic of the Revo1ution, Containing a_Fu11 and Particu1ar Account of

 

 

 

46

the Sufferings and PriVations gf_A11 the American Prisoners Captured gg_

 

the High Seas, and Carried into P1ymouth, Eng1and, during the Rev01ution
.9: 1776; with the Names gf_the Vesse1$ Taken--the Names and Residence
gf_the Severa1 Crews, and Time 9f_Their Commitment—-the Names of §u5h_a§_
Digg_in_Prison, and Such a§_Made Their Escape, gr_Entered gg_§gard

Eninsh Men-gf7War; unti] the Exchange 9f_Prisoners, March 15, 1779.

 

A150, an_Acc0unt of the Severa1 Cruises gf_the Squadron under the

 

Command gf_C0mmod0r~ John Pau1 Jones, Prizes Taken, etc., etc. By_

Char1es Herbert, gf_Newburyport, Mass. Who Was Taken Prisoner jﬂ_the_

 

Brigantine Do1ton, Dec., 1776, and Served in_th§_g, S, Frigate A111ance,
1779-1780.13

 

In addition to Herbert's text, there is a ”Sketch of the

Author" by R. Livesey, who conc1udes with an appea1:

It is to be regretted that Mrs. Herbert has not been ab1e
to obtain either the pension a110wed by the 1aw of our
1and to widows of Revqutionary soniers and sai1ors, or
the prize money due to her husband from government. How
sIow are we to reward those who struggIed hard for our
1iberties. . . . Hoping that 1ibera1 sa1es w111 enab1e
the pub1isher to render to the widow of Char1es Herbert

a 11bera1 donation, it is submitted to a generous pub1ic,
by the pub1isher. (p. 16)

We do not know whether the widow ever received her "11bera1 donation,II
but we do know that under the broader pension act of 1848 she was
"Inscribed on the R011 at the rate of 57 DoITars 88 Cents per annum, to
commence on the 4th day of March, 1848."14
Others who pub1ished their memoirs after the war c1aimed to be
motivated by more traditiona1 concerns. The focus of Thomas Andros'

narrative is evident in his tit1e, The 01d Jersey Captive: _rna

Narrative Qf_the Captivity gj_Th0mas Andros, (Now Pastor gj_the Church

 

 

 

j§_§g§klgy,) on Board the 01d Jerseerrison Ship at_New York, 1781. ;y1

 

a Series 9f_Letters tg_a_Friend, Suited tg_Inspire Faith and Confidence

 

 

47

.iﬂ.9 Particu1ar Divine Providence (Boston, 1833). During the war

Andros had seen service in a variety of capacities on 1and and at sea,

and it was on1y after the war that he entered the ministry. He

qua1ified for a pension under the act of 1818, but he waited unti1

1833, when he was seventy-four years 01d, to puinsh his narrative.

By that time he had been unab1e to perform his duties as a "re11gious

teacher of the congregationa1 denomination" for a number of years, and

so we might specu1ate that Andros, 1ike many of the others, hoped to

profit from sa1es. Whatever the case, it shou1d not be at a11 surprising

that the 01d man shou1d desire to write out a providentia1 interpretation

of his captivity.15
Andros was not the on1y former prisoner to reinterpret his experi-

ences as a captive in the Tight 0f re11gion. After the war, Andrew

Sherburne became a Baptist minister, and in the preface to his Memoirs

we find a statement of reIigious be11ef: Sherburne has

exhibited the mercifu1 interpositions of Providence
amidst distresses, dangers and death, with the hope
that others may be 1ed to p1ace their trust in God.
He has given to his countrymen a "p1ain, unvarnish-
ed ta1e” of the sufferings of those, who, in the
war of our independence, sustained the cause of
1iberty in the "tented fie1d" or "on the mountain
wave." Most ferventIy does he wish that Americans
may proper1y appreciate the freedom which they
enjoy, wh11e they 1earn the price of its purchase.

These are not uncommon sentiments for a minister, and-if we 11nk them to
Sherburne's suggestion, quoted ear11er, that the narrative and proceeds
from it wou1d be the on1y inheritance his ch11dren wou1d receive, we can
see that for Andrew Sherburne the Memoirs is a kind of fina1 testament.
Other postwar narrative writers c1aimed to be writing for different
reasons. Nathanie1 Fanning, in the preface to his Memoirs (pub1ished

anonymous1y in 1806), exp1ains that his motives are patriotic:

48

The author of the fo110wing pages, at the time they were
first written, never intended that they shou1d appear
before the pub11c eye. But through the earnest so1ici-
tation of a number of friends, who having read his
Journa1, from which the f011owing sheets have been com-
p11ed; he has been induced (together with a view of
opposing the zea1 with which certain characters in this
country have strove 1ate1y to debase the American name,
by branding it with the epithet of coward, po1troon,
"not so brave as an Eng1ishman,“ and the 1ike; which
has often sounded in the ears of the author,) to chan e
his intentions, and to commit the wh01e to the press.

Thomas Dring, whose Reco11ections gf_the Jersey Prison-Ship came out in

 

1829, seems to be 1ess interested in the American name than in setting
the record of his own participation in the war straight. A1bert G.
Greene, who prepared Dring's manuscript for posthumous pub1ication, has

this to say:

Not being 1ntended f0r pub1ication, at 1east in the f0rm
in which he 1eft it, he appears to have bestowed but
11tt1e regard on the 1anguage in which his facts were
described, or the arrangement or connexion in which they
were p1aced. His on1y aim, indeed, appears to have been,
to commit faithfu11y to paper his rec011ections of a11
the principa1 events which transpired during his own
confinement, and the materia1 circumstances in re1ation
to the genera1 treatment of the prisoners. 7

Dring himse1f echoes the thought in the opening pages of his narrative:

The principa1 motive of the writer of the f0110wing
pages, in recording the facts which they contain,
was origina11y to strengthen his rec011ections of
the particu1ars re1ative to the events which he has
described. A1though near1y ha1f a century has
e1apsed, since these events occurred, yet so inde1-
ib1e was the impression which they 1eft on his mind,
that they seem in a11 their detai1s, but as the
things of yesterday; and if memory remains to him,
they w111 go with him, in a11 their freshness, to
the grave. (p. 4)

From this we can see that, on one 1eve1 at 1east, Dring set out his

experiences on paper so as to better order and understand them himse1f.18
The motives of the postwar narratives, then, are in fact quite

comp1ex. In addition, we must certain1y a11ow for the fact that the

49

intentions of those who pub1ished narratives were not necessari1y the
ones we find expressed in the tit1es and prefaces. Consider, for examp1e,
the case of the Memoirs gf_Captain Lemue1 Roberts (Bennington, Vt.,

1809). Roberts opens his book with a conventiona1 statement of purpose:

But few things are more frequent, perhaps, than for men
to conceive, that the occurrences of their 11ves have
been singu1ar, and that they possess a sufficiency of
interesting incident, if understandab1y communicated,
to excite surprise, produce p1easure, & probab1y be of
some service to mankind; in disp1aying the changes of
1ife, and the bounty and care of a kind superintending
providence.

The writer and subject of these memoirs is ready to
acknowiedge that this idea has frequentiy impressed his
mind, and from his having been very often requested to
make his sufferings and escapes puinc, by those to
whom he has made them partia11y known, he has at 1ength
decided to comp1y with their request, and wh11e his aim
w111 be to render the narrative worthy of puinc notice,
from its incidenta1 variety and manner of re1ation, his
intention is to pay a strict regard to truth, and to
deta11 events in the 1anguage of honest simp1ic1ty.19

Some ninety pages 1ater the book comes to its conc1usion, and by the end
Roberts' perceptions of what he has done and why he has done it have
changed. The fina1 paragraph of the book is entire1y in ita1ics, and it

contains the fo11owing observation:

I am, by my suffering in the pubTic cause, so ear1y as my
fifty-ninth year, reduced to the inabiIity of seventy or
upward: and indeed, so severe have been the effects of my
sufferings, in the year 1778 (for which I never have yet,
not perhaps ever sha11 receive a d011ar, as payment from
Congress) that I veri1y be1ieve, in the time which has
since e1apsed, I have not been ab1e to perform more than
ha1f the Tabor that I might otherwise have done; and at
present, from the disorder having fa11en into my right
arm, I am rendered a1most tota11y unab1e to attend to
bodi1y 1abor of any kind. (p. 96)

There is certain1y a hint of bitterness in the tone of the parenthetica1
phrase which is out of keeping with the evidences of the ”bounty and care

of a kind superintending providence" which Roberts had 1ed us to expect

50

at the beginning of the narrative. We cannot say with any certainty
whether Roberts puinshed his Memoirs because he simp1y wanted to te11
his story, because he hoped to profit from sa1es of the pamph1et, or
because he was p1anning to petition the government for assistance and
thought to use the narrative to supp1ement his c1aim. We do know that
no subsequent reprinting f0110wed the origina1 appearance of the

Memoirs prCaptain Lemue1 Roberts in 1809, and that the MiIitary Service

 

Records division of the Genera1 Services Administration has no record of
a pension app1ication under the name of Lemue1 Roberts.

The range of prison writing pub1ished in the seventy-five years
fo110wing the American Revo1ution is, as we have seen in this brief
survey of the writers' stated motives, rather broad. 0n the one hand
we have men Iike Ebenezer Fox or Christopher Hawkins who had as their
principa1 motivation the desire to perpetuate the memory of their
experiences among the younger generations of their own fami11es. 0n the
other are those who sought to turn their sufferings into financia1 gain;
as we have seen, Luke Matthewman, Israe1 Potter, and Andrew Sherburne
were a11 quite candid about their hopes for remuneration. Between these

extremes we see such narratives as The 01d Jersey Captive of Thomas Andros

 

or the Memoirs pj_Nathanie1 Fanning, narratives which seem apparentIy to

 

have been pub1ic testimony to re1igious or po1itica1 be11ef. The issue
is further compIicated because a number of works were pub1ished, not by
their authors, but by their widows or their chi1dren, and the considera-
tions under1ying posthumous pub1ication are as comp1ex and as diverse

as those which 1ed the authors themse1ves to pub1ish. Char1es I.

Bushne11 was an antiquarian, and his part in the pub1ication of Ih§_

51

Adventures pf_Christopher Hawkins was motivated by a concern for the

 

preservation of the materiaIS of history. M011y Parker, the widow of
Char1es Herbert, was in her eighties and in extreme financia1 need

when A_ReIic pf_the Revo1ution was pub1ished in 1847. A wide variety

 

of concerns must be acknow1edged as inf1uences in the appearance of
Revqutionary War captivity narratives in the first ha1f of the nine-
teenth century.

This variety 1eads to a number of difficu1ties for the student
attempting to examine these narratives. First, there is the prob1em
of discovering whether there is a common thread binding these memoirs
together. If former captivity is the on1y thing shared by the narrative
writers, then p1ain1y there is 11tt1e reason to study them outside of
their somewhat 11mited usefuIness as historica1 documents; but if the
narratives can be shown to share a number of characteristics, despite
the fact that they were produced f0r any number of reasons, then we w111
have identified a distinct sub-genre of the captivity ta1e. It is the
contention of this study that such a core of shared characteristics
indeed exists and that the deve10pment of the Revqutionary War captivity
narratives is governed by a formu1a which distinguishes them from the
Indian captivity narratives. As we sha11 see in chapter four, the
Revqutionary War formu1a depends for its appea1 upon an important
revo1utionary myth, the myth of repub1ican virtue.

A second prob1em re1ated to the varieties of interests these
narratives serve is the prob1em of eva1uating their significance. As
works of 1iterary imagination, the captivity narratives of the American

Revo1ution have 11tt1e va1ue because they are crude1y written, high1y

52

episodic, and often anti-c1imactic. Moreover, the Revo1utionary War
narratives cannot be easi1y shown to 1ead to any broad popu1ar

1iterary movement in the way that the Indian captivity narrative has
been shown by Roy Harvey Pearce to be a significant source f0r the

dime nove1 and the American nove1 of sensibi1ity. The significance

of these narratives must Tie in their imp1ications for American socia1
history, not 1iterary history, and these imp1ications w111 be discussed
be10w.

Fina11y, there is a third difficu1ty to be encountered. In any
autobiographica1 writing there exists a gray region between fact and
fiction, between what actua11y happened and what the autobiographer
adds or 1eaves out. There are a number of factors which inf1uence this
gray area, and they range from fau1ty memory to poor judgment to se1f—
serving dup1icity. When we study autobiography or persona1 narrative,
then, we can never be preciseiy certain about the accuracy of a11 the
incidents the author portrays. As a resu1t, even if we accept the
notion that the u1timate significance of the narratives is historica1,
we must be very carefu1 when we come to cite the narratives as historica1
sources. The interests of a Lemue1 Roberts, embittered by the govern-
ment's faiIure to provide him with a pension or back pay, are more than
adequate to inspire some skepticism about the ro1e he assigns himse1f
in his Memoirs. This prob1em of re1iab111ty w111 be dea1t with more
fu11y in the next chapter, which reviews the scho1ar1y uses to which

the prison writing of the Rev01ution has been put.

NOTES: CHAPTER TWO

1Historica1 Magazine, May, 1863, p. 148.

2The Adventures Lf Christopher Hawkins (New York, 1864). Though
Hawkins had intended to _pub1ish his Adventures, he died in 1837, and
so the narrative did not see print untii 1864 when Char1es I. Bushne11
c011aborated with Hawkins' son Christopher.

 

 

3"Reminiscences of a So1dier of the RevoTution,” aughters Lf the
American Rev01ution Magazine, 46 (1914), 260.

4The Revqutionary Adventures Lf Ebenezer Fox Lf Roxbury, Massa-
chusettsTTBoston, 1838), p. v1.

5SamueI Lane Boardman, Peter Edes, Pioneer Printer Ln Maine, a
Biography; His Diary wh11e a Prisoner _y_the British Lt Boston Ln 1775,
with the JOUrna1 Lf John Leach Who Was a Prisoner Lt the Same Time—
(Bangor, 1901)} p. 89.

 

 

 

 

 

 

6Memoirs 9_f_ Andrew Sherburne: A_ Pensioner 9: pkg Navy piglg
Rev01ution (Utica, N. Y., 1828).

7

 

See Boatner, pp. 842-43.

8"Narrative of Lieut. Luke Matthewman of the Revoiutionary Navy
from the New York Packet, 1787," Magazine pf American History, 2

(1878), 184.

9Quoted in W. T. R. Saffe11, Records pf the Revo1utionary War:
Containing the Mi1itary and Financia1 Correspondence Lf Distinguished
Officers; Names Lf the Officers and Privates Lf Regiments, Companies,
and Corps, with the Dates of Their Commissions _and En1istments; Genera1
Orders Lf Washington, Lee and Greene Lt Germantown and Va11ey_Forge;
with a List Lf Distinguished Prisoners Lf War; the Time Lf Their
Capture, Exchange, etc. To Which Is Added the Ha1f Pay Acts Lf the
Continenta1 Congress; the Revo1utionary Pension Laws; and a List Lf
the Officers Lf the Continenta1 Army Who Acquired the Right to Ha1f-
Pay, Commutation, and Lands, 3rd. ed. (1894; rpt. Ba1timore: _Gene-
a1ogica1 Pub1ishing, 1969), p.512.

10United States Genera1 Services Administration, Mi1itary Service
Records, FiIe #8369.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

53

54

11Life and RemarkabTe Adventures 9f Israe1 3, Potter, ed. Leonard
Kriege1 (New York: Corinth, 1962), p. 4. Since Potter's deposition
is signed with his mark, we must assume that he had at 1east an amanuensis,
possib1y Trumbu11 the printer.

12United States Genera1 Services Administration, MiTitary Service
Records, Fi1e #15175. A note in the f11e dated 13 March 1911 asserts
that the journa1 referred to by M011y Parker "cannot be found."

13This has been reprinted as A Re1ic Lf the Revo1ution (New York:
New York Times and Arno Press, 1968)”

14It is un1ike1y that the pub1ication of A ReLic Lf the RevoTution
had any inf1uence on the subsequent decision of the pension board to
grant M011y Parker an a110wance.

15See United States Genera1 Services Administration, Mi1itary
Service Records, FiTe # S. 5247.

16John S. Barnes, ed., Fanning' s Narrative, Being the Memoirs Lf
Nathanie1 Fannin , an IOfLicer Lf the RevoTutionary Navy, 1778- 1783
1912),.

(New York

17ATbert Greene, Reco11ections Lf the Jersey Prison Ship from the
Manuscript of Capt. Thomas Dring, ed. Lawrence L. Leder (New York:
Corinth, 1961), p. v.

18For an interesting examination of the background to the pub1ica-
tion of persona1 narratives of revoTutionary experiences, see James H.
Pickering' 5 introduction to his facsimiTe edition of The _31 Unmasked
Lr, Memoirs Lf Enoch Crosby, A11as Harvenyirch, the Hero Lf James
Fenimore Cooper' s The Spy, §y_H. L. Barnum (Harrison, N. Y. Harbor
H111 Books, 1975), p. XXIa: ”The Spy Unmasked be10ngs to a time very
much different than our own. It must be read--for indeed it was written--
as part of the intense1y patriotic 1iterary outpouring that accompanied
the first four decades of our nationaT 1ife, rough1y 1790 to 1830, a
period during which America was very much intent upon creating the story
of its own unique Revo1utionary past. The nationaTism of these years
inspired an increasing number of patriotica11y motivated productions--
histories, annaTS, biographies, memoirs, narratives, noveTS, p1ays, and
poems--a11 dedicated to memoria1izing in a way that their readers cou1d
readi1y understand the events connected with America' s birth.
James Fenimore Cooper's TLe _py_was one such attempt to capture, per-
petuate, and honor the past; H. L. Barnum' s The Spy Unmasked was st111
another.”

19Memoirs of §_ptain Lemue1 Roberts Containigg Adventures in Youth,
Vicissitudes Experienced Ls a Continenta1 So1dier, His Sufferings Ls a
Prisoner, and Escapes from C:ptivity. With Suitab1e Ref1ections Ln —tLe

Changes gf_Life. Written bv H1mse1f (Bennington, Vt. ,1809), p.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THREE:
REVOLUTIONARY WAR PRISON WRITING
AND SCHOLARSHIP

UntiT Beverly VerToris Baxter wrote her dissertation in 1976, no
one had ever had ever subjected the writing of RevoTutionary War prison-
ers to direct schoIarTy examination.1 For over a century, however,
historians have referred to the diaries and narratives in their studies
of the war and of the treatment of prisoners, and during the past thirty
years, critics of American Iiterature have begun citing RevoTutionary
War narratives in their discussions of the Indian captivity narratives
and the rise of the dime nove1. This use of the prison writing rests
upon what we sha11 see are inadequate assumptions about the diaries and
postwar narratives: the historian has tended to accept the material as
documentary evidence of prison conditions and prisoner of war poTicy,
and the critic has generaTTy accepted the narratives of the RevoTution
as a not especiaTTy fruitfui branch of the aIready estabTiShed Indian
captivity narrative genre.

The problem for the historian is simp1y that, for the most part,
prison writing of the RevoTution is not reIiabTe enough to justify its
use as evidence. That this shou1d be true of propaganda, which distorts
facts intentionaIIy, and of the narratives, which were often composed
from memory Tong after the fact, seems obvious enough. Yet we find

prob1ems of reTiabiIity even when we examine the diaries. We know, for

55

56

example, that there is plagiarism involved in the journals of Jonathan
Carpenter and Timothy Connor, two prisoners at Forton.2 There is also
some question as to the authorship of Jonathan Haskins' diary.3 It
seems clear, then, that caution is advisable and that statements about
what happened in the prisons which are supported solely by journals and
memoirs necessarily invite skepticism.

There are, nevertheless, numerous examples of such uncritical use
of prison writing in the historical literature. In the nineteenth
century, the main emphasis of scholarship in American history was the

4 and so

collection of source materials and not the evaluation of them,
it was not at all unusual to find sentiments like those which Charles

Ira Bushnell prefaced to The Adventures 9f_Christopher Hawkins (New

 

 

York, 1864): "The work . . . is truthful and candid, and upon the whole,
a well written production. It is, moreover, full of incident and
adventure, very minute in its details, and of intense interest. It will,
we think, be considered as a valuable contribution to the Revolutionary
history of our country" (p. vii). Moreover, this kind of unquestioning
confidence in the accuracy of Revolutionary War prison writing is by no
means characteristic only of commentators writing in the last century.

In 19l3, for example, Gardner Weld Allen published a two-volume

5

study entitled A_Naval History gf_the American Revolution. Chapter

 

 

XVIII is devoted to "Naval Prisoners," and in it, Allen relies heavily
upon prison writing to support his conclusions. When he discusses
conditions aboard the Jersey (II, 629-36), he cites Thomas Andros' The.

Old Jersey Captive, The Revolutionary Adventures gjLEbenezer Fox, and

 

Ag_Historical Sketch, tg_thg_§gg, of the Revolutionary War, 9f;thg_Life

 

 

57

9f_Silas Talbot (New York, l803) as primary evidence of cruel and in-

 

humane treatment. Allen even goes so far as to base statements upon

propaganda pieces like Some Account gf_the Capture of the Ship Aurora

 

 

 

by Philip Freneau, and he does so apparently because he accepts these
sources as essentially factual. "The accounts of the treatment of
prisoners in New York,” he writes, "unquestionably authentic though
perhaps colored by privation, are difficult to reconcile with the
humane character of some of the British officers in command" (II, 622).
He allows the difficulty to stand, however, and nowhere in the chapter
does he come any closer to questioning the accuracy of the prison
memoirs than he has come here in noting that they are "perhaps colored
by privation.”

Other historians have also relied on narratives to document studies
of the British prison system. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg Richards, for
example, published "The Pennsylvania-German in the British Military
Prisons of the Revolutionary War"6 for the Pennsylvania—German Society
in l924; his essay is put together, however, not from any specifically
German materials, but from such memoirs as Ethan Allen's Narrative and
Jabez Fitch's Qigry, That he takes his sources at face value can be
inferred from part of Richards' introductory statement: "So terrible
were the sufferings of these victims of heartless and rapacious British
hirelings that the student of history, who, today, reads the scanty
memoirs emanating from the pens of a few of the very few survivors, can
hardly be brought to give credence to what he sees on the printed page"
(p. 6). In a sense, of course, this is precisely the point, but Richards

is a bit wide of it and does give credence too readily to the kind of

58

exaggerations found on the pages of Ethan Allen's propagandistic memoir.

The trend has continued throughout much of the present century. In
l960, Richard H. Amerman opened an article about prison treatment with
what had become a familiar observation: "Although set in an l8th-century
era of 'temperate' warfare, the Revolution was cruelly expensive in terms
of patriot Americans who died as prisoners under shocking conditions of
confinement."7 When we examine the basis of Amerman's claim of "shocking
conditions," however, we discover that it consists largely of depositions
and letters published in newspapers during the war by former prisoners.
The following year, Howard Lewis Applegate concluded that conditions at
Old Mill Prison were unnecessarily harsh in an article which depended
almost exclusively upon prison diaries for support.8 Apparently for a
number of historians, the temptation to accept what the prisoners had
to say about themselves and their captors has overcome the dictates of
prudence.

There is, of course, a certain degree of patriotism at work here
which helps to explain the phenomenon. It has been the position of
British historians to argue that conditions generally were not as bad
as their American counterparts charged, and that when conditions did
deteriorate, it was mostly because of factors beyond the control of the

9 American historians have tended in the main to

British commissaries.
respond by reaffirming their belief in the heroic suffering of the
Revolutionary War prisoners and by using the diaries and narratives as
their primary sources of information. A great deal of the history
written about prisoners of war during the Revolution consists, in fact,
of American charges of cruelty countered by English denials and appeals

to extenuating circumstances.10

59

Not all writers, however, have taken the prisoners at their word.
As early as l909, James Lenox Banks sounded the following note of
caution: "The authority for many of the statements made in reference
to the prison ships in the War of the Revolution and the treatment of
the prisoners on those ships is largely the unproved charges of early

11 But

writers and tradition founded on the bitter feeling of the day."
as we have seen, few have followed Banks's lead in questioning the
”authority" of prison narratives and propaganda. The refusal to do so
is perhaps less surprising than it might be, because Banks's book is a
defense of the administration of David Sproat, the British commissary
of naval prisons in New York. His thesis was an unpopular one, and as
a result his good sense went unnoticed.

In recent studies, it has sometimes been the case that historians
are led into difficulty even when they are trying to be careful and

sufficiently skeptical. In a l969 article, Jesse Lemisch cites Jabez

Fitch's unpublished memoir, A_Narrative pj_the Treatment with which the

 

American Prisoners were Used, Who Were Taken by_the British and Hessian

 

 

I5999§_93_Long Island, to make the point that "The New York prison ships
12

 

primarily held soldiers after the Battle of Long Island." Unfortunately,

Lemisch referred to a text published as Prison Ship Martyr, Captain Jabez

 

 

Fitch: His Diary ip_Facsimile (New York, 1903), which was a re-issue

 

of a facsimile published by Mrs. Stephen Van Culen White in 1897. Mrs.
White had received the manuscript from Vernon D. Fitch, the captain's
great-grandson, and in her edition she reprinted the younger Fitch's
prefatory remarks, in which the reader learns that Fitch "was captured

on Long Island on the memorable 27th of August, 1776, and endured an

6O

eighteen months' imprisonment on the British prison ships, where he
contracted a scorbutis complaint which embittered and rendered almost
insupportable more than thirty years of his life.” W. H. W. Sabine,
the most recent editor of Fitch's diary and narrative, takes up the

story:

obviously Vernon D. Fitch had never seen his great-
grandfather's Diary for the period of his captivity.
What is more surprising is that he cannot have read
through the Narrative to which he was supplying his
prefatory remarks. The Narrative, as well as the
Diary, shows that Fitch was only 39 days on the Mentor
and other ships, after which he lived on land. The
Diary shows too that the total length of his captivity
was not eighteen but fifteen and a half months, and
that fully thirteen of those months were passed under
conditions which included no greater hardship than the
limitations of a parole. . . . Mrs. White's facsimile
edition of l897 obscured the truth about Jabez Fitch
still more by its inclusion of pictures of the prison-
ship Jersey, and of "a shaving cup and strop made by
Captain Bissell on board the prison ship Jersey and
presented to Mr. Fitch." The Jersey had much to do
with the purpose of the Martyrs Memorial Fund, of
which Mrs. White was chairman.but it had nothing to

do with Fitch or Bissell.13

Lemisch's source here is faulty, then, from at least two points of view.
First, the narrative he cites was in fact a propaganda tract, but inasmuch
as he refers to Fitch only to verify a fact about who was on the prison
ships (as opposed to how they were treated), the objection is minor and
probably not substantive. Second, and more important, however, is the
fact that the front matter of the edition cited suggests incorrectly
that Fitch was in a real position to know who generally did inhabit the
prison ships. As we can see, the use of Revolutionary War prison writing
as documentary evidence is an enterprise fraught with traps and pitfalls.
Perhaps the most interesting example of the difficulty of establish-

ing the reliability of the prison texts involves the estimate of the

61

number of prisoners who died aboard the Wallabout prison ships in New

York. Mark Boatner in the Encyclopedia 9f,the American Revolution

 

mentions estimates ranging from the "7,000 or 8,000" of Henry Steele
Commager and R. 8. Morris to upwards of 11,000, which was the number

14 Boatner concludes in

published when the bones were interred in 1808.
favor of the higher number and maintains that "reputable modern
authorities estimate that as many as 11,500 prisoners died aboard the
N. Y. C. prison ships" (p. 895). The reputable modern authorities are

Thomas C. Cochran and Wayne Andrews, editors of the Concise Dictionary

 

9: American History (New York: Scribner's, 1962), who note, "It has

been estimated that some 11,500 men died on these ships” (p. 767).
When we seek sources for these figures, however, we begin to run

into difficulty. On May 8, 1783, the New York Packet, and the General

Advertiser ran the following notice from "An American" "Ig_all Printers

 

9f_public Newspapers”:

Tell it to the world, and let it be published in every
Newspaper throughout America, Europe, Asia and Africa,

to the everlasting disgrace and infamy of the British
King's commanders at New-York: That during the late

war, it is said, 11,644 American prisoners have suffer-
ed death by their inhuman, cruel, savage and barbarous
usage on board the filthy and malignant British prison-
ship, called the Jersey, lying at N. Y. Britons tremble,
lest the vengeance of Heaven fall on your isle, for the
blood of these unfortunate victims!

 

This notice was reprinted in 1849 in Revolutionary_Incidents pf_Suffolk

and Kipgs Counties; with an_Account gthhe Battle 9f_Long Island, and the

 

 

British Prisons and Prison-Ship§_at_Ngwaork by Henry Onderdonk, Jr., who

appended a note questioning the article's accuracy:

The above paragraph is the original source of all the
reports of the vast numbers who perished in the prison
ships. What number died, cannot be even guessed at;
all is rumor and cgnjecture, whether it was 11,500, or
half that number.

62

There is little indication, however, that other historians shared
Onderdonk's misgivings.

That caution is advisable becomes apparent, nevertheless, when we
recognize that the British kept very sketchy records of the prisoners
and what happened to them, and that the casual manner in which those who
did die were buried would render it difficult to make an accurate count
of the bodies, if indeed any were ever attempted. During the latter part
of the war, when the J§r§§y_and other prison ships were anchored in
Wallabout Bay, the common practice each morning was to load into boats
the bodies of those prisoners who had died during the night, and to row
them ashore where they were quickly buried in shallow, common graves.

No gravestones or markers were placed, and no records were kept.

After the war there was nothing much said or done about the "prison
ship martyrs," as they came to be called, until 1803, when excavations
for the new Brooklyn Navy Yard disinterred great numbers of the bones.
John Jackson, the man who owned the property upon which a number of the
bones were fbund, was a Sachem of the Tammany Society of New York, and
he decided that instead of simply having the remains buried in the local
churchyard, he would allow the Society to take charge of the interment.
In 1808, under the leadership of Benjamin Romeyn, the Grand Sachem, the
bones were buried and memorialized, and the Society published Ag_Account

gf_the Interment 9j_the Remains gf_1l,500 American Seamen, Soldiers and

 

 

 

Citizens, Who Fell Victims tg_the Cruelties gf_the British 9g Board Their

 

 

 

Prison Ships at_the Wallabout, during the American Revolution. With a

 

 

Particu1ar Description gf_the Grand §_Solemn Funeral Procession, Which

 

 

Took Place gp_thg_g§_ﬂay_1808. Jackson donated the land upon which the

 

63

Society erected the tomb; the cornerstone was inscribed, "Sacred to the
memory of that portion of American Seamen, Soldiers and Citizens, who
perished on board the Prison ships of the British at the Wallabout
during the Revolution.”

In 1832, Romeyn acquired the property when it was sold for taxes,
and he erected an antechamber with a new inscription: "The portal of
the tomb of the 11,500 patriot Prisoners of War, who died in dungeons
and pestilential Prison ships in and about the city of New York."16
The figure of 11,500 took on by virtue of this one action a tangible

solidity, but it is one based on as little evidence as the newspaper

estimate of 11,644. In Ag_Account pf_the Interment, all we find is the

 

following unsatisfactory statement: "How many perished on board these
Prison-ships, and how many were . . . carried to this modern Golgatha,
cannot be accurately stated. It is ascertained, however, with as much
precision as the nature of the case will admit, that upwards of 11,000
died on board the Jg5§§y_alone. The probability therefore is, that the
real number of victims were many thousands more" (p. 5). It is likely

that David Ramsay's History gj_the American Revolution (Philadelphia,

 

1789) provided the Tammany Society with its source because of similari-
ties in phrasing; Ramsay had written, "It has been asserted, on as good
evidence as the case will admit, that in the last six years of the war
upwards of eleven thousand persons died on board the Jersey" (II, 285).
In both cases, the use of a passive construction and the lack of specific
citation invite skepticism.

Sixteen years after the funeral procession and burial, Albert Greene

pub1ished Captain Thomas Dring's memoir, Recollections pf_the Jersey_

 

 

64

Prison-Ship, and the narrative shows evidence that Dring or Greene or

both were acquainted with the Tammany Society text. In the first chapter,
where Dring establishes his credentials, we find a somewhat softened
estimate of the number of prison ship dead, but the wording suggests a
conscious borrowing: "The number of those who perished on board the
prison and hospital ships at the Wallabout, has never been, and never

can be known. It has been ascertained, however, with as much precision

as the nature of the case will admit, that more than ten thousand died

on board the Jersey, and the hospital ships Scorpion, Strombolo, and

 

Hunter” (p. 21). That Dring, who was after all writing a1most fifty
years after the fact, should turn to published sources to refresh his
memory is not surprising; that Dring's phrasing should so closely fbllow

that of Ag_AcCount 9f the Interment, however, seems significant, especially

 

since he chose to lower the number of dead and to increase the number of
ships on which they died. But the significance went largely unnoticed
throughout the nineteenth century, in part, perhaps, because the number
11,500 had been chiseled in stone at the Wallabout monument, and in part
because the Jggsgy_had become a popular symbol of alleged British in-
humanity and so "upwards of 11,000" appeared bolder upon the page than

17 In any case, the number 11,500

Dring's more conservative ten thousand.
has had a curious longevity which has certainly profited from the fact
that upon a quick perusal Ramsay, the Tammany Society, and Dring appear
to provide independent sources for an estimate in five figures.18
Indeed, it is only recently that historians have begun to doubt
that so many died aboard the prison ships. In 1971, Charles H. Metzger,

referring to the writer of AQ_Account gf_the Interment and his estimate

 

65

of ”upwards of 11,000," wrote:

We must conclude that this figure was wide of the mark.
For he cites no source in support of this estimate, and
the headquarters papers of General Clinton, so far as we
could discover, contain no reports on casualties on these
vessels. Our suspicion is bolstered by the circumstance
that after he repeated this figure on a later page he
indulged in an outburst of emotion, an exhortation to
compassion, proper perhaps in oratory but inappropriate
in sober history. Moreover, if we may assume that some
men were not casualties, it taxes the imagination how
the total number implied could have been confined on this
one vessel of moderate size. (p. 282)

Larry G. Bowman has tried to determine exactly how many prisoners the
British Navy he1d, both on the New York prison ships and at Old Mill and

Forton in England. His conclusion is enlightening:

An actual count of the number of men captured and im-
prisoned by the Royal Navy simp1y can not be compiled.
A host of problems arises when trying to develop a
census of the captives. As mentioned before, the
eighteenth century did not exhibit the modern day
penchant for precise record keeping, and what few
documents survived are incomplete. The material only
hints at answers and does little to provide solid
evidence upon which reliable totals may be computed.
An educated guess concerning the absolute number of
men captured by the British Navy would not be more 18
than eight thousand seamen throughout the entire war.

If we accept Bowman's "educated guess,” we must drastically reduce the old
figure of eleven thousand, because Bowman's number includes men held in
England as well as on the prison ships, and because we must suppose that

a significant number of the prisoners at the Wallabout survived their
ordeal. It would thus appear that the Tammany Society and Dring were
advancing estimates of the number who died which may have been more than
twice as great as the actual figure. We can see, then, that personal
memoirs and patriot pamphlets can be very misleading. Historians cannot
and should not ignore such documents, but they must be wary when they use

them.

66

Historians are not the only scholars who have turned their attention
to the Revolutionary War prison narratives, and in the 1940's, critics
of American literature began to take an interest in them. The general
trend, however, has been to view the prisoner of war narrative in the
larger context of the Indian captivity narrative, which had been part

of the literary scene since the seventeenth century.20

Phillips 0.
Carleton early in the decade published an article suggesting that the
Indian captivities should receive "better treatment”--"They are, I
believe, unique, vigorously written narratives containing in their pain-
ful realism, their simple unaffected prose, their revelation of a
pioneer people, the virtues of true literature. . . . The material is
exciting enough in itself--but its chief value for the contemporaries

who read it was its truth."21

A1though Carleton says nothing directly
about Revolutionary War captivity narratives, there is nothing in the
article to exclude them; indeed, his treatment of the Indian narratives
has much in common with the way in which the historians we have been
discussing handled the prison writing. In both cases, part of the
significance of the narratives lay in their alleged truth, their ability
to give us a picture of what life was like for those captured, whether
by the British or by the Indians.

In 1947, Roy Harvey Pearce viewed the situation differently. He
was less convinced than Carleton of the truth of the captivities, and
in an article that traced the genre from its seventeenth-century begin-
nings, he concluded that "It is as the eighteenth-century equivalent of
the dime novel that the captivity narrative has significance for the

22

history of our literature." However, when he comes to view the

67

Revolutionary War narrative, Pearce's assumption that these narratives
descend from the Indian tales and that the basic ingredient is sensa-
tionalism leads him to what I believe is misplaced emphasis. "The

Narrative 9: Mr, John Dodge (1779),” he writes, "in which hatred is

 

shifted from the French- to the British-inspired Indian, is marked by
a minute description of the 'thoughts that must have agitated the
breast of a man, who but a few minutes before_saw himse1f surrounded by
Savages,‘ and who was now being saved in proper melodramatic style"
(p. 9). I will not deny the presence of "proper melodramatic style,”
but when we turn to examine the whole of Dodge's text, we discover that
Indians play only an incidental role and that sensationalism is obviously
subordinated to a patriotic purpose.

In the first place, Dodge identifies, not Indians, but the British
as the villains in the titles to both editions of his Narrative: .A

Narrative gf_the Capture and Treatment 9f_John Dodge by_the English at

 

 

 

Detroit (Philadelphia, 1779) and My, Dodge's Narrative gf_his Sufferings

 

 

among the British at_0etroit (Danvers and Salem, 1780). Second, he places

 

the real blame squarely on the head of Detroit's British Governor, Henry
Hamilton, who incited the Indians by telling them that "the Americans
were going to murder them all and take their lands; but if they would
join him, they would be able to drive them off, and that he would give
them twenty dollars a scalp" (p. 7). The point of British responsibility
is reinforced a few pages later in what is perhaps the most sensation-

alistic scene of the narrative:

Those sons of Britain offered no reward for Prisoners,
but they gave the Indians twenty dollars a scalp, by
which means they induced the Savages to make the poor

68

inhabitants, who they had torn from their peaceable homes,
carry their baggage till within a short distance of the
fort, where, in cold blood, they murdered them, and
delivered their green scalps in a few hours after to those
British barbarians, who, on the first yell of the Savages,
flew to meet and hug them to their breasts reeking with
the blood of innocence, and shewed them every mark of joy
and approbation, by firing of cannon, &c. (pp. 13-4)

And finally, the book's resolution clearly supports the conclusion reached

about it in Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763-1783 by Philip

 

Davidson: John Dodge's Narrative is not a dime novel but anti-British

propaganda.23

"Had the love of my country no ways prompted me to act
against the tyranny of Britain," writes Dodge, "I leave it to the world
to judge, whether I have not a right to revolt from under the domination
of such tyrants, and exert every faculty God has given me to seek
satisfaction for the ill usage I received; that if I had ten thousand
lives, and was sure to lose them all, I think, should I not attempt to
gain satisfaction, I should deserve to be a slave the remainder of my
life” (p. 27). Dodge's emphasis and Pearce's are not quite the same.

In addition to Dodge's Narrative, Pearce specifically mentions The-

Narrative gf_Ebenezer Fletcher, a_Soldier gf_the Revolution (1813)24 as

 

 

another example of a prison narrative in the Indian captivity tradition

(p. 16 h,) Again, I think that to make this particular association is

to leave the reader with a somewhat distorted view. Pearce himse1f may

have been led astray by the book's sub-title, which states that Fletcher

was ”taken prisoner at the battle of Hubbardston, Vt., in the year 1777,

by the British and Indians," but the only sentence which mentions Fletcher's
treatment by Indians while a captive comes at the end of a litany of his

troubles almost as an afterthought:

69

Some of the enemy were very kind; while others were very
spiteful and malicious. One of them came and took my
silver shoe-buckles and left me an old pair of brass ones,
and said exchange was ng_robbery; but I thought it was
robbery at a high rate. Another came and took off my neck
handkerchief. An old negro came and took my fife, which I
considered as the greatest insult I had received while with
the enemy. The Indians often came and abused me with their
language; calling us Yankees and rebels; but they were not
allowed to injure us. I was stripped of everything valuable
about me. (p. 16)

Fletcher was but sixteen-years old when he was captured, and while his

 

narrative voice betrays something of the callow youth, he does not
exploit his material for sensational effect.

Richard Van Der Beets, in a 1973 dissertation, refines the Pearce
thesis without really changing it to any great extent. "The entire
range of captivity narratives," represents for Van Der Beets, "a single
developing genre--a genre reflecting variations of cultural application
and effect, but nonetheless a single genre in terms of the shared literary
and archetypal, as well as historical and narrow cultural, significances

25 Like Pearce, Van Der Beets sees the narratives

of the narratives."
moving in the direction of the dime novel and penny dreadful: "Accounts
first became stylized and romanticized for literary 'effect,‘ then render-
ed overtly sensational and melodramatic though still grounded largely in
fact, and finally fictionalized--cu1minating in the outright novel of
sensibility with the context of Indian captivity employed as a fictive
device for narrative management" (p. 44). The Revolutionary War prison
narratives are made to fit into the scheme; Van Der Beets sees them only
as part of the developing Indian captivity genre, and he never examines

them in their own context, as personal narratives written by participants

in a war for national independence. He goes so far as to suggest that

70

the Revolution might properly be called the "British and Indian War" and
that the narratives of the period "serve in many ways as vehicles for
anti-British propaganda of the kind directed against the French in the
earlier French and Indian captivities" (p. 37).26
There is, however, 1ess anti-French propaganda in the narratives of
the French and Indian War than we might otherwise expect. Instead, we
find books which either examine the workings of divine providence in
directing the course of events or revel in the lurid detail of Indian

cruelty. Gilbert Tennent, for example, wrote the original introduction

for The Dangers and Sufferings gf_Robert Eastburn, and His Deliverance

 

from Indian Captivity (1758; rpt. Cleveland, 1904), and Eastburn himself

was a Presbyterian deacon. .A 'Plain Narrativ' gf_the Uncommon Sufferings

 

and Remarkable Deliverance gf_Thomas Brown, gf_Charlestown in_New England

 

 

 

(1162:1169) (1760) fulfills its promise of the title page to depict
”divers Tortures and Shocking Cruelties, that were practiced by the
Indians on several English Prisoners;--one of whom he saw burnt to Death,
another tied to a Tree and his Entrails drawn out, &c &c.“27
There is nothing in the prison narratives published after the
Revolutionary War which quite compares with either type. Only in Ihg_gld_
Jersey Captive (1833) by Thomas Andros and in the Memoirs_gﬁ_Ahdrgy
Sherburne (1828) does providence play a significant role, and they both
were ordained ministers. None of the postwar narratives portray inci-
dents of cruelty without pointing out as well a proper political inter-
pretation. The prisoner of war narrative of the Revolution, in short,

differs in a number of key ways from the mainstream Indian captivity

narrative and from the French and Indian War ta1e. For one thing, it pays

71

little homage to providence and a providentia1 view of history, and when
providence is mentioned at all, it most often reflects a comnonplace of
expression and not a testimony of belief. For another, the Revolutionary
War narrative refrains from sensationalized depictions of violence and
brutality for their own sake. Finally, this group of narratives focuses
its attention upon the plight of a narrator in the hands of a political,
not a religious or racial, foe. The result is a sub-genre of personal
narrative which must be dealt with on its own terms.

Such an investigation has never been undertaken, yet, as we have
seen, studies based to some degree on prison writing or studies attempt-
ing to discuss such writing in different contexts continue to be pub1ish-
ed. The simple fact is that the Revolutionary War captivity narratives
are not especially useful sources of historical information, and they are
not merely another kind of Indian captivity. Instead, these narratives
provide us with a group of narrative personae who share not only the
experience of captivity but a special viewpoint about that experience,
because a prisoner in a revolution, in a civil war, faces the problem of
loyalty as well as the more straightforward problem of survival. It is
this particular feature--the notion that virtue manifests itself as
loyalty regardless of pressure and consequence~~which separates the
Revolutionary narrative from the Indian narrative, and it is within this
context of revolutionary virtue that the memoirs of men like Thomas Andros
and Ebenezer Fletcher must be examined. This examination will be the

subject of the next chapter.

NOTES: CHAPTER THREE

1"The American Revolutionary Experience: A Critical Study of
Diaries and Journals of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary
Period,” Diss. University of Delaware, 1976.

2See John K. Alexander, ed., "Jonathan Carpenter and the American
Revolution: The Journal of an American Naval Prisoner of War and
Vermont Indian Fighter," Vermont History, 36 (1968), 75-6, for a dis-
cussion of the plagiarism. Connor's journal was printed by William
Cutler in New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 30 (1876),
174-7, 343-52; 31 (1877), 18-20, 212-3, 284-8; 32 (1878), 70-3, 165-8,
281-6; 33 (1879), 36-41.

3John K. Alexander, "Jonathan Haskins' Mill Prison Diary: Can It
Be Accepted at Face Value?" New England Quarterly, 40 (1967), 561-4.

4David D. Van Tassel makes the point in Recording America' 3 Past:
An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America,
1607- 1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. —101- 2:
"One way in which historical societies measured their success was to
point not to the quality but to the quantity of documents they had put
into print. . . . A single document or manuscript might appear insignif-
icant, but in the aggregate they formed the stuff from which history was
distilled."

5(

 

 

 

 

 

 

1913; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962).

6The Pennsylvania-German Society Proceedings and Addresses, 32
(1924), 5-33.

7”Treatment of American Prisoners during the Revolution,“1g§y
Jersey Historical Society Proceedings, 78 (1960), 257.

8"American Privateersmen in Mill Prison during 1777-1782," Essex
Institute Historical Collections, 97 (1961), 303-20. John K. Alexander,
”'American Privateersmen in the Mill Prison during 1777-1782': An
Evaluation,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, 102 (1966), 318-40,
carefu11y outlines the distortions in Applegate's analysis.

9See, for example, Olive Anderson, "American Escapes from British
Naval Prisons during the War of Independence," Mariner's Mirror, 41
(1955), 238- 40, and ”The Treatment of Prisoners of War in Britain during
the American War of Independence," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research, 28 (1955), 68-83, and Eunice H. Turner, "American Prisoners of

72

73

War in Great Britain, 1777-1783," Mariner's Mirror, 45 (1959), 200-6.
Earlier, Francis Abell discussed the problem in a wider context in
Prisoners of War in Britain.

10A recent study by Charles H. Metzger, The Prisoner in the
American ReVolution (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 197T)— takes
the unreliability of prison writing into account, nevertheless, Metzger's
main conclusion seems to be that American prisoner of war policy was
not only more humane than that of the British, but that in fact the
British policy was deliberately cruel. "The application of physical
as well as moral pressure to American prisoners to induce or compel
them to enlist in the military forces of their captors appears to have
been so general that it gave occasion for periodic protest and not a
little fruitless correspondence. . . . While we can fathom, and perhaps
appreciate, the motivation of the British, it is impossible to condone
the measures employed to attain their purpose" (p. 135).

HDavid Sproat and Naval Prisoners in the War Lf the Revolution,
with Mention Lf William Lenox, Lf Charleston—(New York: Knickerbocker
Press, 1909),_ pp. 1- 2.

12"Listening to the 'Inarticulate': William Widger' 5 Dream and the
Loyalties of American Revolutionary Seamen in British Prisons," Journal
Lf Social History, 3 (1969), 8 n.

13

 

 

 

 

 

The New- York Diary Lf Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, p. 133.

14P. 895. Boatner' s estimates come from Commager and Morris, The
Spirit Lf Seventy_Six, II, 854, and from An Account Lf the Interment Lf
the Remains Lf 11, 500 American Seamen, Soldiers and Citizens, Who Fell
Victims to the Cruelties Lf the British Ln Board Their Prison Ships Lt
the Wallabout, during the— American Revolution. With a Particular Descrip-
tion 9: the Grand §_Solemn Funeral Procession, Which Took Place Ln the 26
May —1808. And an Oration Delivered at the Tomb Lf the Patriots hy
Benjamin DeWitt, M. D. A Member Lf'the— Tammany_Society Lr Columbian
Order (New York, 1808).

15(1849; rpt. Port Washington, N. Y. : Kennikat, 1970), p. 245.
See also Connecticut Gazette, April 25,1783, and Pennsylvania Packet,
April 29,1783.

16For the details about the burial of those prisoners who died in
captivity I am indebted to Charles Ira Bushnell' 5 long note in The
Adventures Lf Christgpher HaWkins, pp. 266- 80, and to Eugene L.
Armbruster, The wallabout Prison Ships, 1776- 1783 (New York, 1920),
pp. 22- 3. Armbruster includes a comment upon Romeyn's decision to
include the patriots who died in the city dungeons in his inscription:
"First, some of the bodies of Prisoners who had died in dungeons in New
York, were brought to the Long Island shore for burial. Second, he
himself had been for seven weeks a Prisoner in two of the prisons in
New York City and wanted to be buried with these remains. Regarding the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

74

inscription of the cornerstone of 1808: There is no record extant which
would plainly show that any American Soldiers were brought on board of
any of the Wallabout Prison Ships for permanent confinement."

17See Henry R. Stiles, Letters from the Prison- -Ships Lf the Revolu-
tion (New York, 1865), pp. 46- 7 n. , for a typical view of the Jerse '5
significance: "Her character, as one of the most loathsome and dismal
prisons to which British inhumanity consigned their prisoners, is too
well known, and has been too often recited to require any lengthy
description at our hands. Sufficient it is to know that the terrible
sufferings which were endured by thousands of American soldiers and
sailors during the Revolutionary War, have rendered her name a synonym
for prison-ship."

 

 

18Thomas Andros, The Old Jersey Captive, p. 8, also quotes a figure
in line with Dring's and the Tammany Society's, and on no better evidence.
Yet acceptance of mortaility in the range of 11,000 has found its way into
standard reference materials. Amerman, p. 268, accepts the estimate, and
George G. Carey, "Songs of Jack Tar in the Darbies," Journal Lf American
Folklore, 85 (1972), 169, quotes a figure of twelve thousand dead for the
Jersey alone. Lemisch, p. 9 n_., tries to be more balanced: "Since we do
not know how the figure of 11,644 was derived, we must distrust it.
But British prison officials who were in New York after the war had ample
opportunity to deny it and never did. . . . Conservative projections on
the basis of known daily death rates derived from sources cited in this
article produce a total of over 11,000." But upon examination, this does
not hold up either. Since no accurate records of prison mortality were
kept, David Sproat, the former connnssary, would have no real way to
counter the figure published in the papers. Also, the "sources cited in
this article" are mostly prison narratives and wartime newspaper accounts,
and these are of questionable reliability.

19

 

Captive Americans, p. 61.

 

200ccasiona11y we find captivity narratives examined, not as part of
the Indian captivity tradition, but as sources for subsequent literary
works. The obvious example is Kenneth Roberts' March to Quebec Roberts
began seeking out these journals originally for background information for
his novel Arundel, and he states his purpose for publishing annotated
reprints of them: "In order to simplify the work of those wishing to
consult these records, they have been brought together in this book for
the first time” (p. xi). Arnold Rampersad, Melville's Israe1 Potter: A
Pilgrimage and Progress (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University
Popular Press, 1969) is interested in Potter's Life and Remarkable
Adventures (1824) only insofar as it served to inspire Melville. About
the memoir itself he writes, "From the point of view of literary excellence,
there is nothing remotely remarkable about the Life and Remarkable
Adventures. There is evidence to doubt its validity as sincere auto-
biography; it does not hesitate to employ melodrama to hold attention, or
maudlin sentimentality to encourage sympathy. Structurally it is without
distinction; its central character invites pity but not admiration; its

 

 

 

 

 

 

75

peripheral figures are faceless sufferers or i11defined agents" (p. 44).

21"The Indian Captivity," American Literature, 15 (1943-44), 169.

 

22"The Significances of the Captivity Narrative," American
Literature, 19 (1947), 13.

23(

24Charles I. Bushne11 reprinted the fourth edition of 1827 in 1866;
Bushnell's edition has again been reissued (Freeport, N. Y.: Books for
Libraries Press, 1970), and it is this modern reprint from which I have
taken quotations.

 

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), p. 402.

25"The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre," Diss.
University of the Pacific, 1973, p. v.

26See also Van Der Beets, "The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual,”
American Literature, 43 (1972), 548-62, and Held Captive by_Indians:
Selected Narratives, 1642-1836 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1973); and David L. Minter, "By Dens of Lions: Notes on Stylization in
Early Puritan Captivity Narratives," American Literature, 45 (1973), 35 -
47. Larry Lee Carey, "A Study of the Indian Captivity Narrative as a
Popular Literary Genre, ca. 1675-1875," Diss. Michigan State University,
1978, borrows from the work of John Cawelti to examine the literary
formula employed by the narrative writers; although Carey does include a
chapter on the Revolutionary War, the narratives he examines are specifi—
cally Indian narratives, usually describing experiences on the western
frontier. Carey does not take up those narratives which are the subject
of the present study.

27Brown's Plain Narrativ is reprinted in The Magazine gf_History with

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and Queries, 1 (1908), 209-21.

 

FOUR: REVOLUTIONARY VIRTUE
AND THE
CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE PERSONA

The writer of a Revolutionary War prison narrative, especially if
he hoped to profit from sales, faced the task of making his book appea1-
ing to as many readers as possible, and this was by no means easy.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, when most of the
narratives were published, there were at least two obstacles to the
potential popularity of Revolutionary War memoirs. First, the veteran of
the Revolution was not an unambiguous figure in society; although he was
a hero and patriot, he became a nuisance and embarrassment as well in the
years following the war. The issue, not surprisingly, was money.

During the war, pay in the Continental Army was almost always in
arrears, and the situation in state militia regiments was never much
better. The tremendous inflation in Continental currency served only to
make the problem more severe, and the collapse of the currency in 1781
brought the situation to crisis. The financial instability created by the
war and by attempts to solidify the economy after the war led to continuing
difficulties. Congress was chased from Philadelphia by a mutiny in the
Pennsylvania line in 1783. The hard money policy of the Massachusetts
legislature spelled financial ruin for independent farmers, many of whom
resorted to arms in Shay's Rebellion of 1786 and 1787. In 1794 the state

of Georgia defied a Supreme Court decision and refused to repay a war

76

77

debt to a private citizen of another state who had brought suit. In the
same year, participants in the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania
opposed a levy on the distilling of whiskey with the same vehemence with
which they had opposed the Stamp Act thirty years earlier. In addition,
there was the normal flood of petitions and applications for back pay,
bounty 1and,.unpaid prize money, and disability pensions. And despite

the fact that many veterans were unemployed and indigent,1 Congress was

in no position to make good on all these claims. Against such a backdrop,
a narrative writer had to take care to create a persona who stopped short
of accusing the citizenry, his potential readers, of ungenerous ingratitude
for his sacrifices.

The veteran's position in society, then, was one difficulty faced by
the narrative writer, but the other was perhaps more formidable. As
adventure stories, Revolutionary War prison narratives had to compete with
the Indian captivities, but they did so at a disadvantage. Stated simply,
the cruel excesses of naked, uncivilized savages are more easily exploited
for the purposes of Gothic sensationalism than are the arrogant inhumanity
and callous brutality of the British and Tories. This is true, at least
in part, because Indians are exotic and mysterious in a way that English-
men are not, and the element of mystery is a stock device in the creation
of horror and hair-raising adventure. The Revolution was esSentially a
civil war, and despite the fact that cruelties abounded and that the
Jersey_prison ship provided an excellent symbol of British inhumanity,
the sufferings endured by the prisoners were at least familiar and, to a
degree, understandable. The enemy, after all, shared their language,

religion, and customs, and one result is that the narrative writers were

78

somewhat restricted in the extent to which they could appeal to the kind
of Gothic effects which increasingly were coming to characterize Indian
captivity tales.

A comparison will help illustrate the point. Ethan Allen's
Narrative is full of propagandistic bombast, and in it he goes to some

effort to expose British cruelty. One of his strongest passages follows:

I next invite the reader to a retrospective sight and
consideration of the doleful scene of inhumanity, ex-
ercised by General Sir William Howe, and the army under
his command, towards the prisoners taken on Long Island,
on the twenty—seventh day of August, 1776; sundry of

whom were, in an inhuman and barbarous manner, murdered
after they had surrendered their arms; particularly a
General Odel, or Woodhull, of the militia, who was hack-
ed to pieces with cutlasses, when alive, by the light
horsemen, and a Captain Fellows, of the Continental Army,
who was thrust through with a bayonet, of which wound he
died instantly. Sundry others were hanged up by the neck
till they were dead; five on the limb of a white oak tree,
and without any reason assigned, except that they were
fighting in defense of the only blessing worth preserving.2

This is a strong indictment, and the image of General Woodhull being
”hacked to pieces" is a fine sensational touch, but it pales before the
description of the death of a man named Flinn as it is portrayed inig

Narrative gf_the Incidents Attending the Capture, Detention, and Ransom

 

 

gj_Charles Johnston, 9f Botetourt County, Virginia, Who Was Made Prisoner

 

 

 

 

by_the Indians, gg_the River Ohio, iﬂ_the Year 1790; ngether with gg_

 

 

 

Interesting Account gf_thg_Fate gj_His Companions, Five ig_Number, One gﬁ

 

 

 

Whom Suffered at the Stake:

Incisions were made through the muscular parts of his arm,
between the elbows and shoulders, and, by thongs of buffalo
hide passed through them, he was secured to a strong stake.
A fire was kindled around him. A group had collected,

among whom he discerned a white man. Flinn asked, if he was
so destitute of humanity, as to look on and see a fellow-
creature suffering in this manner, without an effort to his
relief? This man instantly went into the adjacent village,
informed the traders there of the plight Flinn was in, and

 

79

of the necessity for interposition in his favour without
loss of time. They made up the customary value of a
prisoner in silver broaches, which they delivered to the
white man; and he hastened back, not doubting that the
ransom which he carried would be accepted: but it was
peremptorily rejected. . . . All the ingenuity of the
savages was exercised in aggravating his torments, by all
those means which they know so well how to employ. His
firmness remained unshaken; and he acted the same part
which their own warriors perform on such awful trials.
Nothing.could break his heroic resolution. At length the
fire around him began to subside. An old squaw advanced
to rekindle it. When she came within his reach, he kick-
ed her so violently, that she fell apparently lifeless.
His tormentors were then exasperated to the highest point,
and made incisions between the sinews and bones at the
back of his ankles, passed thongs through them, and close-
ly fastened his legs to the stake, in order to prevent any
repetition of their exertion. The old squaw, who by this
time had recovered, was particularly active in wreaking
her vengeance for the blow he had inflicted upon her. She
lighted pine torches, and applied their blaze to him; while
the men bored his flesh with burning splinters of the same
inflamable wood. His agonies were protracted until he
sunk into a statg of insensibility, when they were terminated
by the tomahawk.

Flinn's ordeal at the stake is portrayed here in excruciatingly graphic
detail because the horror of death at the hands of savages is a major
theme of Johnston's book. The thongs sewing Flinn to the stake, the
Indians' refusal to forgo the delights of torture even for silver, and
the demonic thirst for vengeance on the part of the old squaw all strike
the reader as unnatural and extreme, and this, of course, enhances the
sensational effect. What Allen's version of Woodhull's death portrays is
merely grim because hangings and stabbings, however cruel and unjustified,
were all too commonplace in the American experience. Johnston, on the
other hand, offers the unusual and the bone-chilling.

The narrative writers of the Revolution, then, found themselves in
need of something more than sensationalism to hold their books together

and to capture the interest of a popular audience. They answered that

80

need by grounding their memoirs in the myth of republican virtue, the
notion that the independent and self-governing American was more virtuous
and public-spirited than his British counterpart, who was, of course,
corrupted by a tyrannical monarchy and ministerial system. The decision
to tell their stories from this perspective solved a number of problems
for the writers of prisoner of war narratives. The most obvious of

these is audience appeal; to characterize those who fought the war as
motivated by concerns of virtue and public duty is to help impart a
tradition of heroism to the beginnings of the nation. Readers, then, were
invited to bask in the reflection of the noble deeds of the patriots and
to feel that they too were part of the revolutionary experiment. Comments
about the poverty of the authors and the unfairly narrow limitations of
the pension laws were relegated to apparently subordinate positions out-
side the narrative proper, and such remarks usually appeared either in
prefaces or postscripts.

Another problem solved by the republican virtue motif is the whole
issue of plot. It is not difficult to write an exciting captivity
lnarrative if the story is filled with daring escape attempts against a
background of cruelty and intrigue. Many of the Revolutionary War writers,
however, had no such interesting tales to tell because their prison
experiences consisted entirely of boredom and deprivation. As a result,
the major conflict in the Revolutionary War captivity narrative becomes
internalized; instead of pitting the captive against his enemies, these
narratives portray the struggle between republican virtue and self-
interest within the character of the narrative persona. In this way the

writers are able to transform a story in which essentially nothing

81

happens into one of considerable tension and interest.

The myth of republican virtue was not, of course, the invention of
the postwar narrative writers. William D. Liddle, for example, in a
1978 article entitled "'Virtue and Liberty': An Inquiry into the Role
of the Agrarian Myth in the Rhetoric of the American Revolutionary Era,"
characterizes the eighteenth-century yeoman farmer as "a moral symbol
for that age." He goes on to define the agrarian view of virtue which
he finds as a basis of revolutionary rhetoric: "Virtue . . . required

free men to put the welfare of the community above their own private

ends, whatever the incentives to personal aggrandizement might be."4

Bernard Bailyn finds exactly the same kind of classical virtue under-
lying the patriotic pamphlets written before the war. Comparing America

to ancient Rome, he writes,

For the colonists, arguing the American cause in the
controversies of the 1760's and 1770's, the analogies
to their own times were compelling. They saw their
own provincial virtues--rustic and old-fashioned,
sturdy and effective--challenged by the corruption at
the center of power, by the threat of tyranny, and by
a constitution gone wrong. They found their ideal
selves, and to some extent their voices, in Brutus,

in Cassius, and in Cicero, whose Catilinarian orations
the enraptured John Adams, aged 23, declaimed aloud,
alone at night in his room. They were simple, stoical
Catos, desperate, self-sacrificing Brutuses, silver-
tongued Ciceros, and terse, sardonic Tacituses
eulogizing Teutonic freedom and denouncing the decadence
of Rome.

To the eighteenth—century American, the myth of the yeoman motivated by a
kind of Roman virtue was a commonplace; indeed, after the war former
Revolutionary officers formed a fraternal organization called The Society
of the Cincinnati. In his study of the American constitutions written in
the years after the war, Gordon S. Wood has found that the Americans of

the time believed in the notion that “Frugality, industry, temperance,

82

and simplicit --the rustic traits of the sturdy yeoman--were the stuff
that made society strong. The virile martial qua1ities--the scorn of
ease, the contempt of danger, the love of valor--were what made a nation
great."6

It is important to emphasize here that, while republican virtue is
significant as an informing myth behind much of the rhetoric of the
Revolution, self-sacrificing virtue will not in reality suffice to explain
the motivations of Revolutionary Americans. Regular service in the
Continental Army tended to attract mostly the less well-off members of
society, and Congress and the states were often constrained to raise the
bounties for enlistment in order to keep the armed forces fully manned.
The newspapers provide further evidence that the myth was not the reality.
For one thing, they are littered with offers of rewards for the return
of deserters. For another, the newspapers often contain descriptions of

less than virtuous acts on the part of the citizens. The Boston Gazette

 

and Country Journal, for example, printed a resolution of the Cambridge
Committee of Safety on July 17, 1775: the committee threatened to take

action against "some evil minded Persons, taking Advantage gf_the Confusions

 

 

 

occasioned py_the Battles of Lexington app Charlestown, have plunder'd

 

 

 

and carted off into several Parts gf_this and the neighboring Colonies,

 

sundry Goods and Household Furniture, belongipg_tp_some pf the unhappy

 

 

Sufferers pf_Boston apg_Charlestown." The Connecticut Gazette of

 

February 23, 1776, reports:

Some take advantage of the times to lett out their
houses at a higher price than usual, and it is said
indeed, that some have even doubled their rents.--
This is a crime of dark complexion,--a crime en-
gendered by a sordid love of self; bro't forth by

a principle of ingratitude, worse than the sin of

83

witchcraft, and nursed to its present size by an im-
placable hatred to the rights of mankind.

”Bob Centinel," writing in the Connecticut Courant and Weekly Intelligencer
for November 3, 1778, examines the paradox of republican virtue, an ideal

to which all subscribe but to which many do not adhere:

ATTENTIONI--my fellow-citizens, to your rulers of
every order; for if you do not attend to them, they
will attend to themselves, and not to ygg, No free
people ever long preserved their liberty and happi-
ness without watching those who hold the reins in
government. . .

ATTENTION'--to your Commissaries of Prisoners, that
they treat the unfortunate men under their care with
all humanity and indulgence consistent with the public
safety, and no more; that the prisoners we have, be
faithfully exchanged for the redemption of our brethren;
that no clandestine trade with our enemies be carried
on in our flags, &c. and nothing done, that may bear
the least appearance of a secret bargain, between a
British officer, tory merchant, or mercenary whig, and
an American Commissary.

ATTENTION!--to British Commissaries; British insinua-
tions, and British arts, and take care that their gold
be not more fatal to you than their lead. The last
has slain its thousands, the first may purchase for
millions. Observe where it is like to go; mark its
effects in every order; and let the sovereign remedy
be ever kept, a wakeful attention in tpg_body pf thg
people. No people in their senses would refuse a

good peace, but take care, that in the shape of peace,
you do not embrace the most miserable bondage, and
without remedy.

 

 

 

All three of these passages are in fact admonitions against a self-interest
detrimental to the public good; they are encouragements to the practice of
republican virtue, and there are numerous and recurring calls to self-
sacrifice in all the newspapers of the war years. The violation of the
myth by some made those who remained true to it do so with all the more
fervor.7

If, as we have seen, repub1ican virtue was an important ideal in

eighteenth-century America, it is then easy to understand how readily

84

exploitable it was in the nineteenth century. In the popular imagination,
the American Revolution had been a virtuous struggle in the cause of

the rights of man. In popular biography there was a similar reverence
for the same kind of classical virtue. "Parson Mason Locke Weems,"

writes David D. Van Tassel,

discovered a key and established a formula for writing
biographies likely to appeal to the nation as a whole.
He made national symbols of his subjects, legendary
giants of republican virtue and bravery, of revolution-
ary figures created heroes for a hero-starved people--
heroes of fact for a people accustomed to such heroes
of legend as Beowulf and King Arthur. Weems put no
great emphasis upon the regions from whence his sub-
jects came and gave the fullest account of their roles
in the American Revolution. He imitated the behavior
books which taught such universal virtues as honesty,
bravery, and thrift by representing these qualities or
the lack of them. . . . Weems wrote stories of American
citizens who could be held up as shining examples of
the popular virtues.

It is within this context of the popular ideal of republican virtue that
an examination of the Revolutionary War prison narratives begins to bear
fruit, and we can now turn directly to them.

Major Abraham Leggett was taken at Fort Montgomery and confined at
New York in the Old City Hall and later in the Old Provost. "While I
was a Prizener," he tells us in his narrative, "I Had Véry Flattering
offers if I would Join the British, or in otherwise would Take Protection
and Go into Business in New York--my answer was, I have put my Hand to

9 For the

the Plow and Cant look back-~I shall Stand by my Country."
Revolutionary prisoner, republican virtue became simply a matter of

loyalty to the cause, but that loyalty could be terribly difficult to
maintain. While Major Leggett had only to resist "Very Flattering offers,”
others woke daily to conditions of deprivation and cruelty, and they were

taunted by the guards with the promise that their sufferings could be

relieved if they would only enlist in His Majesty's service.10 Prisoners
aboard the Jersey, for example, probably suffered more than any others
did throughout the war; one of them, Alexander Coffin, gives us this

picture of what he saw the day he came aboard:

On my arrival on board the old Jersey, I found there
about eleven hundred prisoners; many of them had been
there from three to six months, but few lived over
that time if they did not get away by some means or
other. They were generally in the most deplorable
situation, mere walking skeletons, without money, and
scarcely clothes to cover their nakedness, and over—
run with lice from head to foot. The provisions .
that were served out to us was not more than four or
five ounces of meat, and about as much bread, all
condemned provisions from their ships of war, which
no doubt were supplied with new in their stead, and
the new in all probability charged by the commissaries
to the Jersey.1 .

This is a typical description, and one like it can be found in all the
memoirs of former Jersey prisoners. What can also be found are testi-
monies to virtue.‘ Thomas Dring claims, “During the whole period of my

confinement, I never knew a single instance of enlistment from among the

.112

prisoners of the Jersey. Thomas Andros writes,

If there was any principle among the prisoners that
could not be shaken, it was the love of their country.
I knew no one to be seduced into the British service.
They attempted to force one of our prize Brig's crew
into the navy, but he chose rather to die, than per-
formiog duty, and he was again restored to the prison-
ship.

As we can see, a man's willingness to remain true to his country‘s cause
is the touchstone of his virtue and heroism in the world created by Dring
and Andros.

Sometimes, as in the case of Ebenezer Fletcher, the narrator's
sense of loyalty and self-sacrifice is naive or ill-defined at first.
This boy was only sixteen years old when he was wounded in the back

at the Battle of Hubbardton.

86

I flattered myself that our men would come back after
the battle was over and take me off; but to my great
surprise, two of the enemy came so high, I heard one
of them say, "Here is one of the rebels." I lay flat
on my face across my hands, rolled in my blood. I
dared not stir, being afraid they meant me, by saying,
"here is one of the rebels." They soon came to me,
and pulled off my shoes, supposing me to be dead. I
looked up and spoke, telling them I was their prisoner,
and begged to be used well. "Damn you," says one,
"you deserve to be used well, don't you? What's such
a young rebel as you fighting for?"1

At that point young Fletcher probably did not know why he had been fight-
ing. He had simply joined the army and assumed that all would go well,

or at least that his friends would pick him up after the fighting. The
persona Fletcher creates in his book learns the real meaning of republican
virtue only after his capture and subsequent escape.

Fletcher's wounds had not completely healed when he ran off from his
captors, and after a few painful nights alone in the woods he found him-
self wishing he had never escaped. At this point he was still respond—
ing as a young boy might, but he found his own republican feelings at a

farmhouse he stopped at along the way.

I got to the door just as the man arose from his bed.
After the usual compliments, I asked him how far it
was to the British encampments? He answered about
fifty rods. "Do you want to go to them?" says he.

I never was more at a stand what reply to make. As
none of the enemy appeared about the house, I thought
if I could persuade this man to befriend me, I might
avoid them; but if he should prove to be a tory, and
know from whence I came, he would certainly betray me.
I stood perhaps a minute without saying a word. He
seeing my confusion, spoke again to me: "Come," said
he, "come into the house." I went in and sat down.

I will tell you, said I, what I want, if you promise
not to hurt me. H replied, "I will not injure you,

if you do not injure us." This answer did not satisfy
me, for as yet I could not tell whether he would be a
friend or foe. I sat and viewed him for some minutes,
and at last resolved to tell him from whence I came
and where I wished to go, let the event be what it
would. I was a soldier, said I, in the Continental

87

army, was dangerously wounded and taken prisoner, had
made my escape from the enemy, and after much fatigue
and peril, had got through the woods, being directed

to this house by the crowing of a cock. He smiled and
said, "You have been rightly directed, for had you gone
to either of my neighbors, you undoubtedly would have
been carried to the enemy again; you have now found a
friend, who will if possible protect you. It is true
they have forced me to take the oath of allegiance to
the king; but I sincerely hope the Americans will
finally prevail, for I believe their cause to be just
and equitable; should they know of my harboring rebels,
as they call us, I certainly should suffer for it. Any-
thing I can do for you without exposing my own life, I
will do." I thanked him for his kindness, and desired
him not to expose himself on my account. (pp. 28-30)

This passage is significant for a number of reasons. For one thing, it
represents the first time that Fletcher commits himself entirely to the
republican cause without any external support. At Hubbardton he had
relied upon his friends and their loyalty, but that had been a naive
reliance. Here we find him announcing himself as a Continental soldier
"let the event be what it would"; Fletcher's persona has identified itself
with the revolutionary cause. It is also interesting in the structure of
this narrative that Fletcher's declaration is immediately reinforced by
the response of the farmer. Up to this point Fletcher had met with occa-
sional kindness and occasional cruelty, but this is the first instance in
which motives are presented in a context larger than that embraced by the
self-interest of the characters. The farmer is willing to help Fletcher
despite the very real risks involved because he believes that the revolu-
tionary position is "just and equitable"; in other words, the farmer is
acting from a sense of republican virtue and thereby confirming Fletcher's
own dedication. A final significance of this passage is that it marks the
end of Fletcher's innocence. The boy who had been wounded and taken at

Hubbardton began to deal with his situation and its attendant problems

88

more realistically and more confidently after his conversation with the
farmer.

An example of Fletcher's new attitude can be found in an incident
which took place shortly after the one discussed above. Several Tories
approached Fletcher on the road and accused him of being a rebel spy.

He replied that he was no spy, that he was on his way to the home of his
friend Joshua Priest, and that he would answer all their questions if

they would accompany him there.

I then in the presence and hearing of my tory followers,
told Priest the story of my captivity and escape: also
repeated the insolent language used by the tories towards
our people, when prisoners with the enemy, finding Priest
my friend, I said many severe things against the tories,
and fixed my countenance sternly on those fellows, who
had pretended to lord it over me and stop me on the way.
They bore all without saying a word, but looked as surly
as bulls.

I soon found these tory gentry had premeditated carrying
me back, and were seeking help to prosecute their design.
My friend Priest loaded his gun, and said he would give

them a grist, if they dared come after me: but failing
of getting any persons to join them, I was not molested.

(p. 39
Here we find the familiar scorn for cowardly Tories and the willingness on

the part of the patriots to stand up to it. Priest and Fletcher were only
two against several, but the Tories said and did nothing. Virtue and mean-
ness here have a political base, and Fletcher defines his persecutors in
political, not moral, terms. He implicitly completes the equation between
republicanism and virtue in this incident, and he ends his narrative a

few pages later by underscoring the notion of self-sacrifice: "And now,
kind reader, wishing that you may forever remain ignorant of the real
sufferings of the veteran soldier, from hunger and cold, from sickness

and captivity, I bid you a cordial adieu" (pp. 43-4).

ll

 

89

Ebenezer Fletcher was not alone in using an ideal of republican
virtue as an important influence in his own passage to maturity.
Christopher Hawkins was only thirteen years old when he signed aboard
the privateer schooner E2912, He says of himself at the time that he
know little of the sea or of politics, but that he was attracted by the
prospect of the glory and wealth to be gained by the taking of British
prizes. By the time he was fourteen he had been captured and pressed
into the British service as a waiter. He immediately laid plans for

escape and discussed them with a companion named Rock.

I soon intimated to Rock my intention of escape. He
then said he would escape with me. I undertook to
dissuade pim_from attempting it, and as a reason that
he was an englishman and had no family connections in
America--thus being situated if he should not succeed
he would be severely punished. That my case was very
different from his--that I had parents and a large
circle of family connections who were interested in
my fate, and all of them engaged in support of the
cause of American independence--that I considered the
attempt on my part hazardous in the extreme, but I
considered it my duty however perilous the effort
might be, to undertake the enterprize, and more
especially as I was compelled on board Ehe frigate

to perform service against my country.1

Whether Hawkins actually viewed his case as "hazardous in the extreme" is

open to question. He certainly saw a difference between the dangers he

faced and those awaiting an Englishman like Rock should he be caught attempt-

ing to desert. It seems reasonable to assume that despite the references

to duty and country, Hawkins' real interest was to return again to his

family. A true notion of virtue and self sacrifice would come to him

only after his second capture when, instead of being assigned comfortable

duty aboard a frigate, he was imprisoned below the decks of the Jgrgey.
Hawkins portrays the first night of this second captivity as one

charged with patriotism and disdain for the loyalist guards:

90

The singing was excellent and its volume was extensive--
and yet extremely harsh to the taste of the captors.
The guard frequently threatened to fire upon us if the
singing was not dispensed with, but their threats avail-
ed them not. They only brought forth higher notes and
vociferous defiance from the crew. The poetry of which
the songs were many of them composed, was of the most
cutting sarcasm upon the british and their unhallowed
cause. I recollect the last words of each stanza in
one song were, "For America and all hers sons forever
will shine." In these words it seemed to me that all
the prisoners united their voices to the highest key,
for the harmony produced by the union of two hundred
voices must have grated upon the ears of our humane
captors in a manner less acceptable than the thunder
of heaven. For at the interval of time between the
singing of every song the sentinels would threaten to
fire upon us and the officers of the frigate would

also admonish with angry words. "Fire and be damn'd"
would be the response from perhaps an hundred voices

at the same instant. The singing would again be re-
newed and louder if possible. . . . The cowardly
tyrants dared not fire upon us, notwithstanding their
repeated threats--They were often set at defiance
sometimes in the following words--"We dare you to

fire upon us. It will be only half work for many of
the prisoners are now half dead from extreme suffer-
ings." (pp. 63-4)

The ideal informing this passage is, of course, simple patriotic virtue.
Hawkins portrays himself and his fellow prisoners as cheerful in the face
of cruel oppression; ”Fire and be damn'd," they tell their cowardly captors.
Indeed, the passage introduces a long section of the narrative in which
Hawkins paints the sufferings endured aboard the Jgppey_in some detail to
give the reader a picture of what the patriot prisoners went through in
the cause of liberty, and the reader is invited to admire the self-
sacrifice.

Hawkins himself soon made plans to escape and managed one night to
swim ashore. In his travels on Long Island he found assistance at several
farmhouses, and in a contrast between two of the women who helped him,

Hawkins gives us an explicit definition of the myth of republican virtue:

91

The one was loyal to enthusiasm, and prayed for the
success of British arms and the subjugation of the
people to their unhallowed ambition, and the confis-
cation of the property of all those patriots who had
drawn the sword in defence of their rights; the other
patriotic to the cause of civil liberty, and no
sacrifices too great for the purpose of securing free-
dom and independence. In the short space of eight
hours both had treated me with the most generous and
unalloyed hospitality. The former for the reason that,
through fear her agency might send me back into New
York again into a loathsome and dreadful captivity, I
had avowed myself to be in favour of the oppressive
measures of the british crown towards my bleeding and
suffering countrymen. The latter because I had es-
caped from captivity and from the power of these
oppressors. (p. l33)

In short, we are told that the first woman acted from spite, and the

second from altruism. It is this myth--that the Revolution represented

republican virtue overthrowing base tyranny-~that underlies all the action

in the captivity narratives and serves as the central motivation of the

narrative personae.

Appeals to the myth appear in a number of forms. Lemuel Roberts,

for example, embraces it directly when he explains his motives for his

second army enlistment:

On my term of enlistment expiring [in l775] I returned
home, pretty much detenmined to give up the idea of
having any thing further to do with a soldier's life:
But meeting with some disappointments, and my elder
brother returning home by agreement with me, to take
charge of the family, together with the news arriving
of the unfortunate failure of our troops in their
attempt upon Quebec, together with the solemn tidings
of the death of the brave General Montgomery, it
altogether weighed too heavily on my mind to admit of
my staying at home, and I enlisted for a year's service,
into the Company of Captain Thomas Alexander, in Col.
Porter's regiment, of the Massachusetts' line, an in
April I776 we marched from Old Hadley for Quebec.

Despite several captures and escapes, Roberts insists that the dedication

to the cause described above never wavered. When, for example, he was

threatened by a British lieutenant during an interrogation about the

92

battle of Monmouth, Roberts tells us that he remained firm and cheerful,

and he fashions a dialogue to demonstrate his resolve:

I told him all I know of the matter, Sir, is, that
our most intelligent papers state, that in a few
days, if Clinton continues on his present route,

our armyehave great hopes they shall Burgoyne him.
Burgoyne him, gf-D--them, says he; then they call
it Burgoyning of him do [they]. —Yes, please your
honor sa 5 I, that is the n_§__me [?J printers give i__t_.

(575—8 _ _—_

A short while later Roberts and his companions refuse "to claim any title

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

as officers" even though as officers they could obtain paroles. This
apparently incomprehensible behavior can be explained by the fact that the
men planned to attempt an escape and so had no desire to sign paroles they
intended to violate (pp. 69-70). Again, this is a direct assertion that
Roberts and the other prisoners are motivated by loyalty and honesty, even
if self-interest dictates more devious tactics. And, as We have already
seen, Roberts ends his narrative by alluding to his personal I'sufferings
in the public cause” (p. 96).

John Blatchford presents the myth early in his narrative, but instead
of simply asserting it, he gives it more force by describing its betrayal.
Blatchford and five companions have worked "ten or twelve days" to tunnel

out of a Canadian prison when suddenly their plans are discovered.

But while we were in the midst of gaity, con-
gratulating each other upon our happy prospects, we
were basely betrayed by one of our own countrymen
whose name was Knowles: he had been a midshipman

on board the Boston frigate, and was put on board

the Fox when she was taken by the Hancock and Boston.--
What could have induced him to commit so vile an
action cannot be conceived, as no advantage could
accrue to him from our detection, and death was the
certain consequence to many of his miserable country-
men--that it was so, is all I can say.

A few hours before we were to have attempted our
escape, Knowles informed the sergeant of the guard
(Mr. Bible) of our design; and by his treachery lost

93

his country the lives of more than a hundred valuable
citizens--fathers and husbands--whose return would
have rejoiced the hearts of now weeping fatherless
children, and called forth tears of jgy from wives,
now helpless and disconsolate widows.

The persona Blatchford creates simply cannot deal with the treachery of
Knowles; he has no way to understand it because he assumes that virtue
and loyalty to the Revolution are uppermost in the minds of the prisoners.
That Knowles stood to gain nothing from his actions only renders the
situation more incredible to Blatchford, because for him betrayal of the
cause is betrayal of everything. All he can do is dwell on the widows
and orphans for whom he is willing to sacrifice his comfort because he
must preserve the myth of republican virtue.

In some cases, a commitment to republican virtue was the product of
considerable soul-searching and inner tension. When Ebenezer Fox was
confined aboard the Jgrpgy, he observed that a major contributor to the
despair of the American prisoners was the unlikelihood of a speedy re-

lease:

The long detention of American sailors on board of
British prison-ships was to be attributed to the
little pains that were taken by our countrymen to
retain British subjects, who were taken prisoners

on the ocean during the war. Our privateers captured
many British seamen; who, when willing to enlist in
our service, as was generally the case, were received
on board our ships. Those, who were brought into
port, were suffered to go at large; for in the
impoverished condition of the country, no state or
town was willing to subject itself to the expense

of maintaining prisoners inpa state of confinement:
they were permitted to provide for themselves. In
this way, the number of British seamen was too small
for a regular and equal exchange. Thus the British
seamen, after their capture, enjoyed the blessings

of liberty, the light of the sun, and the purity of
the atmosphere, while the poor American sailors were
compelled to drag out a miserable existence amid want
and distress, famine and pestilence. As every princi-
ple of justice and humanity was disregarded by the

94

British in the treatment of their prisoners, so like-
wise every moral and legal right was violated in
compelling them to enter into their service. 8

The reason for Fox being so circumstantial on this point is that Fox
himself escaped prison ship horrors by enlisting for service in the West
Indies, and he goes to some pains to examine his motives and exonerate
himself. The enlistment, of course, constituted a violation of the
ideal, whether Fox would thereby be forced to take up arms against the
United States or not. On the other hand, Fox in no way considers him-
self a traitor. His defense, of himself and of republican virtue, hinges
therefore on the subsequent intention to desert the British service at

the first opportunity:

Situated as we were, there appeared to us to be no
moral turpitude in enlisting in the British service,
especially when we considered that it was almost
certain we should soon be impressed into the same.
Our moral discernment was not clear enough to per-
ceive, that it was not safe "to do evil that good
may come." We thought the end justified the means,
and, in despair of any improvement being in prospect
for our liberation, we concluded that we would en-
list for soldiers, for the West-India service, and
trust to Providence for finding an opportunity to
leave the British for the American service.

(pp. l40-4l)

The defensive tone here is plain: the enlistment was the result of faulty
discernment and not moral turpitude. Immediately after signing, however,
Fox sees the full gravity of his deed. "How often did we afterwards
lament," he writes, ”that we had ever lived to see this hour! how often
did we regret that we were not in our wretched prison-ship again, or buried
in the sand at the Wallabout!" (p. l45) In other words, Fox examines
himself here in terms of the ideal and concludes that a miserable and
anonymous death in the cause of liberty is far preferable to the mean and

self-serving offense he has committed by putting on a British uniform.

95

The rest of the book, which consists entirely of the details of Fox's
desertion and escape, represents for Fox a return to the grace he has
forfeited.

The moral implications of this return are quite explicit. After
considerable difficulties, Fox and his companions were able to run away
from the British, but they still faced the problem of getting back to
the United States. Although the obstacles seemed formidable, the
Americans resolved this time to avoid moral shortcuts; in contrast to
what took place on the Jgppgy_there would be no doing evil to effect
good, at least within limits.

So, for example, in their attempt to get off the island of Jamaica,
they managed to commandeer a sailboat with f0ur local black men and a
boy aboard. Taking the boat seemed justified by the nature of their
plight and by military practice, but what to do with the crew presented

a more subtle problem:

Had we been disposed to do an unjust action, we
had an opportunity of realizing a considerable sum
of money, by carrying them off to Cuba and selling them
for slaves.

The temptation was great to men destitute of funds
as we were; but our moral sense overcame the temptation,
and we gave them their choice to proceed with us on our
voyage, or expose themselves to the hazards of drowning
by attempting to swim ashore. They accepted the latter
proposition. (pp. l89-90)

By overcoming the temptation to adopt the easy course of action and by
returning honorably at last to his native Boston, Fox is able to take a
place again under the umbrella of public virtue.

That his return to America and his return to virtue should coincide
is not at all accidental, because Fox believes that virtue and a spirit

of self-sacrifice result from the political climate of one's homeland as

96

much as from one's own personal morality. Consider, for example, this
description of the non-American prisoners whose lot on the Jersey was

more wretched than that of Fox and his companions:

The lowest dungeon was inhabited by those prisoners
who were foreigners, and whose treatment was more
severe than that of the Americans. . . . Many of
these men had been in this lamentable condition for
two years, part of the time on board other prison-
ships; and, having given up all hope of ever being
exchanged, had become resigned to their situation.
These men were foreigners, whose whole lives had been
one continual scene of toil, hardship, and suffering.
Their feelings were blunted, their dispositions sour-
ed; they had no sympathies for the world; no home to
mourn for; no friends to lament for their fate.

(pp. l05-6)

Nathaniel Fanning expressed similar feelings a good deal more strongly in
his narrative. After being exchanged from a naval prison in England,
Fanning was sailing as a passenger from France to America when he was

shipwrecked:

After I got safe on shore, I could not help reflecting
on my past misfortunes, which it seemed to me were
never to end. However, I soon recovered from such
visionary ideas; I grew calm, and I came to this
determination, never to attempt again to cross the
vast Atlantic Ocean until the god of war had ceased

to waste human blood in the western world. I consider-
ed that it made but a little difference whether I
fought under the French or American flag, as long as

I fought against the English; and besides, the French
at the time were our allies and best friends. 9

Fanning's experiences in France, however, pointed out to him that very
real differences existed between his lot and that of his "allies and best

friends":

My reflections now led me to consider from what
source originate such multitudes of beggars in
France, and after weighing the subject every way
maturely, I concluded it must be owing to the
government under which they lived, being at this
time swayed by a king, with his swarms of nobles,
farmers general, and other royal leaches, who are
continually preying upon and devouring the hard

97

earnings of the people. 0, my country, how happy a lot
has Providence placed her in. (p. l49)

Again we find that an important source of virtue is a government which
allows its citizens to be naturally hard-working and self-reliant. What
Crevecoeur had said about America found echoes in the writing of these
prisoners, because for them, America was a source of strength as well as

liberty. Even Israel Potter, whose Life and Remarkable Adventures is a

 

somewhat embittered attempt to induce the government to award him a
pension, gives voice to the myth. After a long discussion of postwar
poverty in England, he writes that America, "like a phenix from her ashes,
having emerged from a long, an expensive and bloody war, and established a
constitution upon the broad and inmovable basis of national equality, now
promises to become the permanent residence of peace, liberty, science, and
national felicity."20
We can see, then, that the narrative writers derived a number of
benefits from their decision to associate their personae with the ideal of
republican virtue. This chapter began with the assertion that the myth
provided audience appeal, and this is certainly true. The first half of
the nineteenth century was a time of rising nationalism, and Americans
needed to feel good about themselves. The prison memoirs tapped into
this need because they portrayed simple men behaving altruistically in
the service of a cause larger than themselves. The heroes of the captivity
tales were people with whom the readers could identify, people whose
sacrifices confirmed the American's satisfaction in his national righteous-
ness. No other circumstance serves as well to explain why a pamphlet like

The Narrative pf_Ebenezer Fletcher, which is neither well written nor

 

particularly exciting, should have been reprinted four times between l8l3

and 1827.

98

A related circumstance, of course. is the fact that America was a
nation in search of a history, and this too worked in favor of the
narrative writers who presented themselves as men who sacrificed personal
interests for the public good. We have already seen that men like Parson
Weems attempted to fill the historical void by making larger-than-life
heroes out of the leaders of the Revolution. The captivity narrative
personae, as less prominent but no less virtuous participants in the
struggle, laid claim to the same kind of self-sacrificing heroism, and
there is some evidence that the public Was willing to accept them in this
light. On February lO, l803, Samuel L. Mitchell presented a memorial to
the Senate and House of Representatives on behalf of the former prisoners.
In it he compared those who died in the British prisons to the heroes of
ancient Greece and so tried to compensate for America's lack of a past
by linking the Revolutionary struggle to the traditions of classical

antiquity:

If the ancient Grecian Republics--if Athens, the
noblest of them all, raised columns, temples and
pyramids to commemorate those who fell in the fields
of Marathon and Plateae in defense of their country;
can America be backward, and yet just, in paying her
tribute of respect to the memories of citizens, who,
equally patriotic and meritorious, perished less
splendidly, in the prisons of unheeded want and cruel
pestilence.

This lack of heroes coupled with a public desire to honor and revere what
they considered to be their own noble and upright national origins worked
well to the advantage of the writers of captivity narratives; by tying
into the myth of republican virtue they were able to offer themselves as
candidates.

Other benefits were less public. Simply in terms of the narrative

structure of the books, the notion of republican virtue provided a

99

touchstone by which all the action could be measured. For men like

Andros and Dring aboard the Jersey, virtue and dedication to the cause

of liberty were what gave the incredible suffering meaning; heroic self-
sacrifice can make sense only if the cause is worthwhile, and the will-
ingness of others to sacrifice provides self-fulfilling evidence of that
worth. For Fletcher, an education in republican virtue corresponded with
the personal growth of his narrative persona, and the boy we meet in the
narrative matures as he comes to grips with the broad issues of the
struggle in which he is engaged. Blatchford finds the extreme of villainy
in the betrayal of the ideal, and his narrative leaves little doubt about

22 And

why Tories were held in deepest contempt by the former prisoners.
all of the writers shared in the belief that America was particularly
blessed, that the tendency to public virtue was one of the rewards of
living in a free society, and this was the most important part of the myth
because it brought all the other elements together. Americans were
virtuous and deserved to win the Revolution because America was worthy of
their sacrifice.

There is also a psychological bonus conferred on the narrative writers
by the myth of republican virtue. As we saw earlier, many of these books
came to be written because their authors found themselves in financial
distress; several--Ebenezer Fletcher and Lemuel Roberts for example--were
permanently disabled during the war, and to some extent the narratives
provided an answer to whether or not the suffering had been worth it. If
the myth were true, if America could fulfil the promise of the myth, then

of course the suffering became a point of pride and not something to be

regretted. Whether it was conscious or not, when each of these writers

100

sat down to his book, he took the myth and made it live, and in doing so
he gave meaning to his own existence. This indeed may be the most
important reason why republican virtue lurks behind every character and
every incident in the Revolutionary War narratives.

The fullest and most direct statement of the myth appears at the end

of Alexander Coffin's published letter on The Destructive Operation pf

 

Foul Air, Tainted ProVisions, Bad Water and Personal Filthiness:

I have given you part of the history of my life and
sufferings; but I endeavoured to bear them as became
an American. And I must mention, before I close, to
the everlasting honour of those unfortunate Americans
who were on board the Jersey prison-ship, that not-
withstanding the savage treatment they received, and
death staring them in the face, every attempt (which
was very frequent) that the British made to persuade
them to enter on board their ships of war or in their
army, was treated with the utmost contempt; and I
never knew, while I was on board, but one instance of
defection, and that person was hooted at and abused by
the prisoners till the boat was out of hearing. The
patriotism in preferring such treatment, and even
death in its most frightful shapes, to the serving the
British, and fighting against their own country, has
seldom been equalled, certainly never excelled. And
if there be no monument raised with hands to commemorate
the virtue of those men, it is stamped in capitals on
the heart of every American acquainted with their merit
and sufferings, and will there remain so long as the
blood flows from its fountain. (p. l5)

There is little question that the myth of republican virtue was stamped in
capitals on America's heart in the early nineteenth century, and that is
why it is not at all surprising that we find the myth at the heart of

the Revolutionary War captivity narrative.

NOTES: CHAPTER FOUR

1Indeed, many of the veterans had not been too well off to begin
with. John Shy, A_Pegple Numerous and Armed: Reflections pp_tpg_
Military Struggle for American Independence (New York: Oxford, l976),
pp. l72-73, writes: "The pattern is clear, and it is a pattern that
reappears wherever the surviving evidence has permitted . . . inquiry.
Lynn, Massachusetts; Berks County, Pennsylvania; Colonel Smallwood's
recruits from Maryland in l782; several regiments of the Massachusetts
Line; a sampling of pension applicants from Virginia--all show that the
hard core of Continental soldiers . . . who could not wangle commissions,
the soldiers at Valley Forge, the men who shouldered the heaviest
military burden, were something less than average colonial Americans. As
a group they were poorer, more marginal, less well anchored in society."
Jesse Lemisch makes a similar point about those who served aboard
privateers and in the navy in ”Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen
in the Politics of Revolutionary America," William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd. ser., 25 (I968), 37l-407.

2The Narrative pf Colonel Ethan Allen, pp. 78-79. The controversy
surrounding the circumstances of Gen. Nathaniel Woodhull's death dragged
on through the l840's. Other versions can be found in Onderdonk,
Revolutionary Incidents pj_Suffolk and Kings Counties, pp. 36-4l.

 

 

 

3Reprinted in Van Der Beets, Held Captive py_Indians, pp. 298-99.
4

 

South Atlantic Quarterly, 77 (I978), 2l, 27.

 

 

 

5The Ideological Ori ins pf_the American Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press, I967), pp. 25-26.

6The Creation pf_the American Republic, l776-l787, p. 52.

 

 

7See Charles Royster, "'The Nature of Treason': Revolutionary Virtue
and American Reactions to Benedict Arnold," William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd. ser., 36 (l979), l63-93, for a discussion of this phenomenon.
Royster gives an instance of the importance of the ideal during the
Revolution despite the reality of Toryism and treason: "Private Samuel
Downing was in the 2nd. New Hampshire Regiment at Tappen, New York, when
Arnold defected. In l863, when Downing was one hundred years old, an
interviewer asked him about Arnold. The old man's memory had changed the
facts, but the Revolutionaries in I780 would have approved of the reaction
to Arnold's treason which Downing gave to posterity: 'he ought to have
been true. We had true men then; 'twasn't as it is now. Everybody was
true: the tories we'd killed or driven to Canada'" (p. l90). Other
examinations of virtue in the Revolution include Royster's forthcoming

 

lOl

102

A_Revolutionary_Peoole gt Wee; The Continental Army and American
Character,_l775-l78§ and Edmund S. Morgan, "The Puritan Ethic and the
American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 24 (l967),
3-43, which has been reprinted in Edmund S. Morgan, The Challenge pjt_he_
American Revolution (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 88-l38.

 

 

 

 

8Recording America's Past, pp. 70-71.

9The Narrative pleajor Abraham Leggett, p. 23.

 

 

10As we have already seen, the British did attempt to use their prisons
and prison ships as inducements to enlistments; see Bowman, Captive
Americans, pp. 94-97. For a discussion and documentary sample of the
controversy surrounding the British treatment of naval prisoners at New
York, see Banks, David Sproat and Naval Prisoners.

HThe Destructive Operation pf_Foul Air, Tainted Provisions, Bad
Water and Personal Filthiness, pp. 7-8. Coffin's statement was originally
a letter to the editor and appeared in Medical Repository, II (1807),
260-67.

12

 

 

 

 

 

Recollections pflthe Jersey Prison-Ship, p. 90.

 

 

13The Old Jersey Captive, p. l8.

 

14
15

The Narrative pf_Ebenezer Fletcher, pp. l4-l5.

 

 

The AdVentures pf_Chri$topher Hawkins, pp. 47-48.

 

 

16Memgireijaptain Lemuel Roberts, pp. 27-28.

 

17Ne§petiyehijemarkable Occurrences, ip_§pe_Life pf_John Blatchford,

 

 

18The Revolutionary Adventures pf_Ebenezer Fox, pp. 130-31.
19

 

 

Fanning's Narrative, ed. John S. Barnes, p. I46.

 

20Life and Remarkable Adventures pf_Israel R. Potter, p. 77.

 

21Quoted in Ap_Account p:_the Intenment, p. 8.

22Dring (p. 89) characterizes the guards: "We always preferred the
Hessians, from whom we received better treatment than from the others. As
to the English, we did not complain; being aware that they merely obeyed
their orders in regard to us; but the Refugees or Royalists, as they termed
themselves, were viewed by us with scorn and hatred."

 

FIVE: THE PRISON NARRATIVE FORMULA

The work of John G. Cawelti has shown that popular literature can
be viewed as the formulaic depiction of basic archetypal patterns, and
that ”by discovering these . . . universal story types, we will be better
able to differentiate what is particularly characteristic of an individual

culture or period from those aspects of formulas which are a function of

1

more universal psychological and artistic qualities." In the case of

the Indian captivity narrative, this kind of examination has already
been done. Richard Van Der Beets, fbr example, has defined the whole

spectrum of Indian captivities as a single genre:

The discrete historical and cultural significances of
the Indian captivity narrative, however illuminating
they may be in their religious, propagandistic, and
visceral applications, are subordinate to the funda-
mental informing and unifying principle in the narra-
tives collectively: the core of ritual acts and
patterns from which the narrative derive their
essential integrity. The variable cultural impulses
of the narratives of Indian captivity are then but

a part of their total effect, and the narratives are
more than the simple sum of their parts. The result
is a true synthesis. The shared ritual features of
the captivity narratives, manifested ip both act and
configuration, provide that synthesis.

For Van Der Beets, the "fundamental informing and unifying principle” is
that of the Monomyth, ”that of the Hero embarked upon the archetypal
journey of initiation. The quest, or ancient ritual of initiation, is a
variation of the fundamental Death-Rebirth archetype and traditionally
involves the separation of the Hero from his culture, his undertaking a
long journey, and his undergoing a series of excruciating ordeals in

passing from ignorance to knowledge" (p. 553). The thrust of the argument

103

104

here is not so much to establish that Indian captivity narratives share
deep-rooted patterns with other literatures as it is to assert that the
differences between Indian captivities are of less significance than
the unifying patterns. Specifically, Van Der Beets is attempting to
amend the view of Roy Harvey Pearce, who "conceived of the Indian cap-
tivity narrative as but a thread in the loose fabric of American cultural
history; consequently he discerned not a single genre but rather several
'popular' sub-literary genres ranging from the religious confessional to
the ndisomely visceral thriller, their several significances shaped and
differentiated largely by the society for which the narratives were
intended" (p. 549). We can see, then, that, according to Van Der Beets,
such diverse features as religious testimony and dime—novel sensationalism
do not actually fragment the genre; instead, they provide the constellation
of ritual which illuminates the essentially monomythic structure under-
lying all the Indian captivity narratives. The result is a study of how
one culture--that of white Americans of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries--reinterpreted an archetypal pattern to answer its
own needs.

The argument which Van Der Beets presents is compelling, at least as
it applies to the Indian narratives. He extends the limits of the genre,

however, to include the Revolutionary War narratives:

The propaganda value of the captivity narrative became
more and more evident and was increasingly a factor in
narratives treating experiences during the eighteenth
century. . . . The Revolution (often called "The
British and Indian War”), during which many tribes
shifted allegiance to the English against the settlers,
called forth . . . inflammatory accougts of Indian out-
rages, depredations, and captivities.

Such a view must either ignore the narratives we have been discussing, or

it must distort them to some extent in order to make them fit the paradigm.

105

We must remember that, even though Indian outrages took place during the
Revolution, Indian problems were peripheral to the central issues. It
is not surprising, then, when we discover that Van Der Beets cites only
three specific narratives from the Revolution and that each of these is
rather well removed from the revolutionary context. The first is the
”Destruction of the Settlements at Wyoming," which appeared in Affecting
History gf_the Dreadful Distresses pf_Frederick Manheim's Family (Phila-

 

 

delphia, 1794); this is anti-British inasmuch as it blames Colonel John
Butler, the Tory commander of the enemy forces, for the massacre, but
the focus is squarely on the Indians and the cruelties they practiced.

The other two examples are weaker. The Sufferings pf_John Corbley's

 

 

Family was also first published in the Manheim anthology, but the author
makes no mention of the British or of the Revolution. Later, when it was

reissued in Samual G. Drake's Indian Captive; pp, Life jg_the Wigwam

 

 

(Auburn, 1850), an anti-British preface written by Rev. William Rogers

was added. Finally, Van Der Beets mentions ATrue Narrative eftje

 

Sufferings‘pf_Mary Kinnan (Elizabethtown, N. J., 1795) as another example

 

 

of a memoir of “The British and Indian War,” yet it contains nothing

4 These

about the Revolution except an apostrophe to "cruel Britain."
three narratives, then, are in fact Indian captivity narratives with
little direct link to the Revolutionary War. Other narratives, like those
of Andros or Dring who had no contact with Indians at all, are simply not
mentioned, but the reader is left with the impression that all captivity
narratives are essentially the same.

There are, however, three important respects in which the formula of

the Revolutionary War narratives differs from that of the Indian captivities.

106

The first, of course, involves the myth of republican virtue which informs
every element of the Revolutionary War fonnula. Second, the transforma-
tion which the hero of a Revolutionary War narrative experiences is not at
all like that experienced by the Indian captive. Finally, the return which
completes the monomyth cycle and the Indian captivity formula is much more
complex in the Revolutionary War captivity--the returning soldier often
concludes that, while he has remained true, his society has been corrupted.

In the previous chapter we have seen how, for the writers of the
Revolutionary War captivity narratives, republican virtue became the
touchstone by which they evaluated their own behavior and that of their
fellow prisoners. Because the Indian captives were in less control of
their fate than the prisoners of war, however, the existence of an absolute
moral standard of captive behavior is of little importance in the Indian
captivity narrative. The privateer held aboard the gepeey_was always free
to enlist in the King's service and thereby relieve his own suffering and
deprivation, but the captive carried off by the Indians was completely at
the mercy of his captors. The Revolutionary prisoner, then, not only had
to endure the hardships of captivity, but he had to remain loyal to the
cause, to the myth of republican virtue, as well.

The Indian captive experienced captivity as a threat to his life and
to his identity, but not as a threat to his loyalty. (Indeed, even when
Indian captives willingly became adopted members of the tribes that held
them, it was more the result of a long process of acculturation than of any
betrayal of principle. The experience of captivity for the two groups,
then, was simply different.

It is this moral standard of republican virtue which accounts for the

different ways in which the Indian captive and the prisoner of war are

107

transformed by their experiences. In "The Indian Captivity Narrative as

Ritual," Richard Van Der Beets characterizes the change:

But it is in the captivity experience itself--the trans-
formation by immersion into an alien culture accompanied
by ritualized adoption into that culture--that constitutes
the initiatory process and prepares for the enlightened
return or rebirth of the initiate. This process of trans-
formation in the captivity experience involves first a
ritual initiatory ordeal, followed by a gradual accomoda-
tion of Indian modes and customs, especially those re-
lating to food, and finally a highly ritualized adoption
into the new culture. (p. 554)

The experience Van Der Beets describes here is a direct challenge to the
captive's identity. The initial ordeal which most Indian captives were
forced to endure was the running of the gauntlet, and Van Der Beets pro-
vides quite a number of examples of captives who were stripped and beaten
upon first arriving in an Indian camp. Running a gauntlet could prove
fatal, since some of the Indians lining the way were armed with hatchets,
but the more likely result was to impress the captive with how fully alone
he was and how totally his life was in the control of his captors. The
random beating of a naked captive by an entire village, including the
women and children, served to demoralize and to dehumanize him, and for
the narrative writer, this was the first step in a deep transfbrmation of
his sense of personal identity. The Revolutionary War prisoner, however,
usually suffered little more than the loss of any valuable property--such
as money or a good coat-~found in his possession at the time of his
capture. While this practice certainly angered the prisoners and often
left them with inadequate clothing against the weather, it is presented

in a flat matter-of-fact manner in the narratives. The prisoners resented
their loss, but they did not perceive themselves as demoralized or de-

humanized by it.

108

The Revolutionary War captivities devote a lot of attention to
descriptions of prison conditions and prison routine. Thomas Dring's

RecolleCtions gf_the Jersey Prison Ship, for example, is not so much

 

 

chronological in its organization as it is topical: each subdivision
describes a different feature of life aboard the gepeey, The typical
reaction to conditions of deprivation and cruelty is resignation. The
Indian captive, on the other hand, had more to do than simply accustom
himself to prison routine. After running the gauntlet, the Indian captive

still faced other threats to his identity:

the captive then underwent the second phase of trans-
formation by a gradual accomodation to Indian prac-
tices and modes. The most striking and consistently
recorded of these accomodations is at once the most
fundamental: that of food. In narrative after
narrative, captives describe an initial loathing of
Indian fare, then a partial compromise of that dis-
gust under extreme hunger, and ultimately a complete
accomodation and, in many cases, even relish of the
Indian diet.

Isaac Jogues, for example, declares near the end of his narrative that
”Such food as this, with the intestines of deer full of blood, and half
putrefied excrement, and mushrooms boiled, and rotten oysters, and frogs,
which they eat whole, head and feet, not even skinned or cleaned; such
food, had hunger, custom, and want of better, made, I will not say

"5 The ability to find such fare pleasing

tolerable, but even pleasing.
represents a tremendous accomodation to Indian customs and practices, and
it is the product of a highly personal transformation.

There is nothing like this kind of internal transformation of the
hero in the Revolutionary War narratives. We saw in the first chapter

that food--or more precisely the lack of it--was a principal concern of

the men who kept prison diaries and a major complaint of those who wrote

109

propaganda. In the narratives too we find ample treatment of the subject,
but without any hint of real accomodation. John Van Dyke's description

of the fare aboard the Jersey is typical:

Every man in the mess of six took his daily turn to
get the mess's provisions; one day I went to the
galley, and drew a piece of salt boiled pork. I
went to our mess to divide it; I held the pork in

my left hand, with a jack-knife in my right to mark
it in six parts . . . I cut each one his share, and
each one of us eat our day's allowance in one mouth-
ful of this salt pork, and nothing else. One day,
called pea day, I took the drawer of our Doctor's
(Hodges of Philadelphia) chest, and went to the
galley, which was the cooking place . . . with my
drawer for a soup dish; I held it under a large
brass cock--the cook turned it--I received the
allowance for my mess--and behold! brown water

and fifteen floating peas-~no peas on the bottom

of my drawer-—and this for six men's allowance for
twenty—four hours. The peas were all on the bottom
of the kettle; those left would be taken to New York,
and, I suppose, sold. One day in the week called
pudding day; three pounds of damaged flour--in it
would be green lumps--such as their men would not eat,
and one pound of very bad raisins, one—third raisin
sticks; we would pick out the sticks, mash the lumps
of flour, put all, with some water, in our drawer,
mix our pudding, and put it in a bag with a tally
tied to it, with the number of our mess; this was a
day's allowance.

There is no evidence that Van Dyke ever found the pork, the peas, or the
pudding not only tolerable but pleasing. Moreover, the provisions for
prisoners aboard the gepeey_and the other prison ships were perhaps the
worst of the war. Andrew Sherburne, who was held at Mill Prison in
England, found less to complain of: ”The provision while I was there,
was in general, pretty good, but we had not half enough of it" (p. 83).
We can see, then, that however otherwise unpleasant the prison experience
was to the Revolutionary War captives, it did not involve threats to
their cultural identity like those faced by Jogues and others who came

to enjoy eating the bowels of deer. The experience, and thus the literary

110

expression of it, was not the same.

In the Indian narratives, the direction of the transforming is clear.
Van Der Beets writes: ”The final phase of transformation, as represented
in the captivity experience, is that which effects the deepest immersion
into the alien culture and completes the initiation of the Hero: sym-
bolically 'becoming' an Indian by ritualized adoption into the tribe."8
The fact that Indians were an alien culture is, of course, the key to the
different meanings of captivity which we find in the Indian narratives
and in those of the Revolution. The monomythic transformation of the
Indian captives consisted in his absorption into a new culture, and this
absorption took place with at least tacit agreement on the part of the
captive. Indeed, the Indian narratives abound with stories of captives
who refuse to return to white society even after they have been ”rescued,"
and there are numerous references to captives who have forgotten how to '
speak English. The hero of the Revolutionary War prison narrative does
not confront an alien culture, nor does he undergo any threats to his
sense of cultural identity. For the Revolutionary War prisoner, the
issue at stake is his virtue, specifically his loyalty, and this requires
that his narrative take on a different cast. The transformation of this
hero involves no threat to his identity; instead, he is transformed from
a youth whose virtue is untested and naive into a man who has suffered
for a cause and remained true to it.

Finally, there is the question of the captive's return. Van Der
Beets tells us that in the case of Indian captives, most, "having been
given up for dead or at best considered 'lost' after capture, were

received on their return by relatives and friends in the sense of having

111

come from the grave, reborn to the world from which they had passed by

means of symbolic death."9

This symbolic return from the dead is the
natural resolution of the monomyth as it is played out in the Indian
captivity narrative-~the cycle of separation, transformation, and return
is completed. In the Revolutionary War narrative, however, simple return
from captivity is insufficient to resolve the tension and complete the
story because the primary myth is the myth of republican virtue which

must be worked out in terms broader than any concern for the personal

fate of the hero can encompass. The final resolution of the Revolutionary
War captivity narrative is and must be the success of the Revolution, the

vindication of republican virtue. The title page of Ebenezer Fletcher's

Narrative, for example, promises us the story of how the hero was severely

 

wounded and taken prisoner et_the battle gf_Hubbardston, 13,, jp_tpe_year

 

 

I777, py_the British and Indians, et_tpe_ege_pf_l§_years, after recover-

 

 

ipg_ip_part, made his escape from the enem , and travellingthrough_g_

 

 

 

dreary wilderness, followed py_wolves, and beset py_Tories gp_his way, who

 

 

 

threatened tp_take him back tp_the enemy, but made his escape from them

 

 

 

all, and arrived safe home; this looks as if it might fit into the pattern

 

 

which Van Der Beets identifies as the basic configuration of Indian
narratives, but Fletcher's Narrative in fact does not end with his safe
return. Fletcher rejoins his regiment after his escape, and he only ends
his book when the war and his term as a soldier come to an end. In these
narratives, the ideal of republican virtue becomes the real center of
attention, and it diverts some interest from the changes and difficulties
experienced by the individual heroes.

It should now be clear that an examination of the prisoner of war

narratives of the Revolution on the basis of the Indian captivity

 

 

112

narrative formula is inadequate. The initiation into captivity, which

Van Der Beets correctly sees as the starting point of the Indian captive's
monomythic journey, is not a significant element in the Revolutionary War
narratives, which almost invariably begin with the hero's decision to
fight for his country. The captivity experience leads to transfonnation
and symbolic death in the Indian tales, but for the prisoners of war, no
real transformation takes place. Instead, we find that prison tests and
tempers virtues which were latently present in the heroes' personae before
they were captured. The final difference between the two groups of
narratives involves the resolution of the story; while the Indian captive
returns home to safety, the prisoner of war who escapes or who is exchanged
returns to the service of his country.

The republican virtue formula, then, is similar to the Indian captivity
formula inasmuch as both consist of three main stages, but instead of the
separation-transformation—return pattern which characterizes the Indian
tale, we find in the Revolutionary War narrative a pattern in which the
hero first commits himself somewhat naively to a cause, and then has that
commitment severely tested. This formula finally culminates, not in re-
turn, but in confirmation of republican virtue and rededication to the
republican cause. Differences in the mythic content of the two varieties
of narratives are, of course, the basis for the different formulaic
patterns-—the Indian captivity narrative as a journey of initiation in
which the hero survives but is transformed by threats to his cultural and
personal identity, while the Revolutionary War prison narrative is a tale
of progress toward moral and political maturity brought about by an ordeal

testing the hero's integrity.

113

In the first stage of the Revolutionary War prison narrative, the
hero portrays himself as a youth going naively off to war and glory.

We have already seen how young boys like Lemuel Roberts, or Christopher
Hawkins, or Ebenezer Fletcher joined the army or went to sea without any
real understanding of the meaning of their actions or the possible out-
come. Republican virtue for these boys is virtue untested, a set of
platitudes about free Americans and oppressive British tyrants. Once the
boy is captured and made a prisoner, however, his perception of himself
and the cause change radically because for the first time he is forced to
face the consequences of revolution realistically. As a prisoner, he
might starve in the hold of a smallpox-infested hulk or in an eg_hge_
prison ashore, and he would regularly be offered the promise of good treat-
ment and provisions if he would but abandon his foolish notions of re-
bellion. The circumstances of prison life thus lead the naive hero to
examine, perhaps even to question, his original commitment, and the sub-
sequent testing of his virtue provides much of the tension in the narra-
tives.

This trial by ordeal is the second stage of the Revolutionary cap-
tivity formula, but the ultimate effect on the prisoner differs from the
transformation Van Der Beets describes in the Indian captivity. Instead
of undergoing a symbolic death, the Revolutionary prisoner of war faces
death squarely, and by choosing to endure suffering rather than betray
his comrades and principles, he manages in a sense to transcend death.
The Indian captive emerges from his ordeal a changed human being, but the
prison narrative hero is essentially the same after his imprisonment as

before except that he is very much stronger. Instead of having his

 

 

114

identity transformed, the Revolutionary War prisoner has his virtue con-
firmed and reinforced.

The final stage of the formula begins when the hero gains his re-
lease from captivity, and it is in this stage that he puts his renewed
sense of virtue to action. There are two basic patterns followed in this
stage: the prisoner escapes or he is exchanged, but in either case he
returns to Revolutionary service. Escape, of course, can add a good deal
of excitement to a narrative, but in these stories the escape motif serves
more importantly to show how virtue and tenacity can be rewarded. Perhaps
the best single example of a narrative emphasizing escape is the Narrative

pf Remarkable Occurrences, ip_tpe_Life gf_John Blatchford, in which the

 

distinction between the second and third stages is quite blurred by the
fact that Blatchford's story is a long series of escapes and recaptures.
Throughout them all, the hero's resolve holds firm despite numerous dis-
couraging setbacks. After several abortive escape attempts both in Canada
and in the West Indies, for example, Blatchford was shipped to England,

but he tried to get away again while the ship was off the Irish coast:

I jumped overboard, with intention of getting away; but
unfortunately I was discovered and fired at by the marines:
the boat was imnediately sent after me, took me up and
carried me on board again. At this time almost all the
officers were on shore, and the ship was left in charge of
the sailing-master, one Drummond, who beat me most cruelly;--
to get out of his way I run forward-~he followed me, and as

I was running back he came up with me and threw me down the
main hold. The fall, together with the beating, was so
severe that I was deprived of my senses for a considerable
time; when I recovered them I found myself in the carpenter's
birth, placed upon some old canvass, between two chests,
having my right thigh, leg and arm broken, and several parts
of my body severely bruised. In this situation I lay eighteen
days. (p. 7)

Blatchford's story is full of such frustrations and hardships--he was even

pressed into service by the British East India Company but managed to

115

escape--and it was always his trust in providence and his devotion to the
American cause which sustained him. The role of republican virtue in the
escapes of Fletcher and Hawkins was discussed in the previous chapter. In
each case, the escaping prisoner portrays his efforts as the operation of
a virtue and loyalty superior to that of the enemy, especially Tories who
had betrayed and continued to betray that ideal. The second pattern of this
final stage also advances the myth of republican virtue because exchanged
prisoners in the narratives return, not to their families and the relative
ease of civilian life, but to the fighting. We have seen earlier, for
example, that Nathaniel Fanning chose service with the French rather than
a return to America as a passenger after his exchange because "it made

but a little difference whether I fought under the French or American
flag, as long as I fought against the English" (p. 146). The point, then,
is that regardless of how the narrative persona managed to free himself
from his captors, it was his duty to use that freedom in the service of
republican virtue. Even Israel Potter, who was not able to return to
America until almost fifty years after the war, ends his narrative with
rhapsodic praise of the American republic because his return was to the
ideal, not to the Rhode Island farm which had long since been sold or to
the family which had scattered or died off.

An examination of the Revolutionary Adventures pf_Ebenezer Fox pro-

 

 

vides an excellent example of how the three-part fbrmula works to pro-
vide the reader with an adventure tale which is in fact a presentation

of the republican virtue myth. The book opens to present us with a
laughably naive boy romantically influenced by all the talk of political
liberty which abounded in Boston in the 1770's. 0n the night of April 18,

 

116

I775, Fox and a boy named Kelley ran off from their parents in Roxbury in
search of adventure. Their destination was Providence, where they ex-
pected to be able to ship out and see the world, and they hurried all the
more toward it because of the unusual commotion in the streets that night;
they thought the bustle preceding the battle of Lexington was in fact a
massive attempt to find them and return them to their families. After
near capture by the British aboard a coastal smuggler and a second success-
ful smuggling voyage to Cape Francois, Fox, a young patriot who still had
learned little of republican virtue, returned to visit his parents and

was forced to sign on as an apprentice to a barber and wigmaker. When

the master was drafted, he sought a substitute:

The spirit of adventure had been suppressed, but not
destroyed, within me. The monotonous duties of the
shop grew irksome, and I longed for some employment
productive of variety. The opportunity seemed favor-
able to my desires; and, as my elder fellow apprentice
was fearful that he might be called upon, he en-
couraged me in the project, and I resolved upon offer-
ing my services. (p. 47)

In September, I779, Fox enlisted in the militia, but his regiment never
saw action. After his discharge, and again in search of prize money and

adventure, he signed aboard a privateer, The Protector.

 

Throughout the first five years of fighting, then, Fox maintained
his boyish enthusiasm. Indeed, he saw the war as a means for the relief
of boredom and as an avenue to possible wealth. Ideas of patriotism and
republican virtue are not really absent in Fox's characterization of these
early years, but they are not at all emphasized because they were ideas in
the air, which could be heard everywhere, and for the Fox persona they
were ideas yet to be tested. It was easy to be a patriot, it could even

be fun, as long as patriotism offered the possibility of excitement and

117

monetary gain. When patriotism offers only the prospect of an unpleasant
death, however, the patriot is faced with a challenge to his integrity

which cannot be evaded.

For Fox, the challenge began when The Protector was attacked by the

 

men-of-war ROe-Buck and May-Day. This event provides a sharp juxtaposition
of naive patriotism and true republican virtue: For the adventure-seeking
boy, even capture by the enemy can be taken lightly-~Fox used the confusion

of the situation to indulge himself:

Our capture was now considered no longer problema-
tical; and, being unwilling that the stores, es-
pecially of crackers, cheese, and porter, should
fall a prey to the appetite of the enemy, and not
knowing when we should have an opportunity of en-
joying such luxuries again, I invited about a dozen
of my friends into the store room, where we exerted
ourselves to diminish the quantity of this part of
the prize which we thought would shortly be in
possession of the enemy. The porter made us cheerful
if not happy, and having sat and drank to our satis—
faction, we shook hands as friends soon to part, un-
certain when we should meet again, and returned on
deck without our absence having been noted. (p. 84)

This light tone continues even after the British have boarded Fox's ship.

Each man aboard The Protector had been given fifteen dollars in specie to

 

hide on his person so that at least some of the money might not fall into
the hands of the enemy; as we have already seen, however, prisoners were
routinely searched and plundered of all of value, and so the British were

soon aware that each man was carrying cash:

Such was the art which some had exercised in hiding
the money, that they were stripped entirely naked
before it was fbund. One fellow had secreted his
share so effectually, that it baffled all searching
operations to find it; and the officer, being con-
fident that the fellow had it about him, took the
satisfaction of giving him a tremendous kick in the
rear by way of conclusion, roaring out at the same
time, "Away with you, you damned rebel, into the
hold." (pp. 86-87)

118

Unlike the threatening initiations to captivity found in the Indian tales,
Fox's first experiences as a captive seem almost burlesque, but all of
that changes in a single sentence when Fox boards the gepeey; "I now
found myself in a loathsome prison, among a collection of the most wretch-
ed and disgusting-looking objects that I ever beheld in human fbrm"

(p. 97).

In the Revolutionary War captivity narrative, the conditions under
which the prisoners were forced to live operated to steel a nascent sense
of republican virtue and make it strong, and we see this at Work in Fox's
tale. The realities aboard the gepeey_had caused him to abandon his
naive notions, but they also fostered more realistic ones. Fox mentions,
for example, the hasty burials on the beach at the Wallabout. Those
_ prisoners fortunate enough to be chosen for the work parties who went
ashore with the dead each day "were hurried away before their task was
half completed, and forbidden to express their horror and indignation at
the insulting negligence toward the dead." Such callous behavior on the
part of the British produced but bitter fruit for them, because Fox goes
on to say, "The emotions thus suppressed, only glowed the more intensely
within their bosoms, and contributed as much as any other cause to keep
alive the hatred and animosity toward their enemies" (p. 111). Such test-
ing and trying of the men is typical of the genre, for in the Revolutionary
captivity we are presented with heroes who use their suffering to strength-
en their devotion to cause rather than attempt to relieve it by betrayal.

In the case of Ebenezer Fox, however, the path toward republican
virtue was a bit crooked; as we saw in the previous chapter, he and

several of his friends tried to find a shortcut to freedom by enlisting in

119

the British service and then looking out for the first opportunity to
desert. Nevertheless, this was not an abandonment of the principles of
republican virtue, but a faulty approach to the problem of escape. We
have already seen the self-recriminations Fox suffered and the rededica-
tion to purpose which the incident precipitated, and we are left to
conclude simply that Fox strayed from the path but returned, and that his
virtue, having undergone a severe test, was the stronger fbr it.

Ultimately Fox's escape was successful, and it marks the end of the
second stage of the narrative--the naive boy has become the republican
hero. The third stage involves the hero's return, but in the Revolution-
ary War narrative this return is dependent upon the triumph of the
American cause. When Fox arrives in Cuba after his escape from the
British West Indies, he signs on an American thirty-two gun frigate, the
flgre, despite the fact that she was bound for active duty and France and
not for Boston and home. In fact, Fox was still in France when he
received word of the American victory, and he finally returned home as a
crew member aboard an American warship. His own glorious homecoming,
then, was subsumed by the more general celebration of the United States'
defense of independence. ”The story of Ebenezer Fox is a kind of allegori-
cal parallel to the story of the progress of republican virtue, and in
Fox's persona and that of the other narrative writers we see the triumph
of that virtue.

There is one other feature of the Revolutionary War captivity
narratives which deserves mention. Most of them were written or publish-
ed quite a long time after the events which they describe took place.

Some of the reasons why this is so and some of the factors which motivated

120

the writers were discussed in the second chapter, but the fact that
twenty, thirty, or forty years separate the events from their retelling-
has a significance beyond the scope of that earlier discussion.
Ostensibly, these tales were addressed to the children and grandchildren
of the men who wrote them, but in a broader sense they were intended to
remind the whole post-revolutionary generation of what common people had
done in the name of freedom. Republican virtue is the central myth of
these books because the old soldiers feared that devotion to it was
slipping away, that, in the words of Private Samuel Downing, "'twasn't

as it is now. Everybody was true." The need to believe this about their
own lives and about their own part in the nation's history provides a
strong determining force for the way in which the former prisoners shaped
the Revolutionary War captivities. That need may in fact be stronger
than the desire to supplement a pension application or to pick up a
meager return in sales. Viewed in these terms, occasional lapses into
bitterness make emotional sense despite the fact that they contradict the
mythology of the narratives as a whole. Lemuel Roberts was a great
praiser of republican virtue, and he wrote, by his own admission, because
he needed the money. Yet while he is ever at pains to promote the
virtuous ideal, he cannot resist noting as well that "injustice is too
often done by officers, to soldiers who risk their lives with boldness,
and who render essential service to their country, and thus a good cause
is too often fatally injured" (p. 26). That Roberts never received a
pension is, of course, one explanation for the remark, but a better one
is the suggestion that by 1809 when his book was published Roberts had

come to believe that as a soldier he truly did follow the ideal, that he

121

really was a virtuous republican. What we have, then, in the Revolution-
ary War prison narrative is a genre quite distinct from the Indian cap-
tivity narrative with which it is often grouped because it uses personal
narrative as a vehicle for national historical mythology and not as an
illustration of a providentia1 interpretation of history or as a frame-
work for highly sensationalized novels of sensibility. In a sense, these
narratives rather self-consciously attempt to provide a nineteenth-century
American audience with a glimpse into the nation's only claim to a golden

age.

 

NOTES: CHAPTER FIVE

1"Notestoward a Typology of Literary Formulas," Indiana Social
Studies Quarterly, 26 (Winter, l973-74), Zl. Cawelti has further re-
fined his ideas on literary fonmulas in The Six-Gun M sti ue (Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971) and in
Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular ‘
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l976).

2”The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual," p. 549; see also Larry
Carey, "A Study of the Indian Captivity Narrative as a Popular Literary
Genre, ca. 1675-1875.”

3

 

 

 

 

 

 

Held Captive py_Indians, p. xvii.

 

4See "The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre," pp. 36-38;
the three narratives are reprinted in Held Captive py_Indians, pp. 205-7,
237-42, 3l9-32.

5

 

"The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual,” p. 555.

6"Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the Society of Jesus, Among
the Mohawks," reprinted in Held Ceptive py_Indians, pp. 33-34.

7

 

”Narrative of Confinement in the Jersey Prison Ship," p. I48.

8”The Indian Captivity Narrative as Ritual," pp. 557-58.

91bid., p. 56l.

122

CONCLUSION

When the former prisoners of war in the American Revolution sat
down to write out their memoirs, they may possibly have had the example
of the Indian captivity narratives in mind, but what they produced was
quite different. The sensationalized depiction of inhuman cruelty and
daring escapes, which came more and more to characterize the Indian
captivities of the nineteenth century, was never really a major concern
of the men who described the crushing tedium of Forton and Mill or the
disease and deprivation which reigned aboard the gepeey, Instead, the
prison narratives strike the reader as somewhat more introspective and
interpretive; the prisoners who looked back on their wartime experiences
chose in their narratives to emphasize dedication and sense of purpose,
and to explain, not so much what they had endured, but why they had been
willing to endure it. The gratuitous cruelties of the British and Tories
take on significance in the prison narratives only inasmuch as they are
illustrative of the virtue and steadfastness of the prisoners who never-
theless remained loyal to the patriot cause. Richard Van Der Beets argues
convincingly that the Indian captivity narrative dramatizes a profound
transformation in the hero's character, but in the Revolutionary War story
we have the declaration of the hero's refusal to be transformed by his
captors.

It is this difference between the two varieties of captivity narrative

which provides us with the key to understanding their respective significances.

123

 

124

The Indian narrative, as Roy Harvey Pearce has pointed out, has been the
wellspring of a rich popular literary tradition which includes American

Gothics like Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntley and, later, the dime

 

novel. The Revolutionary War prison narrative, on the other hand, gave
rise to no such tradition; its importance lies in what it tells us about
how nineteenth—century Americans perceived themselves and their national
history. Through the myth of republican virtue, the narrative writers
were able to affirm that the cause of I776 had indeed been just and that
the men of I776 had been true, and the message was an important one for a
new nation which, unlike Great Britain, lacked a historical mythology and
pantheon of heroes. In Recording America's Past, David Van Tassel notes
that throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, state historical
societies devoted themselves to the collection of documents and materials
which would establish the American Revolution as an event of significance
for mankind, because each state wished to lay claim to a share of the
glory. The same desire motivated individuals: some men wrote their
memoirs to demonstrate the virtue of a golden age, and others read the
narratives in order to partake in the swell of national pride. It is not

surprising, then, that Thomas Andros, who wrote The Old Jersey Ceptive when

 

he was old and indigent and infirm, should begin his narrative by pointing
out that ”Virgil represents AEneas as soothing the breasts of his afflict-
ed companions with this remark, 'Perhaps the recollection of these things
will hereafter be delightful.'”

Ultimately, the prison narratives of the Revolution do not really
qualify as adventure stories because their basic appeal is not so much
excitement as national mythology. Such appeals, of course, were common

in the first part of the last century, and professional writers like

 

125

Cooper were as enthusiastic as the narrative writers in their praise of

the principles of the Revolution. Statements of national pride and

national virtue, however, were ultimately insufficient to prevent the

sectionalism which culminated in the Civil War, and after that war the

myth of republican virtue no longer sufficed as a formulaic basis on

which to base popular literature. In this connection it is significant

that it was during the Civil War, from l86l to 1865, that Charles I.

Bushnell published no fewer than seven prison narratives, seven testi- 1
monies to republican virtue, at his own expense. The myth had had its

heyday and it was over. Bushnell's books did not sell.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. The narratives:

Allen, Ethan. The Narrative_gf Colonel Ethan Allen. Ed. Brooke Hindle.
New York: Corinth, 1961.

 

 

Andros, Thomas. The Old Jersey Captive: Ora Narrative Lf the Captivity
Lf Thomas Andros,TTNow Pastor Lf the Church Ln Berkley, ) Ln Board
the Old Jersey Prison Ship Lt New York, 1781. lp_e_Series Te: Letters

Loa Friend, Suited Lo Inspire Faith and Confidence Ln a Particular
Divine Providence. Boston, l833.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blatchford, John. Narrative of Remarkable Occurrences, Ln the Life Lf
John Blatchford, Lf Cape_Ann, Commonwealth Lf Massachusetts, Con-
taining, His Treatment in Nova- Scotia--the T‘est- Indies--Great
Britain--France, and the East- Indies, as a Prisoner Ln the Late War.
Taken from His Own Mouth. New London, 1788.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bushnell, Charles Ira. A_Memoir pf_Eli Bickford, e_Patriot pf_§pe_
Revolution. New York, 1865.

 

 

Coffin, Alexander. The Destructive Operation Lf Foul Air, Tainted Pro-
visions, Bad Water and Personal Filthiness upgp Human Constitutions;
Exemplified Ln the Unparalleled Cruelty Lf the British Lo the
American Captives Lt New York during the Revolutionary_War, Ln Board
Their Prison and Hospital Shlps, Ln aCommunication Lo Dr. Mitchell,
Dated September 4,1807. Also a Letter Lo the Tammanv Society, upon
the Same Subiect, py_Captain Alexander Coffin, Jun. , One of the
Surviving Suiferers with Ln Introduction, py_Charles I. Bushnell.
New York, 1865.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Davis, Joshua. A Narrative Lf Joshua Davis, Ln American Citizen, Who Was
Pressed and _Served Ln Board Six Ships Lf- the British Navy. Baltimore,
18ll.

 

 

 

 

Dodge, John. A Narrative Lf the Capture and Treatment Lf JLhn Dodge _y_
the Enlgish Lt Detroit. Written _y Himself. PhiladelpTia, 1779.

 

 

Fanning, Nathaniel. Fanning' s Narrative, Being_the Memoirs of Nathaniel
Fanning, Ln Officer Lf the Revolutionary Navy, I778- 1783. Ed. John
S. Barnes. New York, _l9l2.

 

126

127

Fletcher, Ebenezer. The Narrative Lf Ebenezer Fletcher, a Soldier Lf
the Revolution, Written.gy_Himself. With Ln Introduction and Notes,
.gy Charles I. Bushne11. 1866; rpt. Freeport, N. Y. Books for
Libraries Press, 1970.

 

 

 

 

Fox, Ebenezer. The Revolutiona_y_Adventures Lf Ebenezer Fox Lf Roxbury,
Massachusetts. Boston, 1838.

 

 

Freneau, Philip. Some Account Lf the Capture Lf the Ship_Aurora. 1899;
rpt. New York. New York Times and Arno Press, 1971.

 

 

 

Greene, Albert. Recollections Lf the Jersey Prison Sh1p from the Manu-
script Lf Capt. Thomas Dring. Ed. Lawrence H. Leder. New York.
Corinth, T1961.

 

 

 

 

Hanford, Levi. A Narrative Lf the Life and Adventures Lf Levi Hanford,
a Soldier Lf the Revolution. Ed. Charles I. BushneTl. New York,
1863.

 

 

 

Hawkins, Christopher. The Adventures Lf Christooher Hawkins, Containing
Details Lf His Captivity, a First— and Second Time Ln the High Seas,
Ln the Revolutionary War, Ly the British, and His Consequent Suffer-
iTgs, and Escape from the Jersey Prison Ship, ThenL Lying in the
Harbour Lf New York, py_S wimming. Now First Printed from— the Original
Manuscr1pt. Written _y_Himself. With gg_1ntroduction and Notes _y_
Char1es_l. Bushnell. New York, 1864.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Herbert, Charles. A Relic Lf the Revolution, Containing_a Full and
Particu1ar Account Lf tTe Sufferings and Privations LfA Ail Lhe
American Prisoners Captured Ln the H1gh Seas, and Carried into
P1ymouth, England, during the Revolution Lf 1776; With the Names gf_
the Vessels Taken--the Names and Residence Lf the Several Crews, and
Time Lf Their Commitment--the Names of SuchT as Died in Prison, and

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

until the Exchange Lf Prisoners, March L5,1779. Also, Ln Account
Lf the Several Cruises Lf the Sguadron quer the Command Lf Commodore
John Paul Jones, Prizes Taken, etc. , etc. §y_Charles Herbert, Lf
Newburyport, Mass. Who Was Taken Prisoner in the Brigantine Dolton,
Dec. , 1776, and Served Ln Lhe U. S. Frigate Alliance, 1779-80. 1847,
rpt. New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1968.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laurens, Henry. "Narrative of His Capture, of His Confinement in the Tower
of London, &c. 1780, 1781, 1782." South Carolina Historical Society
Collections, 1 (1857), 18-83.

 

Leggett, Abraham. The Narrative Lf Major Abraham Leggett, Lf LheA my Lf
the Revolution, Now First PriTted from the Or1gina1 Manuscripp
WrittenLgy_Himself. With Ln Introduction and Notes _y Charles I.
Bushne11. New York, 1865.

 

Matthewman, Luke. "Narrative of Lieut. Luke Matthewman of the Revolutionary
Navy From the New York Packet, 1787.” Magazine pf American Histqpy,
2 (1878), 175-85.

 

128

Potter, Israe1 R. Life and Remarkab1e Adventures Lf Israe1 R. Potter.
Ed. Leonard Kriege1. New York: Corinth, 1962.

 

 

 

Rathbun, Jonathan. Narrative of Jonathan Rathbun, with Accounts of the
Capture Lf Groton Fort, the Massacre That Fo11owed, and the Sackiml
and Burn1ng Lf New London, September 6,1781,.by_the British Forces,
under the Command Lf the Traitor Benedict Arno1d. New London, 1840.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roberts, Lemue1. Memoirs Lf Captain Lemue1 Roberts Containing Adventures
in Youth, Vicissitudes Experienced as aContinenta1 So1dier, His

Sufferings as a Prisoner, and Escaoes from Capt1vity_.with Suitab1e

Ref1ections on the Changes gf_L1fe. Written _y_Himse1f. Benn1ngton,
1809.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sherburne, Andrew. Memoirs gf_Andrew Sherburne: A_Pensioner of §h§_Navy
.gf_the Revo1ut1on. Ut1ca, 1828.

 

 

Van Dyke, John. ”Narrative of Confinement 1n the Jersey Prison Ship, by
John Van Dyke, Captain in Lamb's Regiment, N. Y. S. A." Historica1
Magazine, May 1863, pp. 147—51.

 

Woodruff, O11ver. "Rem1n15cences of a So1dier of the Revo1ut1on."
Daughters of the American Revo1ution Magazine, 46 (1914), 260-63.

 

II. Diaries, journa1s, and other contemporary accounts:

A1exander, John K. "Jonathan Carpenter and the American Revo1ution: The
Journa1 of an American Nava1 Prisoner of War and Vermont Indian Fight-
er." Vermont History, 36 (1968), 74-90.

 

A11aire, Anthony. The Diary Lf Lieut. Anthony A11aire, Lf Ferguson's
Corps. New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1968.

 

 

Anderson, Enoch. Persona1 Reco11ections Lf C_ptain Enoch Anderson. New
York: New York T1mes and Arno Press, _1971.

 

An Authentic Narrative Lf Facts Re1at1ng to the Exchange Lf Prisoners Taken
Lt the Cedars, Sgpported by_the Testimonies and Depositions Lf His
Majesty' 3 Officers, with Severa1 Origina1 Letters and Papers. To-
gether with Remarksu gpon the Report and Reso1ves of the American
Congress on that Subject. London, 1777.

 

 

 

 

Barber, Danie1. The History 9: My_gwg_T1mes. 3 Vo1s. Washington, D. C.,
1827-1832.

 

Barney, Mary. A Biographica1 Memo1r Lf the Late Commodore Joshua Barney:
From Autobiographica1 Notes and Journa1s 1n Possession Lf His Fami1y,
and Other Authentic Sources. Boston, 1832.

 

 

129

"Benjamin Trumbu11's Journa1 of the Campaign around New York, 1776-77.”
Co11ections g: the Connecticut Historica1 Society, 7 (1899), 175-219.

 

 

"Benjamin Trumbu11' s Journa1 of the Expedition against Canada, 1775. "
Co11ections Lf the Connecticut Historica1 Soc1e_y,7 (1899), 137- 74.

 

 

Boardman, Samue1 Lane, ed. Peter Edes, Pioneer Printer 1n MaLne, 1
Biography; His Diary wh11e a Prisoner _y_the British Lt Boston in
1775, with the Journa1 Lf John Leach Who Was a Prisoner at the Same

Time. Bangor, 1901. -' -____—_

 

 

 

 

Boardman, Timothy. _pngook of T1mothy Boardman, Kept Ln Board the
Privateer 011ver Cromwe11, dur1ngya Cruise from New —London, Ct. ,to
Char1eston, S. C. , and Return, Ln 1778; A150, a Biographica1 Sketch
Lf the Author. _y_the Rev. Samue1 w. Boardman, D. D. Issued under
the Auspjces Lf the Rut1and County_H1stor1ca1 Society. A1bany, 1885.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boudinot, E11as. Journa1 py_Historica1 Reco11ections pf_American Events
dur1ng the Revo1ut1onary Mar. 1894; rpt. New York: New York Times
and Arno Press, 1968.

 

 

. "Report on American Prisoners of War in New York." Ed.
David L. Ster11ng. w111iam and Mary Quarter1y, 3rd ser., 13 (1956),
376-93.

 

 

Bray, Robert C. and Pau1 E. Bushne11, eds. Diary Lf a Common So1dier Ln
the American Revo1ution, 1775-1783: An Annotated Edition of the
M111tary Journa1 Lf Jeremiah Greenman. De Ka1b, I11. Northern
I11inois University Press, 1978.

 

 

 

 

 

Brown, Thomas. "A 'P1ain Narrat1v' of the Uncommon Sufferings and Re-
markab1e De1iverance of Thomas Brown, of Char1estown 1n New Eng1and
(1757-1760). " The M_gazine Lf History w1th Notes and Queries, 1,
extra no. 4(1908), 209- 21.

 

Burgoyne, John. A State Lf the Expedition from Canada, as Laid before the
House Lf Commons, _y_Lieutenant- -Genera1 Burgoyne, and Ver1f1ed py
Evidence, w1th a Co11ection Lf Authent1c Documents, and Ln Add1t1on
Lf Many Circumstances Nhich Mere Prevented from Appear1ngL be fore tL e
House py_the Prorogation Lf Par11ament. London, 1780.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coan, Marion, ed. "A Revo1utionary Prison Diary: The Journa1 of Dr.
Jonathan Haskins." New Engand Quarterly, 17 (1944), 290-309, 424-42.

 

Conno11y, John. "A Narrative of the Transactions, Impr1sonment, and
Sufferings of John Conno11y, an American Loya1ist and L1eut.Co1.1n
His Majesty's Service." The Pennsy1vania Magazine of Histor and
Biography, 12 (1888), 310- 24, 407- 20; 13 (1889), 61- 70, 153- 67, 281- 91.

Corne11us, E11as, Journa1 Lf Dr. E1ias Corne11us, a Revo1utiona§y Surgeon.
Graphic Descrxption Lf His Sufferi_gs wh11e a Prisoner in Provost Ja11,
New York,*1777 and 1778, with Biographica1 Sketch. Nash1ngton, D. C,
1903.

 

 

 

 

130

Cresswe11, N1cho1as. The Journa1 pf_Nicho1as Cresswe11, 1774-1777. 2nd.
ed. New York, 1928.

 

 

Cut1er, Samue1, ed. “Prison Ships, and the 01d M111 Prison, P1ymouth,
Eng1and, 1777." New Eng1and Historica1 and Genea1og1ca1 Register,
32 (1878), 42-44, 184-88, 305-8, 395-98.

Cutter, W111iam Richard. ”A Yankee Privateersman in Prison in Eng1and,
1777-1779." New Eng1and Historica1 and Genea1ogica1 Register, 30
(1876), 174-77, 343-52; 31 (1877), 18-20, 212-13, 284-88; 32 (1878),
70-73, 165-68, 280-86; 33 (1879), 36-41.

 

Eastburn, Robert. The Dangers and Sufferings pf_Robert Eastburn, and His
De11verance from Indian Captivity: Reprinted from the Origina1
Edition pf_1758 with Introduction py_John 3, Spears. C1eve1and, 1904.

 

 

 

 

 

Ap_Epist1e from Edward, Ln Amer1can Prisoner in Eng1and, pp_Harriet,.yp
America. Dura sed emovere 1oco me tempora g_ato, / C1v11isque rudem
be11i tu1it aestus jp_arma. London, 1779.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fanning, David. The Narrative Lf Co1one1 David Fanning_(a Tory 1n Lhe
Revo1utionary War with Great Britain): Giving Ln Account of HLs
Adventures in North Caro11na from 1775 to 1783, L5 Written _y HLm-
se1f. 1861; rpt. New York, 1865.

 

 

 

 

Fe1tman, W1111am. "The Journa1 of W1111am Fe1tman, of the First Pennsy1vania
Regiment, from May 26, 1781 to Apr11 25, 1782, Embracing the Siege of
Yorktown and the Southern Campaign." Pennsijania Historica1 Society
C011ections, 1 (1853), 303-48.

 

F099, Jeremiah. Journa1 Lf Major Jeremiah Fo ogg, dur1ng_the Expedition
Lf Gen. Su111van in 1779, against the Western Indians. Exeter, N. H.,
1879.

 

 

 

 

Foote, Ca1eb, comp. "Reminiscences of the Revqution. Prison Letters and
Sea Journa1 of Ca1eb Foot: Born, 1750; Died, 1787.” Essex Institute
Historica1 Co11ections, 26 (1889), 90-122.

 

Gage, Thomas. The Letters Lf the Two Commanders- -in- -Chief; Genera1$ Gage
and Washington, and Major GeneraIS Burgoyne and Lee, with the
Man1festo Lf Genera1 Washington to the Inhabitants Lf Canada. New
York, 1775.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Graydon, A1exander. Memoirs Lf His Own Time. With Reminiscences pf_§pe_
Men and Events Lf the Revqution. Ed. John Stockton Litte11.
Phi1ade1ph1a, 1846.

 

 

 

 

Green, Ezra. Diary Lf Ezra Green,M _. Surgeon Ln Board the Continenta1
Ship-Lf- -War "Ra_ger," under John DPau1 Jones, from November 1,1777,
to September 27,1778. With Historica1 Notes and a Biograph 7py
Commo. Geo. Hen:y7Preb1e, U. S. N. , and Wa1ter C. Green. Boston,
1875.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

131

Green, Samuel A. ed., Diary Kept by_Lieut. Amos Farnsworth gj Groton,

Mass., during a Part gf_thg_Revolutionary Way, April, l775-ng,
l779. Cambridge, l898.

 

 

 

Haskell, Caleb. Caleb Haskell's Diary. ﬂay_§, l775—M y gg, l776. A

Revolutionary Soldier's Record before Boston ggg_with .rnold's
Quebec Expedition. Edited, with Notes, by_Lothrop Withington.
Newburyport, l88l.

 

 

 

 

 

 

American Revolution. From the Oriainal Manuscript. With a 519;

graphical Sketch gf_the Author by_George Winqate Chase, Eng Illus-
trative Notes gy_Henry g. Dawson. Morrisiana, N. Y., l865.

 

 

 

 

Howard, Thomas. A Journal by Thos: Hughes fgy_ﬂi§ Amusement, §_Designed
Only for His Perusal by_thg Time Hg_Attains th§_Ag§_gfn§Q_if_Hg Lives

SQ Long—KT778-l7895. Ed. E. A. Benians. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, l947.

 

 

Ag_Interesting Journal 9f Occurrences during the Expedition tg_Quebec Conduct-
Revolution Giving a_Particular-Account gf'th§_UnEarall§leg Suffer-
ings Sustatg§g_by_that Detachment ig_Passing through th§_Wilderness:
Together wyth g Description gf_thg_8attle gf_Quebec. Kept by_George
Morison g__olunteer ig_th§_Company g: Riflemen Comnanggg_gy Capt
Hendricks Who Was Slain at the Attack u on Quebec. 1803; rpt. The

Magazine 9: History, extra no. 52 il9l6 , DP. 3—44.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Irvine, William. "Gen. Irvine's Journal of the Canadian Campaign, l776.”
Historical Magazine (April, l862), pp. ll5-l7.

Johnson, James. Narrative gj_James Johnson, g_Captive during the French
Egg Indian Wars. Ed. G. Waldo Browne. Manchester, N. H., l902.

 

 

”Journal of Bayze Wells of Farmington, in the Canada Expedition, l775-77."
Collections 9: th§_Connecticut Historical Society, 7 (l899), 239-96.

”Journal of Ensign Nathaniel Morgan at Siege of Boston, l775.” Collections
gf_thg_Connecticut Historical Society, 7 (l899), 99-ll0.

”Journal of Joseph Joslin, Jr., of South Killingly, a Teamster in Western
Connecticut, l777-78.” Collections gf_th§_Connecticut Historical
Society, 7 (l899), 297-369.

"Journal of Oliver Boardman of Middletown in the Burgoyne Campaign, l777.”
Collections 9: the Connecticut Historical Society, 7 (l899), 22l-38.

”Journal of Simeon Lyman of Sharon, 1775.“ Collections gf_thg_Connecticut
Historical Society, 7 (l899), lll-36.

132

Judd, Jacob, ed. The Revolutionary War Memoir and Selected Correspondence
of_Phillip Van Cortlandt. Tarrytown, N. Y.: Sleepy HolTow Restora-
tions, 1976.

Knap, Isaac. The Diary Lf Isaac Knap, Ln the Province Lf Massachusetts
Bay_ig_New E_g1and. _Written Lt the —Second Sieg__Lf Louisburg Ln
1758. Boston, 1895.

 

 

 

 

Lardier, A. Histoire des Pontons et Prisons d' Angleterre, Pendent La
Guerre du Consulat et del 'Empire. Paris, 1845.

 

Laurens, John. The Army Correspondence Lf Colonel John Laurens yg_Jl_
Years 1777-8. New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1969.

 

 

Lee, Henry. Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department Lf the United

States. 2 Vols. Philadelphia, 1812.

 

 

Lincoln, James Minor. The Papers Lf Captain Rufus Lincoln Lf Wareham,
Mass. 1904; rpt. New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1971.

 

 

Martin, Joseph Plumb. A_Narrative gf_Somelngthe Adventures, Dangers and
Sufferings Lf a Revolutionary Soldier; Interspersed with Anecdotes of
Incidents that Occurred within His Own Observation. Hallowell TMe:f,

1830.

 

 

Moody, James. Lieut. James Moogyfs Narrative Lf His Exertions and Suffer-
ings in the Cause Lf Government, Since the —Year 1776; Authenticated
_gy Proper Certificates. 1783; rpt. New York: New York Times and
Arno Press, 1968.

 

 

Morris, Anna Wharton, ed. "Journal of Samuel Rowland Fisher, of Philadelphia,
1779—1781." Pennsylvania Magazine gf_History_and Biography, 41
(1917), 145-97; 274-333; 399-457.

 

 

Narrative of the Surprize and Capture Lf Maigr-General Richard Prescott,
Lf the —British Army, Ln His Headquarters, Together with His Aid- Le-
Camp Major Barrington, Igy_ a Party Lf American Soldiers under Major-
General William Barton, Ju1y9 1777. Detailed from Facts Furnished
_y_Gen. Barton Himself, and Never Before Published. To Which Is
Added, a Statement of General Barton' 5 Law Suit, Ln Vermont, “and His
Subsequent tSuffering§_. Windsor, Vt. ,1877.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nichols, Francis. "Diary of Lieutenant Francis Nichols, of Colonel
William Thompson's Battalion of Pennsylvania Riflemen, January to
September, 1776." Penngylvania Magazine gf_History and Biograph ,
20 (1896), 504-14.

 

 

”Orderly Book of Capt. William Coit's Company at Siege of Boston, 1775.“
Collections gf_the Connecticut Historical Society, 7 (1899), 1-98.

 

Phelps, Richard Harvey. A History gf_Newgate gf_Connecticut. 1860; rpt.
New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1969.

 

133

Pickering, James H., ed. The Spy Unmasked 9:, Memoirs 9f Enoch Crosby,
Alias Harvey Birch, the Hero gf_James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy,
by H. L. Barnum. Harrison, N. Y.: Harbor Hill Books, 1975.

 

 

 

 

Popp, Stephan. Popp's Journal, 1777-1783. Ed. Joseph G. Rosengarten.
Philadelphia, 1902.

 

Porterfield, Char1es. "Journal of Charles Porterfield. From March 3,
1776, to July 23, 1776, while a Prisoner of War in Quebec."
Southern History Association Publications, 6 (1902), 113-31, 199-
209, 295-303, 400-407.

 

Proceedings Lf a Court Martial, Held Lt Cambridge, _y_Order_ of Major
General Heath, Commandi_g the American Troops for the Northern
District, for the Trial Lf Colonel David Henley, Accused Ly_
Genera1 Burgoyne, Lf Ill Treatment Lf the British Soldiers, &c.
Taken in Short Hand by an Officer, Who Was Present. London, 1778.

_——_———_—4—__

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Recollections of Brooklyn and New York in 1776. From a Note Book of
Gen Jeremiah Johnson, of the Wallabout, L. I.” The Naval Magazine,
1 (1836), 367-76, 466-73, 561-71.

 

Sabine, W. H. W., ed. The New- York Diary Lf Lieutenant Jabez Fitch.
1954; rpt. New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1971.

 

 

Scheer, George F. , ed. Private Yankee Doodle, Being,a Narrative Lf Some
Lf the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings Lf a Revolutionary_Soldier.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

 

 

 

Smyth, John F. D. "Narrative or Journal of Capt. John Ferdinand Dalziel
Smyth, of the Queen's Rangers." Pennsylvania Magazine gf_Histogy
and Biography, 39 (1915), 143-69.

 

 

Stiles, Henry R. Letters from the Prisons and Prison-Ships gfung
Revolution. New York, 1865.

 

Stone, Hiram. ”The Experiences of a Prisoner in the American Revolution:
Recollections of Thomas Stone, Born in Guilford, Connecticut, in
1755, as Told in His Own Handwriting. Graphic Narrative Revealed
in the Ancient Manuscript Now in the Possession of Reverend Hiram Stone.”
Journa1 9f American History, 2, no. 3 (1908), 527-29.

 

Talbot, Silas. An Historical Sketch, to the ELd Lf the Revolutionarv War,
Lf tLe Life_ Lf Silas Talbot, Esq. Lf_ tLe State Lf Rhode- Island,
Lately Commander Lf the United States Frigate, The Constitution, and
Lf Ln American Squadron Ln the West- Indies. New York, 1803.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tallmadge, Benjamin. Memoir Lf Colonel Begjamin Tallmadge. 1858; rpt.
New York: New York Times —and Arno Press, 1968.

 

134

The Tammany Society or CoTumbian Order. An Account Lf the Interment Lf
the Remains Lf 11 ,500 American Seamen, So1d1ers and Citizens, Who
Fe11 Victims to the Crue1t1es Lf the British Ln Board Their Prison

Ships at the Na11about, during the American RevoTution. With a

Particu1ar Description Lf the Grand & So1emn FuneraT Procession,
Which Took P1ace Ln the 26 May 1808. And Ln Dration De11vered Lt
the Tomb Lf the Patriots by_ Benjamin De Witt, M. D. a Member Lf the
Tammany Society Lr Co1umbian Order. New York, 1808.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thompson, George. "Diary of George Thompson of Newburyport, Kept at
Forton Prison, Eng1and, 1777—1781.” Essex Institute Historica1
Co11ections, 76 (1940), 221~42.

 

 

Topham, John. "The Journa1 of Capt1an John Topham, 1775-6.” Magazine
.of History, pt. 2, extra no. 52 (1916), pp. 89-132.

Nadde11, J. A., ed. "Diary of a Prisoner of War at Quebec, 1776."
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 9 (1902), 144-52.

 

 

 

Ware, Joseph. "Expedition against Quebec. Journa1 Kept by Joseph Mare,
of Needham, Mass. , with a Short Genea1ogy of the Nare Fam11y Annexed.
A Journa1 Lf a March from Cambridg__Ln Ln Expedition against Quebec,
in C01. Bened1ct Arno1d' s Detachment, Sept. 13, 1775. " New Eng1and
Historica1 and Genea1ogica1 Register,6 (1852), 129-50.

 

 

 

 

Widger, w1111am. "Diary of w111iam Midger of Marb1ehead, Kept at M111
Prison, Eng1and, 1781.” Essex Institute Historica1 Co11ections, 73
(1937), 311-47; 74 (1938), 22-48, 142-58.

w11d, Ebenezer. “A Journa1 of a March from Cambridge, on an Expedition
against Quebec in Co1one1 Benedict Arno1d's Detachment, Sept. 13,

1775." Massachusetts Historica1 Society_Proceedings, 2nd ser., 2
(1886), 267-75.

111. Newspapers:

The Boston Gazette and Countrngourna1.
The Connecticut Courant and Hartford Neek1y Inte11igencer.

The New Jersey Gazette.

 

The New York Packet, and the Genera1 Advertiser.
The Pennsy1van1a Gazette.

Rivington' s New-York Gazetteer; Lr, the Connecticut, Hudson' 3 River, New-
Jersey, and Quebec NeekTy Advertiser.

The Roya1 Gazette.

 

 

135
IV. Secondary materia1:

Abe11, Francis. Prisoners of Na: in Britain, 1756 Lg 1815: A_Record 9:

Their Lives, Their Romance, gﬂg_Their Sufferings. London: Oxford
University Press, 1914.

 

 

 

 

A1exander, John K. ”'American Privateersmen in the M111 Prison during
777-1782': An Eva1uation.” Essex Institute Historica1 Co11ections,
102 (1966), 318—40.

 

"Forton Prison during the American Revo1ution: A Case Study
of British Prisoner of War PoTicy and the American Prisoner Response
to that Po1icy." Essex Institute Historica1 Co11ections, 103 (1967),
365-89.

. "Jonathan Haskins’ M111 Prison Diary: Can It Be Accepted at
Face Va1ue?” Ngw_Eng1and Quarter1x, 40 (1967), 561—64.

A11en, Gardner Ne1d. A_Nava1 History gf_tﬂg American Revo1ution. 2 Vo1s.
3; rpt. New York: Russe11 & Russe11, 1962.

 

Amerman, Richard H. ”Treatment of American Prisoners during the Revo1ution.”
Ngw_Jersey Historica1 Society Proceedings, 78 (1960), 257-75.

Anderson, 011ve. "Amer1can Escapes from British Nava1 Prisons during the
War of Independence.” Mariner's Mirror, 41 (1955), 238—40.

. ”The Treatment of Prisoners of War in Britain during the
American War of Independence.” Bu11etin gf_§hg Institute gf_Historica1
Research, 28 (1955), 63-83.

 

 

App1egate, Howard Lewis. "American Privateersmen in M111 Prison during
777~1782.” Essex Institute Historica1 C011ections, 97 (1961),
303-20.

 

Annbruster, Eugene L. Ihg_Wa11about Prison Ships, 1776-1783. New York,
1920.
Bai1yn, Bernard. Ihg_1deo1og1ca1 Origins gf_§h§_American Revqution.
Cambridge: Be1knap, 1967.
Ihg Origins gf_American Po1itics. New York: Knopf, 1968.

Banks, James Lenox. David Sproat agg_Nava1 Prisoners jg_§hg_ﬂa:_gf_£he
Revo1ution, with Mention gf_w111iam Lenox, g: Char1eston. New York,

 

Baxter, Bever1y Ver10ris. ”The American Revo1utionary Experience: A
Critica1 Study of Diaries and JournaTS of American Prisoners during
the Revqutionary Period.” Diss. University of De1aware, 1976.

 

136

Berger, Pame1a E. F. ”Varieties of Autobiography in Ear1y America."
Dissertation Abstracts InternationaI, 35 (1974), 2213A (George
Washington University).

Boatner, Mark Mayo, III. Encyc1ooedia gf_§pg_American RevoTution. New
York: McKay, 1966.

Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon. "In Search of Freneau's Prison Ships.” Ear1y
American Literature, 14 (1979), 174-92.

Bowman, Larry G. Captive Americans: Prisoners during the Anerican
Revo1ution. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976.

 

C1arence S. Brigham. History 33g Bib1iography gf_American Newspaper ,
1690-1820. 2 Vo1s. Worcester, 1947.

Carey, George G. ”Songs of Jack Tar in the Darbies.” Journa1 p: Nnerican
F01k1ore, 85 (1972), 167—80.

, ed. A_Sai1or's Songbag: Ap_American Rebe1 jp_gp_Eng1ish
Prison, 1777-1779. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976.

 

Carey, Larry Lee. ”A Study of the Indian Captivity Narrative as a Popu1ar
Literary Genre, ca. 1675-1875.” Diss. Michigan State University,
1978.

Car1eton, Phi111ps D. ”The Indian Captivity.” American Literature, 15
(1943-44), 169—80.

CaweTti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Fonnu1a Stories as Art

33g Popu1ar Cu1ture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

[hp Sly;§pp_Mystigue. Bow1ing Green, Ohio: Bow1ing Green
University Popu1ar Press, 1971.

C1ark, W111iam Be11. Beg Frank1in's Privateers: A_Nava1 Epic pf_§pg

American Revo1ution. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1956.

Cochran, Thomas C. and Wayne Andrews, comps. Concise Dictionarv pf
American History. New York: Scribner's, 1962.

Commager, Henry S. and Richard Morris. ng_$pirit pf_Seventy Six, 2 Vo1s.
Indianapo1is and New York: Bobbs Merr111, 1958.

 

Dabney, W111iam M. After Saratoga: ng_$tory gf_§pg_Convention Army.
A1buquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954.

Dandridge, Danske. American Prisoners of the Revo1ution. 1911; rpt.

Ba1timore: Genea1ogoca1 Puinshing, 1967.

137
Davidson, Phi1ip. Propaganda apg_§p§_American Revo1utigp, 1763-1783.
Chape1 H111: University of North Caro1ina Press, 1941.

Dorson, Richard M., ed. America Rebe1s: Narratives gf_£hg Patriots. New
York: Pantheon, 1953.

Drake, Samue1 G. Indian Captives; 9:) Life jp_tpg_Wigwam. Auburn, 1850.
Eastman, Ra1ph M. Some Famous Privateers pf_N§w_Eng1and. Boston, 1928.

Fregau1t, Guy. Canada: The War of the Conguest. Tran. Margaret M.

Cameron. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1969.

 

Granger, Bruce Ingham. Po1itica1 Satire in the American Revo1ution, 1763-
178 Ithaca, N. Y.: Corne11 University Press, 1960.

Greene, Jack P., ed. Ihg Ambiguity pf_§hg American Revo1ution. New York:
Harper & Row, 1968.

Heitman, Francis 8., comp. Historica1 Register pf_0fficers _j Egg
Continenta1 Army. Washington, D. C., 1914.

Howarth, W111iam L. "Some Princip1es of Autobiography." Ngw_Literary
History, 5 (1974), 363-81.

Lemisch, Jesse. ”The American Revo1ution Seen from the Bottom Up.”
Inc1uded in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a_N§w_Past: Dissenting
Essays ip_American History (New York: Pantheon, 1968).

"Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Po1itics of
Revo1utionary America." W111iam gpg_Mary Quarter1v, 3rd ser., 25
(1968), 371-407.

”Listening to the 'Inarticu1ate': W111iam Widger's Dream and
the Loya1ties of American Revo1utionary Seamen in British Prisons."
Journa1 pf Socia1 History, 3 (1969-1970), 1—29.

 

and John K. A1exander. ”The White Oaks, Jack Tar, and the
Concept of the 'Inarticu1ate.'" W111iam gpg Mary Quarter1y, 3rd ser.,
29 (1972), 109-42.

Lidd1e, W111iam D. ”'Virtue and Liberty': An Inquiry into the Ro1e of
the Agrarian Myth in the Rhetoric of the American Revo1utionary Era."
South At1antic Quarter1y, 77 (1978), 15-38.

Lossing, Benson J. The P1ctoria1 FieId-Book of the Revo1ution: or,

I11ustrations, py_E§p_gpg_Penci1, pf_§p§ History, Biography, Scenery,
Re11cs, and Traditions of the War for Independence. 2 Vo1s. New

York, 1851.

Matthews, W111iam, comp. American Diaries: Ap_Annotated Bib11ography 9:.
American Diaries Written Prior pp_§h§_Year 1861. Upjyersity pf

Ca1ifornia Puincations 1p Eng1ish, 16 (1945).

138

Metzger, Char1es H. The Prisoner in the American Revo1ution. Chicago:

Minter, David L. ”By Dens of Lions: Notes on Sty1ization in Ear1y
Puritan Captivity Narratives.” American Literature, 45 (1973),
335-47.

Moore, Frank, comp. Diary of the American Revo1ution. From Newspapers

apg_0rigina1 Documents. 2 Vo1s. New York, 1860.

Morgan, Edmund 5. [pg Cha11enge gf_§pg_American Revo1ution. New York:
Norton, 1976.

Onderdonk, Henry, Jr. Documents and Letters Intended to I11ustrate the

Revo1utionary Incidents pf_Queens County; with Connecting Narratives,
Exp1anatory Notes, apg_Additions. New York, 1846.

 

 

Revo1utionary Incidents gf_Suffo1k apg_Kings Counties; with
pp_Account pf_§p§_8att1e pf Long Is1and, apg_§hg_8ritish Prisons apg ‘

Prison-Ships a; N§w_York. 1849; rpt. Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat,
1970.

 

 

 

Pearce, Roy Harvey. ”The Significances of the Captivity Narrative."
American Literature, 19 (1947-48), 1-20.

Rampersad, Arno1d. Me1vi11e's Israe1 Potter: A_Pi1grimage apg_Progress.
Bow11ng Green, Ohio: Bow1ing Green University Popu1ar Press, 1969.

 

 

Richards, Henry Me1chior Muh1enberg. ”The Pennsy1vania-Gennan in the
British Mi1itary Prisons of the Revo1utionary War." ng_Pennsy1vania-
German Society Proceedings apg_Addresses, 32 (1924), 5-33.

Roberts, Kenneth. March to Quebec: Journa1s of the Members of Arno1d's

Expedition. New York: DoubIeday, 1938.

Royster, Char1es. ”'The Nature of Treason': Revo1utionary Virtue and
American Reactions to Benedict Arno1d.” Wi111am apg_Mary Quarter1y,
3rd ser., 36 (1979), 163-93.

Saffe11, Wi111am Thomas Roberts. Records pf Egg Revo1utionary W31:
Conta1n1ng §h§_M111tary apg_Financia1 Correspondence pf Distinguished

 

 

Genera1 Orders 9: Washington, Lee and Greene a§_Gennantppp_ppg Va11ey

Forge; with g_List g: Distinguished—Prisoners gf_ﬂpp; §p§_Time pf
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