Captives of Liberty

Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution

T. Cole Jones

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780812296556
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Contrary to popular belief, the American Revolutionary War was not a limited and restrained struggle for political self-determination. From the onset of hostilities, British authorities viewed their American foes as traitors to be punished, and British abuse of American prisoners, both tacitly condoned and at times officially sanctioned, proliferated. Meanwhile, more than seventeen thousand British and allied soldiers fell into American hands during the Revolution. For a fledgling nation that could barely afford to keep an army in the field, the issue of how to manage prisoners of war was daunting. Captives of Liberty examines how America's founding generation grappled with the problems posed by prisoners of war, and how this influenced the wider social and political legacies of the Revolution. When the struggle began, according to T. Cole Jones, revolutionary leadership strove to conduct the war according to the prevailing European customs of military conduct, which emphasized restricting violence to the battlefield and treating prisoners humanely. However, this vision of restrained war did not last long. As the British denied customary protections to their American captives, the revolutionary leadership wasted no time in capitalizing on the prisoners' ordeals for propagandistic purposes. Enraged, ordinary Americans began to demand vengeance, and they viewed British soldiers and their German and Native American auxiliaries as appropriate targets. This cycle of violence spiraled out of control, transforming the struggle for colonial independence into a revolutionary war.In illuminating this history, Jones contends that the violence of the Revolutionary War had a profound impact on the character and consequences of the American Revolution. Captives of Liberty not only provides the first comprehensive analysis of revolutionary American treatment of enemy prisoners but also reveals the relationship between America's political revolution and the war waged to secure it.

Chapter 1
The Vision of War

George Washington had been in command of the infant Continental Army for just over a month when he penned a letter of stern reproach to a former comrade, British lieutenant general Thomas Gage, on “the Obligations arising from the Rights of Humanity, & Claims of Rank.” Washington rebuked his opponent for the treatment of American prisoners confined in Boston. In his scathing reprimand, the American general asserted that these men, most of whom had been captured during the fighting at Bunker Hill in June 1775, were “thrown indiscriminately, into a common Gaol” overflowing with disloyal Bostonians, suspected spies, unruly redcoats, and common criminals. The wounded and sick sweltered alongside the healthy in the summer heat, with only a single bucket of water a day for both hydration and sanitation. The prisoners were deprived of nourishment and “the Comforts of Life” at the whim of the British provost officer. In the opinion of one prisoner, “The place seems to be an Emblem of Hell.”¹

For Gage, an officer who had served with distinction in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), and the Seven Years’ War, chastisement from a man whose most impressive military accomplishment had simply been to survive the defeat of Major General Edward Braddock in 1755 must have smacked of the impudence of a rank amateur. The British general would not tolerate a lecture on the proper conduct of war from a novice and a traitor to his king and country. Gage reminded Washington that, “under the Laws of the Land,” the Continental commander and his entire army deserved to hang for treason; simply foregoing summary execution was thus a sign of British mercy. He refused to countenance any claim of rank that was not derived from a king’s commission; thus the officers would remain in the same jail with common criminals. Nevertheless, Gage strongly asserted that captured Americans had “hitherto been treated with care and kindness.” He defended this assertion by invoking European customs for the treatment of prisoners of war: “To the Glory of Civilized Nations, humanity and War have been compatible; and Compassion to the subdued, is become almost a general system.” This was language that Washington understood. Well-read in contemporary military literature and theory and a veteran of the most recent imperial conflict against the French, he shared a set of values about the conduct of war with his British antagonist. As Gage’s comment indicates, European elites possessed a common culture of warfare, what Wayne Lee has defined as “a broadly understood set of cultural expectations about the uses and forms of war.” By the late eighteenth century, Europe’s culture of war emphasized controlling violence and protecting enemy prisoners.²

* * *

Examining the factors that limited war’s destructiveness and improved the plight of prisoners in eighteenth-century Europe, as well as the migration of those factors across the Atlantic, illuminates revolutionary Americans’ cultural expectations about the treatment of prisoners in 1775. It was these European norms that shaped the colonial elite’s vision of how war should be conducted. While Americans had experienced over a century and a half of nearly endemic warfare with the indigenous peoples of the continent, they were largely unprepared to wage a European-style war. Nonetheless, revolutionary leaders thought they knew how such a conflict would unfold. They imagined that both sides would conform to the prevailing European standards of acceptable violence in warfare. This vision of restrained and limited war as conducted among “civilized” peoples conditioned the revolutionary leadership’s response to captured British soldiers when fighting engulfed the colonies in the spring and summer of 1775. By treating their prisoners according to these European customs, influential revolutionaries (such as Washington) intended to demonstrate the legitimacy of their cause to their British enemies. Given the inherent illegitimacy of rebellion, they could hardly have done otherwise.

There was another vision of war available to colonial Americans, one that Washington, as a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, knew well: retaliatory warfare. In the colonial wars of the eighteenth century, Anglo-American forces had encountered in Native Americans an enemy with a very different understanding of the norms of acceptable violence in warfare. While the British and their American auxiliaries had hoped to conduct military operations during that earlier conflict according to the practices of “civilized” nations, on the frontier, where war parties and rangers roamed, alleged atrocities committed by one side had been answered with revengeful reprisals by the other. Away from the judgmental gaze of their European superiors, Franco-Canadian and Anglo-American forces, in conjunction with their Native allies, escalated the violence well beyond Old World norms. Twenty years later Washington and many of his fellow American veterans of that war were determined that their dispute with Britain would never devolve into a similar cycle of retaliatory violence. In this new confrontation, enemy prisoners would be treated with humanity according to an idealized vision of European practice—or so they thought.

Prisoners of War in Early Modern Europe

In 1753, when twenty-one-year-old George Washington began his military career, the rules by which European powers conducted war were becoming increasingly rigid. Horrified by decades of sanguinary religious conflict, eighteenth-century princes, philosophers, jurists, clerics, and soldiers all sought to control the violence of European warfare. With monarchs rather than mercenaries directing its progress, war would be waged by standing armies of long-serving volunteers or conscripts, controlled by discipline, rules, regulations, and aristocratic officers, gentlemen who shared a code of honor. Battles would be bloody, but in their aftermath captured soldiers could expect adequate food, clothing, and quarters. Most important, they would be quickly released through an equitable exchange. Officers, as members of a pan-European aristocratic culture, could offer their parole (from the French meaning “speech” or “spoken word”) of honor not to engage in hostile actions while considered a prisoner, thus enjoying considerable freedom until the cessation of hostilities or exchange for an officer of equal rank. This was European warfare as Washington envisioned it; but it had not always been this way.³

During the previous century, Protestants and Catholics—believing salvation itself at stake—made little effort to temper the fury of war and proceeded to kill and maim one another on a scale not seen in Europe since antiquity. Bands of marauding mercenaries, owing allegiance to none but the highest bidder, pillaged, plundered, and purged their way across the continent. When prisoners of war were taken, their fate depended largely on the caprice of the captors. If he was a wealthy aristocrat or senior officer, a prisoner might be ransomed or exchanged for an equally wellborn captive held by the other side. For common soldiers and civilians, having little monetary value, the outcome was bleak. Housing and feeding large numbers of enemy prisoners were beyond the capacity of the ad hoc armies and nascent states that waged the religious wars. While occasional exchanges of prisoners did occur, those fortunate enough to be taken alive were sometimes impressed into the enemy’s army, though most were simply put to death. The horrors of war were compounded by the prevalence of siege warfare. The populations of fortified cities and towns that resisted an enemy’s conquest could expect the worst when the city’s defenses failed—pillage, rape, and murder on a massive scale. Atrocities were legion, and the death tolls staggering. Prisoners of war and civilian men, women, and children paid the price for the religious and political affiliations of their social superiors.⁴

The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religious wars, did not signal the end of conflict in Europe, though it did usher in a series of changes in the practice of war that had the surprising effect of constraining its horrors. Significant alterations in the organization of armies, and even the states that raised them; the evolving culture of honor and restraint among the aristocracy; and the juridical tradition of the laws of war all coalesced in late seventeenth-century Europe to ensure that warfare in the eighteenth century would look remarkably different from that of centuries prior.⁵

Known to scholars as the “military revolution,” the early modern period witnessed a series of developments in technology, tactics, and organization that had a profound influence on the conduct of war and the fate of its prisoners. Beginning with the introduction of gunpowder and culminating in the creation of the tax-supported, centralized, and bureaucratic states necessary to pay and provide for the large armies required to employ the new weaponry, these changes consolidated the control of warfare in the hands of European monarchs. On the eve of the eighteenth century, the crowned heads of Europe had achieved a near-complete monopoly on military violence. Fractious nobles, whose confessional squabbles had brought about decades of unfettered violence, now found an outlet for their destructive impulses in the officer corps of state-sponsored standing armies. Serving at the pleasure of the Crown, these armies could wage wars with limited aims, such as the expansion of territory or control of dynastic succession. Throughout the century, monarchs agreed to resolve their disputes on the field of battle. With war the sole domain of kings (and queens), the battlefield, rather than the farmer’s cottage, parish church, or village square, became the primary locus of human destruction, thus mitigating the most violent excesses of wars past.⁶

The military revolution also improved the treatment of prisoners of war by increasing the value of an individual soldier’s life. While the common foot soldier of medieval Europe was expendable in the eyes of his knightly superiors, the rulers of the eighteenth century recognized the value of their highly trained soldiers and wanted them, if taken, returned as soon as possible. Moreover, protracted confinement could prove ruinously expensive. Custom derived from civilian carceral culture dictated that prisoners must pay for their own upkeep. This practice endured during the eighteenth century for captured officers, who possessed the means to provide for themselves, but European monarchs were expected to supply their captive enlisted men with food, clothing, and medicine or to reimburse their opponents for expenses incurred on behalf of their subjects. Rather than write their enemies a blank check, armies would appoint commissary officers to reside near the prisoners for the purpose of procuring their provisions. Predictably, savvy merchants and farmers took advantage of their enemy’s predicament and charged exorbitant rates for the necessities of life. The need both to cut costs and to return veteran soldiers to their regiments induced European monarchs to establish elaborate treaties, known as cartels, for the exchange of prisoners.⁷

Cartels stipulated the terms of the exchange that bound belligerents throughout a conflict and outlined the minimum standard of prisoner treatment. Most eighteenth-century cartels forbade the abuse of prisoners, including forced labor, and guaranteed that captives received rations and accommodations equal to those enjoyed by the capturing army. The ultimate goal, though, was the prisoners’ swift repatriation. Soldiers and sailors were exchanged according to mutually agreed rates based on their military rank—for example, privates for privates, sergeants for sergeants, and generals for generals—typically within a short period of the prisoners’ capture. For instance, the cartel between Britain and France during the Seven Years’ War promised to release all prisoners through exchange within fifteen days; the realities of a global war fought from North America to India often prevented such speedy exchanges. Nonetheless, the cartel system promised, even if it did not always deliver, relief and release from the hardship of prolonged captivity. With this system firmly in place, obtaining enemy prisoners became not only psychologically advantageous, by boosting the morale of the captors, but militarily beneficial as well.⁸

The social structure of the armies also played a part in the constraint of wartime violence. Eighteenth-century Europe was a deeply hierarchical society, and its armies reflected this system. At the bottom of the spectrum, soldiers in the rank and file came from among the working poor. While their motives for enlisting varied, all endured harsh discipline, intensive drill, and corporal punishment aimed at controlling their behavior. Armies instituted labyrinthine systems of regulations to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence and established military courts to adjudicate infractions. The enforcement of these rules fell to officers who rose through the ranks by purchasing commissions from the Crown rather than by merit. Members of the aristocracy, the landed gentry, and the moneyed elite, these men flocked to their monarch’s standard to preserve and perform their honor and gain royal favor. Although not all eighteenth-century officers were nobles, they were all products of a society, and members of an institution, that sanctified aristocratic values. This culture of honor among the officer corps was central to eighteenth-century Europeans’ understanding of the proper treatment of prisoners of war.⁹

Honor was not a revolutionary concept; in fact, these men saw themselves as the lineal descendants of a proud medieval tradition of chivalry, service, and sacrifice for God and monarch. Like their medieval forbearers, elite Europeans understood honor to mean one’s reputation in the eyes of others. But reputation could not be earned through piety, bravery, or loyalty alone—honor was inherited. They took for granted that those of elevated birth possessed honor because of their ancestors. Those of more humble origins had precious few means of elevating themselves to rank among the innately honorable. Although it could not be purchased, honor could very easily be lost. Any insult, reproach, or slight that was not answered could deprive a noble of it. Appearing honorable in the presence of peers was paramount, and social ostracism faced the gentleman who declined an invitation to cross blades or exchange shots on the field of honor.¹⁰

Although obsession with honor could lead a European officer to accept a challenge over a trivial affair or to engage in reckless abandon on the battlefield, this aristocratic attribute also had a limiting effect on the violence of war. Eighteenth-century nobles saw combat as unexceptional, unavoidable, and even natural, but they also recognized their opponents on the other side of a battlefield as members of a common culture and caste. Aristocracy, though it took slightly different forms throughout Europe, looked much the same in Paris as it did in Vienna. Even in England, where the hereditary nobility was comparatively small, the landed gentry aped the styles, manners, and behaviors of their more illustrious Continental peers. This pan-European aristocratic culture stressed rigorous standards of self-control. From the manner of their dress to their posture, poise, and prose, European nobles were exceedingly conformist: excess was rigidly curtailed. Their very emotions had to be tightly managed. Displaying anger was uncouth; rage was for the unreasoning masses, not the genteel elite. Any behavior seen to be untoward would invite censure and dishonor.¹¹

These deeply held values of restraint and self-control translated naturally to warfare. The bloodlust that so characterized the religious wars was incompatible with eighteenth-century aristocratic culture. While the battlefield was their natural theater, noble officers could not be seen to enjoy their part too much. Death in the service of one’s monarch was a glorious sacrifice, but the taking of a common soldier’s life was beneath the dignity of an aristocrat. Officers carried flimsy, highly decorated swords and nearly useless pikes, known as spontoons, rather than firearms. They strove to set an example of personal bravery under fire but left the killing to the common men. It was also incumbent upon officers to restrain their soldiers from any excesses in the heat of battle or its aftermath. This rule applied doubly to the protection of wounded or captured enemy officers. Seeing their conquered foes as fellow gentlemen and nobles, European officers spared their lives and treated them with courtesies that came to be known as the “honors of war.”¹²

Once captured, defeated officers who had behaved honorably in battle could expect from their captors every indulgence in proportion to their rank and social station. Upon offering their parole of honor not to escape or aid the enemy, these men would customarily be allowed to retain their swords and personal property. It was not uncommon for noble officers to entertain their prisoners as dinner guests. In the wake of the failed Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar in 17...