Edwin G. Burrows: Devil's Island, New York
[Edwin G. Burrows, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the co-author of "Gotham: A History of New York to 1898," is the author of the forthcoming "The Prisoners of New York."]
NEW YORKERS are a famously restless, impatient sort of people, focused more on where they're going than where they've been. That's a real pity where the American Revolution is concerned, because the city played a key role in the resistance to King George III that led up to the Declaration of Independence. It's also the place where thousands of men died during the Revolutionary War that followed — not in combat, but in British prisons.
From 1775 to 1783, some 200,000 colonials took up arms against the crown. While the statistics are rough, it has been estimated that more than 6,800 died in battle. An additional 10,000 perished from wounds or disease. At least 18,200 became prisoners of war, most of whom were confined in New York City — along with perhaps as many as 1,500 civilian prisoners.
New York's little-known role as the jailhouse of the Revolution stemmed from a decision by the British to use the city as the nerve center of military operations in North America. An invasion in the summer of 1776 brushed aside General Washington's hastily arranged defenses and left the British with a bumper crop of American captives — and no place to put them.
The solution was to squeeze the men into an assortment of public and private buildings — including the new municipal almshouse and jail, a half-dozen churches, and two or three "sugar houses," or refineries. Broken-down warships and transports, stripped of masts and rigging, were soon pressed into service as well. Anchored in Wallabout Bay (now the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard), they became one of the most widely recognized and terrifying symbols of the British occupation.
These makeshift prisons, most of which remained in use throughout the Revolutionary War, were shockingly overcrowded — 20 men per cell in the city jail, 700 or more in one of the churches, as many as a thousand at a time in the steaming hold of a Wallabout hulk. The men never had enough to eat, and what they did have was barely edible. The water stank. Slop buckets ran over. Blankets and clothing were infested with lice. Typhus, smallpox and scurvy ran rampant.
Those who got out alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own shoes and clothes, of prison hulks whose decks were slippery with excrement, of wagons rumbling through cobblestone streets with corpses stacked like cordwood, of bodies hastily interred by the dozen on the beaches of Wallabout or in trenches on the outskirts of the city.
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NEW YORKERS are a famously restless, impatient sort of people, focused more on where they're going than where they've been. That's a real pity where the American Revolution is concerned, because the city played a key role in the resistance to King George III that led up to the Declaration of Independence. It's also the place where thousands of men died during the Revolutionary War that followed — not in combat, but in British prisons.
From 1775 to 1783, some 200,000 colonials took up arms against the crown. While the statistics are rough, it has been estimated that more than 6,800 died in battle. An additional 10,000 perished from wounds or disease. At least 18,200 became prisoners of war, most of whom were confined in New York City — along with perhaps as many as 1,500 civilian prisoners.
New York's little-known role as the jailhouse of the Revolution stemmed from a decision by the British to use the city as the nerve center of military operations in North America. An invasion in the summer of 1776 brushed aside General Washington's hastily arranged defenses and left the British with a bumper crop of American captives — and no place to put them.
The solution was to squeeze the men into an assortment of public and private buildings — including the new municipal almshouse and jail, a half-dozen churches, and two or three "sugar houses," or refineries. Broken-down warships and transports, stripped of masts and rigging, were soon pressed into service as well. Anchored in Wallabout Bay (now the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard), they became one of the most widely recognized and terrifying symbols of the British occupation.
These makeshift prisons, most of which remained in use throughout the Revolutionary War, were shockingly overcrowded — 20 men per cell in the city jail, 700 or more in one of the churches, as many as a thousand at a time in the steaming hold of a Wallabout hulk. The men never had enough to eat, and what they did have was barely edible. The water stank. Slop buckets ran over. Blankets and clothing were infested with lice. Typhus, smallpox and scurvy ran rampant.
Those who got out alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own shoes and clothes, of prison hulks whose decks were slippery with excrement, of wagons rumbling through cobblestone streets with corpses stacked like cordwood, of bodies hastily interred by the dozen on the beaches of Wallabout or in trenches on the outskirts of the city.
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