PICTORIAL FIELD BOOK OF THE REVOLUTION.

VOLUME II.

BY BENSON J. LOSSING

1850.

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SUPPLEMENT.

IV.

BRITISH PRISONS AND PRISON SHIPS.

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Associations of intense horror are linked with the memory and the records of the cruelties practiced and sufferings endured in the prisons and prison ships at New York, in which thousands of captive patriots were from time to time incarcerated during the war for Independence. Those who were made prisoners on land were confined in the foul jails of the city, while captive seamen, and sometimes soldiers too, were kept for months in floating dungeons,

We have before observed that the prisoners taken in the battle near Brooklyn in August, and at Fort Washington in November, 1776, 2 almost four thousand in all, were confined in prisons in the city of New York. Probably more than a thousand private citizens, arrested by the British on suspicion or positive proof of their being active Whigs, were also made prisoners, and at the close of the year, at least five thousand American captives were in the power of the invaders. The only prisons proper in the city were the "New Jail" and the "New Bridewell." The former, entirely altered in appearance, is the present Hall of Records in the Park, east of the City Hall; the latter stood between the present City Hall and Broadway. These were quite insufficient, and the three spacious sugar-houses then in the city, some of the Dissenting churches, Columbia College, and the Hospital, were all used as prisons. The disastrous effects of the great fire in September, the demands of the British army for supplies, the indolent indifference of Sir William Howe, and the cruel conduct of Cunningham, the provost marshal, combined to produce intense suffering among the prisoners.

Van Cortlandt’s Sugar-house, which stood at the northwest corner of Trinity church-yard, corner of Thames and Lumber Streets; Rhinelander’s, on the corner of William and Duane Streets, now (1852) Lightbody’s Printing-ink Manufactory; and the more eminently historical one on Liberty Street (numbers 34 and 36), a few feet eastward of the Middle Dutch church, now the Post-office, were the most spacious buildings in the city, and answered the purposes of prisons very well. Rhinelander’s is the only one remaining, the one on Liberty Street having been demolished in June, 1840, and Van Cortlandt’s during the summer of 1852. The North Dutch church, yet standing on William Street, between Fulton and Ann, was made to contain eight hundred prisoners, after taking out the pews and using them for fuel, 3 and placing a floor across from gallery to gallery. For about two months several hundred prisoners were huddled together in the Middle Dutch church (see page 629), when they were removed, and it was converted into a riding-school, after taking out the pews. 4 The "Brick church," yet standing in the triangle between Park Row and Beekman and Nassau Streets, was used for a prison a short time, when it, and the Presbyterian church in Wall Street, the Scotch church in Cedar Street, and the Friend’s Meeting-house in Liberty Street, were converted into hospitals. The French church in Pine Street, and a portion of Van Cortlandt’s Sugar-house, were used as magazines for ordnance and stores; and the old City Hall (Federal Hall, page 658) was converted into a guard-house for the main guard of the city. The latter had dungeons beneath it, wherein civil officers, and afterward whale-boatmen and land marauders, were confined. None of these buildings now remain except the two Dutch churches and the "Brick church."

PROVOST JAIL. 5

The "New Jail" was made a provost prison, where American officers and the most eminent Whigs who fell into the hands of the British were confined. Here was the theatre of Cunningham’s brutal conduct toward the victims of his spite. The prisoners were formally introduced to him, and their name, age, size, and rank were recorded. They were then confined in the gloomy cells, or to the equally loathsome upper chamber, where the highest officials in captivity were so closely crowded together, that when, at night, they laid down to sleep upon the hard plank floor, they could change position only by all turning over at once, at the words right – left. Their food was scanty and of the poorest kind, often that which Cunningham had exchanged at a profit for better food received from their friends or the commissariat. Little delicacies brought by friends of the captives seldom reached them, and the brutal Cunningham would sometimes devour or destroy such offerings of affection, in the presence of his victims, to gratify his cruel propensities. Thus for many months gentlemen of fortune and education, who had lived in the enjoyment of the luxuries and refined pleasures of elegant social life, were doomed to a miserable existence, embittered by the coarse insults of an ignorant, drunken Irish master, or to a speedy death caused by such treatment, the want of good food, and fresh air, and innumerable other sufferings, the result, in a great measure, of the criminal indifference (it may be commands) of Loring, Sproat, and Lennox, commissaries of prisoners at various times. Still greater cruelties were practiced upon the less conspicuous prisoners, and many were hanged in the gloom of night, without trial or known cause for the foul murder. 6 And yet, in the presence of the known fact that British power administered by military despotism was the cause of these sufferings, that infamous time-server, Hugh Gaine, who six months previously was professedly a zealous patriot, dared to insult truth and common honesty by publishing in his papers [Nov. 25., 1776.] falsehoods like this: "There are now five thousand prisoners in town, many of them half naked. Congress, deserting the poor wretches, has sent them neither provisions nor clothing, nor paid attention to their distress, or that of their families. Their situation must have been doubly deplorable, but for the humanity of the king’s officers. Every possible attention has been given, considering their great numbers and necessary confinement, to alleviate their distress arising from guilt, sickness, and poverty."

SUGAR-HOUSE IN LIBERTY STREET. 7

Next to the provost prison, the sugar-house in Liberty Street was most noted for the sufferings of captive patriots. It was a dark stone building, five stories in height, with small deep windows like port-holes, giving it the appearance of a prison. Each story was divided into two apartments. A large, barred door opened upon Liberty Street, and from another, on the southeast side, a stair-way led to gloomy cellars, which were used as dungeons. Around the whole building was a passage a few feet wide, and there, day and night, British and Hessian sentinels patroled. The whole was inclosed by a wooden fence nine feet in height. Within this gloomy jail the healthy and the sick, white and black, were indiscriminately thrust; and there, during the summer of 1777, many died from want of exercise, cleanliness, and fresh air. "In the suffocating heat of summer," says Dunlap, "I saw every aperture of those strong walls filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a portion of the external air." At length, in July, 1777, a jail fever was created, and great numbers died. During its prevalence the prisoners were marched out in companies of twenty, to breathe the fresh air for half an hour, while those within divided themselves into parties of six each, and there alternately enjoyed the privilege of standing ten minutes at the windows. They had no seats, and their beds of straw were filled with vermin. They might have exchanged this horrid tenement for the comfortable quarters of a British soldier by enlisting in the king’s service, but very few would thus yield their principles. They each preferred to be among the dozen bodies which were daily carried out in carts and cast into the ditches and morasses beyond the city limits. Sheds, stables, and other outhouses received hundreds of prisoners, who suffered terribly from cold and hunger during the winter succeeding their capture at Fort Washington. Few now live to recite their experience of this horrid sacrifice to the demon of discord, and humanity would gladly drop a tear upon this chapter of the dark record of man’s wrongs, and blot it out forever. Escapes, death, exchange of prisoners, and a more humane policy, gradually thinned the ranks of the sufferers in the city prisons, and when peace came, few were left therein to come out and join in the general jubilee. Hundreds had left their brief records upon the walls and beams (the initials of their names), which remained until these prisons were demolished. 8

The sufferings of American captives in British hulks were greater even than those in the prisons on land. We have already alluded to the woes of those captured at Savannah and Charleston; we will now note briefly the condition of those at New York.

The prison-ships were intended for seamen taken on the ocean, yet some soldiers were confined in them. The first vessels used for the purpose were the transports in which cattle and other stores were brought by the British in 1776. These lay in Gravesend Bay, and there many of the prisoners taken in the battle near Brooklyn were confined until the British took possession of New York, when they were removed to prisons in the city, and the transports were anchored in the Hudson and East Rivers. In 1778 the hulks of decaying ships were moored in the Wallabout or Wallebocht, a sheltered bay on the Long Island shore, where the present Navy Yard is. There, in succession, the Whitby, Good Hope, Scorpion, Prince of Wales, Falmouth, Hunter, Stromboli, and half a dozen of less note were moored, and contained hundreds of American seamen captured on the high seas. 9 The sufferings of these captives were intense, and at the close of 1779 they set fire to two of them, hoping to secure either liberty or death. They felt it