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Reviewed by: Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence by Ken Miller Robert A. Gross Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence. By Ken Miller. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014. 259 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Set amid the rich farmlands of the Susquehanna River Valley, sixty miles west of Philadelphia, the city of Lancaster is today a popular destination for tourists eager to see “Amish country” and to sample a Pennsylvania Dutch way of life with roots in the early eighteenth century. But nearly two and a half centuries ago, Lancaster, then a community of three thousand souls, was a magnet for a very different set of visitors. From the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775 to the last battle in 1781, this rising county seat and market center, founded in 1730, played host to thousands of prisoners of war taken in combat from Quebec to Yorktown and held under the authority of the Continental Congress. The captive soldiers encompassed both the regular forces of George III, recruited from the British Isles, and the auxiliary German troops from Brunswick and Hesse (commonly lumped together as “Hessians”), whose military service in the American war was arranged by the princes to whom they were bound. Though they were at times held “under strict Confinement” (117) and did not often linger long, these sojourners had a powerful influence on the enduring community they passed through. For in Lancaster the struggle for American independence was never far from view. Wherever they fought and won, American forces took prisoners and shipped them to the Pennsylvania town. For its contributions to the Continental cause, Lancaster deserves to be known as the stockade of the American Revolution. Ken Miller, associate professor of history at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, takes the little-known story of prisoners of war in the central Pennsylvania town and puts it at the heart of the inhabitants’ revolutionary experience. This account is at once a community study of Lancaster from the 1730s through the 1780s, an investigation of the shifting relations between captors and prisoners, and an inquiry into changing political and cultural identities. In Lancaster, as Miller depicts, the local was the Continental, and in tending to their “dangerous guests,” the residents—Whig, Loyalist, and neutralist alike—affirmed loyalties, vented hostilities, and forged connections with neighbors close by and fellow Patriots in distant fields. The people of Lancaster waged the American Revolution on home ground one prisoner at a time. Miller borrows his title from a letter sent by George Washington, in winter quarters with the Continental army in Middlebrook, New Jersey, to his Virginia planter-friend Benjamin Harrison in May 1779. Distressed by reports [End Page 182] of continuing escapes from detention by British prisoners of war taken with John Burgoyne at Saratoga in November 1777 and shuttled thereafter into custody up and down the continent, the commander in chief took a dim view of these enemy troops in Continental hands. Far from appreciating mild treatment, redcoat officers repaid “every mark of humanity, civility, and respect” with unending efforts “to poison the minds of those around them” and sap American morale through false reports and exaggerated boasts of British power. Though disarmed, these king’s men were still at war, and given the chance, they were quick to escape from detention and make their way back to British lines. The military prisoners, Washington sadly concluded, were “dangerous guests in the bowels of our Country” (3), ready to attack from within. These observations were well-taken, for the captive British regulars had proved a troublesome lot. But they were not the only adversaries under Continental control. Hessian troops, seized at the Battle of Trenton and elsewhere, filled up stockades in Lancaster, and they were as cooperative with their new masters as the redcoats were defiant. Nor did Washington and his aides always look at the British officers with such distrust. The commander’s severe opinion in 1779 reflected the disillusion of his early hopes to win over fellow Britons to liberty’s cause. His characterization thus summarized Americans’ experience with only some of their prisoners of...

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