Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution

In an endnote, Jones writes “although the Convention Army [those British and German troops captured at the battles around Saratoga, New York] remains the best-studied contingent of Crown prisoners during the war, its story has not been properly contextualized within the larger history of prisoner-of-war treatment during the conflict” (285). This statement can be applied more broadly to his book—the treatment of prisoners held by the revolutionaries has not been properly contextualized within the history of the increasing violence during the American Revolution. Jones proposes that the revolutionaries intended to treat their prisoners humanely according to eighteenth-century European military custom at the beginning of the war, but later responded with retaliation and revenge to both real and perceived abuses and atrocities by the British, their German and Native American allies, and Loyalists as the war progressed.By the eighteenth century, “European rules of war … emphasized restraining violence and treating enemy prisoners humanely, according to their military rank and social status” (1–2). Officers captured on the battlefield could expect to be received as fellow gentlemen by their captors, keeping their swords as their signs of rank and receiving paroles to avoid confinement. They often became dinner guests of officers of the opposing army. Prisoners of enlisted rank were to receive proper housing and food. Their monarchs provided the necessary supplies or reimbursed their captors for such expenses. To reduce such costs and to return veteran captured soldiers to their respective armies, treaties for the exchange of prisoners, known as cartels, were established. Cartels set minimum standards of prisoner treatment, generally forbidding the abuse of prisoners and forced labor and providing that they receive rations and accommodations similar to those of their captors. Prisoners were to be exchanged as quickly as possible at rates based on their ranks.In five relatively long chapters, Jones catalogs the devolution of the revolutionaries’ treatment of prisoners from this ideal to a state of affairs where captive armies were detained indefinitely in deplorable conditions and where backcountry militias and loyalist units summarily executed captives. Each chapter deals with a successive phase of the war starting with the first conflict at Lexington and Concord, followed by the invasion of Canada, the New York Campaign, the battles around Saratoga resulting in the captivity of the “Convention Army,” and concluding with the Southern theater culminating in the American and French victory at Yorktown, Virginia.Jones posits three factors for the increasing violence of the Revolution and the degradation of prisoner treatment: (1) “the revolutionary leadership encountered a resolute enemy required by Parliament to deny American soldiers and sailors the status of legitimate combatants, instead labeling them as rebels and traitors,” (2) “the divided loyalties of their own population, inaugurating civil war,” and (3) the Revolutionary elite “failed to establish a monopoly on violence” because they were “ideologically constrained from forming a centralized government capable of effectively limiting the war’s violence” (as he states in his dissertation abstract).1 When discussing the Convention Army, for example, he observes that not only did the Continental Congress nullify the Saratoga agreement because it did not wish to return British soldiers to their army, it wanted to capitalize on the Americans’ victory in a “policy of retribution” (142). Jones writes, “To parole men to England or to release them through exchange would be to repudiate its hardline stance, destroying congressional credibility with most Americans, who, after years of hearing and reading about British atrocities, thirsted for retribution” (142). In short, British, German, and Loyalist prisoners became pawns in the “politics of vengeance.”Drawing from a broad range of primary and secondary sources, Jones documents the conditions and sufferings of prisoners in American hands. With a lack of centralized prisoner administration and with little previous knowledge of handling the numbers of prisoners they acquired, Revolutionary authorities housed captives in local prisons, old barracks, an abandoned copper mine, hastily constructed encampments, and on ships throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Food and clothing frequently were in short supply or unavailable and disease was rampant. The Convention prisoners were marched from Massachusetts to Virginia and later to Pennsylvania in wintertime. For the British soldiers captured at Yorktown alone, Jones estimates that the mortality rate was about 34 percent (238).While much of the factual material that Jones presents is not new to students of prisoners of war in the American Revolution, his contextualizing it in the overall setting of violence during the war provides fresh insight into the subject. He demonstrates that Congress’s inability to both politically and practically manage the prisoner-of-war issue adversely affected the treatment of prisoners in American custody. He masterfully lays out his argument and supports it with detail after gruesome detail.This book would have been enhanced with a bibliography. The notes are extensive and frequently a paragraph in length. The reader would like a bibliography to quickly see the full reference rather than sift through the dense notes to find the first citation of the source. Furthermore, a bibliography would enable one to more readily comprehend the sources supporting the book. Surprisingly, Jones’s dissertation—the previous version of this publication—includes an excellent bibliography that should have been retained in the book.While his overall narrative succeeds well in supporting his thesis, some of the details are concerning for the Pennsylvania reader. He frequently cites the memoir of Corporal George Fox of the 47th Regiment when describing the travails of the Convention prisoners. Jones states that Fox was among the British prisoners at York, Pennsylvania (Camp Security), “confined in a fenced barracks when he received news of the peace” in April 1783, suggesting that this was evidence of the harsh treatment being served to the prisoners (85). Yet Fox himself recalled that “several of us were bail’d out the greater part of the time” and that he was in the employ of “Mr John Ereman a Dutchman Under sheriff of L. York and Captain of a company of Malitia … till April 83.”2 Thus, Fox was not in the stockade at Camp Security when the preliminary peace treaty was announced.Later, when describing the Yorktown prisoners at Lancaster and Camp Security, Jones remarks that “the British were closely confined and forbidden to leave the stockade for any purpose” (228). This assertion is contradicted by provision returns found in the Bailey-Moore Collection at the Feinberg Library of SUNY Plattsburgh, which show that as late as August 1782 228 of the 474 Convention prisoners and 198 of the 673 Yorktown prisoners assigned to Camp Security were “on bail & pass” or “servants in town.”3Although Pennsylvania played a key role in dealing with prisoners during the American Revolution, Jones gives little evidence that he mined the vast resources of the Pennsylvania State Archives, and he only minimally used the published Pennsylvania Archives. In his notes, he refers to the “Pennsylvania State Government Papers” on microfilm at the David Library of the American Revolution; however, a consultation of that institution’s online catalog yields no such title. Having worked at the Pennsylvania State Archives for thirty-five years, this reviewer had never heard of such a collection. A brief investigation revealed that Jones viewed the microfilm of the records of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary governments—Record Group 27 at the Pennsylvania State Archives. That group has several series, and his references to those records would be more helpful if he had cited the specific series.Despite these minor misgivings, this book is a fine addition to the growing body of work on British and German prisoners of war during the American Revolution. As Jones concludes, “if we seek to understand the nation born of that war, in all its complexities and contradictions, its tragedies as well as its triumphs” (249), then we should not forget the “horrors” experienced by its prisoners as the war degenerated from a civilized, humane conflict into retributional violence.

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