Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 2015 221 tious problems in British colonial Pennsylvania. Dunmore's New World also boasts a massive bibliography that hints at the importance of minor individuals who were entrusted with power in eighteenth-century Atlantic history. This biography is recommended for graduate students and scholars. Butler County Community College R. WILLIAM WEISBERGER Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence. By KEN MILLER. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 260 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $35.) British and Hessian prisoners of war were confined in Reading, Lebanon, Lancaster, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Frederick, Maryland; and Winchester, Virginia. Lancaster was the primary detention site, entertaining these "dangerous guests" almost continuously from 1775 through 1783. Ken Miller's case study of interaction between prisoners and their reluctant Lancaster hosts is set within a thoroughly researched social history of the community and of the changes outside events—from the French and Indian War through the Revolution—brought to Lancaster. The emergence of a revolutionary community is a persistent theme of Miller's book, although the supposed consensus was seriously frayed by the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution, and the ardor of many German Lancastrians had cooled by 1777. Miller acknowledges the deep divide, dating back at least to the 1750s, between Mennonites and Quakers and Presbyterians that came to a head in the aftermath of the Paxton Boys' murders. He draws on Owen Ireland and Wayne Brockleman's work on ethnic and religious divisions in Pennsylvania politics , but he could have given more attention to this aspect of the study. His assertion that "the Revolution politicized local identities, rupturing the community and splitting patriots and loyalists into mutually antagonistic camps," clearly does not tell the whole story (135). The prisoners themselves were more pawns than agents in changing loyalties. The first prisoners to arrive were British regulars, the garrisons of forts captured on Montgomery's march to Quebec in 1775, who came with their wives and children. The Lancaster Committee of Safety was obliged to provide food and winter clothing for the dependents when Continental authorities demurred. Curiously, this is Miller's only mention of women and children, who were part of every eighteenth-century army and, notably, of the Convention Army surrendered at Saratoga. Officers were released on their word as gentlemen and allowed to lodge where they chose and to roam the town at will. Privates were confined in the barracks on the north side of Lancaster, built to house British soldiers during the French BOOK REVIEWS 222 April and Indian War. They were able to hire themselves out as artisans or farm labor, so they, too, enjoyed considerable freedom. British prisoners had a propensity to escape to rejoin their comrades; Hessians were more inclined to remain where they were, even marching themselves to a new prison camp in Winchester, Virginia. They were also far more likely to stay in America after the peace. Miller mentions in passing that American authorities routinely violated surrender agreements: "By 1779, frustrated by Congress' failure to liberate the Convention prisoners [taken at Saratoga] in accordance with the terms of their capitulation, the British command actively encouraged escapes" (171). Escaping British prisoners had a well-established route to New York, and, for a few months in 1777–78, to Philadelphia. Quakers and other pacifists often sheltered and guided them, and in the last years of the war were entrapped by Continental soldiers pretending to be fugitives. In marshaling his extensive research to make a coherent argument about the impact of prisoners on their host communities, Miller has added an important chapter to the Pennsylvania story. University of Florida RICHARD K. MACMASTER Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health. By JEANNE E. ABRAMS. (New York: New York University Press, 2013. 304 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $30.) Yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, malaria, influenza, and countless other diseases swept through eighteenth-century North America with frightening regularity. As Jeanne E. Abrams makes clear, no one, not even the elite families of the founding fathers, was immune from the ravages of disease. Abrams provides an eminently readable account of the illnesses and health of the "founding fathers and mothers" that focuses on...

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