Overview

Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons-more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crowns military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed-those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence-and how much we have forgotten.

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9780465008353

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Washington Post Book World <br> [A] pathbreaking examination of the treatment of American prisoners during the Revolutionary War... Burrows's book is a landmark whose significance far outweighs recent, popular biographies of the Founding Fathers. His sparkling prose, meticulous research and surprising findings recast our understanding of how the new nation was brought forth... Burrows masterfully explores a subject that had been left nearly untouched for more than two centuries. <p> Seattle Times <br> [Burrows] offers riveting accounts of what prison life was like in New York...It is as if, more than 200 years later, fitting tribute has finally been paid.

Washington Post Book World [A] pathbreaking examination of the treatment of American prisoners during the Revolutionary War... Burrows's book is a landmark whose significance far outweighs recent, popular biographies of the Founding Fathers. His sparkling prose, meticulous research and surprising findings recast our understanding of how the new nation was brought forth... Burrows masterfully explores a subject that had been left nearly untouched for more than two centuries. Seattle Times [Burrows] offers riveting accounts of what prison life was like in New York...It is as if, more than 200 years later, fitting tribute has finally been paid.

A Pulitzer Prize - winning historian revisits the story of the brutal, degrading treatment of American prisoners of war during the Revolution.According to Burrows (History/Brooklyn Coll.; co-author, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, 1999, etc.), 20th-century historians have underestimated the extent and severity of British mistreatment of American prisoners, wrongly dismissing letters, affidavits, legal documents and other contemporaneous accounts as exaggerated propaganda. The author maintains that of the 35,800 American war-related deaths, roughly half died in New York City, either in the prisons, sugar houses and churches converted for the purpose, or prison ships. Victims of rotten food, foul water, overcrowding and a lack of proper clothing, blankets and firewood, a small number of the captives turned coat, sterling proof of their virtue. Moreover, as the war progressed, the unspeakable deaths of so many established a kind of moral Rubicon, making reconciliation with the mother country impossible. Americans accused Britain of purposely erecting a system designed to murder [the prisoners] by inches, to treat them ten times more cruelly than if they had hung them all the day they took them. Although 18th-century rules of war were merely theoretical (even the informal code among officers and gentlemen broke down in this peculiar conflict), references to captured Americans as POWs appeared to concede the reality of American independence and legitimize Congress. With the legal status of the prisoners uncertain, British authorities allowed Gen. William Howe and his subordinates a free hand, with disastrous consequences for the prisoners and for British prestige. This horrific tale references such glittering personalities as Washington, Lafayette and Franklin, as well as Ethan Allen and Philip Freneau. Mostly, though, it's the story of thousands of nameless Americans who gave their lives for liberty.A moving tribute to the martyrs of the prison ships and a cautionary tale for a country, itself now wealthy and powerful, at risk of becoming the kind of enemy they laid down their lives to defeat. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

"Edwin G. Burrows is Distinguished Professor of History at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is the co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History, and has received awards also from the Municipal Art Society, the St. Nicholas Society, and the New York Society Library, among others. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani named him a ""Centennial Historian of New York."" For the past five years Burrows has been a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, and he serves on the board of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in Manhattan. He lives in Northport, New York."

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