Prisoners of war in the American Revolutionary War

King George III of Great Britain had declared American forces traitors in 1775, which denied them prisoner-of-war status.

[4][5] American prisoners of war tended to be accumulated at large sites, which the British were able to occupy for extended periods of time.

The surgeon in charge of the New York hospitals housing American prisoners, Francis Mercier, was accused of killing them by poisoning and by assault, and he was ultimately executed for an unrelated murder.

Historian Edwin G. Burrows writes that "by the end of 1776, disease and starvation had killed at least half of those taken on Long Island and perhaps two-thirds of those captured at Fort Washington – somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 men in the space of two months.

The prisoners of war were harassed and abused by guards who, with little success, offered release to those who agreed to serve in the British Navy.

[14] Many of the remains became exposed or were washed up and recovered by local residents over the years and later interred nearby in the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument at Fort Greene Park, once the scene of a portion of the Battle of Long Island.

[15] Survivors of the British prison ships include the poet Philip Freneau, Congressmen Robert Brown and George Mathews.

[16] The American Revolution was an expensive war, and lack of money and resources led to the horrible conditions of British prison ships.

Over 100 prisoners were employed as forced laborers in coal mines in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia – they later chose to join the Royal Navy to secure their freedom.

On September 14, 1775, Washington, commander of the Northern Expeditionary Force, at camp in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote to Colonel Benedict Arnold: "Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]...

"[22][23] After winning the Battle of Trenton on the morning of December 26, 1776, Washington found himself left with hundreds of Hessian troops who had surrendered to the Americans.

"Let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands," Washington said.

The Continental Congress's policies on the treatment of POWs remained the same for all enemy combatants, and so the prisoner system was generally the same for the two nationalities.

[29] There were very few American prisons because the Thirteen Colonies and the Continental Congress were not in a position to create new ones to imprison British and German soldiers.

British and German prisoners cultivated gardens; worked for farms and craftsmen; and found other forms of unskilled labor.

[30] Even when British and Hessian prisoners of war were not being held in individual houses, they were still in public view, which caused general fear, resentment, and anger.

In Virginia and other southern states, wealthy planters and plantation owners were happy to have prisoners (in Albemarle County, for example), because they could count on an even greater abundance of free or cheap labor.

[32] The Continental Congress was now in the position of holding a massive number of prisoners of war on American soil, an infrequent occurrence until then.

Congress saw that condition as an abysmal part of the treaty for one of its greatest victories in the American Revolution and delayed its ratification repeatedly.

Congress used Burgoyne's words as evidence that he was planning to renounce the convention and suspended it until Great Britain recognized American independence.

In 1780, it had become difficult to provide British and German prisoners of war and their guards with food in the South, where their presence had become a security risk.

When it became clear that the Americans had no intention of allowing the British to return to Great Britain until the war ended, tensions between the soldiers and the guard escalated, and desertions rose rapidly in number.

[37] Between the time of the Siege of Yorktown (1781) and the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), many of the Convention troops, by then mostly Germans, escaped and took up permanent residence in the United States.

Exchange, however, was a very complex and slow process because it involved negotiation and diplomacy between a new and inexperienced nation and a state that absolutely refused to recognize American independence.

A degree of mutual acceptance between Congress and the states of the principle of exchange and procedure in its implementing must have been attained by the end of March 1777.

[41] Aside from the official marching of the Convention Army, captured prisoners were paraded through cities after military victories as a form of celebration for the Americans and humiliation for their enemies.