In May 1778, the Continental Congress published a message recommended for reading in every house of worship in the United States.
Congress remarked of British forces, "Their victories have been followed by the cool murder of men, no longer able to resist; and those who escaped from the first act of carnage, have been exposed, by cold, hunger, and nakedness...in the tedious hours of confinement, or to become the destroyers of their countrymen, of their friends, perhaps, dreadful idea! of their parents or children."
Congress observed, "Nor was this the outrageous barbarity of an individual, but a system of deliberate malice, stamped with the concurrence of the British legislature, and sanctioned with all the formalities of law."
Shortly after the war, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Jean Baptiste Meusnier, "This was the most afflicting to our prisoners of all the cruelties exercised on them. The others affected the body only, but this the mind; they were haunted by the horror of having, perhaps, themselves shot the ball by which a father or a brother fell."
Worthington Chauncey Ford, editor, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789: Volume 11: May 2-September 1, 1778 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908), page 476. Albert Ellery Bergh, editor, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1907), 17:101
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4 comments:
Very interesting.
Yes, the revolutionary war was in many instances a civil war.
It should be noted that if the 'Americans' were attacked by, say, the Spanish wanting to impose Catholicism, it would have been the same soldiers who the Americans were fighting who would have defended the Americans.
(Some of) the Americans were fighting their own protectors! Talk about an insurgency!
Grover:
Thank you for your observations.
You mention a hypothetical war between Spain and the British North American colonies. In the century previous to the American Revolution, Britain's North American colonists did engage in wars with the French and the Spanish.
British soldiers and officers fought alongside the Americans; Americans thought of themselves as equally engaged in the defense of the British Empire.
A report from Massachusetts on the suffering caused by Parliament's Boston Port Act (1774) mentioned American participation in the 1745 capture of the Fortress of Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island: "This is the treatment meted out by a British Minister to a town and Province, by whose exertions in a late war the strong fortress of Louisburg was taken, which purchased the peace of Europe, and delivered Britons from their terrible apprehensions of an invasion by French flat-bottomed boats."
http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/cgi-bin/amarch/getdoc.pl?/var/lib/philologic/databases/amarch/.750
Grover:
Thank you for your observation that a civil war within a country or empire often has a more brutal quality than a conflict between nations.
John Witherspoon, the only college president and the only clergyman among the signers of the USA's Declaration of Independence, wrote of civil wars, "Those who are on the side of government are apt to form the most unjust as well as despicable ideas of their opponents, and never to speak of them but in the most opprobrious terms. By this they are naturally led to behave towards them with inhumanity...." Please consult John Rodgers, editor, The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon... (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1801), Volume 4: Page 165.
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