The Nightmare of 1776

 In last weeks of December 1776 and most of January 1777, British military commander Lt. Gen. Sir William Howe released about 2,200 American prisoners just before they died of sickness and starvation. Almost immediately, he began demanding that George Washington release a corresponding 2,200 British soldiers--an exchange of living men for virtual corpses. 

This 2019 article, "1776--The Horror Show," documents the national trauma caused by the appearance of some 2,000 "emaciated spectres." 

This 2020 article, "What Killed Prisoners of War? A Medical Investigation," establishes that American prisoners exhibited the classic symptoms of what 20th-century medicine identified as "famine disease:" a prolonged period of lethargy, closed by a rapid terminal phase marked, in the worst cases, by emaciation, vocal deterioration and fatal diarrhea often mistaken for dysentery. 

I am grateful that the Journal of the American Revolution found these articles worth publishing. I am grateful to tell the story of a mostly forgotten American tragedy.