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In its January 8, 1777 issue, The Connecticut Journal of New Haven carried the following report about prisoners returning from British-occupied New York City:
Last Wednesday [January 1, 1777], a Flag of Truce Vessel arrived at Milford, from New-York, after a tedious Passage of several days, having on board upwards of 200 American Prisoners, whose rueful Countenances too well discovered the ill Treatment they received while they were Prisoners in New-York; twenty of these unfortunate People died on the Passage, and twenty have died since they landed at Milford.
On January 31, 1782, Boston newspaper The Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser reported, "Last week a cartel arrived at Chatham, from St. Lucia, with a number of prisoners, in a very emaciated condition."
British forces employed the most notorious prison ships of the Revolutionary War during their 1776-1783 occupation of New York City, including the infamous prison ship Jersey. The British also used prison ships elsewhere, like the Nancy in Savannah, Georgia and the Torbay and Pack-horse in Charleston, South Carolina. In the West Indian island of St. Lucia, the British used the ship Peter as a prison for Americans captured by the British Navy.
Historian Larry G. Bowman wrote, "Very little information about the Torbay, Pack-Horse, and Peter appears to have survived, but the fragments of evidence indicate they were similar in appearance and function to the more famous prison ships of New York." Larry G. Bowman, Captive Americans: Prisoners During the American Revolution (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), page 42.
The Independent Chronicle's report of prisoners arriving "emaciated" from St. Lucia supports Bowman's comparison of the prison ship there to the prison ships of New York.
A report dated January 23, 1777 from Fishkill, New York relayed information about the Hessian soldiers captured by the Americans at Trenton, New Jersey and sent to Pennsylvania.
The Hessian prisoners were "greatly surprised to find themselves treated with clemency and kindness." Most of the prisoners believed that if other German soldiers employed by Britain's King George III knew how well the prisoners were treated, the Hessians "would all desert."
The report appeared in the February 3, 1777 edition of Connecticut newspaper The Norwich Packet and the Connecticut, Massachusetts, New-Hampshire, and Rhode-Island Weekly Advertiser.
Mao Zedong wrote, "When we capture enemy soldiers...we conduct propaganda among them, and then divide them into those who want to go and those who want to stay. Those who want to leave are given money for their traveling expenses and set free."
Mao explained, "This concrete propaganda immediately knocks the bottom out of the enemy propaganda that 'The Communist bandits kill everyone and anyone on sight.'"
Brandies Historian David Hackett Fischer noted that many American Revolutionaries made a policy treating British and Hessian prisoners with kindness. Fischer wrote, "Of 13,988 Hessian soldiers who survived the war, 3,194 (23 percent) chose to remain in America. Others later emigrated to the New World with their families."
Dear Syrian Rebels: There is a logic to treating prisoners with kindness. Certainly it brings honor and credit to a cause to show magnanimity to a disarmed and vanquished foe. On a practical side, if rebels are kind to prisoners then the enemy's job becomes more difficult; he must struggle to keep his men from joining you.
Front Committee Chair Mao Zedong, "Report of the Jinggangshan Front Committee to the Central Committee," 25 November 1928, in Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949: Volume 3: From the Jinggangshan to the Establishment of the Jiangxi Soviets, July 1927-December 1930, ed. and trans. Stuart R. Schram (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp, 1995), page 101; David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), page 379.
On the night of January 8, 1776, Major Thomas Knowlton of the 20th Connecticut Continental Infantry led a raid on Charlestown, Massachusetts.
The British burned most of Charlestown after the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 15, 1775). According to a report in the Connecticut newspaper The Norwich Packet (January 15, 1776), the American raid targeted those buildings which the British "suffered to remain unburnt in June last, for their own convenience."
In his Revolutionary War Almanac, John C. Fredriksen wrote, "In a unique twist, General William HOWE and his staff were watching a theatrical satire in Charlestown entitled The Siege of Boston, when a uniformed soldier suddenly burst in with news of the raid. The startled audience, assuming it was part of the performance, howled in laughter until Howe ordered all his officers to their stations."
The Norwich Packet reported that Knowlton's raiders found in one house six soldiers and one woman, "all of whom except one refractory fellow, who was killed, were brought off." The Packet included another harrowing detail from the raid:
In another of the houses, according to the information of the prisoners, lived seventeen of the enemy's carpenters. As the woman says she went to this house, in order to borrow something, just before our men arrived; but seeing no light, and not being able to get into that part of the house where they kept she concluded they were all asleep;--and as it is very certain no one escaped from the house;--and as our men set the building on fire very suddenly, it is thought the whole seventeen perished in the flames.
Consult John C. Fredrikson, Revolutionary War Almanac (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2006), page 463; Tony Jacques, Dictionary of Battles and Sieges: A Guide to 8,500 Battles from Antiquity through the Twenty-first Century: A-E (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), page 228.
The Packet account leaves the impression that Knowlton's men were unaware of the men sleeping in the building, apparently only learning of them from the prisoners after the quick action. The Packet reported that the entire mission took less than an hour. The chaos of the situation is suggested by the account that although the American soldiers suffered no casualties, they departed until heavy fire from British positions at Bunker Hill.
