Humanity to Prisoners

     On August 23, 1776, the Marine Committee of the Continental Congress wrote to Lieutenant John Baldwin, commander of the Schooner Wasp, “Use your people well, but preserve strict discipline; treat prisoners, if any you make, with humanity, and in all things be duly attentive to the honour and interests of America.” 
     More than once, the Marine Committee implied a link between kindness to prisoners and the honor of the country.  "...If you make any:" The Marine Committee was not reserving for the captain the right to refuse to take prisoners, but was simply giving instructions in case prisoners fell into his hands.  

Humanity and Generosity

On August 22, 1776, the Marine Committee of the Continental Congress wrote to Commodore Esek Hopkins, “You will instruct the Commander of each vessel to write us, by all opportunities, of their proceedings….  They will no doubt, from principles of humanity and generosity, treat their prisoners with all kindness and attention their respective situations and circumstances will admit of; and we hope their conduct will in all things be such as to merit the continuance of our confidence.”  

For more on the Marine Committee, and the earlier Naval Committee, recommending kindness to prisoners, please visit the post here.  

Continued Close Confinement "Would Have Endangered Their Lives"

In July 1776, the Committee of Litchfield, Connecticut balked at receiving prisoners from New York that included former New York City Mayor David Mathews.  The Committee that already overcrowded conditions of the Litchfield Jail rendered the state of the prisoners already in custody “incompatible either with the publick safety, or even with the safety of the prisoners’ lives….”
    Abraham De Peyster, who escorted the prisoners to Connecticut, returned to investigate the conditions of the Loyalist prisoners from New York.  On August 21, 1776, De Peyster wrote, “When I arrived there [i.e., in Litchfield] I found that the Committee of that town, in my absence, had permitted all the prisoners, who had been put in close confinement, (except Gilbert Forbes,) to go at large about the town, as the keeping them shut up in jail would have endangered their lives.”
    De Peyster found prisoners Isaac Young and Israel Young living in the home of Litchfield County Sheriff Lynde Lord, Esquire.  Prisoner John L. C. Broome [Roome?], Esq. lived in the Jailer’s apartment near the Jail.  “The others were at work in different places, some in harvests, and others at their respective trades, as journeymen.  Mr. Mathews, during my absence, I understand, had agreeable to his promise, strictly confined himself to Captain Seamour’s house, in which I had left him.”
    De Peyster reported, “This change in the prisoners’ situation from that in which they were when I left Litchfield, made the account I brought them of their removal very unwelcome; and they now, to a man, solicit as much to remain at Litchfield as they had before to be conveyed to some other place.” 
    Broome and Mayor Mathews pleaded to stay in Litchfield, Mathews likely the reasonable rent at Captain Seamour’s lodgings, and Seamour pledged security for both gentlemen.  Sheriff Lord, likewise, pledged for the security of the Youngs.  De Peyster and a company of guards transferred six other prisoners to Norwich, Connecticut.   Sadly, De Peyster “was under necessity” to leave sickly “old [Nathan] Gyre” at the roadside lest the jostling wagon on the bumpy road “deprived him of what little life he had left.”    

News from St. Augustine

In a letter dated from St. Augustine, August 20, 1776, an inhabitant of the British province of East Florida reported that Colonel Lachlan McIntosh of the Georgia Militia made prisoners of the British and Loyalists troops stationed at Fort Wright on the St. Marys River, the northeast boundary of East Florida with Georgia.  

The prisoners included Charles Wright and Jermyn Wright, two brothers of the Royal Governor of Georgia Sir James Wright.  The Florida resident believed East Florida officials provoked the raid by trying to recruit the Creeks and Cherokees against the colonists and by sending "plunderers" of East Florida into Georgia.

For more on Sir James Wright, please visit the New Georgia Encyclopedia.  For a brief history of Fort Wright, please check the blog British East Florida.  

Joseph Haight

On August 20, 1776, the Continental Congress indicated

   The Board of Treasury reported, that there is due,
   To Joseph Haight, for sundry supplies of provisions and wood for the British prisoners at Burlington [New Jersey], from the 10th June to the 18th July...two hundred and seventy seven dollars and 36/90 of a dollar:
   Ordered, That the sum be paid

Major Joseph Haight was an office in the Second Regiment of the Burlington County New Jersey Militia.  In addition to his care for British prisoners, the New Jersey Convention ordered Haight and several other officers of the Burlington and Monmouth county militia to "disarm and take prisoners" Monmouth County Loyalists arming to aid the British Army.

Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789: Vol. 5: June 5-October 8, 1776 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906), 673; William S. Stryker, Official Register of the Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Revolutionary War... (Trenton: Wm. T. Nicholson & Co., Printers, 1872), 359; Isaac Collins, ed., Journal of the Votes & Procedures of the Convention of New-Jersey... (Trenton: Joseph Justice, Printer, 1831 [1776]), 36.