Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution. By T. Cole Jones. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 321 pages. Cloth, ebook.
This review first appeared in Social History, Feb. 2021, Vol. 46 Issue 1, pp. 107-109.
Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution
T. Cole Jones
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Americans like to think of their founding moment as a relatively bloodless affair. Images of genteel and wise statesmen gathering to sign the Declaration of Independence or to discuss the new Constitution seem only to confirm that the American Revolution was more a war of words than a worldly bloody war. More recent comparisons of COVID-19-related deaths with those in major wars have reinforced this impression. A Time magazine article puts the Revolutionary War at the bottom of a long list, with an estimated 4435 deaths (https://time.com/5815367/coronavirus-deaths-comparison). Compared to the casualties of the American Civil War (620,000), or the Second World War (405,000 Americans), this would seem a small price to pay for the establishment of a new nation.
Yet historians have of late questioned such low numbers – and the bloodless narrative that supports them. We now know that at least 25,000 and perhaps as many as 36,000 people died during active military service on the patriot side. Moreover, we still have no reliable statistics for the number of dead among the British army, loyalists, Native Americans and civilians. For over two centuries now, no one has bothered counting them up. Still, the numbers we do have give the lie to the idea that the American War for Independence was a limited and restrained struggle for political self-determination. If the 2020 pandemic has taught us anything, it should be that numbers are only useful in context. Even if we take into account the low estimate of the number of patriot deaths, that would be the per capita equivalent of the deaths of some 3,300,000 Americans today.
As T. Cole Jones reminds us in his timely and compelling monograph, the violence of the American Revolution was not only profound, but also profoundly important in shaping the nature of the contest. Jones focuses on the prisoners of war who were at the epicentre of suffering in the Revolution. As he notes, historians estimate that somewhere between 8500 and 18,000 American soldiers, sailors and privateers perished while in British custody – most notoriously aboard the infamous prison hulk Jersey anchored off New York City. Though the estimates vary, scholars agree that roughly one-half of all Americans who fell into British hands died in captivity. Nevertheless, the so-called Founding Fathers also had much blood on their hands. British and Hessian soldiers captured at Saratoga in 1777 were supposed to be sent home. Patriot officials instead drove them from pillar to post across the new states, housing them in abominable shelters with little food, leaving them easy prey to diseases. As one corporal noted, his comrades ‘died like rotten Sheep’ (182). Thousands more loyalist prisoners were treated similarly, and subject to summary punishments and executions – ‘Lynch’s law’ purportedly arose from Virginia militia colonel Charles Lynch who was given to executing loyalists merely on the consent of his soldiers. Almost 35% of British troops captured at Yorktown in 1781 perished before the end of the war. The numbers on both sides were unprecedented in eighteenth-century European warfare and, particularly in light of the largely pre-war harmony that existed between Britain and its colonies, were ‘shocking to humanity’ (238).
As important as the numbers are, in Captives of Liberty, Jones wants to move beyond simply highlighting the extent and nature of the brutality and terror of what many now call America’s first civil war, and instead chart what he calls the ‘descent’ into a ‘politics of vengeance’ (9). At the start of 1775, no one could have predicted what was to come. People and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic shared a notion of European warfare that was restrained and humane. Officers as well as soldiers expected to be looked after and, if they fought honourably, exchanged and sent home. Only the British believed that the initial skirmishes were the result of the actions of a rebellious few and resorted to more brutal precedents set in Ireland and most recently in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. While patriot leaders in Congress tried to maintain the norms of European warfare to legitimate their status as a new nation-state, they struggled against a popular outcry about the brutal British treatment of American prisoners captured in the Quebec campaign of late 1775. This call for vengeance intensified markedly after the fall of New York in 1776 – when more and more reports came in about the horrific conditions in which American prisoners were kept on board the hulks lying at anchor off Manhattan.
The second half of this meticulously researched book details the loss of control over the fate of British prisoners in the face of what Jones calls ‘the violence of the democratization of war’ (11). When Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, Congress bowed to intense popular pressure and openly reneged on its promises to officers and soldiers alike. Thereafter, the patriots struggled to feed, house, clothe and protect the prisoners as few across the states wanted to take any responsibility for them. The culmination of the spiralling politics of vengeance came in the brutal back-country civil war that developed in the southern states, especially after the fall of Charleston in 1780 when, as Jones notes, patriots embraced retaliation for enemy atrocities and ‘engaged in a cycle of revengeful violence in the last years of the war that would have been unthinkable at its outset’ (10).
T. Cole Jones is to be commended for this invaluable contribution to our understanding of the ways in which a War for Independence became a destructive Revolutionary War that had far-reaching political effects. For in the end, what was perhaps more remarkable than the violence itself was the speed with which the story of the conflict was sanitized by a handful of nationalists eager to tame what they saw as an ‘excess of democracy’ let loose during the war – as they took back control with the passage of the new Federal Constitution. In a brief but illuminating conclusion, Jones notes the roles of politicians, painters and early elite historians in downplaying the unruly violence that was so intrinsic to the birth of the nation – while pointing to the need to look more closely at the histories of those who could not forget it. We would do well to remember the human cost behind and because of the narratives we spin.