The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

The lucky ones could build a fire every three days. Many cell blocks lacked hearths or wood. Vermin infested the bedding straw. “It was bad in every sense of the word,” wrote a surgeon’s mate captured in August, “a dirty place, the prisoners wallowing in their own filth.” A British captain acknowledged, “If once they are taken sick, they seldom recover.” Each morning corpses were pitched from the cells, then hauled off on the dead cart to trenches beyond the Jews’ Burial Ground and other grave sites. Prisoners also endured psychological torture. Major Otho Holland Williams of Maryland, badly wounded and captured in mid-November, described being forced to sit on a coffin in a wagon bed with a noose around his neck in a mock execution; others were required to select the rope with which they preferred to be hanged—someday—from several lengths dangled before them. Colonel Robert Magaw, the garrison commander captured at Fort Washington, and six other imprisoned officers wrote to General Howe in mid-December, noting conditions “too melancholy for recital” and requesting proper care for the sick and wounded. By the end of December, according to the historian Edwin G. Burrows, disease and starvation would kill at least half of the Americans captured on Long Island and as many as two-thirds of those taken at Fort Washington—more than two thousand men in all.