Some loyalists believed that everyone captured should be put to the sword. “The most rigid severity at the first would have been the greatest mercy and lenity in the end,” wrote Thomas Jones, a former New York supreme court judge and Yale graduate. But Captain Mackenzie told his diary on November 17, “I am of opinion it is right to treat our enemies as if they might one day become our friends.” Few friends would emerge from the ordeal ahead, given the barbaric treatment of American prisoners. Within eighteen months, roughly two-thirds of those captured at Fort Washington would be dead from
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