Reviewed by: Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones Noah Shusterman T. Cole Jones, Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Pp. 336; 11 illus. $39.95 cloth. In the fall of 1776, George Washington received a letter from William Howe criticizing the conditions in which British prisoners of war were being held, including the American practice of holding them in common jails. Such treatment of soldiers, Howe noted, was not in line with the "Custom of War." Nor was it consistent with Washington's own views of how war should be conducted. According to T. Cole Jones, Howe's reproach "hit a nerve" with Washington, for whom "any feeling of indignation was overcome by shame" (100). Washington had hoped to lead a well-trained army in a European-style war against the British army, following the rules of war that prevailed in Europe at the time—norms that included humane treatment of all prisoners, and through which captured officers were freed on their own parole. But the American Revolutionary War was something different. This was in part because the British, at the start, were hesitant to categorize the Americans as enemy soldiers. The British saw the Americans as "rebels" and therefore outside of the rules of war, as they had declared the Jacobites during the 1740s. Over the course of the war, Washington eventually realized that his view of what the war should be was one that few of his fellow Americans shared. Instead, British prisoners who had surrendered under relatively lenient agreements (including at Saratoga and at Yorktown) found themselves facing a population that wanted vengeance. Local governments responsible for keeping the prisoners according to the terms of the surrender agreements had neither the desire nor the funding to do so. Congress accomplished little other than the occasional retroactive rejection of the surrender agreements which, in practice, had long become dead letters. American prisoners, meanwhile, were held in near-starvation conditions in prisons or even on boats anchored offshore, where diseases ran rampant. Though part of the Americans' mistreatment was a result of British disdain for the rebels, they also suffered from Congress's inability to foot the bill for their food and lodging. As the war dragged on, military leaders on both sides hoped for large-scale prisoner exchanges. For a variety of reasons, including confusion on the American side about the respective prerogatives of state, local, and national governments, those exchanges rarely occurred, and the men were left to either wait out the war in prison or escape. Captives of Liberty, which grew out of Jones's doctoral dissertation, is a detailed and thorough history of the way that the British treated their American prisoners of war and, even more, the way that the Americans treated British prisoners. It is divided into five chapters, organized chronologically and following the course of the war. Jones incorporates an impressive amount of evidence. Its most striking passages are also its bleakest, a result of Jones's decision to center "the war and its consequent horrors." Including both large-scale surveys of the sweep of the war and specific vignettes—many of them horrific—Jones traces the history of prisoners from 1775 until 1783, and also shows how violence toward prisoners increased over the course of the war. By the end, during the Southern Campaign, the story is one of "bloodlust" and kangaroo courts, especially in the violence between local loyalists and patriots (202). [End Page 576] There is a curious tension throughout the book, though—almost as if Jones shares some of Washington's disappointment. By the end of the book, after reading about the repeated failures of Congress to arrange any large-scale prisoner transfers, the numerous attacks on British prisoners by their guards or by local patriots, the population's continued calls for retaliation against prisoners of war, and the willingness on so many levels to ignore agreed-upon conditions for the prisoners' surrender, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the war was waged by a bloodthirsty population and...
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Sep 2, 2024
Nigel Gould-Davies 
Open Access