Prisons and prison-ships, British
The
British in New York confined the
American prisoners of war in various large buildings, the most spacious of which were churches and sugar-houses.
In the
North Dutch Church, corner of Fulton and William streets, were
confined at one time 800 prisoners; and in the Middle Dutch Church, corner of Nassau and Liberty streets, room was made for 3,000 prisoners. Both churches were stripped of their pews, and floors were laid from one gallery to the other.
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Sugar-House in liberty Street. |
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Provost jail. |
Smaller churches were used for hospitals.
Rhinelander's,
Van Cortlandt's, and
Livingston's sugar-houses contained hundreds of prisoners, whose sufferings for want of fresh air, food, and cleanliness were dreadful.
Under Commissaries
Loring,
Sproat, and others, and particularly under the infamous
Provost-Marshal Cunningham, the prisoners in these buildings and the provost jail received the most brutal treatment.
Hundreds died and were cast into pits without any funeral ceremonies.
The heat of summer was suffocating in the sugar-house prisons.
“I saw,” says
Dunlap, in describing the one in Liberty Street, “every narrow aperture of those stone walls filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a portion of the external air.”
For many weeks the deadcart visited this prison (a fair type of the others), into which from eight to twelve corpses were daily flung and piled up. They were then dumped into ditches in the outskirts of the city and covered with earth by their fellow-prisoners, who were detailed for the work.
The prison-ships—dismantled old hulks —lying in the waters around the city, were more intolerable than the prisons on land.
Of these, the
Jersey, lying at the Wallabout, near the site of the
Brooklyn navy-yard, was the most famous.
She was the hulk of a 64-gun ship, in which more than 1,000 prisoners were sometimes confined at one time.
There they suffered indescribable horrors from unwholesome food, foul air, filth, and vermin, and from small-pox, dysentery, and prisonfever that slew them by scores.
Despair reigned there incessantly, for their treatment was generally brutal in the extreme.
Every night the living, dying, and dead were huddled together.
At sunset each day was heard the savage order, accompanied by horrid imprecations, “Down, rebels, down!”
and in the morning the significant cry, “Rebels, turn out your dead!”
The latter were selected from the living, sewed up in blankets, carried on shore, and buried in shallow graves in the sand.
Fully 11,000 were so taken from the
Jersey and buried during the war. In 1808 the bones of these martyrs were gathered by the Tammany Society and placed in a vault near the entrance to the navy-yard, and a magnificent monument was erected and dedicated to their memory in Trinity Church-yard, on
Broadway.
