Patriots or Terrorists? (Fall 2008 | Volume: 58, Issue: 5)

Patriots or Terrorists?

AH article image

Authors: Edwin G. Burrows

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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Fall 2008 | Volume 58, Issue 5

Sometime that seismic spring of 1776, 16-year-old Levi Hanford of Norwalk, Connecticut enrolled in his uncle’s militia company and went to war against the British. He expected to make short work of the enemy. Everybody knew how simple farm boys like himself had just sent the redcoats reeling from Lexington and Concord, then cut them down at Breeds Hill. But Hanford’s war got off to a slow start. Except for a brief stint building fortifications around New York City, his first year under arms consisted mostly of standing watch along the Connecticut coast of Long Island Sound and rounding up Tories. He missed the disastrous Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, in which General William Howe’s redcoats captured a thousand American rebels. Neither was he present two weeks later, when the British swarmed across the East River onto Manhattan, seized the city, and rounded up several hundred more Americans. Hanford did not get his first real taste of action, in fact, until a cold, stormy night in March 1777, when he and a dozen other Connecticut men were surprised and taken prisoner by a Tory raiding party from Huntington, Long Island. What happened next would haunt him until the day he died, 77 years later.

Their captors marched Hanford and his comrades to occupied New York, now the nerve center of British operations in North America and the main holding point for rebel prisoners until the war ended in 1783. Several months before he arrived, more than 5000 of his countrymen had been squeezed into several churches gutted for the purpose, plus a pair of sugar refineries, the municipal jail and almshouse, and even the King’s College building (now Columbia University).

By all accounts, conditions in these makeshift prisons were frightful. The men never had enough clothing, blankets, or firewood. Their rations—when they received them—consisted mostly of rotten pork or beef and scraps of moldy bread. Some inmates ate rats, shoes, and even the lice that covered their bodies. All lost weight, and virtually all exhibited the bleeding gums, open sores, tooth loss, and listlessness characteristic of scurvy. Survivors told of floors slick with human excrement and of air so fetid that candles would not stay lit. Not surprisingly, typhus, dysentery, and other infectious diseases ran rampant, and men died so quickly that burial details could barely keep up. By January or February 1777, it appears that six or seven of every 10 American prisoners had perished—a mortality rate roughly twice that of the infamous Confederate stockade in Andersonville, Georgia. (In World War I, only 3.6 percent of U.S. prisoners died in POW camps. In World War I,I the figure rose to 11.3 percent, and, in Korea, to 37.8 percent.)

Hanford’s destination was a five-story “sugar house” on Crown (now Liberty) Street, just east of Nassau, in what is today the lower Manhattan business district. It had been confiscated from the redoubtable Livingston family, who had built it in the early 1700s to manufacture loaf sugar and rum. The building’s