Captives by Linda Colley

Author:Linda Colley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307425164
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

38. Loyalists rescue a British prisoner of war in America. Conditions were usually much harsher than this.

It seems likely therefore that, in certain peak years in the American Revolutionary War, the number of British soldiers and naval and merchant seamen held captive was in excess of 20,000, particularly since we need to add to the total number of POWs held in America and Europe, men taken in connected battles in the West Indies, in Latin America, in coastal Africa and – as we shall see in a later chapter – in India. Global war resulted in a global pattern of captivities. Yet neither this, nor the poor quality of contemporary record-keeping, is the main obstacle to reconstructing what captivity in this lost imperial war signified for the British. The more intractable and distinctive challenge has to do with definitions. Who, in this conflict, is to be included in an estimate of ‘British captives’? Whom exactly do we count? History is still written overwhelmingly from the viewpoint of the victors, so most accounts of this war conform to the assertions contained in the Declaration of Independence. This means that, after 1775, the main combatants are customarily labelled either as British and pro-British, or as American and pro-American, as though these were distinct, understood and agreed upon polarities at the time. Yet this imposes a degree of clarity and homogeneity on allegiances in this war, and on individual captives, which was often conspicuously absent.

Consider some of the women involved. In 1775, they made up about an eighth of the personnel clustered in the various British army camps in North America. By the end of war, the proportion of women to soldiers in these units was nearer one to four. Inevitably, in the course of battle or in ambushes while on the march, some of these female camp followers and army wives were seized by Revolutionary troops, just as others were raped and/or killed. Just under a quarter of the ‘British’ taken prisoners alongside André in Canada in 1775 are known to have been women and children. Hundreds more women were seized after the British surrender at Saratoga. ‘Such a sordid set of creatures’, wrote one genteel female witness who watched appalled as they tramped past in the wake of their captive menfolk: great numbers of women, who seemed to be the beasts of burthen, having a bushel basket on their back, by which they were bent double, the contents seemed to be pots and kettles, various sorts of furniture, children peeping thro’ gridirons and other utensils, some very young infants who were born on the road, the women bare feet [sic], cloathed in dirty rags, such effluvia filled the air . . . had they not been smoaking at the time, I should have been apprehensive of being contaminated.12

Here was a very different face of British armed imperialism. As the war went on, a growing proportion of these women, who were indispensable to the army in terms of the nursing, cooking and laundrywork they provided, were actually American-born.

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