Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War by Edwin G. Burrows

Author:Edwin G. Burrows [Burrows, Edwin G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780786727049
Google: vpUs4J8XEXoC
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2008-11-11T06:00:00+00:00

But over in Brooklyn, slower to urbanize than its neighbor across the East River, the past would not be scrubbed away so easily. For many years after the end of the war, the sandy beaches of Wallabout Bay remained littered with the bones of men who died in the prison ships—one resident of the area described skulls lying about as thick as pumpkins in an autumn cornfield—while the abandoned black hulk of the Jersey slowly broke up out in the mud flats beyond. In 1792, some residents of Brooklyn village talked about re-interring the bones in the graveyard of the Dutch Reform Church, only to be thwarted by a developer who had recently acquired land on the south side of the bay and said that all the remains belonged to him.8

The outbreak of war in Europe later that same year nonetheless kept the controversy boiling. Americans disagreed, passionately and often violently, over which of the combatants deserved the country’s support—Britain, where George III still sat on the throne, or France, where the Revolution had just toppled Louis XVI. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, seeing the chance to strike another blow against British tyranny, urged President Washington not to renege on the Franco-American alliance of 1778. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton countered that the United States had no duty to support the revolutionaries in France and that another war with Britain would be ruinously expensive. In 1793, Washington declared neutrality. The rancor in his cabinet, however, soon spawned the new nation’s first political parties, the pro-French Democratic-Republicans and the pro-British Federalists. It did not take long for the organizers of New York’s fledgling Democratic-Republican organization to conclude that all those bones of the prison ship dead in Brooklyn could serve as talismans of popular resistance to British aggression on both sides of the Atlantic—sacred relics, not merely of “unfortunate men,” as Congress had described them a decade earlier, but of martyrs in the struggle against oppression and injustice.

Perhaps the earliest indication of this shift in perception came from an up-and-coming Republican operative named Matthew Davis. In 1794, Davis proposed erecting a monument on the shores of Wallabout Bay, near the “neglected and unhonored” bones of the thousands who died there during the Revolutionary War. It would stand “as a grateful memorial of the services which those heroes rendered their country; and transmit to posterity, a sense of the virtue and merits of their ancestors, that thus they may know the value of liberty, and view with abhorrence, the schemes of tyranny and arbitrary power.” Davis’s idea received much wider attention in 1800, when Jonathan Russell, a rising young Republican orator in Rhode Island, proposed building “one vast ossory [sic]” as a permanent memorial to the 11,000 “willing martyrs” murdered on the Jersey. Or, if not an ossuary, then “a Colossal Column whose base sinking to Hell, should let the murderers read their infamy inscribed upon it; and whose capital of Corinthian laurel ascending to Heaven, should show the sainted Patriots that they have triumphed.

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