clinton made some mistakes in reenforcing cornwallis because he sent about 6,000 troops? >> in fact, he could have recall the cornwallis entirely to a new york which is probably what he should have done. he knew as early as june that cornwallis was in virginia and, in fact, by late may or the first of june he knew that cornwallis was in virginia and at some point during the summer he gets intelligence reports that indicates that they are bringing the french fleet from the caribbean north. he doesn't know where he is coming but he knows he is coming to the north and he guessed that they were coming to new york and he thought that there would be a campaign that rochambeau and washington would try to take new

york and he could have recall the clinton -- cornwallis at that point to new york. he did and i think in part because he expected some reinforcements from the caribbean himself up which he got then turned out to be useless because washington did not attack me york but he did get those reinforcements and he thought there would be adequate but also because he was confident that the allies in just could not succeed in an attack on york. that he had the capability to repulsed an attack and then cornwallis' could go from there in virginia. >> you historians that no have a grasp of this time like you do, john is a pleasure to have a here. >> thank you. [applause]

>> join us sunday at noon for in depth with historian john ferling. edwin burrows talks about the over 30,000 recons were prisoners of war during the american revolution. he says 6000 american men died during battle and close to 18,000 died in prison. this program hosted by the national archives in washing the nbc last about an hour. >> is a real pleasure to be here talking to you about this book because my first opportunity to speak about "forgotten patriots" outside new york so this is the

launching of my road show and an eager to find out what you think. wants to begin our conversation today by reading several passages from the book that will give you a sense of its range and a stone and then alan to speak very briefly about several key issues that are likely to be on everybody's mind in. and after that we can open the floor to questions. i want to pick up the story in the winter of 1776, 77 by which time the british had taken more than 5,000 prisoners. about a thousand of these have been captured at the bottom line of brooklyn in august of 1776, several thousand more falun were taken prisoner when a washington fell in november of that. the ballots were taken infighting around new york city and from snack in white plains and elsewhere.

these prisoners were held in a variety of public and private buildings in the city. the municipal almshouse, and have a dozen churches, the king's college building, a couple of sugar houses and taverns. they were also held on a pair of broken down warships stripped of sales, masts and other usable equipment. that are pressed into service as prison hoax. by the end of the year warner both of these ships were anchored in wall about bacon a shallow inlet on the brooklyn side of the east river. to the man to the americans invaded to the winter of 1776, 77 told a of almost unimaginable horrors. james little was on a ship so crowded he wrote that the men could not lie down all it wants and their rations barely

sufficed to keep body and soul together. in the morning the receives half a pint of a watery stools coming in the evening and they received a scraps of cannabis can't. be added in the putrefied stagnated air of a hold of the vessel crowded with berman, he and his companions scrupulously paint -- made and people and once the smallpox began its deadly work the mortality was just heartbreaking. every morning little recall the dead bodies were hoisted on back coming cannonball fastened to them and they were thrown overboard with a shout of, there goes another damnyankee rebel. little also remembered that when eyes against got permission to bury his father in the winter, he as well as the two friends he took with him to help, none of them wearing proper clothing does so chilled and frozen that they died soon after their return. in the narrative that he said the paper for his children

ichabod perry then a 17 year-old private from fairfield, connecticut describe the other darkness of his first night aboard the ships when he and the other men were packed so tightly that as many as a third of them suffocated by morning. it took us the better part of the day to pull out the dead he wrote, the survivors had rations not fit for hogs and as soon became delirious with hunger. perry himself began to think that i eat my own flesh without wincing. because only a few prisoners were allowed on deck at a time, we had no means for cleansing ourselves, our outside close were glazed over an hour under close was not much better. one of those around first of february 1777, perry somehow manage to make it home partly neighbors to draw 1 foot after the other he said been eager to be exchanged so i can be at them

again. david thorpe, a native of woodbury connecticut recalled that ford is a week his eight men ms received nothing to eat except several points of the wormy zero mail, on the other three days each of them had 2 ounces of salt beef with a little hard biscuits. once they had no fresh water for three days. did not take long before the man held under these conditions began sinking into a kind of catatonic despondency. initially held in the north dutch church and then held in a ship recorded their decline in his diary. sunday, the eighth of december december 1776, this day we were almost discouraged but consider that would not do. castoff such thoughts. we would eat are bred any with sadness, spent the day reading an invitation hoping for good

news. friday the 13th of december, 1776, we now see nothing but the mercy of god to intercede for us. soren full-time, all phases of palin discouraged. tuesday the 17th, we are treated worse than cattle and hogs. friday the 20th, prisoners in their heads and look pale, no comfort. all ciro. cindy the 22nd, less nine nothing but rose on light of sick and dying, men amazing to be holding them all basis that. , the 23rd, one that is almost every day. friday the 27, three men of our italian died last night. been known to imagine that things are in the easier for the thousands left behind in your churches in the bridewell or provost or city hall or the

sugar houses. private thomas point of pennsylvania recall the wormy fruit, putrid water, random fulani's in the gaging fetter a year in an experiment and so much sadness that burial parties would remove 10 or 20 bodies every morning. henry franklin, a quaker who visited the north dutch church only to this after the fall for washington testified that the men in there were already fighting over scraps. two those who were modest and backward he added that and get little or none. capt. edward boils in the snatch by tories near his new jersey home in january 1777 found himself in livingston sugarhouse. here he wrote with such the filthy state of things the was not a place to live down from rest to my day or night but upon the excrements' but the prisoners and to sleep was only certain death. with the yellow fever, want and suffering the prisoners were

dying constantly and it was impossible to move about without stumbling over the dead and dying. one of the private inmates confirmed under oath that he and his companions were allowed every three days, one half pound of biscuit, half a pound of pork, half a pint of peace, have a deal of rice and a half an ounce of bader. the whole lot more than enough for one good meal. and had no hay or straw to lie on he wrote in no fuel but when a carload per week for 800 men. every night at nine he added hessian guards would come in to douse the fires covering prisoners to fill to get out of the way fast enough. the enemy seem to take a cut in internal pleasure in our sufferings he recalled. unsurprisingly the man began to die like ron sheep with cold hundred injured. one purportedly not his arms to

keep from starving to death. in a man was said to have expired while trying to eat a brick. by the end of 1776, disease and starvation have killed a least half of the men taken prisoner on long island and perhaps two-thirds of those captured at fort washington. somewhere between 2000 and 2500 men in the space of two months know no one will know for sure. the impact on local communities was crashing. of the 36 men from litchfield, connecticut who helped defend a fort washington, four were killed and 32 taken prisoner. twenty of them died in the presence of new york. another six on the way home. comey six return to the litchfield, six of the original 36. have a company of 100 men a

raise in denver was captured at fort washington and confined in one of the sugar houses, two of them survived. some pounds may have lost everyone. at dinner one night in april april 1777 admiral howe secretary heard of a little town in connecticut that had turned out 220 man for the american cause. every last one of whom died in battle or succumb to disease and one of the presence of new york. many families appear to have been entirely wiped out or nearly sell. two of the three sons were taken prisoner at for washington, one lost both the to frostbite trying to walk home from new york in the dead of winter. the other returned home with smallpox and died, but not before infecting his has been who subsequently died as well. kinetic it was not alone a.

of the 130 militiamen from northampton county pennsylvania were captured on long island only 40 made it out of new york alive. from all thomas farley inform the general washington and to be rid of 1777 that of the many men from your county who fell prisoner at fort washington only a handful live he wrote to tell the doleful story of their captivity and distress. almost all of them had died within days of rejoining their families. so 217 young men from berkeley county virginia took part in the defense of fort washington and run up in prisons of new york city. 15 of the 17 did not survive the winter of, their names and dates of death sorrowfully reported in the journal of the captain who had the lead them so far from home. of the two ailing survivors only one lived until summer of. stories of this kind wrapped in prided and bitterness and grief

suffused local memory in family legend for generations of. nearly 60 years later a newspaper editor in interest massachusetts would give his readers in a long and haunting account of how his late father was beaten and robbed by the rent of two captured him in january 1777. after a week's confinement on an unnamed prison ship he was put in livingston's sugarhouse recession was in the full lisa of things he wrote that there is not a place to lie down for rest day nor night but upon the actions of the prisoners. and was a story his son erode he never forgot. as a pencil, one right in that letter to washington and the influence these things will have upon the country will take a long time to wear off. pass for a couple years to 1779, a couple of years and about 100

pages of the book to a somewhat different topic. and the summer of 1779 in philadelphia printer named robert bell began to advertise a slender volume that would transform the way americans understood and responded to the abuse of prisoners in your. this was the grand eloquent taino narrative of colonel ethan allen captivity from the time of his being taken by the british on the 20th day in 1775 to the time of his exchange on the sixth of may 1778 written by himself and. it was an immediate best-seller. ellen's narrative would be reprinted eight times before the end of the war and would go on to be one of the most widely read books in the united states during the first half of the 19th century. alan success stems in part from advance publicity that most authors only dream about.

did anyone in the country cannot know by 1779 and lease the general outlines of his career as a prisoner of war? he had been taken prisoner during invasion of canada, home off to england in chains and then thrown into the provost in new york and so on. his only rival as a celebrity captive was general charles lee. and thanks to his recent showing of the battle of poorhouse lee was in disgrace. the timing also helped his reputation in the phil's of his book. even though the abuse of american prisoners was not news by 1779 noam before alan had given the reading public a full length firsthand blow by blow account when it was like to be caught and held by the enemy. how more than anything else and i think the distinctive popularity of allen's book reflected the distinctive

contribution that made to the robust tradition of captivity narratives real and imagined it known to every literate american in the final decades of 18th-century. the jews in egypt, christian martyrs, john smith and virginia, robinson crusoe, glover, the locutions, the black hole of calcutta, the list goes on and on, it's a very long one. ninety-two captivity in one form or another, not simply stores about captivity was a very real part of ethan allen's world. think of imprisonment for debt, the practices of indentured servitude and, of course, slavery. now, in the are typical narrative falling in the hands of one's narrative is shameful things gone wrong. is a mark of failure. personal or collective or above that cries out for explanation

and accountability. the capt. story in the traditional format becomes a quest for redemption, getting to the end it means a re-education, transformation, even rebirth. the person who emerges from captivity is not the same person who was taken prisoner paragon but ellen's narrative works differently. his captivity is not the consequence of sinfulness or moral turpitude or incompetence, let alone cowardice. he surrendered to the enemy, for the eminently sensible reason that he and his men were cornered. is an explanation, but not an apology. he committed no crime infighting for his country, he refuses to be labeled a rebel. he demands to be treated, in fact, as a gentleman of the military establishment. thus, his subsequent career as a

captive cannot be understood as a voyage of self discovery or moral progress because he never had second thoughts or regrets. the cause i was engaged in he writes i ever viewed as worth has in my life for, nor was i the most critical moments of trouble sign that i engaged in at. indeed, instead of making him conscious of his own shortcomings captivity awakens him to those of his enemies. his encounters with haughty malicious officers, venal ship captains and foul mouth guards to teach him that british civility is a hoax. britons he realized revel in cruelty as other authors had written, cruelty is international trade, the personality so to speak of tyrrany. and the outrage are rows across america is why there can be no peace without independent.

of i know you have individuals who still retain their virtue he tells his captors directly, but as a nation i hate and despise you so when he finally regains his freedom at the conclusion of the narrative is not because his odyssey through british jails and prisons ships made him a different person but precisely because he remained at the same person, a full blooded yankee he writes in the bitter and. less than a year after the initial publication of narrative americans were confronted by a new horror, the prison ship jersey easily the biggest daedalus' of her kind in the revolutionary war. she would claim some elias during her brief time that for generations she was served as the most widely recognized symbol of it british cruelty. worse than the provost, more shocking than the sugarhouses.

once in 1736, the jersey had seen in decades of service in the mediterranean as a fourth rate frigate and before the navy converted terror to a hospital ship from 1771. she came to new york with the rest of the fleet in the summer of 1776 and is one of the largest vessels imports, the great black coal would have been a familiar sight to residents of the city. in april or early may of 1780 the royal navy moved the jersey too well about bay or she was presumably refitted to begin receiving prisoners. hoping the jersey for use as a prison ship began with a mole of her mass candice lines, or illness, figurehead and writer, her downpours for then sealed and replaced by two small rose at airports part with and lattices for the benefit of prisoners confined on her lower tax. on the quarterdeck enlarge on in our tent shelter 30 on marines

who watched through holes in a 10-foot high barricade when the prisoners came up on deck to exercise. on the part of the gun deck directly below the quarterback for the officers kevin and various store rooms. between the court rejected and the gun deck known as the spar deck, it too was successful the prisoners during the day though a good bit of it was only a per. foreign where half of this is kept pace with their own consumption. in the bay massive chain cables for an after anchored the jersey securely in the shallow channels that lived between the mud flats, she lay about 100 yards off shore opposite that mouth of the race and sheltered from the weather by the grassy sandbanks that itch to the bay to the south and east, none of that course is now survived and entranced formed into the brooklyn navy yard. the rising and falling tides camp of the water in the channel moving but never saw a fleet

enough to clear away the greasy slick that encircled her after the necessary tubs were brought up from below and emptied over the sign in a daily ritual. a flock of smaller vessels usually hovered nearby, among them though not always at the same time the john, bristol and appear have transferred sometimes boys took prisoners. exactly when the jurors to begin to receive american prisoners is unclear, it may have been when she missed those services and hospital ship. the ones she became a prisoner of the numbers soared and conditions rapidly deteriorated and among her first prisoners which john van dyke road into a man who had the misfortune of being travelling on the brink of a stick and by the enemy frigate iris. he and the others were taken to new york in consign on the jersey toward the end of may 70. when i came on board man i

recall, for stench was so great i thought it would soon kill me beer down the ration's he received were so short a person would think it was not passed -- possible for a man to live on. and once vandyke came from the valley with a piece of salt pork so small that he and his five mismates had only one mouthful each and i think also the entire day. another time the had only some suit that consisted of brown water and 15 floating peace. to hold them for 24 hours. each week they received 3 pounds of flour contain strange gloves with a pound of very bad reasons. all they mashed this all together and will live in a bag to make a kind of putting and this he recorded became known as putting a pair of although captain vandykes more will not be published until long after his death american newspaper soon gave their readers plenty of comparable stories about the

jurors a two worry about. most frequently reprinted was a deposition taken from george patterson, a prisoner on the jersey with said that when he was sent to board and the autumn of 17 the jersey held an astonishing 1100 prisoners, three times for normal component of seamen. to soften them up for royal navy recruiters, their rations were recruited to a pint of water and 8 ounces of condemned% per day. plus 8 ounces of meat per week. american officers who urged them in to resist or thrown into the process. one of his fellow prisoners that fall with silas talbott, a privateer captain and a providence, rhode island are a known for wrecking havoc with enemy shipping. twenty-three years later he described a world below decks for which is a miracle anyone

emerged saying little long live. ever know burst receipts to lie on he wrote. not a bench to sit on. many men were almost without close. the dysentery, fever, friends in the. prevailed among them until the place with filth, the stuffed in horror. the steadiness of the lounge, the bad quality of the provisions, brutality of the guards and the sick pifer conference all together furnish continuing. one of the greatest scenes of human distress and misery i ever be held. it was now the middle of october, the weather was: clear, so that the number of deaths per day was reduced to an average of 10. in december was considered by the survivors and small one and compared with a terrible mortality that had prevailed for most earlier parked on contemporary accounts confirm the accuracy of his memory that prisoners on the jersey virtue

with unparalleled severely inhumanity, they received only a few dances of bad meat per week and fought like wild beasts to get near the small airports so they can. and seminar in of them died every 24 hours. well, there is a lot more of that, but hopefully you get the point. after the passage of 200 years he might think that there isn't much left to be said about the revolutionary war. curiously however, historians have never paid much attention to what became of americans captured by the enemy in the course of that conflict. a visit to your local library might turn up a couple of dry monographs that you with logistical and diplomatic issues and are so specialized articles an academic journals, but that is all. it is no exaggeration to say that for gone patriots is the first-ever attempt to address this whole story from start to

finish. i'm sure you have questions but before we get to the questions i want to say a few words about several key issues very quickly. health news of the issues that i think reviewers' likely to focus on and it seems they want on the right to resume use myself. in anticipation of the reviews. of the first of the problems is the problem of numbers, tried to figure out exactly how many people were talking about and that is not easy because, in fact, the records of this story are scattered and not very accurate. between 1775 and 1783 something like 200,000 americans took up arms against the crown, that is roughly 40 percent of the white male population 16 years of age or older in the country and fewer than 3 million inhabitants. of cornyn to the most recent

scholarly tabulations slightly over 1600 of those 200,000 men died in battle and another 10,000 in camp from wounds or disease in a minimum of 18,000 were thought to be prisoners of war. on the 18,200 is only the minimum number and includes a police soldiers and sailors were in the uniform of the continental forces or those of the individual states. when it doesn't include enacting this is important, what it does include of the thousands of seafaring men captured aboard private tears some of whom were a little better than pirates. it doesn't include thousands of clergymen, politicians and other prominent civilians who were jailed in new york for advocating independence, these are so-called prisoners of state, we would call them political prisoners. neither does that figure included hundreds of american

soldiers and seamen who were taken prisoner and actions to small to be reported or not captured in battle at all but off-duty so to speak at home ploughing their fields or like general charles lee, sitting in a tavern someplace. .. toll will never be known. although the available evidence suggests the mortality rate hovered between 60, and 70%.

for example, of the 2700 men captured at fort washington in november, 1776, 1100 died over the winter. it bears mentioning that the mortality rate among union prisoners. it was the 85%. a 60% mortality rate would mean an overall total of 18,000 fatalities. during the revolutionary war, more americans lost their lives in the prisons and prison ships of new york than anywhere else, between two and three times as many as died in combat. nobody was surprised when the marshal the credit for killing more rebels in new york and the

rest of his majesty's forces combined. it was there, not in boston or valley forge, where the vast majority of americans gave their lives for independence. it is the mean, ugly story, it is also a story that enlarges our understanding of how the united states was made. not merely by gentlemen in powdered wickes, but thousands upon thousands of ordinary people who believed in something they considered worth dying for. the second problem that may very well occur to you, as the discussion proceeds, the problem of intention. numbers is the first problem, the problem of intention is the second. almost from the very beginning, americans denounced the deaths of so many prisoners as systematic, cold-blooded murder. to day, we would be tempted to

use terms like ethnic cleansing or genocide. a congressional committee collected batches of sworn eyewitness reports confirming the mistreatment of american captives. the american, sayre general of prisoners made an inspection to the new york and return with hair raising accounts of conditions in the prisoners. were the british deliberately killing prisoners in new york? was this, in some sense, intentional? i think the answer depends on what you mean by deliberate. if you mean a consciously formulated policy communicated in writing from the king to his ministers to generals in the

field, the answer is probably no. there isn't any evidence that i have seen to support the claim that the -- thousand american pows was intentional or premeditated. as has often been pointed out, there were extenuating circumstances. the british army in america often found itself short of provisions, and the wonder sometimes is that prisoners got anything to eat at all. redcoats too were afflicted with smallpox, dysentery, and other diseases. the mortality rate on the voyage from england to america was always horrendous. nobody in the eighteenth century ever treated prisoners well. keep in mind the following. his majesty's government had threatened for years before the war to hang every american taken in arms against the crown. england had a long history of

suppressing the uprisings without mercy. everybody at the time of the american revolution new about the blood bath that had followed the scottish uprising in 1745, and more than a few officers in america were veterans of that brutal business. like the colonial secretary, they believed american prisoners, american rebels should be treated with as much severity as their scottish and irish counterparts, as indeed they were. too, the case of ethan allen prove instructive. after his capture, the government brought him back to england for a date with the hangman. they got rid of habeas corpus which would have forced them to be produced in court and run risk of a public trial. before it could be delivered, allen was hustled back to

america, beyond the reach of metals and judges and juries. a year later parliament suspended habeas corpus, allowing captured americans to be confined indefinitely without the need to file charges against them. that they were then treated indifferently at best should come as no surprise. it is worth adding here that the british were under no formal obligation to take better care of their prisoners in any case. by the 18th-century it was generally agreed that disarmed adversaries should not be executed, humiliated, tortured or mutilated, they should not be denied ransom, prosecuted as criminals or enslaved, they should not be denied appropriate, food, clothing, and shelter. none of this had been notified in multinational trees or conventions, nor would it be for more than a century. the so-called rules of war, exculpated by jurists, were

largely theoretical and not enforceable. they were not rules strictly speaking, merely optimistic guidelines for mitigating the severity of armed conflict between purportedly civilize princes. whether they even applied in cases like domestic insurrections or rebellion was, and still is, open to question. besides parliament and the administration adamantly refused to classify americans as prisoners of war until after yorktown when the independents of the united states could be denied the longer. british commanders knew full well what was happening in the jails and prisons in america. they knew that americans are dying by the thousands in those places, yet they did nothing. none of them ever bothered to deny that the mortality in those places was truly heartbreaking.

there's one last problem that might have occurred to you, and i want to say something briefly about it, that is the problem of memory. why has this extraordinary story remained largely unknown, a mere footnote to the revolutionary epoch? there are a couple reasons that come to mind. one of them that will make sense to a new york audience, whether it quite grips an audience out of new york as it would residents of new york is the relentless transformation of the city's build environment over the last 200 years. other than st. paul's chapel, completed in 1766, and tiny bowling green at the foot of broadway which as some of you already know, has the same cast iron fence around it that it did when the revolution began, every tangible connection to the city's revolutionary past has vanished. of the places where thousands of american prisoners died from

starvation and disease, the churches, jail, prison ships, nothing survives. it is all gone. most of these places had disappeared from the urban landscape well before the civil war. fink for a moment about the difference between new york and philadelphia or boston. these cities have preserved multiple physical links to the revolution. carpenter's hall, bunker hill, paul revere's house and countless other places that sum up the memory of long ago people in any events. new york, on the other hand, is the most historic site of places. residents glory in the defeat of history. they have no patience with it. they come to escape the past, not to find it, they want to start over, fresh, free of the dead weight of musty tradition and look ahead to the future. what happened before is of no consequence, there too busy. in this sense it is not surprising that the story of

those suffering revolutionary war prisoners has been so neglected. so has almost everything else in new york connecting its residents to the resolution -- revolution. why is it hard to remember the biggest battle of the war was fought in brooklyn? because the site has long ago vanished. has been paved over, built up an offense in. is just not there any longer. there are a few monuments, the prison ship martyr's monument. on monument to the sugar house prisoners in trinity church. but that is not the same as the real place. that is not the only reason the story of the prisoners of new york has disappeared. i would suggest there's another one, that is the anglo-american -- that germinated for the end of the nineteenth century and bloomed in the heat of two world

wars. historians in those years like to dwell upon the english foundation of the american values and institutions. there was spirited talking the 89s and 1900s of anglo-saxon racial unity and anything that threatened to revive memories of the long, bitter struggle for american independence actually began to seem downright disloyal. consider, for example, the story of the spirit of '76, a silent film with graphic scenes of british brutality. it was famously suppressed under the espionage act of 1917, and its producer was sentenced to 12 years in a federal penitentiary. why? the judge explained, because he created animosity or loss of confidence the tween us and our allies. in new york, fewer and fewer residents to pardon the city's annual celebration of the evacuation day, nov. 20 fifth,

seventeen eighty-three, the day the red goes filing left manhattan. its last official observance attended by if you score old veterans, took place in 1916. not surprisingly, historians began to suggest that this was largely propaganda, founded on the bitter feeling of the day. later in the twentieth century, at the height of the cold war, of our most eminent historians, samuel eliot morison, made the same point in his biography of john paul jones, we shouldn't dwell on what happened to american prisoners during the revolution, he said, because it only provide fuel for american anglophobes. it happened, but no good purpose is served by continuing to talk about it. the pow story did not disappear, in other words, it was buried.

thank you. [applause] >> now is your time to tell me what you have in mind. please. >> do i go to a microphone? >> yes, that is what we should do so it can be properly documented. >> thank you for bringing this to light. this doesn't get enough publicity. two questions, what did the main general no? secondly, did the americans make a mistake in not retaliating? they had scores of prisoners of their own take and on ships and in battle. they had retaliated and done similar treatment, would that

have save some lives were to be a credit of the americans they didn't do that? >> the short answer to the first question, what did he know and when did he know it, he knew the whole thing and he knew it pretty early in the game. there was no lack of information about this, officers on his staff knew it. americans were getting out letters which had to pass through the censors before they could be sent across the lines detailing these things. it was widely known among staff, he himself was informed by washington on numerous occasions. i have absolutely no doubt that he was perfectly aware of this. i think he just didn't care at needed did general quinn who succeeded him. the second question about retaliation is an interesting one. there was a lot of talk on the american side, particularly in congress, about retaliating. they came close to doing about a number of occasions. washington did not like the idea

of retaliation. he was always deeply troubled by the implications. he was aware that it was very important for the american army and himself personally to appear conventional, as if -- to appear to conventional and legitimate and he was worried that if americans began retaliating on british prisoners in their hands that it would only look bad in international opinion. to his credit, he always stepped away from the temptation to do that and insisted, unlike his british counterparts, on treating prisoners well. thank you. yes? >> my thanks, it was really pretty neat. i have a question on a certain family, clark family, fighting in the civil war. william clark became louis clark, the older brother, george rogers clark, held together western wing from the

encirclement by his incredible deeds. they had brothers in between them that were on -- i wonder if you had come upon their story at all. and if not, if you could comment on the war of 1812 warships that have to lot of the british sailors. >> the short answer is no, i don't think i did, but there were some letters from the clarks, out in madison. i didn't have a chance to look at those but i seem to recall something about that. i added database of all the names, but i don't remember anything about the clarks specifically. the second question had to do

with the war of 1812. i'm going to duck that because of the war of revolution, i didn't get a chance to get into the war of 1812 but i will say that the war of 1812 was important in reviving this story momentarily during the nineteenth century. it was during the run up to the war of 1812 that the society in new york fixed on this story and the last chapter in my book is about the ups and downs of historical memory of this and it was that society that began to collect bonus and make plans and collect money to put up some kind of memorial for the prisoners which really didn't happen until the early part of the 20th-century. it was a kind of stimulus to remembering this story but it didn't last because of years after the end war of the war it

disappeared from view again. >> did the british used torture to interrogate or give information? >> i only had a few cases, the answers to that is clearly no. in fact, oddly enough, one of the common reasons for the mistreatment of prisoners was recruitment, not intelligence gathering. british recruiters in the army and navy regularly patrolled prisons and prison ships, looking for able-bodied men, they were hungry enough to want to stand up, there's a reason to believe that hundred did at various points, signed up with the british to get off of these prison ships are out of the jails. it is true, this is anecdotal, but as soon as they had the

opportunity, absconded from the british had made their way back to american lines. abuse, torture for the purpose of getting information, i don't see very much of that if at all. >> the manner of incarceration by the british rebound against the british or loyalists during or after the war? >> that is why i think the story of each and allen is interesting. what ethan allen said -- benjamin franklin was reading about the abuse of american prisoners and troubled by this. for franklin and many other americans it was a the done thing that convinced them that there could be no reconciliation between the united states and

great britain, that this was, for a lot of people who were sitting on the fence, a little unsure about what made americans different from the mother country, once the stories of prisoner abuse came out it was dramatic. everybody said this is it. now we know what we are fighting about. now we know how different we are from these people. this is the fate that awaits all of us if we don't win. i have some stories of american general's conducting recruiting campaigns. everybody was so angry about it. it was a public-relations disaster for the british and the wonder is that people like general powell or general clinton just never got it. they never understood what a disaster this was. >> what about the treatment of

benjamin franklin? >> i take up briefly the question of whether americans british -- treated british prisoners as badly, there is no doubt that there are comparable stories. the state of new york had its own prison ships that were anchored in the hudson river, in upstate new york. which were every bit as dreadful as british prison ships. the only difference is, if there's a difference, there were far fewer of them. the mortality rates, as far as i can tell, on these prisons, was much lower. nothing to compare with what took place in new york. british prisoners were never held and the kind of concentrations -- they never seemed to have been decimated by

disease. the conditions they were held in were not pretty but the results were not as disastrous as they were for americans in new york. >> are there records of post-traumatic stress among the american population? >> i talked to a couple people giving me advice on how to detect signs of that and i didn't find very much of it accept every so often in a pension application you read a story of a guy in the 1830s or 40s whose life after the war was -- he could never get it together and had problems with drinking and wife beating and all sorts of things, i didn't feel confident enough to deal with it in those terms, but i think there is reason to believe what we would now call post-traumatic stress was a

factor in the lines of these veterans. it would make a wonderful to talk about the lives of veterans after the war, not just former prisoners but guys who had seen combat. it would be an interesting book if you could wait your way through 80,000 pension applications. >> before i came interested in the subject, i had a sense of lot of the blame went to american story joshua loren. is there a sense the british private plane -- they were not at fault? >> i never saw a figurepointing on the british side. they never responded. there was that it -- never an attempt to say it was that guy.

general robertson was the commandant in new york, told elias' that he had been misinformed by his aides and he would see to this problem immediately. this was immediately a hoax because i know he had been in the prison a month or so before. the extraordinary part of the story is the british in difference to the implications of what they were doing. in a lot of ways we use terms like depraved indifference to what they were thinking. >> any indication -- >> it is often said that after saratoga, when americans began capturing large numbers of british prisoners, they necessarily began treating our prisoners better. i have read diaries that cover

those periods, things were bad until the end. >> could you talk about the method of means that you write in the book and the motivation, how long did it take you to write it, where did you write it. >> i wrote it slowly. this is one of the topics that i got intrigued by when i worked on this larger book. i came across this story. the more i read, the less i found. it went on my list of interesting things to look into. when the dust had finally settled from that book, i went back to this, as i began reading

newspapers and looking at pension records. when a story like this gets a hold of you it doesn't let go. it probably took me four or five years. i have a day job, wasn't able to work on it full time. >> to what extent did class considerations contribute to the british treatment of american prisoners? >> in the beginning, a lot. i tell some stories from the very early days of the war, after 4 washington, when british officers, when british officers would encounter their nominal counterparts among americans, they would find there was an american calling himself a captain or a turtle and he was a

shoemaker or storekeeper in private life. the british were indignant that the americans would make an officer out of someone who was not a gentleman. i really do think there was a sense of real indignation, that these people should not, as 1 officer said the we just cannot treat them as if we were on an equality. they call themselves officers but they're clearly not, they're not gentlemen. they have no right to use those kinds of ranks and that kind of terminology. i think it resulted in a lot of trouble for americans in the beginning. my sense is as the war went on, it was a war that lasted seven or eight years, this is one of

the longest wars in american history. by the end of it, the british were taking a different view. there were some officers who go on record as saying halfway through the war, i don't think this is going to be a walk in the park like we imagine. these people are much better than we have given them credit for and those attitudes began to change, but that sense of class hostility was very important in the beginning. >> i don't know if i can reach you. >> there you go. >> this is something i have been interested in for many years. dimension the database. the gentleman who asked, the story is written some place. one of the sons was named james, he came home and died. i am not a virginia expert but i know it is there. you mentioned this database, you

read journals, letters and so on. have you ever made a systematic attempt to go through the british records to see a list of who these men were. >> lot of the british records have been published. facsimiles of them are available in new york. this is something american researchers have been looking for for a long time. in the nineteenth century, george bancroft, a team of people cowering british aircraft. if i had had another couple years and a couple more sabbaticals and my editor hadn't been so impatient, i might have gone over and spend a couple years looking through british archives. i felt, and still do feel, there was a point of diminishing returns on