Privatizing Prisoner Management: The British Garrison of Fort Ticonderoga in American Captivity, 1775–77

Less than a month after shots were fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, a motley crew of outlaws-turned-soldiers surprised and seized Fort Ticonderoga and its garrison of over fifty British soldiers and civilian followers. Ticonderoga’s guns and munitions would eventually enable General George Washington to drive the British from Boston, securing the first American victory of a war that would become a revolution. But in the days immediately following the fort’s fall, Ethan Allen and the captors of Ticonderoga had more pressing concerns. What were they to do with the enemy in their hands? By analyzing the captivity experience of Ticonderoga’s prisoners—the first sizable contingent of British prisoners in American custody—this paper reveals the factors that coalesced to shape America’s first POW policy: a policy predicated on the exploitation of prisoner labor.

When Ticonderoga fell, few in the revolutionary movement had contemplated what to do with the prisoners their forces would inevitably capture. Unwilling to release the men, Allen had little choice but to foist his prisoners on the neighboring colonial governments. After some debate, the problem of housing, clothing, feeding, and guarding the prisoners fell to Connecticut’s Jonathan Trumbull, the only royal governor to support the resistance movement. The combination of colonial labor shortages, military necessity, and precedent from prior imperial conflicts induced Trumbull to outsource the prisoners’ management to local farmers willing to pay for their labor. Rather than exchange the prisoners for Americans in British custody, as was the custom in contemporary European warfare, Trumbull kept them at work in the fields and domestic manufactories near Hartford for over a year. By hiring-out Ticonderoga’s garrison, Trumbull effectively privatized the administration of enemy prisoners, creating a model for American POW management that would remain more or less intact for the remainder of the eight-year struggle.