"Keeping Them Entirely Separate": British Policy and the Threat of Disease in Revolutionary War Pow Camps

To counter what they see as overly sanitized and overly idealized accounts of the American Revolution, historians are now taking pains to underscore the grim violence of the War for Independence. Recent studies, for example, have emphasized the harsh treatment and miserable conditions endured by the war’s prisoners. British officials have been singled out for special condemnation for their punitive and negligent management of their American captives. Edwin Burrow’s research posits that of the almost 30,000 Americans captured, sixty percent or more of them did not survive. While important, however, this new emphasis has occasionally been taken to extremes, with one scholar recently likening British officials to “Nazis” and their detention facilities to “concentration camps.” This interpretation is dangerous, as it provides public memory with an incomplete picture of British policy that is far from reality. This poster seeks to reevaluate British policy by highlighting the motives underlying and the obstacles undermining Britain’s treatment of enemy prisoners while acknowledging the wartime resentments that often-animated prisoner management

Disease and, subsequently, epidemics were a posed and ongoing threat in colonial society and could prove particularly disastrous in times of war. Epidemics posed such a threat to the Continental Army that Washington instituted a policy of mandatory inoculation in 1777 to combat the smallpox epidemic that swept Eastern North America from 1775 to 1782. This epidemic would eventually kill over 100,000 Americans and members of the Royal Army and Navy. The British would face an unprecedented problem related to the disease’s impact on their American captives- self inoculation. Prison officials would ultimately try to curb this problem by imposing the same punishment on self-inoculators as escaped prisoners.

In contrast to Europe, medical education in the American colonies was hard to come by, with one method of becoming a physician simply being to move to a location without one. With medicine being less professionalized in North America, and the increased frequency of smallpox epidemics continuing to ravage the population, it is little wonder that many American soldiers and seamen were familiar with the process of inoculation, regardless of whether they had been inoculated themselves. But, one aspect of inoculation was largely lost on the American colonists, for even when inoculation was administered by a physician, many patients would ignore the suggested quarantine period which resulted in inoculated individuals infecting those they encountered. This could prove catastrophic within the cramped confines of British detention facilities.

British policy concerning the spread of disease depended upon the resources the prison had available. The Mill Prison in Plymouth, England, provided better access to food, healthcare, and supplies than would the infamous Sugar House and prison ships of New York. This poster will compare the spatial bounds of these prisons to highlight the ways in which British policy regarding disease prevention was hindered by the space and local resources available to them. Yet it will also underscore the ways in which the British did follow standard disease prevention measures despite the many obstacles they faced.