Battle field and prison pen, or Through the war, and thrice a prisoner in rebel dungeons. A graphic recital of personal experiences throughout the whole period of the late war for the Union
Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-359) and index.
Contents
German soldiers in British service -- Subsidy treaties -- Recruitment patterns -- Social composition -- Into captivity -- Prisoners of war in western warfare -- Capture and surrender -- Prisoners of war -- The first prisoners of war in revolutionary hands, 1775-1776 -- German prisoners of war, 1776-1778 -- Provisions and exchange, 1778 -- The Convention Army, 1777-1781 -- Continuity and change, 1779-1783 -- Release and return -- Epilogue -- Appendix: Common German soldiers taken prisoner.
Summary
"Some 37,000 soldiers from six German principalities, collectively remembered as Hessians, entered service as British auxiliaries in the American War of Independence. At times, they constituted a third of the British army in North America, and thousands of them were imprisoned by the Americans. Despite the importance of Germans in the British war effort, historians have largely overlooked these men. Drawing on research in German military records and common soldiers' letters and diaries, Daniel Krebs places the prisoners on center stage in A Generous and Merciful Enemy, portraying them as individuals rather than simply as numbers in casualty lists. Setting his account in the context of British and European politics and warfare, Krebs explains the motivations of the German states that provided contract soldiers for the British army. We think of the Hessians as mercenaries, but, as he shows, many were conscripts. Some were new recruits; others, veterans. Some wanted to stay in the New World after the war. Krebs further describes how the Germans were made prisoners, either through capture or surrender, and brings to life their experiences in captivity from New England to Havana, Cuba. Krebs discusses prison conditions in detail, addressing both the American approach to war prisoners and the prisoners' responses to their experience. He assesses American efforts as a "generous and merciful enemy" to use the prisoners as economic, military, and propagandistic assets. In the process, he never loses sight of the impact of imprisonment on the POWs themselves. Adding new dimensions to an important but often neglected topic in military history, Krebs probes the origins of the modern treatment of POWs. An epilogue describes an almost-forgotten 1785 treaty between the United States and Prussia, the first in western legal history to regulate the treatment of prisoners of war."--Publisher's website.
Records of the revolutionary war: containing the military and financial correspondence of distinguished officers; names of the officers and privates of regiments, companies, and corps, with the dates of their commissions and enlistments; general orders of Washington, Lee, and Greene, at Germantown and Valley Forge; with a list of distinguished prisoners of war; the time of their capture, exchange, etc. To which is added the half-pay acts of the Continental Congress; the revolutionary pension laws; and a list of the officers of the Continental Army who acquired the right to half-pay, commutation, and lands
The original lists of persons of quality, emigrants, religious exiles, political rebels, serving men sold for a term of years, apprentices, children stolen, maidens pressed, and others who went from Great Britain to the American plantations, 1600-1700 : with their ages, the localities where they formerly lived in the mother country, the names of the ships in which they embarked, and other interesting particulars, from mss. preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public Record Office, England
Life in southern prisons; from the diary of Corporal Charles Smedley, of Company G, 90th regiment Penn'a volunteers, commencing a few days before the "battle of the Wilderness", in which he was taken prisoner, in the evening of the fifth month fifth, 1864: also, a short description of the march to and battle of Gettysburg, together with a biographical sketch of the author
Highwaymen and pirates' own book : containing historical narratives of the most celebrated robbers, pirates, &c., together with an account of the loss of the ship William Brown : and a full description of the mutiny on board the United States' brig Somers, with the execution of Spencer, Cromwell and Small
[pt. I] Life and adventures of ... Joseph Thompson Hare. Awful account of the ... pirate, Alexander Tardy.--[pt. II] Annals of the revolution.--[pt. III] James Moran, executed at Philadelphia ... May 19, 1837. The mutiny on board the brig Braganza. The loss of the ship William Brown. A full account of the mutiny on board the United States brig Somers.
