The Prison Ship Uprising (episode 228)

HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

On August 10, 1780, British prisoners of war being held on a ship on Boston Harbor conspired to disarm their guards and escape. In the end, they were all caught, but an American guard was killed. This case gives us a fascinating insight into what life was like for POWs in the American Revolution, but there’s very little record of it in historical sources. If the prosecutor in the murder case hadn’t signed the Declaration of Independence four years earlier, his papers may not have been considered worth saving, and we might have no record of this interesting case at all. Amazingly, the defense basically argued that all’s fair in love and war, and that since the redcoats had been taken prisoner by force, they had a right to seek freedom by force. Even more amazingly, it worked!

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/228/

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The Prison Ship Uprising

• Without Christina Carrick’s 2016 blog post about the prison ship uprising, I would never have heard about this fascinating incident
• Robert Treat Paine’s notes on the grand jury, the indictment and plea, the defendants’ petition, and the trial itself
• Corporal Fox’s memoir about his captivity with the Convention Army in Boston
• Grenadier Bense’s memoir about his captivity with the Convention Army in Boston
• Ebenezer Fox’s memoir about his captivity on the Jersey
• Notes about some American prison ships in Boston, and the ship that wouldn’t sail
• MILLER, KEN. “‘A Dangerous Set of People’: British Captives and the Making of Revolutionary Identity in the Mid-Atlantic Interior.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 32, no. 4, 2012
• Tourtellot, Arthur. “Rebels, Turn Out Your Dead.” American Heritage, August 1970