Emerging Revolutionary War welcomes a guest post from historian Keith J. Muchowski. Keith is a librarian and professor at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in Brooklyn. He blogs at thestrawfoot.com.

King Juan Carlos I arrived in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park on Saturday June 5, 1976 to great fanfare. The thirty-eight-year-old monarch had ascended to the Spanish throne just seven months previously, two days after the death of Francisco Franco. The new leader was determined to reform his nation after three and a half decades of strongman rule. Juan Carlos I’s ancestor, King Carlos III, had helped the colonists achieved their independence nearly two centuries previously with his supply of money, matériel, and men. Many of those Spaniards made the ultimate sacrifice; well over one hundred of them alone perished in British prison ships moored off Brooklyn Wallabout Bay during the war.^[i] Now King Juan Carlos I was in the outer borough to recognize them, dedicate a tablet to his fallen countrymen, and help his American hosts celebrate the bicentennial of their independence. The entombed Spaniards were among the over 11,500 men commemorated by the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument. The king’s visit in the mid-1970s was the latest in a series of public commemorations of the prison ship dead dating back over a century and a half. Some of the institutions that did so much to recognize the martyrs, such as the Society of St. Tammany, are today long gone. Others however very much remain. The Society of Old Brooklynites, a civic organization founded in 1880 when Brooklyn was still an independent municipality, has been holding events since the late nineteenth century.

Prison ships were a brutal fact of the American Revolutionary War, as they had been in wars around the world for decades. Floating jails were part of civilian life as well. In May 1776 British Parliament passed the Hulks Act to accommodate the temporary holding of convicts aboard dilapidated ships on the River Thames, and while this provision was for the incarceration of British criminals the legislation coming when it did offered precedent and sanction for similar use in North America. The employment of prison ships in the War of Independence was inevitable given how ill-prepared both sides were once the fighting came. General George Washington made his views about cruel and unusual punishment known to Lieutenant General Thomas Gage just two months after taking command, writing to his counterpart on August 11, 1775 that “My Duty now makes it necessary to apprize you, that for the future I shall regulate my Conduct towards those Gentlemen who are or may be in our Possession, exactly by the Rule which you shall observe, towards those of ours, who may be in your Custody. If Severity, & Hardship mark the Line of your Conduct, (painful as it may be to me) your Prisoners will feel its Effects: But if Kindness & Humanity are shewn to ours, I shall with Pleasure consider those in our Hands, only as unfortunate, and they shall receive the Treatment to which the unfortunate are ever intitled..”^[ii] Gentlemanly conduct toward detainees would quickly prove a chimera; what had begun as a trickle during Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775 would become a flood after the Battle of Long Island and other engagements in and around Manhattan the following year. The British were in full control of New York City by late 1776, and would hold the island until their evacuation in November 1783.

In that time Loyalist refugees flooded into the crowded city situated on the lower tip of Manhattan Island. The already overburdened city was further strained by a fire that destroyed as much as a quarter of the city’s infrastructure in September 1776, followed by a smaller but still devastating one two years later. The British and their Hessian allies dismantled many of the still-standing wooden structures and used the material for firewood. Unhoused residents on the west side of the island soon crowded into a tent city called Canvas Town, which was exactly what it sounds like. With agriculture and transportation networks disrupted during the war, food insecurity was an increasing concern for the island’s inhabitants. New Yorkers in British-controlled Manhattan were already doing without, and properly feeding and housing the growing number of detainees came last. The British imprisoned an estimated 20,000 men—soldiers, sailors, spies, saboteurs, politicians, privateers, and others—of numerous nationalities in this this global war. The Redcoats warehoused the growing number of inmates wherever they could, including among other places in already existing jails, in sugar houses made of stone and masonry, in forts, churches, schools, and within the holds of weathered ships stripped of anything militarily useful and repurposed into floating lockups. Incarceration was hardly unique to New York. The port cities of Savannah and Charleston for instance held a number of prison ships. In their colony of East Florida the British kept POWs in the Castillo de San Marcos, a masonry fortification in the capital of St. Augustine. The British held captives in England, British Canada, the West Indies, and other locations wherever convenient throughout their extensive empire. The vast majority of Patriots captured by the British however were held in prison ships in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay, where well over a dozen floating jails housed captives in squalid conditions. The Whitby was the first prison-ship anchored in Wallabout Bay, on October 20, 1776. As the war ground on and the death toll climbed ships like the Whitby, Jersey, Falmouth, Good Hope and others became synonymous with suffering. Men died by the thousands of smallpox, dysentery, typhoid, starvation, and other means. their bodies lowered from the deck and buried without ceremony in shallow graves. Roaming animals and the incessant pounding of the East River waves quickly uprooted many of their remains.

When peace came the fortunate survivors returned home and Americans began building their new nation. New Yorkers, as New Yorkers do, moved on to more current matters. In Brooklyn itself however it was impossible to ignore the prison ship martyrs altogether; throughout the 1780s and 1790s the abandoned Jersey—by far the most notorious and deadly of the hell ships—was easily seen by passersby sinking into the muck as worms ate its timbers. The macabre scene on the Brooklyn shoreline worsened annually, with more remains washing ashore each year adding to the piles of sun-bleached skulls and skeletons already lining the coast. Much of this land along Wallabout Bay and the East River had come into the possession of one John Jackson, a businessman originally from Long Island seeking to do better closer to Manhattan. When President John Adams created the first U.S. navy yards toward the end of his administration Jackson sold a portion of his holdings to the United States government. Construction of the New York Naval Shipyard, known more widely as the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in the early nineteenth century led to the discovery of further remains of the prison ship martyrs, which in turn led for calls to build a proper resting place.

The Tammany Society of New York was behind the first serious effort to commemorate the prison ship dead. This fraternal group was incorporated in May 1789 and comprised largely of mechanics and other workingmen who allied increasingly with the Jeffersonians in their disputes with the Federalists. Internal disputes in early America were compounded by external ones. British authorities had never fully reconciled with American independence and tested the young nation at every turn. Historian Alan Taylor notes for instance that between 1803 and 1807 the British impressed some 10,000 Americans into the Royal Navy.^[iii] The Jefferson Administration passed an Embargo Act in 1807 to force economic pressure on the Crown and Parliament. Americans prepared for war, or at least defense. In addition to other fortifications up and down the Eastern Seaboard the Jefferson Administration began construction of Castle Williams (1807) on Governors Island in New York Harbor and Castle Clinton (1808) in Lower Manhattan to prevent another British occupation. With war against Great Britain increasingly likely supporters of a monument to the prison ship martyrs had every reason to highlight past British depredations. It was in this milieu that the first tomb was built.

Property owner John Jackson, himself a Tammany leader, provided a small parcel to accommodate the construction a modest crypt adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The leader in the movement to create a proper resting place was Tammany-man, Revolutionary War veteran, British war prisoner, and educator Benjamin Romaine. (In the 1790s future novelist and George Washington biographer Washington Irving had been one of Romaine’s students.) Once a deal was reached and details worked out things moved quickly. On April 13, 1808, twenty-five years after the war’s end, Tammany’s Wallabout Committee led a solemn procession to the land adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and laid the cornerstone. The vault was finished six weeks later and on May 26 Tammany held a large ceremony attended by the sitting governor and future vice president Daniel D. Tompkins and Mayor De Witt Clinton, who years later as the Empire State’s chief executive would build the Erie Canal. Some 30,000 people attended that ceremony.^[iv]

Fears of a second war with Great Britain of course proved prescient when the United States and Great Britain went to war four years later. With peace in 1815 and completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 Brooklyn and New York City grew exponentially. As they did residents again began forgetting the prison ship martyrs. Still, some remembered and as the Revolutionary War generation aged there was always a modicum of interest. Memoirs such as “Recollections of the Jersey Prison-Ship; Taken and Prepared for Publication from the Original Manuscript of the Late Captain Thomas Dring, of Providence, R.I. One of the Prisoners” (1829) and “The Old Jersey Captive: Or, A Narrative of the Captivity of Thomas Andros on Board the Old Jersey Prison Ship at New York, 1781” (1833) sold briskly and found a readership. Orations at the Wallabout Bay site, including one by Romaine himself on the Fourth of July 1839, were a feature of patriotic holidays.^[v] For Romaine the vault was personal, so much so that in 1828 he had purchased the site for $291.08 in back taxes and added an addition whose purpose was to hold himself once he passed.^[vi] When his time came in January 1844 that is exactly what happened. Largely though, despite these occasional speeches, this area adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard grew increasingly rundown and remote.

There was some discussion in these years of reinterring the prison ship dead on Mt. Washington in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a garden memorial founded in 1838 where in August 1776 part of the Battle of Long Island had taken place.^[vii] Nothing developed from that or any other plan, and the prison ship martyrs were again largely forgotten. This changed somewhat when on May 31, 1855 dozens of civic boosters turned out at Brooklyn City Hall to again take up the matter. From that gathering came The Martys’ Monument Association, whose objective according to its constitution was “to erect a suitable Monument to the memory of those who died martyrs to the Revolution, in the British Prison-Ships in the Wallabout Bay.”^[viii] The Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument Association did not accomplish much in its early years, largely because of the growing sectional crisis and coming of the American Civil War. Americans watched nervously after the firing on Fort Sumter to see how Britons—who very much coveted Southern cotton to process in their textile mills—would respond to Confederate secession. Charles Francis Adams Sr., the son and grandson of Presidents John Quincy and John Adams, used all of his diplomatic skills to ensure British neutrality as U.S. minister to the Court of St. James’s. The British nonetheless proved a thorn in the Lincoln Administration’s side, for instance by looking the other way at the construction of the CSS Alabama in Liverpool and allowing Confederate blockade runners to use British ports in the Bahamas.

In November 1865 seven months after Appomattox Frederick Law Olmsted returned to New York City eager to resume the landscape architecture partnership he enjoyed with his London-born colleague Calvert Vaux. Olmsted had done much for the Union cause with his work as secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission. Burned out, Olmsted resigned after the Battle of Gettysburg and took a job with a mining concern in California, as far away as he could get from the fighting within the continental United States. Prior to the war he and Vaux had built Manhattan’s Central Park, and now civic leaders in Brooklyn asked for a green space of their own. Olmsted and Vaux commenced work on Prospect Park, and began too on another Brooklyn project: the remodeling of Washington Park that would include a crypt for the prison ship martyrs. Washington Park was an ideal location for the martyrs to rest. For one thing it stood atop what had been a fortification during both wars against the British. Indeed from the time of the its construction in 1847 many Brooklynites continued calling Washington Park “Fort Greene” after Major-General Nathanael Greene, who besides much else had done so much to secure the topography during the Revolution. (Eventually the name would officially be changed to Fort Greene Park.) It was a verdant piece of land close to Wallabout Bay and with scenic vistas of the East River and Manhattan. In 1867 the city of Brooklyn gave the Martys’ Monument Association a portion of Washington Park to entomb the remains.^[ix]

New York State allocated funds and construction soon began. Olmsted and Vaux explained in a letter on September 9, 1867 to the President of the Board of Commissioners to Prospect Park, Brooklyn that “The hill-side between the Saluting Ground and the exterior of the Meeting Ground seems to be the most appropriate position for the erection of the contemplated memorial [above the tomb], and we have, therefore, reserved at this central point a site amply adequate, not only for the structure itself, but for the approaches and other accessories that will require to be connected with a work of this character.”^[x] The work of reinterring the remains, including those of Tammany’s Benjamin Romaine, took place in June 1873 with surprisingly little ceremony or public demonstration. Laborers loaded the coffins containing the bones onto carts, rode them over to the new site, put them in the crypt, and that was that. The prison ship dead now had a proper resting place, but still no monument. Still, the site became the locus of public commemorations for Decoration Days, Fourth of July speeches, and other civic events. One of the biggest was on July 4, 1876 when Brooklyn celebrated the nation’s Centennial in Washington Park and thousands turned out to celebrate the country’s one hundredth birthday.

The Martys’ Monument Association seems to have gone away during the Gilded Age but others picked up the issue. On March 16, 1888 the New York Herald published a Walt Whitman poem entitled “The Wallabout Martyrs,” which reads:

Greater than memory of Achilles or Ulysses,

More, more by far to thee than the tomb of Alexander,

Those car loads of old charnel ashes, scales and splints of mouldy bones,

Once living men—once resolute courage, aspiration, strength,

The stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.

Born on Long Island in 1819, Whitman had, or at least believed he had, a personal attachment to the Revolutionary War generation based in part due to an incident he had experienced as a small boy when on the Fourth of July 1825 he saw the Marquis de Lafayette lay the cornerstone for the Apprentice Library Building in Brooklyn Heights. Whitman included “The Wallabout Martyrs” within an anthology called “Sands at Seventy,” which itself appeared in the 1888 collection “November Boughs.” This in turn was eventually attached as an “annex” to “Leaves of Grass.”

Whitman was not the first poet to write about the prison ship martyrs. Philip Morin Freneau, the so-called Poet of the American Revolution, had attended the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), where he had a been roommate of James Madison. Both were members of the college’s American Whig Society and graduated in 1771. In 1880 Freneau was captaining a privateer ship when his vessel was captured by the British and he himself detained for approximately six weeks aboard one of the floating jails. Of this experience he wrote “The British Prison Ship: A Poem in Four Cantos,” an extended work he revised several times over the years which reads in part:

The various horrors of these hulks to tell,

These Prison Ships where pain and horror dwell,

Where death in tenfold vengeance holds his reign,

And injur’d ghosts, yet unaveng’d, complain;

This be my task—ungenerous Britons, you

Conspire to murder those you can’t subdue;

In December 1888, shortly after the publication of Whitman’s tribute to the martyrs, the Society of Old Brooklynites published “A Christmas Reminder. Being the Names of about Eight Thousand Persons, a Small Portion of the Number Confined on Board the British Prison Ships during the War of the Revolution.” This sixty-one page booklet was distributed for free to select individuals. “A Christmas Reminder” gave, if not a face, then at least a name and thus some semblance of humanity to two-thirds of the 11,500 men who had perished aboard the hell ships. Recipients of the “Reminder” included President Grover Cleveland, his cabinet, the full Congress, and newspapers with large circulation. The Society of Old Brooklynites printed 1,500 copies of the pamphlet and intended to send it as well to state governors and officials across New York State.^[xi]

People were noticing. In the 1890s there was increasing interest in building a monument with officials at the local, state, and federal levels all promising to contribute funds. Patriotic organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution lent their institutional and financial support as well. On the afternoon of March 23, 1898 citizens gathered at the home of General and Mrs. Alfred Cutler Barnes at 114 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights to reconstitute a monument organization. As if to differentiate themselves slightly from their predecessor they named the group The Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument Association of the United States. According to its articles of association the group’s objective was “to procure money, and to cause to be erected, and forever cared for, a monument at Fort Greene Park.”^[xii] Public interest was heightened in January 1900 when additional remains were discovered during work on various improvements at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument Association of the United States held a ceremony at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church on Saturday June 16, 1900 complete with speeches and a military band before the internment of these remains at Fort Greene Park. The push for money and the search for the right designer continued. On March 29, 1905 in the home of group members Stephen V. (S.V.) and Eliza M. Chandler White at 210 Columbia Heights the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument Association of the United States selected Stanford White’s memorial design. As required by the enabling legislation, the association had previously received the approval of Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., Governor Frank W. Higgins, and Secretary of War William Howard Taft for the design. The project would eventually take three years and cost some $200,000 in 1905 dollars.^[xiii]

A century after the Society of St. Tammany unveiled its modest crypt adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard fifteen thousand Brooklynites turned out at Fort Greene Park on November 14, 1908 to dedicate the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument that we recognize today. Vice President and President Elect William H. Taft was one of the featured speakers, as was New York’s current governor Charles Evans Hughes. It was one of the great moments in Brooklyn history and in the commemoration of the American Revolutionary War. Then, just as quickly, it was all once again largely forgotten.

In the coming years the Great War and the influenza pandemic would take the lives of millions around the world. In 1923 five years after the Armistice Congress and President Harding created the American Battle Monuments Commission to build and maintain military cemeteries for those Americans who had fallen overseas. Closer to home Americans built an estimated 10,000 Great War memorials across the United States, most of them constructed in the 1920s prior to the Great Depression and Second World War. Politically much had changed as well. While Americans had twice gone to war twice against Great Britain and had viewed their British cousins with varying degrees of hostility as late as the Gilded Age, that had begun to change in the late nineteenth century. U.S. ambassador the Court of Saint James’s and later U.S Secretary of State John Hay had done much to begin the so-called “special relationship” throughout the McKinley and Roosevelt Administrations. He knew the fraught history of Anglo-American relation as much as anyone. Hay himself had been a personal secretary to President Lincoln during the American Civil War. Hay’s best friend was Henry Adams, a son of Charles Francis Adams Sr, grandson of John Quincy Adams, and great-grandson of John Adams, all of whom had served as America’s top diplomat in London in their time. The special relationship solidified in the 1910s when the United States and Great Britain were allies in the Great War, as the countries would be again in World War II and throughout the Cold War. In this milieu there was little incentive or desire to highlight British Revolutionary War cruelties as there once had been. Why rehash the depredations of the hell ships when you’re now fighting together at Normandy and confronting the Eastern Bloc nations?

Demographically Brooklyn was changing as well. After gaining inhabitants each decade in the first half of the twentieth century Brooklyn’s population declined in the decades after the Second World War, with a drop of more than half a million residents from 1950 through 1980 according to the decennial census.^[xiv] In this era of white flight Brooklynites who may have had long bonds to the borough were leaving; often replacing them were new immigrants who had few familial or other ties to the prison ship dead or Revolutionary War period. Some gamely persevered. The Society of Old Brooklynites continued holding functions at the site, including one on the fiftieth anniversary in November 1958. The Old Brooklynites’ president, Dr. Foelly Crane, had himself been present half a century earlier and seen Vice President/President Elect William Howard Taft dedicate the monument.^[xv] The closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the mid-1960s and other structural changes to the economy led to decreased tax revenues, and thus shortfalls of funds to care for Fort Greene Park or other municipal sites. Vandalism became a problem as early as the 1920s. In the 1960s through late 1980s crime and vandalism rose precipitously. Brooklyn’s decline continued until the trend reversed itself through gentrification. In 1990 for the first time in forty years the borough gained population, a trend that has continued into the twenty-first century.^[xvi] With that trend has come a revitalization of the park and several renovations. On May 18, 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, the Brooklyn borough president, and others cut the ribbon on a visitor center adjacent to the monument. Inside the modest space there is a small collection of  Revolutionary War military relics recovered in the vicinity, signage explaining the significance of the monument and the site itself, and a placard listing the 8,000 men saved from anonymity by the Society of Old Brooklynites through its “Christmas Reminder” in December 1888. Tucked in a corner is the tablet dedicated by King Juan Carlos I in 1976, taken down somewhere along the way after decades of exposure to the elements and apparent vandalism. On October 5, 2021 during Hispanic Heritage Month city officials and the public joined members of New York’s Queen Sofía Spanish Institute to dedicate a new tablet in Fort Greene Park and thus continue the remembrance of Brooklyn’s prison ship martyrs for the next generation.

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^[i] Joyce Maynard. “Royal Couple Gets to See The Goyas in Exhibition.” New York Times, June 6, 1976: 42.

^[ii] George Washington. “From George Washington to Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, 11 August 1775.” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0192.

^[iii] Alan Taylor. American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), 112.

^[iv] George Taylor. Martyrs to the Revolution in the British Prison-Ships in the Wallabout Bay. (New York: W.H. Arthur & Co., 1845), 59.

^[v] Benjamin Romaine. Review. The Tomb of the Martyrs, Adjoining the United States Navy Yard, Brooklyn City. (New York: C. C. & E. Childs, Jr., 1839), 3.

^[vi] Joan H. Geismar, PhD. Martyrs’ Monument/Monument Lot Block 44, Lot 14, Brooklyn, Memo Report on Archeological Investigations. (New York: The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, The J.M. Kaplan Fund, December 19, 2003), 1, http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/arch_reports/172.pdf.

^[vii] Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Bones of the Martyrs.” January 30, 1845, 2.

^[viii]  George Taylor. Martyrs to the Revolution in the British Prison-Ships in the Wallabout Bay. (New York: W.H. Arthur & Co., 1845), 45.

^[ix] Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Years of Olmsted, Vaux & Company, 1865-1874. Edited by David Schuyler, Jane Turner Censer, Carolyn F. Hoffman, and Hawkins, Kenneth. Vol. 6. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 207.

^[x]  Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Years of Olmsted, Vaux & Company, 1865-1874. Edited by David Schuyler, Jane Turner Censer, Carolyn F. Hoffman, and Hawkins, Kenneth. Vol. 6. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 205.

^[xi] Brooklyn Times Union. “Solid Old Brooklynites.” January 4, 1889, 4.

^[xii] Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument Association of the United States. Secretary’s Report of the Obsequies of the Prison Ship Martyrs at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N.Y. June 16, 1900. (New York: Macgowan & Slipper, Printers, 1901), 22.

^[xiii] Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “For Martyrs Monument Plans Determined On.” March 30, 1905, 5.

^[xiv] “Total Population New York City & Boroughs, 1900 to 2010.” Accessed July 21, 2023. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/historical-population/nyc_total_pop_1900-2010.pdf.

^[xv] Kings Country Chronicle. “To Hold Memorial at Prison Ship Martyrs Monument.” November 11, 1958, 4.

^[xvi] City of New York, Department of City Planning. New York City Population Projections by Age/Sex & Borough 2010-2020. New York, December 2013, 8, https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/projections_report_2010_2040.pdf.