'Deprived of Their Liberty': Enemy Prisoners and the Culture of War in Revolutionary America, 1775-1783

Prisoners of War;American Revolution;History

Jones, Trenton ColePackard, Randall M ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Prisoners of War;    American Revolution;    History;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60296/JONES-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

Deprived of Their Liberty explores Americans;; changing conceptions of legitimate wartime violence by analyzing how the revolutionaries treated their captured enemies, and by asking what their treatment can tell us about the American Revolution more broadly.I suggest that at the commencement of conflict, the revolutionary leadership sought to contain the violence of war according to the prevailing customs of warfare in Europe. These rules of war—or to phrase it differently, the cultural norms of war—emphasized restricting the violence of war to the battlefield and treating enemy prisoners humanely. Only six years later, however, captured British soldiers and seamen, as well as civilian loyalists, languished on board noisome prison ships in Massachusetts and New York, in the lead mines of Connecticut, the jails of Pennsylvania, and the camps of Virginia and Maryland, where they were deprived of their liberty and often their lives by the very government purporting to defend those inalienable rights.My dissertation explores this curious, and heretofore largely unrecognized, transformation in the revolutionaries;; conduct of war by looking at the experience of captivity in American hands.Throughout the dissertation, I suggest three principal factors to account for the escalation of violence during the war. From the onset of hostilities, the revolutionaries encountered an obstinate enemy that denied them the status of legitimate combatants, labeling them as rebels and traitors. They faced the divided loyalties of their own population, which threatened civil war. And they were ideologically constrained from forming a centralized government capable of effectively limiting the war;;s violence. These factors shaped the very nature of the war they fought and forced the revolutionary leadership to reconsider their basic assumptions about warfare. In doing so, revolutionary leaders unwittingly radicalized the struggle, transforming a war for colonial self-determination into a truly revolutionary conflict.Advisor: Philip D. MorganReaders: Michael P. Johnson, Angus Burgin, Alex Roland, and Randall Packard