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Inside New York City's 'Loathsome Dungeons'

The British prisons in New York City were almost as bad as the prison ships on Wallabout Bay. Especially because they were run by the notorious Capt. William Cunningham, who, when he was about to be hanged for forgery a few years later, confessed to having starved to death thousands of American prisoners by selling their rations.

Prison space in New York was limited when the British captured the city in 1776. As the numbers of prisoners rapidly increased, the British turned every conceivable building into a prison: three sugar houses, several dissenting Dutch churches, Old City Hall, Columbia College for a while. They soon became jammed, and bad food and infectious disease took their toll.

"Here," wrote Henry R. Stiles in his history of Brooklyn, "in these loathsome dungeons, denied the light and air of heaven; scantily fed on poor, putrid, and sometimes even uncooked food; obliged to endure the companionship of the most abandoned criminals, and those sick with small-pox and other infectious diseases; worn out by the groans and complaints of their suffering fellows, and subjected to every conceivable insult and indignity by their inhuman keepers, thousands of Americans sickened and died."

In charge of all of this, as head of the military police, was the provost marshall, Cunningham, who Stiles calls "an Irishman by birth, and a brute by nature." He was hanged for forgery in London in 1791, and made a dying confession:

"I shudder to think of the murders I have been accessory to, both with, and without, orders from Government, especially while in New-York, during which time there were more than 2,000 prisoners starved in the different churches, by stopping their rations, which I sold. There were also 275 American prisoners and obnoxious persons executed, out of all which number there were only about one dozen public executions, which chiefly consisted of British and Hessian deserters."