"Our
poor soldiers fared most wretchedly different," says Major Bedinger.
Before we begin, however, to speak of the treatment they received, we
must make some attempt to tell the reader who they were. We wish it
were possible to give the name of every private who died, or rather
who was murdered, in the prisons of New York at this time. But that,
we fear, is now an impossibility. As this account is designed as a
memorial to those martyred privates, we have made many efforts to
obtain their names. But if the muster rolls of the different companies
who formed the Rifle Regiment, the Pennsylvania Flying Camp, and the
other troops captured by the British in the summer and fall of 1776
are in existence, we have not been able to find them.
The records of the Revolution kept in the War Department in England
have been searched in vain by American historians. It is said that the
Provost Marshal, William Cunningham, destroyed his books, in order to
leave no written record of his crimes. The names of 8,000 prisoners,
mostly seamen, who were confined on the prison ship Jersey, alone,
have been obtained by the Society of Old Brooklynites, from the
British Archives, and, by the kind permission of this Society, we
re-publish them in the Appendix to this volume.
Here and there, also, we have obtained a name of one of the brave
young riflemen who died in torment a hundred times worse, because so
much less swift, than that endured on a memorable occasion in India,
when British soldiers were placed, during a single night, into one of
their own "Black Holes.
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