American Citizens, and British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony, 1839-1850 (review)

Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart tell a story that should sound eerily familiar. Their book details the experiences of ninety-two young men captured in a neighbouring country while fighting against the army of their age's dominant power. Considered dangerous revolutionaries and foreign agitators by their captors, they were treated as political prisoners rather than prisoners of war, deprived of due process, summarily convicted, and exiled for years without ever having been properly sentenced. This is not the story of the Taliban fighters imprisoned at Guatanamo Bay by the United States; ironically, American Citizens, British Slaves recounts the experience of young Americans whose republican beliefs drove them to fight against British rule in Upper Canada, only to end up exiled and imprisoned by the powerful empire they so despised.

Pybus and Maxwell-Stewart's study is based primarily on the recollections the prisoners recorded in narratives later published in the American press. These very rich, but often unreliable, accounts are supplemented by extensive research in prison records and other archival sources in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Piecing together the Patriots' story from various sources allows the authors to construct a remarkably complete and extremely credible narrative of their experience, which begins with their ill-fated participation in the Upper Canadian uprisings and follows them through their imprisonment in Canada to their transportation, detention, and exile in Australia. The narrative is particularly valuable in its recording of the prisoners' life in various camps, providing details of clothing, diet, work regimens, and methods of discipline and punishment.

The prisoner narratives are all marked in varying degrees by a healthy republican aversion to privilege and by a critique of the illegitimate power wielded by their captors. The prisoners were particularly vicious in their description of Sir John Franklin, the governor of the colony, who, 'clad in his official garb, adorned with his star and covered with his cocked hat and feather,' welcomed them to their new life with a stern and reproachful speech. The authors insist that the Patriots' caricature of the governor sought to humiliate him in exactly the same terms that prison officials had used to describe them in documents compiled during their admission, and there is even a comparative table provided to back up this point. Still, as the authors themselves later point out, the prisoner accounts were never gentle with royal officials, and the Patriots' critique was framed within a republican discourse that portrayed British officers and governors as the degenerate representatives of a corrupt and tyrannical regime.

The contours of this republican discourse might have been more explicitly drawn in this book, and its analysis of the British Empire's treatment of political prisoners should have been less ambiguous. Clearly, the Patriots posed a delicate problem: there was some question as to whether they could be legitimately imprisoned at all, and some officials, loath to treat them as ordinary criminals, may have attempted to lessen their suffering. Nevertheless, their narrative stands as an eloquent testimony to British cruelty: the exiled Patriots lived in squalid conditions and faced psychological and physical hardship, some were worked to death, and those who broke the rules were remanded to solitary confinement in vermin-infested dungeons. The cruellest and most arbitrary of the indignities the Patriots suffered came at the end of their terms. Pardons transmitted to the colony's governor were made public only at his pleasure and he withheld those of Patriots he deemed unworthy. In one extreme case, John Berry, who was pardoned in 1844, was never informed he was free to leave the colony, and he learned the news thirteen years later, in 1857.

Pybus and Maxwell-Stewart have woven a rich historical account that speaks to the conditions of...