Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence by Ken Miller (review)

Ken Miller’s Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence provides a case study of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during the American Revolution and investigates how an ethnically diverse town faced the wartime pressures of hosting British and German prisoners of war and in turn emerged with a united American identity. Utilizing local archives, military and political records, and engaging with a growing historiography in frontier Pennsylvania and prisoners of war during the War for American Independence, Miller contributes to our understanding of the conflict in the American interior and in the everyday lives of the revolutionaries. An associate professor of history at Washington College, Miller argues that while residents of Lancaster tended to local security and oversaw the detention of hundreds of prisoners, their position as a crossroads, both ethnically and spatially, resulted in a mixture and exchange of differing cultures, backgrounds, and perspectives that transcended their communal attachments. Lancaster’s German, Scots-Irish, and English populations became invested in a larger, communal struggle, and residents increasingly identified with distant friends and allies in a shared sense of patriotism and as Americans.

Presenting his argument in a topical approach, Miller does well in establishing the assorted peoples and cultures making up Lancaster in order to demonstrate their changing identities during the conflict. Pennsylvania’s rich soil and accommodation for different religious beliefs attracted a variety of peoples from Europe who moved to available lands in the interior. Lancaster as a result sprang up with different cultures, religious beliefs, languages, and trades. By the mid-eighteenth century German speakers made up 70 percent of the population, with Scots-Irish and English settlers rounding out nearly the rest. This pluralism did have its drawbacks. Miller shows that established Anglo officials, including Benjamin Franklin, feared a German takeover and that Pennsylvania’s society remained divided along ethnocultural lines. In establishing the sense of exclusiveness among groups, and in particular the struggle faced by Germans to increase their political participation, Miller is able to jump into the meat of his research and to consider the multiple enemies of Lancaster’s Whigs.

Differences among Lancaster’s residents were mitigated by the need for unification against the threat of proximal hostilities or in seeing their enemies face to face. Violence from the French and Indian War had first bonded frontier settlers and communities as they relied upon each other for mutual support and survival. The same dynamic is seen with the American Revolution as the imperial crisis aroused Lancaster’s inhabitants to new public roles and responsibilities, thus requiring interethnic cooperation. The legacy of ethnic antagonism remained as English and German associators mingled and worked uncomfortably with each other at the outset. German print media proved critical in informing the German population and in gathering support for defending their material gains. Loyalist neighbors assisted in furthering cooperation as Lancaster’s revolutionaries marginalized their internal enemies and “enforced the boundaries of a properly patriotic community and refined their evolving American identity” (137).

Miller is at his best in his discussion of prisoners of war, their relationships with their captors, and how residents of Lancaster came to view and treat British and German captives in different ways. The arrival of nearly 400 British captives of the Seventh and Twenty-Sixth Regiments of Foot in early December 1775 put Lancaster’s ethnic and cultural divisions to immediate test. Lacking instructions from the Continental Congress or their state government and with winter approaching, Lancaster’s residents had no time to squabble with each other and worked to provide humane treatment for the prisoners. The deepening conflict entrenched the two camps of the British captives, particularly their vocal officers, and Lancaster’s Whigs. By the summer of 1776 militants collectively identified against their mutual enemies who endangered their community. Not only did the British redcoat become a daily reminder for the cause, but it...