Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones (review)

In early 1777, Moses Dunbar was arrested in Connecticut for enlisting men in a loyalist regiment. Although Connecticut was far from the battlefield, state authorities took Dunbar's actions very seriously, charging him with a capital crime and trying him before the Superior Court. Dunbar held a captain's commission from British general William Howe that, under rules of warfare widely accepted at the time, should have entitled him to benign treatment; Connecticut should have sought to exchange him for an American captain. Instead, the court found Dunbar guilty of treason and hanged him.

Dunbar's story is emblematic of the political challenges posed to both the colonial and imperial governments by prisoners of war in the American Revolution. In Captives of Liberty, T. Cole Jones argues that the European rules of war faltered in the face of American independence. The British army would not offer Continental soldiers the type of accommodations they routinely afforded French prisoners of war because the Americans were in rebellion and thus outside the law. Yet this was only the beginning of the problems that came with applying European rules to North America. As Jones effectively documents, British mistreatment inspired Americans to retaliation and vengeance, while the decentralized power structure in the not-so-united states limited the effect of decrees by national leaders such as George Washington. Most importantly, Jones suggests that the treatment of prisoners of war changed over time in ways that reflected the tumultuous politics of the nation being created and the ascending power of a public increasingly hostile to Britain.

Captives of Liberty is well situated within the historiography of the American Revolution. Jones asserts that neither Neo-Whigs nor Neo-Progressives have paid adequate attention to the violence of the War for Independence. He critiques Gordon S. Wood for paying little attention to bloodshed and for embracing a tendency to see the creation of the United States as devoid of violence.¹ By contrast, though Ray Raphael and Gary B. Nash have been more critical of celebratory American exceptionalism, Jones points out that "the battlefield and its aftermath are peripheral to their story" (7).² As opposed to these historians, Jones takes up Allan Kulikoff's charge to understand "the Revolution as a war" (8).³ As such, Captives of Liberty is a work of new military history, with its emphasis on the experiences of men on the battlefield and the war's consequences for the nation that followed. Although the "new" military history of the revolution dates back at least to John W. Shy's work of the 1960s, Jones's treatment of prisoners of war provides a rich social and cultural history of the American Revolution that evokes the best qualities of Holly A. Mayer's Belonging to the Army and Stephen Brumwell's Redcoats, revealing how common soldiers and ordinary civilians made decisions that shook the empire.⁴

Captives of Liberty begins by detailing the eighteenth-century rules of war. In response to the bloody wars of religion, Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel "emphasized controlling violence and protecting enemy prisoners" (13). Because armies trained according to the dictates of the military revolution, it became impractical and mutually wasteful for captured troops to molder in cells. Governments developed highly detailed rules of exchange under which officers were honor bound to treat enemy troops humanely once they left the battlefield. Although used in the Seven Years' War, these rules fit poorly in the War for Independence. First, no government was required to afford rebels the same rights as foreign troops, as demonstrated at the Battle of Culloden, where Hanoverian troops had offered no quarter to surrendering Jacobites. Second, even Vattel acknowledged that when armies ignored the laws of nations and tortured or killed captives, the opposing side was entitled to proportional retaliation.

The first real test came...