The Full Cost of the Revolution

Yesterday was Memorial Day.

The flags were out. The speeches were made. The number was cited in various forms.

An estimated 6,800 Americans were killed in action. Another 17,000 died of disease. Approximately 8,500 perished while prisoners of war. Twenty-five thousand total. Across eight years of fighting in thirteen colonies.

Most people know the battle deaths. The names of Lexington, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga, Yorktown are familiar. The men who fell in those engagements are at least acknowledged.

The men who died in the camps and on the prison ships are not.

This essay is for all of them.

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The battle deaths.

The fighting began at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Forty-nine Americans were killed that day. Eight of them on Lexington Green at dawn. The others along eighteen miles of road as the British column retreated to Boston under continuous fire from men who had heard the alarm and moved toward the sound of it.

The war’s costliest engagements came later.

At Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, the colonial defenders lost over four hundred killed and wounded. They held the hill through two British assaults before running out of ammunition. The British took the hill on the third assault but paid over a thousand casualties to do it. General Burgoyne wrote privately that another victory like that would destroy the army.

The Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776 was Washington’s first major engagement as commander. The Continental Army was outflanked and nearly destroyed. Over a thousand Americans were killed, wounded, or captured. Washington evacuated nine thousand men across the East River at night in silence. The army survived. The cost was enormous.

The Battle of Germantown on October 4, 1777 cost 152 Americans killed, 521 wounded, and 438 captured. Washington had attacked the British main camp at dawn in a bold move that nearly succeeded. Fog and a stone farmhouse held by British troops broke the momentum. Washington regrouped and kept fighting.

Camden was the worst.

In only one hour of fighting at the Battle of Camden on August 16, 1780, the Americans lost 2,000 soldiers. Over 1,000 were captured and over 900 were killed or wounded. General Horatio Gates, the celebrated hero of Saratoga, fled sixty miles from the battlefield on horseback. Baron Johann de Kalb, a fifty-nine-year-old German immigrant who had come to America to serve the cause, stayed. He was shot three times and bayoneted repeatedly before collapsing. He received eleven wounds in total and died in Camden three agonizing days later. British officers attended his funeral out of respect for an honored foe.

He was not American by birth. He understood what America was trying to become. He stood in the line when the man above him ran.

The battles produced the names we know. But the battles were not where most Americans died.

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The disease deaths.

Historians believe that at least an additional 17,000 deaths were the result of disease.

Valley Forge is the famous example. The Continental Army’s winter encampment from December 1777 through June 1778 killed approximately two thousand men from cold, starvation, and disease before spring arrived. The men who survived Valley Forge are rightly celebrated. The men who did not survive it are less remembered.

But Valley Forge was one winter in one location. The disease deaths ran across all eight years of the war, in every camp, in every season. Typhus. Smallpox. Dysentery. Typhoid. Pneumonia. Men who had survived battle fell to the camps that followed. Men who had never fired a shot in anger died in winter quarters in New Jersey and New York and Virginia and the Carolinas.

The irony that most military historians note is this. The men who died of disease in the camps of the Continental Army died in direct consequence of their service. They had left their farms and their trades and their families to stand in the line. The line moved through camps. The camps killed them. Their deaths are as much a product of the war as any death at the end of a British musket.

They are counted in the number. They are not remembered by name.

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The prison ships.

This is the part of the story that almost nobody knows.

After the British captured New York City in the fall of 1776, they faced a problem. They had more American prisoners than their jails could hold. Their solution was the ships.

During the war, at least sixteen hulks were placed by British authorities in the waters of Wallabout Bay, off the Brooklyn coast, including the infamous HMS Jersey, a former warship converted to a prison hulk.

The ships were overcrowded. Food and water were scarce. Diseases including smallpox ran rampant.

Prisoners were forced to subsist on moldy bread, rancid meat of suspect provenance, and soup cooked in huge copper cauldrons with water from the East River. Every day, corpses were tossed overboard. Five to ten bodies a day from the Jersey alone. Thousands of full and partial remains eventually washed up along the Brooklyn shore.

The most infamous ship was the HMS Jersey, referred to by its inmates simply as Hell. More than a thousand men were kept aboard at any one time, and about a dozen died every night from diseases such as smallpox, dysentery, typhoid, and yellow fever, as well as from the effects of starvation.

Historians estimated that roughly 11,000 prisoners were registered to the HMS Jersey during the Revolutionary War. Eleven thousand men on one ship. Most of them died there. Even after the British surrender at Yorktown in late 1781, prisoners were kept aboard the Jersey and other ships until the war formally ended in 1783.

When the Brooklyn Navy Yard was later established at Wallabout Bay, workers found the remains of thousands of men in the mud along the shoreline. The bones of the dead had washed up along the Brooklyn shore for years after the war. They were eventually collected and interred. Today their remains lie in a crypt beneath Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. A monument stands above them. Most people who walk past it do not know what it marks.

The men on the prison ships died in conditions that their captors controlled entirely. They died slowly, from starvation and disease and despair, on rotting ships in a harbor in Brooklyn, within sight of a city that had been taken from the republic they were fighting to build.

They were not soldiers in any formal sense by the time they died. They were captives. Starving. Sick. Without hope of rescue.

They held.

The accounts that survive describe men who refused to swear loyalty oaths to the British crown even when offered better conditions in exchange. Men who chose the hold of the Jersey over a comfortable betrayal. Men who died with the conviction that the cause was worth more than their lives.

Formed men. To the last.

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What the full cost means.

The revolution was not won cheaply. It was not won quickly. It was won across eight years of fighting that killed one in twelve of the men who served, not counting those who were wounded or captured and survived.

The men who fell in battle are the ones the history books remember. The men who died of fever in winter camps and the men who died on rotting ships in Brooklyn Harbor are the ones who have been largely forgotten.

They are not less dead for being forgotten.

The formation tradition that built these men, that produced the conviction to stand in the line at Lexington, to hold at Bunker Hill, to refuse the loyalty oath on the Jersey even while starving, is the tradition this platform is built to recover.

Not because it produces soldiers. Because it produces men who understand that certain things are worth more than their personal comfort. That liberty is not given. That it is maintained at cost by men who have been formed to understand what the cost is and why it must be paid.

Joseph Warren told his mother: where danger is, dear mother, there must your son be. He was thirty-four years old. He had a general’s commission and a physician’s practice and four children. He stayed to cover the retreat. He was shot in the head. He died instantly. He had been formed to understand that certain obligations could not be declined.

That formation is what we are trying to recover. Not in the abstract. In the household. In the son being raised right now by a father who understands what it cost and why it mattered. The men in the mass graves beneath Fort Greene Park deserve more than a flag once a year.

They deserve sons who know what they paid for. They deserve fathers who are building those sons.

Get to work.

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Value for Value

These men gave everything. If this essay gave you something worth having, give something back. Send it to one father who needs to read it. Post it. Pass it forward. The tradition only survives if it moves.

The book behind this platform is Forge the Son. The formation manual for fathers who understand what the men on Lexington Green and the prison ships of Brooklyn were built from and want to build it again.

Buy on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ezYbsTX

If you want to sustain this work through July 4 and beyond, become a paid subscriber. Every essay in this series is one argument built piece by piece toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.

The republic is rebuilt one household at a time.

Start yours.

~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸

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Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the author of Forge the Son: A Father’s Manual for Raising Sons by the Spirit That Built America.

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