Cornelius continued in the Continental service until January 1st, 1781, and received an honorable discharge. After the war he settled at Yorktown, Westchester County, and came to be known as the "beloved physician." He was very gentle and kind, and a great Presbyterian. He died in 1823, and left descendants, one of whom is Judge C. M. Tompkins, of Washington, D. C.
As we have seen, Cunningham was not always in charge of the Provost. It appears that, during his absence in Philadelphia and other places, where he spread death and destruction, he left Sergeant O'Keefe, almost as great a villian as himself, in charge of the hapless prisoners in New York. It is to be hoped that his boast that he had killed more Americans than all the King's forces is an exaggeration. It may, however, be true that in the years 1776 and 1777 he destroyed more American soldiers than had, at that time, fallen on the field of battle.
When an old building that had been used as a prison near the City Hall was torn down a few years ago to make way for the Subway Station of the Brooklyn Bridge, a great number of skeletons were found _in its cellars_. That these men starved to death or came to their end by violence cannot be doubted. New York, at the time of the Revolution, extended to about three-quarters of a mile from the Battery, its suburbs lying around what is now Fulton Street. Cornelius speaks of the Bowery as about three-quarters of a mile from New York! "St. Paul's Church," says Mr. Haltigan, in his very readable book called "The Irish in the American Revolution," "where Washington attended divine service, is now the only building standing that existed in those days, and that is a veritable monument to Irish and American patriotism. * * * On the Boston Post Road, where it crossed a brook in the vicinity of Fifty-Second street and Second avenue, then called Beekman's Hill, William Beekman had an extensive country house. During the Revolution this house was the British headquarters, and residence of Sir William Howe, where Nathan Hale was condemned to death, and where Major Andrè received his last instructions before going on his ill-fated mission to the traitor Arnold."
Lossing tells us of the imprisonment of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, in the following language: "Suffering and woe held terrible sway after Cornwallis and his army swept over the plains of New Jersey. Like others of the signers of the great Declaration, Richard Stockton was marked for peculiar vengeance by the enemy. So suddenly did the flying Americans pass by in the autumn of 1776, and so soon were the Hessian vultures and their British companions on the trail, that he had barely time to remove his family to a place of safety before his beautiful mansion was filled with rude soldiery. The house was pillaged, the horses and stock were driven away, the furniture was converted into fuel, the choice old wines in the cellar were drunk, the valuable library, and all the papers of Mr. Stockton were committed to the flames, and the estate was laid waste. Mr. Stockton's place of concealment was discovered by a party of loyalists, who entered the house at night, dragged him from his bed, and treating him with every indignity that malice could invent, hurried him to New York, where he was confined in the loathsome Provost Jail and treated with the utmost cruelty. When, through the interposition of Congress he was released, his constitution was hopelessly shattered, and he did not live to see the independence of his country achieved. He died at his home at Princeton, in February, 1781, blessed to the last with the tender and affectionate attentions of his noble wife."