"Nor ought we to omit the insults which the humane Britons offered to our people, nor the artifices which they used to enlist them in their service to fight against their country. It seems that one end of their starving our people was to bring them, by dint of necessity, to turn rebels to their own country, their own consciences, and their God. For while thus famishing they would come and say to them: 'This is the just punishment of your rebellion. Nay, you are treated too well for rebels; you have not received half you deserve or half you shall receive. But if you will enlist into his Majesty's service, you shall have victuals and clothes enough.'
"As to insults, the British officers, besides continually cursing and swearing at them as rebels, often threatened to hang them all; and, on a particular time, ordered a number, each man to choose his halter out of a parcel offered, wherewith to be hanged; and even went so far as to cause a gallows to be erected before the prison, as if they were to be immediately executed.
"They further threatened to send them all into the East Indies, and sell them there for slaves.
"In these and numberless other ways did the British officers seem to rack their inventions to insult, terrify, and vex the poor prisoners. The meanest, upstart officers among them would insult and abuse our colonels and chief officers.
"In this situation, without clothes, without victuals or drink, or even water, or with those which were base and unwholesome; without fire, a number of them sick, first with a contagious and nauseous distemper; these, with others, crowded by hundreds into close confinement, at the most unwholesome season of the year, and continued there for four months without blankets, bedding, or straw; without linen to shift or clothes to cover their bodies;--No wonder they all became sickly, and having at the same time no medicine, no help of physicians, nothing to refresh or support nature, died by scores in a night, and those who were so far gone as to be unable to help themselves lay uncared for, till death, more kind than Britons, put an end to their misery.
"By these means, and in this way, 1,500 brave Americans, who had nobly gone forth in defence of their injured, oppressed country, but whom the chance at war had cast into the hands of our enemies, died in New York, many of whom were very amiable, promising youths, of good families, the very flower of our land; and of those who lived to come out of prison, the greater part, as far as I can learn, are dead or dying. Their constitutions are broken; the stamina of nature worn out; they cannot recover--they die. Even the few that might have survived are dying of the smallpox. For it seems that our enemies determining that even these, whom a good constitution and a kind Providence had carried through unexampled sufferings, should not at last escape death, just before their release from imprisonment infected them with that fatal distemper.