ows for all. So
these wretched men divided themselves into groups, each group crowding
close to the windows for ten minutes, then giving place to another
group. They slept on straw that was never changed, and the food given
them was scarcely enough to keep them alive. Those who suffered this
living death might have been free at any time had they been willing to
go over to the British, but few of the patriots, even in this dread
hour, deserted their cause. To while away the hours of their captivity,
they carved their names upon the walls with rusty nails. Fevers raged
constantly and they died by scores, leaving their half-finished initials
on the walls as their only relics. Their bodies were thrown out of
doors, and every morning gathered up in carts and carried to the
outskirts of the city to be buried in a trench without ceremony.

This was only one of a dozen such prison-houses. There was one other
that, if anything, was worse. It was the New Jail, and it still
stands in City Hall Park and is now the Hall of Records. During the
war it was known as The Provost, because it was the head quarters of a
provost-marshal named Cunningham. It was his custom at the conclusion
of his drunken revels to parade his weak, ill, half-fed prisoners
before his guests, as fine specimens of the rebel army. It is said
of him, too, that he poisoned those who died too slowly of cold and
starvation, and then went right on drawing money to feed them. This gave
rise to the saying that he starved the living and fed the dead. He took
a great delight in being as cruel and merciless as he could, and very
often boasted that he had caused the death of more rebels than had been
killed by all of the King's forces.

Many American sailors were also captured (for the Revolution was
fought on the sea as well as on land) and all these were placed aboard
prison-ships--useless hulks, worn-out freight-boats, and abandoned
men-of-war. For a time these hulks were anchored close by the Battery,
but afterward they were taken to the Brooklyn shore. There was misery
and suffering on all of them, but the worst was called the "Jersey,"
where captives were crowded into the hold, the sick and the well, poorly
fed and scarcely clothed, so many of them as hardly to permit space to
lie down, watched over by a guard of merciless soldiers. Disease in a
dozen forms was always present, and every morning the living were forced
to carry out those who had died over night.

Dur