Page 48 - Demo

against the disease. This act was the most humanity the British showed their captives, but the gesture came too late for many victims of the virus.
The third of twelve articles of capitulation agreed upon between Generals Clinton and Lincoln on May 12, 1780, stipulated that the British would provide adequate shelter and provisions for Continental prisoners. Barracks were constructed at the edge of town. The fourth article ostensibly released captured militiamen home on parole, and the fifth article guaranteed sick and wounded Americans would receive the same quality medical treatment that British soldiers received
in their hospitals.
Instead, confinement aboard these floating death-traps, combined with inadequate nourishment, insufficient medical care, and the autumn chill allowed the highly contagious small pox to run rampant. Mortality figures are difficult to reconcile, but the total American prisoner deaths in Charleston may have been as high as eight hundred.
Fayssoux sought help from Mr. de Rosettee,
the British commissary of prisoners. The doctor pointed out the rising death toll and requested measures to prevent the spread of the disease.
An inspection was carried out by American commissary of prisoners James Fisher and British deputy commissary Dr. James Fraser. Their report confirmed Fayssoux’s complaints, giving him hope that remedies would be forthcoming. British army staff physician Dr. John McNamara Hays was subsequently ordered to investigate the condition of the prisoners.
To Fayssoux’s astonishment, Hays reported
that the prison ships were not crowded, and conditions were acceptable, and no evidence of infectious disease was found among the prisoners!
Driven by outrage, he made one more strong effort on behalf of miserable shipboard sufferers. He placed two corpses, men who had succumbed to smallpox, in the area outside the hospital where they could not possibly pass unnoticed during Dr. Hay’s daily visits to the hospital.
“I marked to him,” said Fayssoux, “the appearances of the subjects, whose bodies were highly tinged with a yellow suffusion, petechied over the breast and trunk, with considerable ecchymosis from extravasated or dissolved blood about the neck, breast and upper extremities.
I inquired if it was possible a doubt could remain respecting the nature of their disorder, and expressed my surprise at the report he had made. The remarkable words of his reply were, ‘that the confinement of the prisoners in prison-ships was the great eye-sore, and there was no help for that, it must be done.’”
Disease was not the sole reason for a reduction of the number of captives aboard the ships in the harbor and in the barracks ashore. Several hundred American soldiers were forcibly conscripted by the British and convinced to switch sides for service in the West Indies as an alternative to prison. To convince the prisoners that their cause was lost, the British withheld clothing and money sent by Congress for
their relief.
Lieutenant Colonel Balfour employed a different tactic: intimidation. The men were given a devil’s choice: either enlist or go aboard the prison ships, where they faced certain death.
Moreover, the rations previously allowed for the support of their wives and children would be withheld. Fayssoux, who witnessed the scene, was proud of his comrades: “Human nature recoiled from so horrid a declaration—for a few seconds the unhappy victims seemed stupefied at the dreadful prospect; a gloomy and universal silence
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