I've been telling my kids and friends this story because it's very revolution, very 1776, very Leverett. The hero of this story was not my ancestor; he died before he could create descendants. He was a Leverett during the Revolutionary War.
Thomas and his cousin John Leverett graduated from Harvard in 1776, the year they moved Harvard over to Concord, Mass. so that the soldiers could use the old buildings as a barracks. Concord was unacceptable as a replacement and many suspected that they cut some corners to make it possible for the class of 1776 to graduate, but they did. Thomas was to become a surgeon while his cousin John was a lawyer and would therefore be known as John Esquire, though he never practiced much as a lawyer.
Thomas would have become a surgeon but the war broke out and, as a doctor, he was placed on a boat heading to Maine to fight the British. But the boat was captured, and all the prisnoners were deposited in the Jersey, an old boat that was sitting and rotting in Brooklyn harbor, a boat that the British were using as a prison.
The British were very aggravated at the rebel soldiers and took it out on them. They figured that if they mistreated these prisoners badly enough it would teach everyone a lesson. The boat was rotting and wet and unsafe below, and they brought only scraps of unhealthy food to them. Soon the prisoners started dying, but they didn't care. The orders were treat them like hell and everyone followed the orders.
Thomas, being a doctor and all, was appalled by the conditions, and protested to the Captain of his own boat, who was also a prisoner. Status however didn't seem to matter. Everyone was suffering appalling conditions.
Finally the captain got Thomas and one other guy to join him, and plead to offer a deal to the Americans. You free some British prisoners, and the British will free these and save their lives. It was their only hope. The British agreed to let them talk to the appropriate authorities, who would be generals under Washington, along with British authorities, and see if some kind of humane trade could be arranged.
They did it at a bad time in the war, though. The Americans weren't interested. They weren't making deals with anyone for anything. They felt like they were about to win the war and any deal would look like accepting the permanent status of prisoners and those who would soon be free anyway. No deals were happening, and Thomas went back to being on the prison ship.
Many died on the Jersey and its documentation rebuilt a very horrific scene. A recent book has been written about it called Ghost Ship of Brooklyn, which documents the horrible conditions and the number of people who died, in some cases seven or eight a day.
Others, like Thomas, were simply so damaged they could never live a normal life again. After the war the prisoners were released and Thomas did have a chance to practice as a surgeon, but he died after only six or seven years, unable to recover his full health. Of course he received lots of recognition as a surviving prisoner of war.
Some said that the harsh treatment of prisoners actually backfired on the British and made Americans more likely to defend the rebels, more likely to join the war efforts, less likely to have any sympathy for the British at all. For years bones would wash up onto Brooklyn Harbor's beaches and people would tell stories about the prisoners. So many of those prisoners didn't survive, or if they did, couldn't have descendents, so we don't know what to make of the stories when we encounter them.
Thomas's cousin John had an interesting tale. During the war his parents were very sick and he moved them to Connecticut, where they could be cared for more properly. His mother would inherit a farm up in Windsor, Vermont, whereas his father, Colonel John, who had given up printing to run an imported goods store, only to find that the 1760's was a terrible time to run an imported goods business, had simply left Boston after years of being an Overseer of the Poor. They had seen enough of the "Times of Hardship" and the "Times of Suffering" where Bostonians had starved and been unable to import food legally due to a chokehold tariff by Britain...anyway, from Connecticut, when he finally did join the war it didn't amount to much. And when his mother inherited that farm in Windsor Vermont, he would move up there and occupy it.
An odd thing happened, though. His second wife was a cousin, Thomas the surgeon's sister Hannah. Thomas the surgeon would have inherited his father's printing fortune, but he, being dead, could not, so Hannah had inherited it, and now all the wealth was combined in John Esquire's household, soon to move to Vermont, and John Esquire would never have to work again. He became a gentleman farmer and a kind of vocal intellectual.
I'm not sure if he was haunted by knowing what happened to his close cousin, Thomas, on that boat in Brooklyn. It was like the people on those boats were the martyrs of the revolution, having died for the cause, and not only died, but suffered quite a bit in the process. Making the book probably helped memorialize them. It's an unpleasant topic, though, because their treatment was so horrific.
I think of the story sometimes when people remind us that 250 years is a long time, and we often forget what happened and why.
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