A hybrid fellow’s forum with Susan Brynne Long, Ph.D. Candidate in American Civilization, University of Delaware from April 20, 2023. Recording available.
About the Presentation
During the Revolutionary War, Patriot victories presented a problem for the early United States in the form of British and British-allied prisoners and their families. Since the Continental Army could not bear the burden of their care alone, the Continental Congress dispersed prisoners throughout the colonies for management by state and local governments. This dissertation examines how military and civil authorities worked with civilians to provision, house, and transport prisoners. By virtue of this service, civilians involved themselves in policy making related to prisoner exchange and freedoms, rendering the prisoner management a democratic process in the early years of the war. The efforts of non-combatants entrenched the civilian control of military doctrine in daily wartime life. When the Continental Army militarized its functions beginning in 1777, it mimicked the policies that localities employed in the early prisoner management systems of the war while also erasing popular control. By assuming majority control of prisoners, the Continental Army distanced civilians from the war effort, lessening support for the war by delocalizing common defense in early America. At the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Long looked at the Papers of the Pocket Plantation. The plantation owners helped to supply the Continental Army during the war, and these papers will reveal whether it also supplied prisoners of war stationed in nearby Charlottesville. She also consulted the papers of Theordorick Bland, commander of the prisoner barracks in Charlottesville from 1779-1780, within the Papers of Thomas Jefferson series. These and other collections at ICJS rounded out the southern colonies chapter of her dissertation, which considers how prisoner management in the region differed from the approaches employed by authorities in northern colonies.
About Susan Brynne Long
Susan Brynne Long is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the American Civilization program at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation is titled “‘the disagreeable situation in between the Civil and the Military”: Prisoner of War Management in the American Revolution.” Long’s project examines how the management of military prisoners by American authorities evolved over the course of the war. She argues that state and local governments relied on noncombatants to meet prisoner needs starting in 1775. In 1777, Congress replaced the ad-hoc organizations of prisoners management with a single system operated by the Continental Army. This process of “delocalizing” prisoner management reduced the authority that noncombatants had wielded over prisoner populations through their governments. This transition challenges the idea that the American Revolutionary War acted as the staging ground for the nation’s tradition of “civil control over the military.” Analyzing who managed military prisoners during the Revolution reveals that federal authority gradually supplanted the authority of non-combatants and their governments in the administration of wartime logistical support services. The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, the First Families of New York, and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies have generously supported this dissertation.