Monument to the Revolutionary Martyrs Who Perished in Wallabout Bay

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MONUMENT TO THE REVOLUTIONARY MARTYRS WHO PERISHED IN WALLABOUT BAY.

Some days since General Duryea¹ introduced a bill into the Legislature to provide the rites of sepulture for the American soldiers who perished on the prison ships in Wallabout Bay, during the Revolution.² These martyrs to American liberty were the soldiers captured at Fort Washington and who were afterwards brought to New York and there placed in confinement. Provost Marshal Cunningham was the jailor of these patriots, and the holds of five wretched hulks in Wallabout Bay constituted their dungeons.³

There, shut out from the light of day, deprived of wholesome and sufficient food, poisoned by a mephitic atmosphere, till famine and noxious air infected all their blood with fever, these men languished for months, sometimes for years, when endurance could so long resist the assaults of pestilence, till death relieved them from their sufferings. The tortures of the Africans on the slave ships, during the horrors of the middle passage, were surpassed by those endured by the unfortunate victims of British cruelty, on board these floating hells.

They literally perished by hundreds. Some idea may be formed of their heroism, fortitude and devotion, when we recall the fact that they were offered liberation from their imprisonment, good pay, and position in the British army equal to that which they had held in the American, at any time that they would abandon the American cause. They resisted the temptation and chose instead the dreadful fate which the tender mercies of Cunningham and his myrmidons had prepared for them.⁴

During the period of the occupation of New York by the British, eleven thousand five hundred men perished on board those five hulks. Their bodies were interred in pits upon the beach; where, in many instances, the shallow and which covered them was washed off by the tides, leaving their bones and decomposing bodies exposed.

In 1808 the Tammany Society⁵ disinterred these remains and removed them to the grounds of Mr. Benjamin Romayne​ .⁶ The ceremonies on this occasion were of an imposing character; the federal officers were invited to take part, and they were deposited in their present resting-place, near Hudson avenue, we believe with Masonic rites. The place is now greatly dilapidated, many of the bones have again become exposed, and it is said that large quantities of them have been taken away and employed by button makers in their manufacture.

The bill of General Duryea proposes to rescue these remains from further desecration, by removing them to Fort Greene, and there giving them honorable sepulture.⁷ It also provides for the erection of a suitable monument to their memory, by opening a subscription for contributions from those disposed to aid in such an enterprise, and empowering the Common Council of Brooklyn to make a suitable appropriations, not to exceed two thousand dollars, to complete the work.

When we recollect that this is the greatest collection of human bones of revolutionary heroes now existing in any place, and that the sum proposed to be expended is less than a dollar for each person, we can not consider the appropriation extravagant.

Those who perished in the Wallabout, it is true, were not generals or men that had achieved a glorious name, but they were no less heroes and patriots than those who during that eventual contest made themselves known to fame.

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