into the hands of the enemy during the period of the Revolution. We
have concealed nothing of the truth, but we have set nothing down in
malice, or with undue recrimination.

It is for the sake of the martyrs of the prisons themselves that this
work has been executed. It is because we, as a people, ought to know
what was endured; what wretchedness, what relentless torture, even
unto death, was nobly borne by the men who perished by thousands in
British prisons and prison ships of the Revolution; it is because we
are in danger of forgetting the sacrifice they made of their fresh
young lives in the service of their country; because the story has
never been adequately told, that we, however unfit we may feel
ourselves for the task, have made an effort to give the people of
America some account of the manner in which these young heroes, the
flower of the land, in the prime of their vigorous manhood, met their
terrible fate.

Too long have they lain in the ditches where they were thrown, a
cart-full at a time, like dead dogs, by their heartless murderers,
unknown, unwept, unhonored, and unremembered. Who can tell us their
names? What monument has been raised to their memories?

It is true that a beautiful shaft has lately been erected to the
martyrs of the Jersey prison ship, about whom we will have very much
to say. But it is improbable that even the place of interment of the
hundreds of prisoners who perished in the churches, sugar houses, and
other places used as prisons in New York in the early years of the
Revolution, can now be discovered. We know that they were, for the
most part, dumped into ditches dug on the outskirts of the little
city, the New York of 1776. These ditches were dug by American