This was only one of a dozen such prison-houses.  There was one other that, if anything, was worse.  It was the New Jail, and it still stands in City Hall Park and is now the Hall of Records.  During the war it was known as The Provost, because it was the head quarters of a provost-marshal named Cunningham.  It was his custom at the conclusion of his drunken revels to parade his weak, ill, half-fed prisoners before his guests, as fine specimens of the rebel army.  It is said of him, too, that he poisoned those who died too slowly of cold and starvation, and then went right on drawing money to feed them.  This gave rise to the saying that he starved the living and fed the dead.  He took a great delight in being as cruel and merciless as he could, and very often boasted that he had caused the death of more rebels than had been killed by all of the King’s forces.

Many American sailors were also captured (for the Revolution was fought on the sea as well as on land) and all these were placed aboard prison-ships—­useless hulks, worn-out freight-boats, and abandoned men-of-war.  For a time these hulks were anchored close by the Battery, but afterward they were taken to the Brooklyn shore.  There was misery and suffering on all of them, but the worst was called the “Jersey,” where captives were crowded into the hold, the sick and the well, poorly fed and scarcely clothed, so many of them as hardly to permit space to lie down, watched over by a guard of merciless soldiers.  Disease in a dozen forms was always present, and every morning the living were forced to carry out those who had died over night.

During this year 1778, and for several years after, the war was carried on for the most part in the South, in Georgia and South Carolina, while the British soldiers in the city made trips into the surrounding country and laid it waste.  Washington and his army in New Jersey could do little more than watch.

In the year 1780 the American cause came very near receiving a serious check, when an officer high in rank turned traitor.  This man was Benedict Arnold, and had been a vigorous fighter.  But now he bargained with the British to turn over to them West Point, where he was chief in command.  Major John Andre, a brilliant young officer under the British General Clinton, was sent to make the final arrangements.  Andre was returning to New York when he was captured with the plans of West Point concealed in his boots.  He was hanged as a spy, and Arnold, escaping to the British in New York, fought with them, despised by the Americans and mistrusted by the English; for a traitor can never be truly liked or respected even by those who benefit by his treachery.

The War of the Revolution went on until the fall of the year 1781, when General Washington made a sudden move that drew his men away from the vicinity of New York before the British army could foresee it.  Then he hurried to the South.  There, at Yorktown, in Virginia, the combined American army hemmed in, and after a battle forced to surrender, Lord Cornwallis, the British commander in the South, and all his men.