American Social Standing in the Napoleonic Era

by lazybrunch

How would an American army or naval officer have been received by their counterparts in European militaries during the Napoleonic period? I’m particularly interested in how the British Army would’ve have treated an American officer, given the importance attached to social status in the period. Given the lack of noble titles in the United States, would a captured American officer have been afforded the same level of respect as, let’s say, a French nobleman? I imagine the War of 1812 resulted in some interactions between the American and British officer corps.

PartyMoses

This doesn't include much in the form of naval officers, but I wrote an answere about the prisoner of war experience during the War of 1812 here.

I'll c/p a few of the more relevant bits from that answer. The long and the short of it is that officers were generally held in very high esteem, and treated as equals, or at least as men worthy of respect and admiration.

Winfield Scott, a colonel captured during the Battle of Queenston Heights, describes several instances of great kindness and hospitality during his time as a prisoner. He is given quarters with the commander of the garrison at Prescott, a Colonel Pearson, and the commander having been captured and paroled only recently himself, the two swapped stories and shared a meal and a few drinks. The story told by the Pearson is worth relating here, as it is indicative of the cordiality with which most officers were treated during the conflict:

On board of a transport ship, with his young wife, he fell in with the ------, Captain -------, and being without heavy guns, surrendered after the first fire. Captain ------, with a party, boarded the prize, when learning that Mrs. Pearson was thrown into a state of premature labor, he placed a sentinel at the cabin door, and left to the colonel an absolute control over all within it - giving such aid as was called for. The colonel was also desired to mark everything that belonged to him, with his name, and assured that all should be held sacred as private property.

Scott and the rest of the regulars were paroled once they reached Quebec, and Scott, in his autobiography, notes that he and the men were treated with a great deal of kindness and charity from the British officers throughout their ordeal. Hull, for his part, is relatively quiet about his time as a prisoner of the British, but he does note that his daughter was treated with kindness, and then released when the force passed Buffalo.

Enlisted men could not expect the same treatment. Men captured when Fort Detroit fell were marched - literally marched, at one point directly in the view of American positions across the Niagara river - to Halifax, and put on board prison hulks. Their treatment on board was not unkind, necessarily, but conditions were grim and sickness was prevalent. Again, from a reply to the posted answer:

The British kept prison barges in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and had only recently converted the HMS Malabar, a fourth-rate Ship of the Line at anchor in the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, into a prison barge. A young Maine militiaman named Joseph Penley, Jr., was interned there, and wrote of his experiences. It's interesting to note that though Penley was a militaman, since he was captured in the taking of the USS Growler, his experiences would match the experiences of the sailors taken as well.

On the march to the Malabar, the men were put up in whatever convenient locations could be found, and it seems like the British made an effort to attend to the comfort of their prisoners as much as possible. On the King's birthday, they were given "a glass of Old Jamaica" to drink to the King's health.

The march, as you'd expect, was tough, and the men often had to sleep either in boats on the river or under single blankets exposed to the elements in small harbors. Penley wrote of one night, when they were put up in an old stone barracks that

"we had a pretty good night's rest, and we were very much in need of it, for, being in open boats the two nights before, with nothing but the canopy of the heavens to cover or screen us from the chilly air and heavy night dews, to sleep was impossible: nor was there room in the boat for a man to lay down. We had nothing to eat but raw pork and bread, and as for drink, we had the river water we floated in, from the time we went on board the boats at Montreal, until the first day of the next November."

On their arrival at Quebec, Penley estimated that there were about 430 men on board the Malabar, including all of the prisoners and guards, which would be relatively comparable to the number of men on board if the ship were fully manned. So, cramped, but not more oppressively than your average sailor would have experience were it at sea.

The men were mostly confined to areas belowdecks, and allowed to take the air only on the forward half of the top deck. A single mess (6 men) were selected each day to clean the prison area - Penley doesn't go into detail about what was being cleaned, but he does mention that "they used 3-cornered scrapers, shovels, scrub-brooms, buckets of water, mops &c." so you can use your imagination about the state of things.

Quarters were tight, but the hammocks had been replaced with berths designed to hold four men, but "we were obliged to crowd five into each berth, and then had to lay spoon fashion, and when one turned or shifted sides, all had to change too."

Conditions were bad. Inadequate food, not enough fresh air - Penley describes their conditions as "the Egyptian dark" - frequent illness, all led to various attempts by men to escape. A few made it, a few drowned in their attempt to reach the shore. Many died of the illnesses that swept through the population, especially in the summer months, when "some days two, three, and sometimes, four men would die" in a day.

The British tried to let the men out as often as they could, and there were several visits from high ranking generals looking to make conditions better. One duty that men could volunteer for was, grimly, a burial detail, that at least allowed a short visit to the city and fresh air.

I'm of course happy to answer follow-ups, and I recommend reading the posted thread, as I go into much more detail there.


Sources include The Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, LLD

The Journals of Elias Darnell, William Hull, and Thomas Mallary.

Of general use is Jon Latimer, 1812: The War with America and Donald Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict