Some of those people were soldiers or sailors captured in military operations while others had been detained as politically suspect.
American authorities were ready to arrange exchange prisoners as long as the British released someone of equal importance.
There were disputes about what that meant, of course. In July, a Boston crowd forcibly prevented Dr. Benjamin Church, suspected traitor and spy, from being traded for Dr. James McHenry, a young military surgeon who had already been paroled.
The Massachusetts government balked at releasing the Loyalist merchant Benjamin Davis, Sr., until a petition linked his case to Samuel Richards of Norwalk, Connecticut, as quoted yesterday.
Richards (1716–1777) lived in the village of Rowayton. He was a committee man clamping down on local Loyalism and captain of the militia company that guarded the shore.
Another Norwalk man, Stephen Hoyt (c. 1750–1809), had crossed to Long Island, New York, to work for the Crown. He cruised the coast in a sloop, picking up recruits for a Loyalist regiment called the Prince of Wales’s American Volunteers.
On the rainy night of 16 March, Capt. Hoyt led about twenty men into Rowayton to raid Richards’s farm. He captured fifteen armed men, including Capt. Richards, three Continental soldiers on leave, and eleven local guards.
Hoyt took those prisoners to New York, where they were locked up in the Provost jail. On 10 April the city’s Royal American Gazette praised the raid: “Such excursions as these will keep the Rebels in constant trepidation & give life & Spirit to our new made Soldiers & Officers.”
In May, Richards’s brother petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to exchange Benjamin Davis, Sr., for Capt. Richards. The legislature approved that plan on 2 June.
Davis traveled to New York. Samuel Richards returned to Norwalk but died very soon after, on 23 June. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.
TOMORROW: Benjamin, Jr.
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