Camp Security: Digging for the Revolution’s Forgotten Prisoner-of-War Camp

When the British army of Lieutenant General John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777, its soldiers stepped into a legal gray area that would last until the end of the Revolutionary War. Today, a nonprofit group is searching the ground near York, Pennsylvania, for traces of the camp where many of them ended up.

Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, painted by Percy Moran. Credit: Library of Congress.

The Convention Army

Burgoyne negotiated the Saratoga Convention with the American field commander, Major General Horatio Gates: the British would lay down their arms in return for a promise of parole. Paroled soldiers were normally sent home on the pledge not to fight again for the rest of the war, or at least the rest of the campaign — a common arrangement that spared both sides the burden of feeding and guarding large numbers of prisoners.

But the Continental Congress rejected Gates's terms. The captured soldiers — who became known as the Convention Army — were treated poorly and moved again and again, so that other British forces could not free them. Thousands of soldiers, with their wives and families, were marched:

1. from Saratoga to Boston;
2. from Boston to Charlottesville, Virginia;
3. after more than a year there, split among camps in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Camp Security

Outside York, Pennsylvania, Camp Security grew to hold more than 1,500 soldiers and their families from the Convention Army, along with British forces captured at the Siege of Yorktown. They stayed from October 1781 until the war ended in 1783. Afterward the camp vanished into the landscape and into local folklore.

In 2022, the nonprofit Friends of Camp Security began archeological work to find it again.

The grant

The American Battlefield Protection Program's Preservation Planning Grants support the preservation and interpretation of sites of armed conflict on American soil, including battlefields and related sites. The program also offers land acquisition, interpretation and restoration grants to encourage community-driven stewardship by states, tribes and localities.

Sources

Based on "Soldiers with No Weapons: Remembering the Convention Army and Examining What Life Was Like for British Prisoners-of-War at Camp Security," part of the National Park Service series 2024 Preservation Planning Grants Highlights; a work of the United States government in the public domain.