Major Andrè's Description of the Mischianza.—Philadelphia Provost Prison.—Cunningham.
ill-natured Irishman of sixty years, whose conduct as provost marshal here and in New York has connected his name with all that is detestable. There were confined the American prisoners taken at Brandywine and Germantown, many of whom died of starvation after feeling the lash of Cunningham's whip, or the force of his heavy boot, and were buried in the Potter's Field near by, now the beautiful Washington Square. It makes the blood curdle to read of the sufferings of those who fell under the sway of that monster, so devilish in all his ways. The miseries of others seemed to give him great delight; and often, in the sight of the starving prisoners, would he kick over a pail of soup, or scatter a basket of fruit or cold placed upon the door-stone with the hope that it shall meet him hereafter as provost marshal in victuals which some benevolent hand had might nourish the famished soldiers! We New York. Tradition says he was hung
* This edifice was erected in 1774, and taken down in 1836. The beautiful new Athenæum occupies a portion of the ground on Sixth Street, and the remainder is covered by elegant dwellings. It is a singular fact that the architect who constructed it was the first person incarcerated in it. He was a Whig, and, having incurred the displeasure of the British, he was locked up in that prison. The Public Ledger of June 26th, 1837, gives an account of an armorial drawing, representing, in bold relief, a cuirass, casque, gorget, and Roman battle-ax, with radiating spears, which was made upon an arch of one of the second story cells, by Marshall, an English engraver, who was confined there for many years for counterfeiting the notes of the United States Bank. He was the son of the notorious "Bag and Hatchet Woman," of St. Giles's, London, who followed the British army in its Continental campaigns, and gathered spoils from the slain and wounded on the field of battle. Those who were dead were readily plundered, and the wounded as readily dispatched. This woman and son were master-spirits in the purlieus of St. Giles's, among robbers and counterfeiters. The gang were at length betrayed, and the parent and child fled to this country, bringing with them considerable wealth in money and jewels. They lived in splendid style in Philadelphia, riding in a gorgeous cream-colored phaeton, drawn by richly-caparisoned horses, driven tandem. Their means were soon exhausted, when the son married, and commenced business as an engraver. He counterfeited notes of the United States Bank, was detected, and in 1803 was sentenced to eighteen years' confinement and hard labor in the Walnut Street Prison, then the State Penitentiary. While he was in prison, his mother, who had wandered away from Philadelphia in poverty and destitution, was executed in another state for a foul murder and arson.
Washington Square.—Office of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs.—The Secretary's Aids.
at Newgate, in England; but the records of that prison, examined by Mr. Bancroft, exhibit no such name.
Washington Square, the finest promenade in Philadelphia, was inclosed and set apart as a "Potter's Field"—a place to bury strangers in—in 1704, and was used for that purpose until within the last thirty-five years. There a great multitude of soldiers, who died of the small-pox and camp diseases, were buried in 1776—7. It was indeed a Golgotha. Many of the bodies, buried in pits from twenty to thirty feet square, were piled upon each other, the topmost barely covered with earth. At least two thousand American soldiers were buried there within the space of eight months. The bodies of hundreds of victims of the yellow fever, in 1793, there found a resting-place. At that time, the ground being full, interments ceased.
It was made a public walk in 1815; and that "city of the dead," shaded by sixty or seventy varieties of trees, is now traversed daily by thousands of the inhabitants of the teeming city of the living around it.