An illustration of the captured Patriot Stephen Haines taken, as a prisoner, to the Rhinelander Sugar House which the British are said to have used as a prison.
During this prelude to the actual 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence we are looking at some of our local people who put their possessions and lives on the line for freedom for America.
We speak here about Stephen Haines II.
Stephen Haines is believed to have been among the American patriots imprisoned in the sugar house prisons in Manhattan during the Revolutionary War — a brutal chapter in New York’s wartime history.
Much of this story has been pieced together from fragments but is believed to be, on the whole, true.
Haines was from Elizabethtown, N.J., a place with many Patriots, several of which were associated with Sussex County. Haines was hounded by the British Army who in mid-1776 had come to America in angry response to the Declaration of Independence and defeated the Americans at the Battle of Long Island and forced the Continentals into a subsequence retreat to Manhattan and then up the island and over to White Plains and further.
Many prisoners had been captured during one of these early campaigns—possibly after the Battle of Fort Washington in November of 1776, when over 2,800 Americans were taken prisoner. With many men taken prisoner there was the question of where to keep them. The sugar trade with the Caribbean islands had been a strong and profitable one, with storage of the import in southern Manhattan. The British converted several sugar warehouses to detain thousands of American prisoners of war. It is said that Haines was taken from his home, in his night clothes, and marched barefoot for 3 miles and then taken by water 15 miles to the dreaded sugar house.
Prisoners were held in cramped, unsanitary conditions, often with little food, no medical care, and rampant disease. The buildings were sometimes six stories high, with low ceilings, no ventilation, and were so foul that lamps couldn’t stay lit due to the stench. Many prisoners died and were buried in mass graves—some estimates suggest over 11,000 deaths in New York’s wartime prisons. There were also prison ships with at least as horrific conditions.
It is said that Haines was held in Rhinelander Sugar House on Nassau Street. He was captured in the fall of the 1776, and was not released until after the battle of Monmouth, June, 1778, when the numerous captures by Washington made the British glad to make an exchange of prisoners.
The Sugar House prisons became symbols of British cruelty and American sacrifice. Haines’ survival and later legacy as a “distinguished patriot” reflect the resilience of those who endured these conditions. Stephen Haines’ experience would have shaped his family’s values — passed down to grandson Daniel Haines, who championed reform and civic virtue in 19th-century New Jersey as two-term governor of New Jersey and long-time resident of Hamburg, N.J.
Bill Truran, Sussex County’s historian, may be contacted at billt1425@gmail.com He is the author of “Voices of ‘76: Americans Speak of our Freedom.”
