Connecticut’s Prisoner Problem: What to Do with Captured Noncombatants?

Posted on June 5, 2025

Connecticut’s Prisoner Problem: What to Do with Captured Noncombatants?

After the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Fort Crown Point, and Skenesborough, NY, the American colonies faced new challenges. One of those challenges was caring for the prisoners they had taken. 250 years ago this week—June 3 and 5, 1775—the Connecticut government reimbursed Captain John Bigelow for his work with some of the prisoners taken at Skenesborough.

The settlement of Skenesborough was founded and led by Colonel Philip Skene, a career British army officer and Loyalist. Skene was on a ship returning from England at the time Skenesborough was taken, but the American expedition captured his son, Major Andrew Skene, and his two daughters, Katherine and Mary Ann Margaret. Andrew was also a British army officer and was kept as a prisoner of war, but the two sisters, aged about 20 and 19, were noncombatants. What should be done with them?

Rather than holding the sisters captive in Connecticut along with their brother (and paying for their care), Connecticut elected to remove them from the playing field. In these two pay orders, dated June 3 and 5, 1775, Connecticut’s Committee of the Pay Table ordered the colony’s treasurer to compensate Captain John Bigelow for “the Expence of Removing from this Colony to Montreal sundry persons taken & bro’t from Skenesborough”. Among those “sundry persons” were the Skene sisters. The journey was expensive—Bigelow was paid 100 pounds on June 3, then a further 50 pounds on June 5—but it solved the problem of what to do with the sisters and other captured Skenesborough residents. They could wait out the war in Canada, in exile but safe and among fellow Loyalists.

Click here to view Connecticut’s pay orders to John Bigelow (MS.7517 and MS.7518, property of Robert Nittolo) on the Ticonderoga Online Collections Database.