The French History Podcast · Evergreen Podcasts

Napoleon's American Prisoners with Anne Morddel

·37 min·2 clips

French ports used bread-and-water jails, chained marches, and straw bedding for captured sailors.

1. The French History Podcast episode centers on Anne Mordell's book Napoleon's American Prisoners and the 1,500 American merchant seamen she found in French archives. 2. Anne Mordell is a genealogist and archive researcher, and Boyd Ellen Brewer is mentioned as the publisher offering the book at 50% off with code BB112. 3. The episode asks why American sailors were captured, how French prisons treated them, and why release depended on diplomacy and Napoleon's decisions. 4. Mordell says life at sea around 1800 was physically demanding, with little technology, crowded work, and no privacy aboard merchant vessels. 5. She says sailors faced disease on shore and at sea, including cholera, plague in North African ports, and illnesses such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, rubella, and measles. 6. She describes seamen as young men in their late teens to mid twenties who were often treated as violent labor that needed control and management. 7. The dangers she names include Royal Navy impressment, pirates in the West Indies, violent storms, shipwreck on shoals, French privateers, abandonment by captains, and unpaid wages. 8. Mordell explains that captured men were first brought into French Atlantic ports, with Brest as the most common arrival point in her sources. 9. She says prisoners were held in fortresses used as military jails, fed bread and water, and then marched hundreds of kilometers to prison depots in chains two by two. 10. American prisoners usually lacked the charitable funds that British prisoners received, so they had no money to improve food, clothing, or living conditions. 11. Mordell says the key issue in release was not nationality alone but the flag and nationality of the ship on which the men were captured. 12. Prisoners wrote to American consuls in ports or Paris and used seamen's protection certificates to argue for release. 13. She says that argument usually failed unless the men could prove they had been captured on an American vessel rather than an enemy ship. 14. One exception was the 1807 case in which John Armstrong and Fowler Skipwith obtained the release of 60 or 70 men as a favor from Napoleon. 15. Mordell also describes George D. Wilson, who reported a British escape attempt at Brion-Saint and was later moved to safety before joining a released group. 16. She says about 100 to 113 men were released in 1813 to serve on the True-Blooded Yankee, after which Denis Decret convinced Napoleon to stop further releases. 17. The interview moves quickly and keeps a practical, explanatory tone, with Mordell answering detailed questions about prisons, consuls, privateers, and diplomatic bargaining. 18. The format stays interview-based and archival, with long factual answers built from prison records, diplomatic correspondence, and named officials like Talleyrand, Armstrong, and Skipwith. 19. Readers interested in Napoleonic-era naval history, diplomacy, and French archives will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a light overview without prison detail or archival names may skip it.

As heard by us

A restrained archival look at American sailors held in Napoleonic France, and the narrow chances some had to regain freedom.

Napoleon's American Prisoners brings a neglected wartime story into focus: about 1,500 American merchant seamen held in Napoleonic France, some for the full 11 years of the war.

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You want the strange, overlooked story of 1,500 American merchant seamen held prisoner in Napoleonic France.

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