Patriot newspapers publicized vivid atrocity stories of British rape in New Jersey.
Evidence
Although General Howe dismissed them as propaganda, reports in the patriot press featured vivid tales of British soldiers raping and killing civilians in New Jersey. In December, a front-page account in the Pennsylvania Packet told of a woman “and her only daughter (a child of ten years of age) ravished” and a thirteen-year-old girl “taken from her father’s house, carried to a barn about a mile, there ravished, and afterwards made use of by five more of these brutes.” — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 315
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the course theme of how rhetorical appeals (here atrocity propaganda) shape the legitimacy narrative of founding legal-political documents. — connects to: Lived British abuses, not abstract declarations, drove New Jersey civilians to embrace independence. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 316