The outgrowth of this was that he enlisted in the American Army, Jan. 1, 1777, being then only twenty years of age. On April 15, 1777, he was appointed Surgeon's Mate in the Second Regiment of Rhode Island troops under the command of Col. Israel Angell. His appointment was signed by John Cochran, Surgeon General; James Craik,[1] Chief Physician and Surgeon to the Army; Col. Israel Angell and others. Four months after this, Aug. 22, 1777, while on a reconnoitering trip, Dr. Cornelius was surprised and taken prisoner by the British, at East Chester. He was robbed of all his belongings, and then marched to New York under charge of Hessian Guards by whom he was treated in an insulting and cruel manner. On his arrival there he was lodged in the Old Sugar House prison, in which the private soldiers were kept. Soon after he was removed from that prison and thrown into a dungeon in the Provost Jail. [1] It will be remembered that Dr. Craik was the physician who attended Gen. Washington in his last and fatal illness, December, 1799. Dr. Craik was then residing at Alexandria, Va. Concerning this Jail, Mary L. Booth, in her History of New York City, quotes from a published document of John Pintard, one of the founders of the New York Historical Society, as follows: "The Provost was destined for the more notorious rebels, civil, naval and military. An admission to this modern Bastile was enough to appall the stoutest heart." The Jail was under the superintendence of the notorious Provost Marshal Cunningham, and no greater brute, or demon in human form, ever had charge of captives of war. The barbarities practiced on the defenceless prisoners by this man stand unparalleled in the history of war. It is stated that he treated them with the utmost cruelty, heaped every possible indignity on them, and while his victims were dying off from cold and starvation, like cattle, he actually mingled an arsenical preparation with their poor food in order to kill them off quicker. It is also recorded that he openly boasted that "he had killed more of the rebels with his own hand than had been slain by all the king's forces in America." Such was the Provost Jail and its keeper. Among Dr. Cornelius's friends and fellow prisoners in the jail, he mentions Ethan Allen, the hero of Ticonderoga, and Majors Williams, Paine and Wells.