The Dartmoor Massacre: Nicholas Guyatt (1815)
Nicholas Guyatt, author of The Hated Cage
In the spring of 1815, as all Europe fretted about the return of Napoleon Bonaparte, a terrible massacre was perpetrated by British militiamen against American inmates at Dartmoor Prison in England. This episode has been very nearly forgotten in the two centuries since. Today the historian Nicholas Guyatt takes us back to the early nineteenth-century to explain just what happened.
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Nowadays there is much talk about the so-called special relationship between Great Britain and the United States of America. Inconvenient to this narrative, however, is the story of the first forty years of this relationship. The period between 1775 and 1815 was a time when very little cosiness existed.
The USA, of course, was born out of a revolutionary conflict with Great Britain in the 1770s and 1780s. During the decades that followed the War of Independence the hostilities continued. In America this was a time when the great founding generation of politicians – people like Jefferson, Maddison and Adams – were seeking to define what kind of country theirs was going to be. In Britain, meanwhile, an old mistrust lingered.
Almost half a century after the confrontations at Concord and Brooklyn Heights, Britain and America went to war again in 1812. This conflict, as our guest Nicholas Guyatt explains, is one that for reasons of cultural expediency, we have generally forgotten. Memories of the conflict have ‘vanished beneath the waves of the past.’
But the War of 1812 was actually a vital moment in the development of the West. Central questions of Indigenous rights and trading relationships were fought over, most notably at Ghent in the discussions that ended with a peace treaty at Christmas in 1814. This was a peace that allowed Britain to direct all of their attention on the greater threat posed by Napoleon.
Read an extract from The Hated Cage at Unseen Histories
Just a few months before Wellington’s century defining defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, however, another bloody event happened. In the south western corner of England, not far from the naval base at Plymouth, a new prison had been built on Dartmoor. The prison was constructed to the ideals of the day and it reflected powerful theories about civility that had been gaining ground in British culture. As Nicholas Guyatt points out, though, the dreams of Dartmoor were really not much more than that. For the thousands of American prisoners who were incarcerated there, the reality was a nightmare.
For years the tension had been building. After Peace of Ghent, the Dartmoor prisoners expected to be quickly returned to their home country. But this process was frustrated by constant delays. With each of these came a worsening of the mood inside the prison. On a bright April day in 1815 tempers snapped.
The massacre that happened at Dartmoor was a desperate event. Despite this, despite all the death, it is not much talked about today. While every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Massacre of 1770 in great detail, the Dartmoor Massacre of 1815 – in which more people died – has been lost in obscurity.
Nicholas Guyatt has written about this massacre and this period of history in his absorbing new book, The Hated Cage: an American tragedy in Britain’s most terrifying prison. In this episode of Travels Through Time he takes us back to the early nineteenth-century and inside the granite walls of Dartmoor Prison, to explain just what happened.
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Nicholas Guyatt’s The Hated Cage is newly published in hardback by Oneworld
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Show Notes
Scene One: Ghent, 24 December 1814 – the signing of the treaty that would end the War of 1812.
Scene Two: Dartmoor, 26 March 1815 – more than five thousand American prisoners were still in the prison months after the peace treaty had been concluded. On this day tempers begin to fray.
Scene Three: Dartmoor, 6 April 1815. The day of the massacre.
Memento: The effigy of Reuben Beasley
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Nicholas Guyatt
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
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About Nicholas Guyatt
Nicholas Guyatt is professor of American history at the University of Cambridge where he is a Fellow at Jesus College. The author of six books, he has written for the Guardian, Telegraph and London Review of Books and was a consultant for the acclaimed BBC Four television series, Racism: A History. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two children.
Image credit: Wiki Commons
A plan of Dartmoor Prison
Image credit: British Library
