The Hated Cage
An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A leading historian reveals the never-before-told story of a doomed British prison and the massacre of its American prisoners of war
After the War of 1812, more than five thousand American sailors were marooned in Dartmoor Prison on a barren English plain; the conflict was over but they had been left to rot by their government. Although they shared a common nationality, the men were divided by race: nearly a thousand were Black, and at the behest of the white prisoners, Dartmoor became the first racially segregated prison in US history.
The Hated Cage documents the extraordinary but separate communities these men built within the prison—and the terrible massacre of nine Americans by prison guards that destroyed these worlds. As white people in the United States debated whether they could live alongside African Americans in freedom, could Dartmoor’s Black and white Americans band together in captivity? Drawing on extensive new material, The Hated Cage is a gripping account of this forgotten history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Guyatt (Bind Us Apart), an American history professor at the University of Cambridge, chronicles in this colorful account the little-known story of more than 6,000 American POWs held at Dartmoor Prison in southwest England during the War of 1812. Explaining that "virtually all" of the prisoners were sailors whose private vessels had been outfitted with guns and ordered to harass British merchant ships, Guyatt notes that British impressment of American sailors was a primary cause of the war, and draws on prison diaries and letters to explain how Dartmoor became "the first racially segregated prison in American history" when white prisoners asked to be housed in separate quarters from their Black compatriots. Guyatt also delves into the story of Black sailor Richard Crafus, known as "King Dick," who became a leader of the Black section of the prison, which white inmates visited for gambling, theatrical plays, and even Sunday sermons, and documents how mounting tensions over delays in releasing the Americans after the war's end and an attempted escape led to the massacre of nine prisoners and the wounding of many others in April 1815. Expertly weaving digressions on the history of incarceration and the racial dynamics of America's shipping industry into the narrative, Guyatt delivers an engrossing look at an intriguing historical footnote.
