“The prisoners were convinced that the events of April 6, would live forever in infamy. One told his diary that night that their ordeal would be remembered with the same reverence and fury as the Boston Massacre of 1770.”

By Nick Guyatt

BY ANY measure, Dartmoor Prison was a desperate place. Marooned high on a blasted plain, offering no protection from the rain, wind and snow that claimed this part of southwest England for much of the year, the prison became the preeminent POW facility for Americans during the War of 1812.

More than six-and-a-half thousand names were written into the prison register from April 1813 until March 1815, and 268 more were written into the adjoining volume recording deaths in captivity. Dartmoor was the largest war prison for American captives before World War II, but for more than two centuries it’s remained in obscurity.

Had they won release in March 1815 – when news of Congress’s ratification of the Treaty of Ghent reached Britain – the ordeal of the Dartmoor Americans would have been bad enough. But neither the British nor American governments would allow the prisoners to leave, despite the peace.

Although the U.S. consul in London initially allowed prisoners with wealthy relatives or friends to fund their own passage back to the United States, soon he was turning down all requests for release – hoping instead to charter commercial vessels which could sail the survivors back across the Atlantic. But after Napoleon’s escape from Elba and sudden re-emergence in Paris in March 1815, all hell had broken loose. The British government was now commandeering every commercial vessel to send men and materiel to France for a climactic battle; the Dartmoor Americans would have to wait for their homecoming.

With rumours circulating back at Dartmoor that the U.S. consul might need a full year to complete the evacuation, the prisoners’ patience reached its breaking point. A minor altercation with the prison guards on April 6, 1815 led to a tense stand-off in the main yard. The guards had neither enthusiasm nor training for their work. After all, they were only militiamen who were no keener to be at Dartmoor than the inmates.

By the early evening, the prisoners were hurling insults at the guards, and daring the militia to open fire. The troops were ordered to advance, with their bayonets presented, and eventually got close enough to draw American blood. The prisoners withdrew, then surged forwards, then fell back again; the militia lost their discipline. One shot sounded, then another.

The Americans initially thought that the guards were firing blanks, before they noticed men falling all around them. The inmates fled towards the relative safety of the seven prison blocks above the main yard, but when they tried to get in, they found many of the doors were already locked. It was close to turning-in time, and the turnkeys had been faithfully following their usual routines even as the drama had been building in the main yard. Now the militia were giving free rein to the frustration, boredom and anger that had built up doing their winter rotation at Dartmoor. Guards became death squads, firing indiscriminately on the prisoners as they fought desperately to get back into their blocks.

One prisoner who’d earned the enmity of the guards, Neil McKinnon of New York, clearly saw a rifle raised in his direction and knew that his life was about to end. Then, as the shot rang out, he saw a 14-year-old African American boy named Thomas Jackson crumple to the floor in agony. The shot intended for McKinnon had hit the youth, who had only been in the prison for a few weeks. The terrified child held on through the night, despite losing part of his intestines as the bullet tore through his body. He died the following morning, the youngest of nine American fatalities in the ‘Dartmoor Massacre.’

The prisoners were convinced that the events of April 6, 1815 would live forever in infamy; one told his diary that night that their ordeal would be remembered with the same reverence and fury as the Boston Massacre of 1770. But the British and American governments had other ideas. Neither side wanted to reopen the War of 1812, and each recognized the sensitivity of what had taken place. The British announced an official investigation, but successfully recruited a callow American merchant – Charles King, son of the former U.S. ambassador Rufus King – to represent the United States. King’s British counterpart was an older and much wilier British military lawyer, who expertly steered proceedings.

The prisoners were interviewed, along with guards and prison officials. The verdict was maddeningly vague. Yes, the soldiers had fired unlawfully on the prisoners. But it was impossible to establish which soldier had started the shooting, and it would be improper to hold their commander (or the prison’s governor) responsible for the deaths.

The Prince Regent sent a stiff half-apology to the United States; the Madison Administration showed its mild displeasure by refusing the British offer of compensation. All the while, the evacuation at Dartmoor proceeded with a glacial slowness. The last Americans, including some of those injured most gravely on April 6, were still in the prison through the last week of July 1815.

Why were the Dartmoor Americans treated so badly – by the British, by their own government, and especially by posterity? Part of the reason they faded from view is that, after a half-century of near-constant tensions, they were the last victims of a conflict between Britain and the United States. The War of 1812 was a messy affair, and since its protagonists never went to war with each other again there was little appetite for remembering the stories of those who had fought (and suffered) on both sides. The Dartmoor Americans, and especially those who lost their lives in the massacre, were doubly cheated by history: in April 1815 they were prisoners of a war that had ended, and in the decades and centuries after 1815 they were martyrs to an enmity that had largely vanished.

But there’s another factor to consider. Nearly all of the Dartmoor Americans were sailors, the vast majority on trading vessels and privateers. America’s leaders had consciously decided before 1812 to limit the size of the U.S. Navy, and instead to privatize the war effort via the exploits of privateers. This may have suited Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were spared the expense and the responsibility of a large cadre of uniformed navy personnel, but it inevitably left ordinary sailors in harm’s way with relatively few protections from their government. (It also meant that the men who had fought for the republic on the high seas in 1812 were mostly denied pensions or other recompense for their sacrifice.) The Dartmoor story lacked champions after 1815 precisely because its protagonists lacked the standing and visibility that uniformed personnel could more easily draw from the public.

In The Hated Cage, I’ve tried to bring these men and their experiences back to life, and to recover some of the passion and despair that characterized their experiences of the War of 1812. The Dartmoor Americans were extraordinarily resourceful: in the book I describe the incredible worlds they built within the prison, from boxing gyms and theatres to churches, casinos and lending libraries; along with the daring escape attempts which anticipate almost every cliché from the prison-break movies of a later era. They were, above all else, prisoners: of Britain, for sure, but also of circumstance and fortune. And after all this time, their story deserves to be remembered.

Nicholas Guyatt is the author of The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain’s Most Terrifying Prison. He is professor of American history at the University of Cambridge and the author of five previous books, including Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation. He lives in Cambridge, U.K.