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Dartmoor Prison massacre

Dartmoor Prison massacre
An illustration of Dartmoor Prison by an American prisoner.
Location	Dartmoor Prison
Date	6 April 1815 (1815-04-06)
Deaths	9 prisoners
Injured	50 prisoners

The Dartmoor Prison Massacre occurred on the evening of April 6, 1815, in HM Prison Dartmoor, after British prison guards opened fire on American prisoners of war. It resulted in 59 casualties, including nine deaths. The prisoners were captured during the War of 1812, and remained incarcerated after the war's official end in February 1815. The massacre was met with much disdain from the American public, however an inquiry into the incident found no wrongdoing on the side of the British prison guards.

Context

Dartmoor Prison was opened in 1809 with the purpose of containing the growing population of foreign prisoners of war on British soil, particularly those of French and American origin. The first American prisoners of war arrived at Dartmoor in 1813, during the War of 1812 (or Madison’s War), an Anglo-American conflict that began on June 18th, 1812 and ended on February 17th, 1815.

American Prisoners in Dartmoor

A total of 6,553 American prisoners of war were detained at Dartmoor during the War of 1812. Only 250 of these prisoners were serving as soldiers and sailors in the United States Navy at the time of their capture. A larger number of captives, around 2,243 men, had previously been privateers and merchantmen. Robin Fabel notes that “300 of 526 privateering voyages [during the war] were fruitless or ended in surrender.” Most of those who had surrendered were admitted to Dartmoor.

Not all Americans in Dartmoor had been captured, a significant proportion of prisoners had previously served in the British Royal Navy and, upon the beginning of the war, had willingly chosen imprisonment in Dartmoor as opposed to continued service in the Navy. As of March 31st, 1815, 2,200 Americans in Dartmoor had been given up from Royal Navy ships.

There were 955 Black men imprisoned at Dartmoor, making up about 14.5% of the prison’s captive population. Of these men, a total of 541 came from Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, with New York being the most common birthplace for Black prisoners. There were significantly less southern Black captives than northerners. However, Virginia and Louisiana provided a total of 101 Black prisoners. The exact number of Black prisoners who had previously been enslaved is unknown but the entry books show that 14 had been born in Africa. Of the 2,200 American prisoners who had come from the ranks of the British Royal Navy, 218 were Black.

From October 1913 onwards, Black and white prisoners were housed separately due to an influx of complaints from white prisoners.

Admiralty policy emphasised that “neither women nor children were to be sent to Dartmoor [for any reason].” Some historians suspect that women did in fact have a miniscule presence within the captive population, but the only recorded female prisoners were of French origin.

Registration Procedure

Prisoners’ admission to Dartmoor began with a 24km (15 mile) march from the coast, where they were captured, to the gates of the depot. During this march, prisoners were sometimes pricked by the bayonets of the accompanying officers if they were seen to be slowing down.

Upon arrival at Dartmoor, prisoners were subject to a physical examination in which their measurements were taken and any distinguishing features—birthmarks, scars, tattoos, for example—were noted. The officers also recorded the prisoner’s skin colour, age, birthplace, the vessel on which he had previously served, and his rank on that vessel. Following this examination, each prisoner was assigned a number to be used in place of his given name, establishing a new identity and demonstrating the prison’s administrative power over the captives.

Life at Dartmoor

At the command of Captain Isaac Cotgrave, the prisoners were subject to the widely resented practice of a daily roll-call. The roll-call took place everyday at dawn until early 1813, when complaints from the prisoners convinced Cotgrave to delay them until 10am. As a means of keeping prisoners under control, the dawn roll-call was reinstated during periods of widespread rebellion, but they were “abandoned definitively” once Captain Thomas Shortland took control of the prison in November 1813.

In compliance with Admiralty guidelines, all prisoners were to be supplied with a daily ration of bread, meat (or fish on certain days), and a variety of vegetables. Despite this, complaints about the lack of food were abundant. Prisoners also made complaints about the clothes they were made to wear and the prevalence of diseases such as smallpox, pneumonia, rubella, and measles.

Historians acknowledge the existence of a prison economy founded upon gambling and the smuggling of beer, spirits, tobacco, and other goods from the locals. Robin Fabel highlights that the prisoners would have been paid for work by prison officers “at a rate of between threepence and sixpence a day.” American prisoners had the opportunity for both internal and external work. Internal tasks included cooking, sweeping, and hair-cutting, whilst external tasks included “building a road from Dartmoor to the nearest ports, clearing a turnpike of snowdrifts, and farm work.” Those who did external work received payment at three-month intervals to discourage any attempts to escape.

Incident

On 4 April, there was an incident involving an attempted prison break stemming from heightened internal tensions in the facility. The prisoners received a small amount of hard biscuits, instead of the soft bread they usually received. This decision was made by Captain Thomas Shortland, the agent in charge of the prisoners at the time of the massacre, in an attempt to reduce spending at the jail. The prisoners - who were already discontent, having expected release at war’s end - expressed extreme dissatisfaction at this change.

A group of inmates ran from the prison yards towards the gate to the market square, broke the lock and entered. They surrounded the storehouse and beat on the door, demanding their ration of bread. The head clerk, Mr. Mitchell, told the group that they would receive fresh bread, which calmed them enough to back down. They did receive bread, just before midnight, much to the displeasure of Shortland.

Shortland had been informed of the incident on 4 April and, in response, travelled to Dartmoor accompanied by a company of soldiers, arriving on the morning of April 5. Upon their arrival, they noted that no clear evidence of a riot was present, and the broken lock of the market gate had been repaired. As no one was injured during the incident, nothing significant came of this event. However, Shortland and his men remained at the prison.

6 April, 1815

On the morning of 6 April, a group of inmates were in a space between the prison buildings and the barrack-yard playing a primitive form of baseball. One batter hit the ball over the barrack-yard wall, and the prisoners shouted for the ball to be returned to them. Usually, a soldier in the yard would return the ball to the prisoners - however, on this day, no one responded to their shouts.

The group recalled a small hole in the stone wall of the barracks discovered during a previous day’s outdoor time, suggesting that one of them could go retrieve the ball. The small hole was created as a result of prisoners discovering a loose brick during their yard time. It was not large enough for a person to fit through, so a few inmates went and broke off window bars to act as makeshift crowbars.

The lack of intervention by prison guards can be attributed to an incident occurring at the same time, where dozens of prisoners had scaled the barrier between the prison buildings and the yards. By the time the guards had noticed the gap in the wall, it was large enough for people to get through to the market square. Shortland was informed of an attempted prison break. At around 6:00pm, he ordered the prison alarm to be sounded, leading a few hundred armed British soldiers to gather in the barrack-yard. A few hundred inmates had also gathered in the market square to investigate the commotion.

Shortland and other soldiers attempted to tell the inmates to go back to their prisons, to no avail. Shortland then ordered the guards to open fire on the group of prisoners. His order was met with reluctance, at which point he took a musket from one of his men and opened fire himself. Once this occurred, the other soldiers began shooting at the inmates through the hole in the wall, causing a number of casualties. Despite this, the American prisoners held strong, refusing the guards’ attempts to herd the prisoners back to their respective buildings. Once again, the guards opened fire on the prisoners, wounding many more inmates, ultimately signalling the end of the incident.

Casualties

The total casualties in the massacre amounted to fifty wounded and nine dead prisoners. John Haywood, Joseph Johnson, William Leverage, James Mann, and John Washington all died on 6 April. James Campbell and Thomas Jackson passed away the following day, on 7 April, owing to their wounds. The final two deaths, John Gray and John Roberts, died due to infection associated with the wounds they suffered during the incident in the weeks following the massacre.

Aftermath

In the direct aftermath of the Dartmoor Massacre, there were three prominent, coexisting factors: the US press seeking to continue inflammatory rhetoric towards the British; Dartmoor Prisoners seeking to voice their experience; and both United States and United Kingdom diplomats seeking to remove the Massacre from public discourse. This diplomatic effort comes in the context of seeking to continue the peace secured by the Treaty of Ghent.

Public Reaction in the United States

Public reaction to the Massacre in the United States, as represented through its reporting in the press, was defined by an increase in both commemoration and nationalist rhetoric throughout the direct aftermath of the War of 1812.

This nationalist sentiment was generated largely through the press’ continued ‘inflamed rhetoric’ of ‘the cruel and barbarous British “other”. A commonality between these publications was the effort to attribute sole blame for the Massacre on the British officers, whilst simultaneously depicting the American prisoners as victims of poor conditions. This nationalist rhetoric was not limited to the press, but also a topic used in political speeches. Future North Carolina Congressmen William B. Shepard, for example, spoke of the Massacre to more broadly criticise the English and defend the actions of the prisoners:

‘(the) disregard of life, when robbed of liberty so congenial to an American, excites them to resist (the British) whom neither principles of honor could reform, or the appeals of humanity soften’.

A depiction of the Dartmoor Prison massacre by Hitchcock.

American Soldiers

Personal memoirs, letters, and illustrations from United States soldiers within Dartmoor provided the greatest insight into the effort to attache their experience of the Massacre to the American public’s collective perception of the British. For example, when prisoner James Fairfield wrote to his wife, the Massacre was referred to as ‘that never to be forgotten day the 6th April 1815’. Further, the chaos of the massacre is visually represented through the birds-eye illustration by DeWitt C. Hitchcock, which depicts the reinforced British officers surrounding an enclosed prison population.

Inquiry into the Dartmoor Prison Massacre

The Massacre was subject to a joint Anglo-American inquiry commissioned on April 16, 1815, that used the testimony of over 100 witnesses present at the event. This involved accounts of both Dartmoor Prison officials and prisoners, which produced evidence ridden with contradicting and confused constructions of what parties were to blame for incident.

The report attributed no fault to the prison authorities, including in the ordering of gunfire on the prison population. Instead, the report condemned the action of the prisoners.

The overriding purpose of the bilateral inquiry was to reduce hostile rhetoric in public discourse and consequently reduce tension between the United States and the United Kingdom through presenting a consensus on both government’s understanding of events. This notably contrasts both the pervasive US public opinion and the ambitions of the United States press. This bilateralism has been justified as an attempt to maintain peace between the two states that had been secured through the Treaty of Ghent.

Ultimately, given that Dartmoor Prison’s ‘early history as a war prison have… been the object of virtually no detailed study by historians’, it can be deducted that the ambition of the bilateral official inquiry - being to avoid a disturbance to the peace secured by the Treaty of Ghent - succeeded.