Nicholas Guyatt’s new book The Hated Cage tells the riveting tale of an English prison named Dartmoor that held thousands of Americans captive during the War of 1812. That war, once dismissed as a folly, has drawn increasing scholarly interest over the past decade, leading historians like Alan Taylor, Donald Hickey, and Nicole Eustace to posit that it was central to American nation-building at the time. Guyatt adds to this tale, taking us far across the Atlantic to a dreary dungeon where thousands of Americans found themselves constructing their own society from within the confines of cold granite walls.
The story is fascinating. Guyatt provides a glimpse into early 19th century penology and brings to life the chaotic world of trans-Atlantic navigation during the Early Republic when American sailors, many of them privateers, skirted British blockades and hunted British merchant vessels from the Caribbean to the French coast. England, conversely, struggled to find space for all the Americans that it captured with its massive, omnipresent navy. To meet said demand, England built Dartmoor Prison, an impressive penal complex in the Duchy of Cornwall.
Not simply a prison, Dartmoor emerges as a microcosm of American society, and a laboratory for Jim Crow. In his previous book, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation, Guyatt argues that American elites came up with the idea of racial segregation long before formal Jim Crow laws emerged in the American South. Specifically, Guyatt recounts antebellum debates about the question of “amalgamation” or race-mixing and shows how most educated white Americans–even abolitionists–rejected the idea that white people and black people could live together in close proximity. Instead, argues Guyatt, they opted overwhelmingly for racial separation, and specifically colonization, the transportation of African Americans to Africa.
But that was not segregation.
According to historian Howard Rabinowitz, segregation differed from colonization in that it did not involve the removal of African Americans to some distant locale. Removing populations, argues Rabinowitz, constitutes exclusion, not segregation. Segregation, by contrast, presumes that the races will live and work in the same spaces, often in decidedly intimate conditions.
Enter Dartmoor Prison. Guyatt shows, for example, that white and black prisoners interacted all the time in the prison, though whites insisted that they could not sleep in the same building as African Americans. According to Guyatt, whites harbored a set of preconceptions about Black behavior, including a sense that African Americans were criminally minded, unruly, and incapable of self-government. Key to this argument is “King Dick,” an African American prisoner remarkable for his physical size and political influence within the prison walls. Dick presided over an entire section of the institution–Prison 4–reserved exclusively for Black prisoners and his rule was sanctioned by whites. White jailers and prisoners both maintained that King Dick was the only government that black people could abide, for “only a strong man could bring order to people of colour.” (P. 214.) Whites, on the other hand, were naturally more inclined to creating “little republics.” (Id.)
Guyatt makes a big argument here, namely that white prisoners came to associate democratic rule with white identity, and authoritarian rule with black identity. The reason for this was prejudice, and specifically a racist notion that Africans lacked the capacity to behave in a responsible, adult manner and had to be ordered around like children. Only an autocrat like King Dick, presumed the whites, could bring order to Prison 4.
Guyatt demonstrates that this was a delusion. Prison 4 becomes, for him, a place that provided African Americans with “an extraordinary opportunity to create a world of their own and set the conditions on which white people could enter it,” (P. 359) so much so that it became “one of the largest self-governing Black communities outside of Africa.” (P. 10.)
That is quite a claim and places The Hated Cage firmly within a growing historiography of Black counter-publics, even as it raises questions about the larger American nation. For example, The Hated Cage suggests that segregation was not simply a product of elite discourse, as Guyatt argues in Bind Us Apart, but rather came from popular ideas about the relationship between race and self-rule. Guyatt notes, for example, that the sailors confined in Dartmoor had worked together on ships that were not segregated, but only demanded segregation once they were incarcerated. Why? Ironically, Dartmoor seems to have left a lot of the prison administration up to the prisoners themselves. This was not the case on ships, where everyone followed orders, and the sudden lack of authority seems to have caused some anxiety. Not only were the prisoners free to organize their social relations, but they were also, ostensibly, equal. This seems to have been too much for the white prisoners to bear, so they turned to racial segregation to alleviate their political anxiety. Racial thinking, in other words, created order where there was none. This link, between the need for order and the demand for segregation, is one of the most interesting aspects of Guyatt’s study, for it suggests that average white Americans had, by 1814, internalized the idea that not only were race and slavery linked, but so too were race and republicanism–or self-government.
The Hated Cage explains how this worked and–in so doing–may tell us something new about America itself. For example, the white prisoners’ insistence that race and self-rule were linked raises the question whether America’s republican experiment invited racism precisely because it did away with authority. By breaking from church and crown, in other words, did Americans find themselves looking for other ways to order their society? And was race one of those ways? Guyatt does not answer this explicitly, but he does present Dartmoor as a microcosm of America, and that America looked a lot like the Jim Crow South. According to him, for example, Prison 4 “illuminates a key question in American history,” namely whether African Americans could live “alongside” whites or whether they were destined to “live apart.” (P. 10.) The answer–intriguingly–is both. White prisoners requested to be separated from black prisoners but sought them out whenever they need a diversion. “In the cockloft of Four,” writes Guyatt, “were teachers of every sort: you could learn to read, write, fence, box, and dance, all things which were ‘very diverting to a young person.’” (P. 231.)
Just like Jim Crow, in other words, white and Black Americans interacted at Dartmoor all the time, even as whites insisted that the formal lines of difference between them remain clear. That this story unspooled during the War of 1812 is truly remarkable, for it suggests that Jim Crow was not simply a capitulation to late 19th Century racial extremism, as C. Vann Woodward argues, but may have been a popular reaction to the problem of equality and/or the absence of authority. Hence, white southerners moved to segregation as a response to the unsettling period of racial equality fomented by Reconstruction, while the prisoners at Dartmoor moved to segregation as a response to the unsettling period of racial equality foisted on them by their English jailers.
Guyatt adds a final wrinkle to this by underscoring that black people accepted the idea of republicanism as well, and even identified as American patriots. This is intriguing. Much has been written recently about Black efforts to escape the United States, particularly during the War of 1812. And a new raft of scholarship has emerged on Black/British alliances during that war, alliances that stretched across the South. Guyatt does not delve into this, perhaps to make a larger point about why Dartmoor has been forgotten. For example, he ends his story with Black historian William Cooper Nell who worked for abolition and recast “King Dick” as an American patriot. That failed, but Nell did succeed in elevating another African American, Crispus Attucks, to national prominence. Attucks, of course, died at the hands of the British during the infamous “Boston Massacre,” and helped cement the notion that black people were patriots.
However, the question remains. If Dartmoor was a “hated cage,” what was the United States?
