The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britains Most Terrifying Prison

(Hardback)

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The War of 1812 the last time Britain and America went to war with each other. British redcoats torch the White House and six thousand American privateers languish in the worlds largest prisoner-of-war camp, Dartmoor. They were of all classes and all races. Some were as young as thirteen. Known as the hated cage andthe depot of living death, Dartmoor wasnt a place youd expect to find full of life and invention. Yet prisoners taught each other algebra, foreign languages and science. While racism raged on in their homeland, in the racially segregated prison Black and white Americans came together to box, dance and put on plays. And then the dramatic prison break. From digging tunnels to hot pursuits, they encountered (or perhaps invented) every prison-break clich, before the terrible moment when they were betrayed by one of their own In The Hated Cage, Nicholas Guyatt brings to life this dramatic tale of race, violence and war.

Reviews

Beguiling.

-- The Times

Meticulously researcheda vivid portrait.

-- Daily Mail

Easily the most comprehensive study to date (and probably for quite a long while) a vivid reconstruction of the experiences of the men who endured Dartmoor, as well as the hundreds who did not survive a compelling story of human indifference, cruelty and endurance.

-- TLS

The Dartmoor Massacre provides the dramatic climax of Nicholas Guyatts The Hated Cage, a compelling and compassionate study of the largest overseas contingent of American POWs before World War IIa vivid and convincing reconstruction.

-- Wall Street Journal

This is history as it ought to be gripping, dynamic, vividly written, and altogether brilliant in its interpretation. Nicholas Guyatt has liberated a motley crew of American sailors from the double darkness of Dartmoor Prison and our own poor historical memory.

-- Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History

A beautifully narrated tale that starts with a forgotten massacre in an English prison and opens out on to a truly epic global canvas. This book illuminates how profoundly Black history underpins the national stories of Britain and the United States and of the world beyond.

-- Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

Captivating, heartbreaking and uplifting,The Hated Cagetakes us on a journey to human creativity and resilience even when violence is lurking on the surface. It shows us the power of togetherness in the midst of suffocating conditions.

-- Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans

In this brilliant book, Nick Guyatt tells the fascinating story of a long-forgotten massacre of American sailors in a British prison. While that tale on its own is gripping, The Hated Cage uses this prison drama to unlock a range of insights about life and death across the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. A must-read work.

-- Kevin M. Kruse, professor of history, Princeton University

In Britain, American military cemeteries dot the landscape, none more forgotten or haunting than the one at Dartmoor, with 271 American sailors from the War of 1812. Guyatt has written a stunning, revealing history of one of the darkest and most inhumane outposts of the British empire, hidden in plain sight and historical memory in southwest England. The book is a withering tale of race and the suffering fate of seamen in the age of sail. It is also a brilliant reminder of why we do research and why we remember.

-- David W. Blight, Sterling Professor at Yale, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

In Guyatts truly extraordinary recovery of Americans imprisoned long ago, he has excavated a most disturbing racial as well as carceral past, one that will feel disturbingly familiar, and one that underscores on every page the imperative of finally reckoning with white supremacy if there is to be a different future.

-- Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water

Nicholas Guyatts absorbing story of the early nineteenth-century Dartmoor prison massacre asks who was an American and could Black men, detained as British as prisoners of war, be citizens Told by way of archival sleuthing and exacting analysis, The Hated Cage is a fascinating study of how ideas about racism and the state became fused to one another in the early American republic. It is a must-read for anyone concerned with the origins of the anti-Black thought of our own time.

-- Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard

Mostly set in a prisoner-of-war camp located on an otherworldly English moor, Nicholas Guyatts The Hated Cage is history at its most beguiling. Guyatt expertly synthesizes critical maritime and prison scholarship to give us a unique window into war, repression, racial violence, and incarceration in early modern American history. Anyone interested in exploring the meaning of the American Revolution would do well to lay off its founding fathers and read Guyatts account of long-ignored, tellingly so, events in Dartmoors Black Prison.

-- Greg Grandin, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University

A gripping book that tells the forgotten account of the events that occurred in Dartmoor prison in 1815. InThe Hated Cage,Guyatt masterfully centres attention on an intriguing cast of characters to document in clear detail the histories of race, violence and the struggles for survival that sit at the heart of the entangled connections between Britain and the US.

-- Imaobong Umoren, associate professor of international history, London School of Economics and Political Science

[A] colorful account Expertly weaving digressions on the history of incarceration and the racial dynamics of Americas shipping industry into the narrative, Guyatt delivers an engrossing look at an intriguing historical footnote.

* Publishers Weekly *

Author Bio

Nicholas Guyatt is a reader in American history at the University of Cambridge. The author of five 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 two daughters.