- Thank you all for coming.
It's my pleasure to
introduce Nick Guyatt today.
Nick obtained his PhD at Princeton
and joined the history faculty
at Cambridge University in 2014.
He's written about American
history and politics
for The London Review of Books,
The Nation, Times Literary Supplement,
The Guardian and New York Review of Books.
His book publications include
Providence and the Invention
of the United States,
which examines the emergence
of American religious
nationalism from the
founding of Virginia in 1607,
to the collapse of reconstruction.
And Bind Us Apart, how
enlightened Americans,
I didn't know there were
enlightened Americans.
(audience member laughs)
Invented Racial Segregation,
which explores the unsettling relationship
between ideas of racial equality
and programs for racial separation
in the early American Republic.
His talk today is based
on a book he's currently
working on, which is
forthcoming with Basic Books.
So thank you, please join me in thanking
Nick for joining us today.
- Thank you so much for coming out.
Koreen says I speak too fast.
I think Koreen speaks too fast.
So if you feel like I'm going too quickly,
please just wave and I
will try and slow down.
It's such a pleasure to be here.
I want to thank Georgetown
Qatar for inviting me.
I want to thank all of
the people who have made
my stay, just for a few
days, but such a lovely one.
Including Haga who's
been wonderful in terms
of making the arrangements,
and all of the admin
and support staff as well.
My driver this morning was awesome,
so, I'm very grateful to him.
It's really lovely to be here.
I've given a version
of this talk in Britain
and in the United States,
and it struck me that
there are some aspects
of the kind of background story here,
which I might want to lean
on a bit more for you guys
if you don't necessarily
have all the kind of details
of your early 19th century
American and European history
kind of completely down.
So I'm gonna try and do that a bit.
I should also say that this is
about a book I'm working on,
I'm sort of supposed to finish
it by the end of the year.
Technically, I haven't started it,
so there are some issues.
There are some issues there.
But I'm starting to think
that this might be quite easy
to write when I can figure it out.
So again, I'd be really
interested if there are some
things you can help me with.
You have some questions
that touch on things
I haven't figured out, I've not
figured the whole thing out.
Okay, let me get started.
In the final weeks of 1814,
the 20th largest American city
measured by population,
was actually in a cold
and gloomy corner of Southwest England.
6000 Americans, mostly sailors,
were incarcerated in Dartmoor Prison,
desperately hoping that the
war of 1812 would soon be over.
And again, history fact, the
war of 1812 is the last time
that Britain and the
United States went to war
with each other.
They have never fought since.
Guess I shouldn't say in
our current crazy moment
that they never will fight again.
But in effect, the first 50
years of American history
are all about fighting Britain.
And in 1814, the end of that year,
with the 6000 prisoners
in this prison in Britain,
they must think that this hatred,
this enmity between Britain
and the United States
is gonna just carry on rolling.
So they don't know that there
isn't gonna be another war
between Britain and the United States.
Now nearly all of these 6000 prisoners
are still in this prison
in the spring of 1815,
even though the treaty
which ends the war of 1812
has been ratified by the
US Senate in February.
So March/April of 1815, these 6000 sailors
are still in the prison.
It had been a particularly
hard winter in the prison,
but the British authorities
refused to release
the Americans until
arrangements could be made
to transport them back
to the United States.
So they weren't just
gonna open up the gates
and say hey, American
sailors, come out to Britain.
Instead, they had to wait in the prison
as prisoners until these arrangements
to try and repatriate
them could be arranged.
And, well you guys will know this story.
I mean, private contractors, you know,
are trying to pay people
to come and do the job
of picking these guys up in
big ships and taking them back.
Lots and lots of murky things going on,
which delay this process.
So in April of 1815,
these sailors are almost
all still there.
Now, on the 6th April 1815,
a minor disagreement between
the prison guards and the
prisoners spirals out of control.
Essentially a ball from
the American sailors,
the American prisoners sails
over one of the inner walls
of the prison.
So they were all playing
baseball in one of these bits.
A ball sails over the wall
and the guards won't give
the ball back.
The American sailors who are
feeling pretty desperate,
looking for any excuse to go nuts,
they start scratching away at
one of these internal walls.
And they're not made
of stone some of these,
they're made of a kind of
mud, so actually they're able
to get through the wall.
And the next thing, the guards are saying
oh, the Americans are trying to escape!
And they're not trying to escape.
They just want their ball back.
But the plan is, you
know, for the British,
oh we have to try and make
sure that they understand
they need to stay in this
prison, they're the prisoners.
So there's a shot fired in the air,
and there's a shot
fired down on the ground
and then there are more shots fired,
and before you know what's happened,
there has been a massacre.
Dozens of American
prisoners have been wounded,
nine are dead.
Seven died right there and
another two died of their
wounds thereafter.
On sailor from Massachusets,
went back from this
kind of killing field in
the middle of the prison,
and you can see here in the
image that this is actually
the kind of moment of the
massacre taking place.
Here are the British soldiers,
and there you can see them
firing on the American prisoners.
One sailor from Massachusets
went back to his cell
and actually scribbled out in his journal,
which we still have,
"It is worse than the
massacre at Boston in 1770."
Now, he's referring there again,
if you know a little American history,
to this famous, famous,
shooting that took place
in the city of Boston, just
before the American Revolution,
in which five American protestors,
including an African-American,
which is gonna be important
to our story, are killed by the British
outside the Customs House,
which is where this protest
has been going on.
So the Boston massacre became
one of these kind of crucial
stories, that led to
the American revolution.
So, in 1815, this one
Massachusets sailor goes back
to his journal and says this is worse
than the Boston massacre.
And also, this is gonna
be remembered, right?
That we're not gonna
forget what's gone on.
Well, there were some
obvious and immediate effects
to what happened that day.
These killings hastened
the British and American
governments' efforts to get these 6000 men
out of the prison.
So after all of this kind
of you know, waiting around,
finally there's an
expediting of the evacuation
of Dartmoor Prison.
The entire American
contingent are marched down
to Plymouth, which is
the town on the coast,
and they're sent back in
transports to the United States
by the end of July.
So, the process is sped up, but still,
it's gonna take a few
more months to finish it.
The prisoners who survived assumed
that what they were calling
the Dartmoor Massacre
would become as famous as
the Boston Massacre of 1770.
That the treachery, the
cruelty of the British in 1815
would never be forgotten.
Never forget British cruelty.
But, although more Americans
were killed at Dartmoor
in 1815, than had been
killed in Boston in 1770,
the Dartmoor Massacre didn't
get the same traction.
Didn't get the same
purchase as what happened
in Boston in 1770.
And in fact, the Dartmoor
Massacre fell away
from American history altogether.
It kind of disappeared so
much that even people that
might have read about this,
like in graduate school,
they would have read a chapter in a book.
Talk to them 20 years later,
they can't remember it.
Like it doesn't have any kind of standing
in the way Americans
think about their history.
Which I think is really interesting.
And again, it kind of
makes you think about
why we remember some
things, and not others.
It's a very simple point,
but this I think is an event
that really forces you to think
about what gets remembered.
As the historian Eric
Hinderaker has recently argued
in his very cool book, which I recommend,
called Boston's Massacre,
let me see if I can find it.
Here we are, yeah.
Boston's Massacre.
The memory of that massacre back in 1770
has its own complicated history.
Rather than people deciding in 1770,
God, we need to remember this forever,
actually at different
moments in American history,
the massacre kind of came back into focus.
So different people kind of
tried to bring what happened
in Boston back into the
kind of public memory.
And as always with history,
they were usually doing this
for particular political ends.
So you know, there were
reasons that people wanted
to get hold of this
jagged piece of the past,
kind of do things with it.
But the protest in 1770
slotted very easily
into a story about American history,
which you could just tell
very straightforwardly.
The story is simple.
American history in the late 18th century
is about trying to get the
hell away from Britain, right?
It's about trying to escape from Britain.
Here's a massacre which
demonstrates that we need
to be independent.
It's much trickier to create a narrative
that helps you make sense
of what happened in 1815.
As I said, the war of
1812 was the last war
for between Britain and the United States.
Those nine prisoners
of war who were killed
in Dartmoor, were the last
Americans to be killed
by British soldiers.
At least the last one outside of you know,
collateral damage or you
know those kinds of things
that happen in wars you don't intend.
But of course, no one knew in 1815,
that Britain and the United
States would never fight
another war and in fact, the
American government in 1815
was really keen not to reopen the war.
So you remember I said the war was over,
they didn't want this to be
an event that would actually
cause the war to start again.
So those killings in 1815
didn't lend themselves
to the same kind of propaganda
war that you could wage
with the Boston massacre back in 1770.
Now for a bunch of reasons,
which I'm gonna try and share
with you today, I think
that this Dartmoor Massacre
is actually worth remembering.
And let me give you one very obvious one,
which again, I just think is incredible
and a reason we ought
to be thinking much more
as historians about what went on there.
I mentioned there were
6000 or so prisoners there
at the end of 1814.
There was a total of 6500 prisoners,
who came into the prison
from the United States
between 1813 and 1815.
Well, nearly 1000 of them were black.
So you had around 15% of the
prison population was black.
Now these were mostly sailors of color
who had either been
traveling on, or working on,
American ships that got
caught by the British,
or in some cases, they
were sailors of color
who had actually been serving
in the British Royal Navy,
usually not voluntarily.
I mean like, nobody serves
voluntarily in the Royal Navy.
(laughs) In the early 19th
century you know, you'd go out
and get drunk in a pub, and
then someone hits you over
the head, and then you get
dragged off to a ship, right.
It's called being press-ganged,
or being impressed.
It's a funny word.
So actually that process
is what brings many sailors
into the Royal Navy, but
also many black sailors.
So you have these 1000 black sailors
who are coded as American
and find themselves
in the prison.
Now, here's the weird part.
On the ships that they worked on,
black and white sailors
mostly served side by side.
Ships are kind of brutal places.
They're very top-down,
there's the officers,
the captain and so on.
They give orders that are carried out,
but amongst the ordinary sailors,
white and black distinctions
are not prominent.
You can make more money as
an ordinary black sailor
than as a white sailor, if
you have special talents
or experience.
So it's a kind of rare place
in the early 19th century
where, we shouldn't call
it workplace equality,
but there is some kind of buffer against
some of the effects of race,
on shore, on the mainland.
Where you know, there's all
kinds of discrimination.
But what makes that system
work is you have these elite
officers giving out orders.
So you know, you've got your officers
who are kind of brutalizing everyone.
And the black and white
are kind of equally victim
if they're ordinary sailors.
But what happens when
you get to the prison,
is that the officers on board
the ships are all taken out.
They actually aren't in the prison.
The captains, you know,
the kind of first officers,
all those guys are taken
to a little village
where they get to live
in a nice little house.
So they're still in
prison, but they're like,
living in you know, it's
like an open prison.
They don't go into here.
So in fact, what happens
is, you kind of decapitate
the leadership on the ships,
and then leave these ordinary
sailors in the prison,
without their officers.
And that's crucial to our story.
So it's that kind of
divorcing of the control,
the hierarchy, the coercion
of the maritime world.
Once that goes, you have black
and white ordinary sailors
left alone with each other.
Okay, so one of the things we can do,
with this Dartmoor story, is
see what happens when these
racially mixed worlds at sea run aground.
Like, what happens when
you kind of put those
into a place you know,
where you don't have
that same discipline?
What kind of community will they create
without their officers?
And one of the questions I'm
trying to answer in the book,
and I'm not sure if I've
completely figured this out,
but it's whether or not we can think about
this prison with black
and white sailors in it,
as a kind of community
which looks anything like
the cities and the towns
back in the United States.
So again, just to give you some context,
this is the decade, the 1810s,
in which in big American
cities, places like New
York, and Philadelphia,
and Baltimore, you have
around, somewhere between
eight and 12% of those cities,
the population is black.
So they're free blacks,
they're not slaves,
in most of those northern cities.
So actually they are living
alongside white people
and social reformers,
anti-slavery campaigners,
are all arguing, can
black and white people
live together in freedom?
You know, can we make
this work in the cities
in the north?
Well, my story is about
whether black and white people
can live together in captivity.
So it kind of tips that on its head.
Is it related?
Can we say that this
community looks something
like those communities?
Well, one very, very big
difference is that there are
no women in Dartmoor.
And again, I know this
sounds like, (laughs)
you know the way that guys write books
and don't put women in?
It's like now I've found
a book subject that makes
it really hard to get women in.
But sometimes, the absence
of women is something
you can talk about.
And I think in this story,
the absence of women
in a prison is really, really crucial.
So again, we can maybe come back
to think about why, later on.
Okay, right, there are
loads of huge stories,
fascinating things from
Dartmoor that I wanna share.
But I'm just gonna try and do
three things quickly today.
One of them is, I wanna say
something about how this story
of Dartmoor might link to our thinking
about how prisons work.
So again, to use the kind
of fancy, fashionable term,
we now talk, when we talk about prisons
and incarceration, about
something called carceral culture.
So you know, the kind of carceral state,
there's a huge literature on that now.
How did we get to the modern prison?
And how many of the roots
of the modern prison
are in this moment?
So that's one thing I wanna flag, like,
is there any connection
between this prison of war camp
and prisons more generally?
I also want to talk
briefly about segregation.
Dartmoor ends up being the
first racially segregated prison
in American history, despite
the fact it's in Britain.
But the story about how
black and white inmates
come to be separated from
each other is much more
complicated, and interesting
I think, than that sounds.
And finally I just want
to say something briefly
about how the story of Dartmoor
intersects with stories of citizenship.
Who were these white and black Americans?
Did they see themselves as
kind of proud, triumphant,
loyal citizens of the United States?
Or particularly for the
communities of color,
these black sailors, did
they actually see themselves
in a different context?
Did they have options?
Did they have to be American or nothing?
Or could they have other
forms of allegiance?
Okay, well, I'm just very
briefly gonna take you through
an idea of what the sources look like,
and I'll do this super-fast, but again,
I think, I hope this is interesting.
We have three different kinds of sources
about what happened.
One of them, which is really cool,
is we have a bunch of published accounts
of the massacre or the prison experience.
So loads of sailors essentially went off
and wrote up what happened to them.
Most of these were published.
There are a few of them which
you can find in historical
societies archives so you
can find them in manuscript.
There's a whole bunch of these.
So you can see a few of them here.
The first wave of these come
out just after the massacre,
but then actually there's
another wave in the 1830s
and 1840s, including one
version of this which was edited
and embellished by the
novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
you know, who's a big
figure in American history
and culture, obviously,
but who did his own version
of what happened in Dartmoor,
which I just think is fascinating.
And this is his here,
The Reminisces of a Dartmoor
Prisoner, which he writes
up in the middle of the 1840s.
Okay, so there's that set of sources.
There's a manuscript one here.
I found this just the other week.
I absolutely love this.
So here, talking about
arriving at the dreary,
bleak and barren moor.
So this is written by a
sailor in their journal.
And I'd looked this up just
last week in an archive
in Massachusets.
"Not a shrub or a tree could be seen,
"within three miles of its circumference.
"The farmers term it, the devil's land,
"inhabited by ghosts and
sundry imaginary beings.
"They do not dare pass by at night."
And then crucially,
rabbits cannot live there.
So this is such a scary area,
that you can't have any rabbits.
Okay, so that's one set of sources.
Another set is newspaper accounts.
There were loads of write-ups
of this in the papers.
And the third set of
sources is the archives,
the papers, the kind of
machinery of the bureaucracy.
So the Admiralty Board, which
was the part of the Royal
Navy that ran prison,
tons of letters from there
to the bloke who actually
was in charge of the prison,
who was called the agent,
basically the prison governor.
All of that stuff you can find in London,
in the national archives.
And I think the most
fascinating of these sources
is the prison register.
This is what it looked like at Dartmoor.
You got these prisoner of
war registers everywhere,
but there are these five giant books,
and each one of them contains
about 1000 or 1200 names.
So if you look up close,
we get a bit closer.
Okay, do you see here?
This category, black,
mulatto, black, black.
It's fascinating.
When you got to the prison,
there'd be these two guys
at a desk at the front, the
clerks, who would actually
check you in and one of the
things they did at Dartmoor
which they didn't do at other prisons,
is they would try and
come up with some version
of your complexion, or your appearance.
So in a way, these two guys, British guys,
sitting there at the desk, are
kind of making race, right?
If you're from Colombia and
you're skin is quite dark,
black.
Let's say you're from India
and you just happen to have
got caught up in this,
so South Asia, right?
You come in, black.
Let's say you're from
Canton and you're Chinese.
Mulatto.
So all of these people are
kind of brought into the prison
from a bunch of different places,
and they find these two
white guys at a desk,
a bit like this one,
sitting there, making race.
And the great thing, the amazing
thing about the register,
is it's all there.
So all 6500 of these prisoners
have that column filled in.
Now if you're a white guy like me,
it probably says something
like your complexion is fresh.
You know, or your complexion is light.
Doesn't actually say white, right.
But it does say black,
mulatto, a colored man,
negro, so there are these different terms.
So what I've done, because
I'm, as you can see,
a gigantic nerd, is that I
have created my own electronic
version of the prison database.
It's not something I recommend anyone do.
But if you've got this,
you could do all kinds
of really cool things with it, right?
So one thing you can do with
it, is you can figure out
where these black prisoners came from,
because in addition to the race,
you can also find out
here where they came from.
So where they say they were born.
How old they were.
What their role was on the ship.
Their appearance.
Five foot four inches, mulatto,
two scars on right hand.
Whether or not they were in the Royal Navy
or if they came in on a commercial ship.
But then also here, a
huge amount of some very
interesting material.
So huge amounts of material here,
which gives you a really
strong sense of the paper trail
that might have been left
behind by these people.
'Cause generally speaking,
people of color are leaving
far fewer sources.
They're not writing up versions
of what happens in a prison.
So all those prisoners accounts,
there isn't a single one
I've found by a prisoner of color.
So as a historian, what can
you do to try and balance out
the fact that all the
accounts are by white people?
You can do this.
And you can go looking for
letters from these people
in other archives.
Or you can go looking
for details in the census
about what happens to them.
So in a way, having this
big database has been a huge
amount of fun for me, it's
been tough to get it together.
But now I have it, I think
it will enable me to tell
stories of people who
otherwise can be quite hard
for you to write about
confidently and authoritatively.
So kind of putting together,
the white and the black
stories within the prison.
I think, I hope this is
gonna help me to answer
that challenge.
Okay, so I said I'd talk very
quickly about these three
things and I will blow through
this as quickly as I can.
The first thing I mentioned
was prison culture.
If you guys know anything
about Michel Foucault,
the French theorist of prisons,
or Jeremy Bentham, the great
English prison reformer
of the early 19th century,
if you look at this picture
of a circular prison, you
might kind of have in the back
of your mind, a bit of
recollection and think
ah, that looks a bit like the panopticon,
which is that great
idea of Jeremy Bentham,
that every single cell would
be viewed and monitored
from prison guards in the center.
There'd be like a tower in the middle,
and then there'd be a circular
prison and you could kind
of see into all the prisoners' cells.
So you know, kind of thinking
about incarceration as surveillance.
Round prison must be the same.
It's not the same.
This is actually very
different from that model.
What you've got here is these
prison blocks at the top.
Eventually, as you've seen
from one of the other slides
they end up building walls between them.
But when the guys come into the prison,
they can effectively choose
which one of these prison
blocks they live in.
The prison blocks themselves
don't have any doors inside.
There are no rooms, there
are no individual cells.
You have a hammock and you
have to sling your hammock
somewhere, in this
giant kind of warehouse.
So actually, what you don't
have here is that same
kind of individualized, that
same kind of compartmentalized
prison set up, that you would
have or you're gonna have,
in prisons in Britain
and the United States.
But here's what's interesting
I think about this moment.
Actually, those kind of
famous prisons that begin
to isolate human beings in single cells,
and begin to become kind
of committed to the idea
of people reforming
themselves through isolation
and through work.
That's actually a little later.
Not much later, but a little
later in American history.
So, let me see if I can show you a picture
of one of them.
Yeah, okay, so this is
the State Penitentiary,
the Eastern State
Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
This is one of the first prisons
to have individual cells.
The other one is the
state prison in New York,
in Auburn, New York.
Those two prisons emerge
early in the 1820s.
Auburn's built in 1819, but it
doesn't get individual cells
until later in the 1820s.
Eastern State Penitentiary's
built in 1829.
So these visions of
where prisons are going,
and you know, these look a
lot like some contemporary,
like modern prisons.
The same ideas, individualization,
keeping people locked
away on their own, for
hours and hours every day.
That's a little later.
In fact, in 1814 and 1815,
prisons in the United States
look a lot more like Dartmoor prison.
By which I mean, if you
get thrown into prison,
you don't have a cell, you
have like a general dormitory
that you sleep in.
Depending on how friendly
you are with the governor,
you might be allowed to buy stuff.
So you might actually be
allowed to buy and sell things,
and bring things into the
prison, and then the governor
would pocket the money that
he made from that, right.
And he'd use that to pay his salary
or his guard's salaries.
If you were a debtor, you're
whole family would move
into the prison.
So you literally have entire families
living inside the prison.
This stuff does not happen when you begin
to get this kind of prison.
But this earlier moment,
so the 1810s, 1814, 1815,
actually the Dartmoor model
is much closer to the way
American prisons look.
So one of the critical
questions I have to figure out
is whether actually what we're seeing here
in just a few years after
Dartmoor, is a kind of divergence
where prisoners of war,
prisoner of war camps
and regular prisons are gonna
start looking very different.
So in effect, you know, you move to 1850,
a prisoner of war camp still
looks a bit like Dartmoor
and a regular prison looks like this,
and they're very different.
Is that the way this is going?
So there's about to be a divergence.
Or are there still some ways
in which what takes place
in this prison, in Dartmoor,
might have something
to tell us about the
development of carceral culture?
The way that we think about prisons
as spaces for managing race, or deviants,
or all kinds of other things.
So that's one question I
don't think I've completely
figured out yet.
Okay, so that's the kind
of prison culture question.
Which I think is very
important and very interesting.
But let me move onto the
issue of segregation,
'cause this is kind of what I work on,
I have worked on in the past
and I'm very interested in this.
So in October of 1813, this
is five months after the first
American sailors have arrived at Dartmoor,
a group of white American
sailors, petitioned the Dartmoor
governor, the agent of the
prison, the guy in charge,
to be moved away from
their black compatriots.
No reason was given for this at the time,
or at least none that was recorded.
Although one of the
prisoners who left a memoir
immediately after the
massacre, a guy called Charles
Andrews from Rhode Island,
he insisted that the reason
for the segregation was
that black prisoners
had been stealing from white prisoners.
So he said, it was so
tough for us in the prison,
the black sailors were stealing our stuff,
so please can we be moved somewhere else?
That was what he said.
Now historians have tended
either to believe that
directly, so to believe the
black sailors were stealing
from white sailors, or to
say that this just proves
that the white prisoners
were kind of white
supremacists, right?
That in effect, they needed
to be and wanted to be away
from black people,
because of their racism.
And I think the real story's
a tiny bit more complicated.
First, because, maybe this
is the primary reason,
actually it wasn't just
Americans in this prison block
in the fall of 1813.
Also in this prison block with
them were French prisoners.
And the French prisoners
had been in Dartmoor Prison
since it had been opened in 1808.
So these were prisoners of
war from Britain's other war
with Napoleon, which had
been going on for like
20 years, right?
So those prisoners who
were in this prison block,
they weren't just French.
I mean, French would be bad.
Oh, it was much worse.
They were actually a
group of French prisoners
who had lost their minds.
By lost their minds, I
mean that they had decided
because of their despair
of being stuck in a prison
for years and years on
end, that they would adopt
a new moral code.
No clothes.
No food, so when they got their
ration, they would sell it,
and they would eat a kind of broth.
And actions which were deemed unspeakable,
which may have related
to sexual practices.
And the Americans in the
prison were like whoa!
These French, they've lost their minds!
One incident that was
particularly appalling,
which I probably can speak about,
is when two horses came into
the prison yard one day,
the French prisoners all ran at the horses
and tried to eat them alive!
I mean, so these French prisoners,
who were called the Romans,
and they're called the Romans
'cause they were in the
very top of the building,
which is called the
capital of the building.
So they were up there,
they were known as Romans.
These white American prisoners
may, and I want to say,
I've not found conclusive proof of this,
but a lot of strong supporting evidence,
they may have been what
the white American sailors
were trying to get away from.
Which is fascinating, right?
So it's like the white Americans sailors,
hey if we tell the prison
governor we want to move away
from the French, he'll never let us.
Why don't we say we want to
move away from the black people?
That'll work.
And it does work.
And actually what happens
is, the African Americans
and the other black sailors
are left with the French,
which is horrifying.
And sure enough, the French
do actually get moved out
completely, just a little
bit after this moment.
They get moved down to prison hulks,
so they get put on these giant ships,
which this prison at Dartmoor
was built to be more humane
than these prison hulks that
previously had contained
prisoners, but actually the
Brits decide these French
are so terrible, just put
them back in the hulks.
That's really the best for everyone.
So there's this crucial,
crucial story of the French.
But there's one other
thing I want to say about
the segregation angle, which again I think
is so interesting.
Here's what happens in the prison.
You remember I said that they,
the sailors have lost their
kind of officer club, so the
people that gave them orders
on the ships are gone.
Well guess what happens in the prison?
They govern themselves.
And they govern themselves
by forming associations
and communities and electing leaders,
and effectively, they
regulate their prison block.
Now again, let me let that
sit with you for a second.
So this is not like a prison
guard or a prison governor
coming in and telling
the prisoners what to do.
The prisoners are invited to
govern and police themselves.
So in addition to these
white American sailors
wanting to get away from the French,
I think the other thing that
they want to get away from
is sharing political
power with black people.
And again, I wanna just kind
of put into your minds here
that when we think about
how racism operates,
or when we think about the
challenges of co-existing
across the color line,
living alongside black people
is one thing.
Sharing food with black
people, that's one thing.
Even sleeping in the same
place as black people,
I mean, all of these things
white sailors have done
on the ships.
What they haven't been
asked to do on the ships
is share power with black people,
to create a politics amongst themselves,
in which there is a
genuine racial equality.
And I think it's that challenge,
which they've never experienced before,
they don't experience
that back in the towns
and the cities in the US.
That's not the way things work.
Black people aren't voting.
But here, 15% black, big number,
lots and lots of potential
political power.
I believe it's that challenge
which these white American
sailors end up not being
able to go through with.
So again, of course it's racism.
Of course it's white supremacy.
But it's a particular kind of racism
and white supremacy, which in a way,
points towards the bigger
challenge for the United States.
Which its still trying to work out.
Which is, how do we run a
politics that's genuinely
equal and inclusive?
So it seems invidious to say that we ought
to kind of have like a sort of hierarchy
or a spectrum of racisms.
But we kind of need one.
We kind of need to think
about how racism operates
in these different registers.
And I think the sharing of political power
is the real challenge for these guys.
Okay, all right.
Let me move onto the final
thing that I wanted to mention.
Which is this question of
how all of this relates
to citizenship.
What do I mean by that?
Well, there's one set of arguments,
one set of, kind of,
historiographical debates,
which surrounds this
question of whether sailors
were a particularly important group
for understanding the development
of citizenship in the US.
Let me back up.
There isn't actually
any federal citizenship
in the US until 1868.
By which I mean, the federal
government doesn't make
you a citizen because
you're born in the US,
until the 14th Amendment passes in 1868.
You get your citizenship
of the United States
before then, because of your
citizenship of a particular
state, but hey, different
states treat citizenship
in very different ways.
So actually, a really interesting question
in the early United States is,
are black people citizens of the US?
Well, yes and no.
Partly it depends the context
in which you're invoking this.
It also depends where they're from.
You may be a citizen or deemed
a citizen in Massachusets,
and it may be impossible for
you to become a black citizen
in South Carolina.
Now again, the federal
government, the kind of national
government of the United States,
really ought to be the arbiter here.
But it can't arbitrate, because of course,
it's divided by the slavery question.
So it doesn't arbitrate, it abdicates.
So that's the kind of citizenship context.
On these ships though,
you remember I started
by talking about press-gang?
About the ways in which
the British effectively
were taking black and white
sailors from American ships
and saying, right now you're
serving in the Royal Navy.
This gave the federal government,
the national government
a motive for trying to
find a way to guarantee
or proclaim citizenship for sailors.
So actually because sailors were out there
in the Atlantic, where their
citizenship could be attacked
by the British, British
attacked white people,
black people, they take anyone, right?
So in fact, the citizenship regime,
which is introduced by
the federal government,
is applied to sailors.
An act is passed in the 1790s,
that gives sailors the right
to obtain a certificate,
a piece of paper, saying
this person is a citizen
of the United States.
And I was just down in Maryland
in the national archives
and it's incredible.
So you know, there's a
certificate saying, you know,
this certifies that John
Smith, a colored man,
is a citizen of the United States.
It's crazy, it's incredible.
So in effect, this kind of maritime space,
because the British are
such a threat to American
citizenship, black or white,
becomes a place the
federal government feels
it has to kind of defend
American citizens,
regardless of their race.
So there's been some really
good stuff written about this.
This book by a guy called
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
is really terrific.
He says, in effect that
sailors become kind of brokers
of national belonging.
They become the people that
force the American government
to think, hey, we need to sort
this citizenship thing out.
We need to try and guarantee it.
We can't just let our battles
over slavery inside the US
force us to abdicate from this.
We need to guarantee citizenship.
And also, one thing he does in this book,
is he talks about American
citizens effectively
proving that you can choose your nation.
This is an interesting
subject to talk about
in this part of the world maybe,
but this idea that your nationality
is something that you
might be able to choose.
So let's say an American sailor
had been born in Britain,
but it wants to be an American,
the American ideology says, sure.
Naturalize.
Become an American citizen.
The British are like, no
you were born in Britain.
You are forever a subject of the king.
So the other thing he does in this book
which is really interesting,
is he kind of mashes up
these two different ideas
about what it means to be a citizen.
Okay, so there's that literature saying
hey, sailors are really important because
they are in the middle
of these debates about
how to create and protect US citizenship.
And hey, what's really
interesting is black sailors
as well as white sailors
can get these government
certificates saying they are American.
But then there's another literature,
another historiography
which has a different view.
Represented by Ira Berlin,
sadly passed away earlier
this year and Jane Landers.
And these guys argue that actually,
if you're a sailor of color
in the Atlantic world in
the late 18th and early 19th
century, although you
have many disadvantages,
one of the ways in
which you live your life
is to blend and merge
and kind of like move
between worlds and nations.
So maybe you go to Cuba,
and you become Cuban.
Maybe you're five years as
Cuban and then you decide
you're gonna go off and become Haitian.
You know, maybe you're
done with being Haitian
and you're gonna go and serve
in the American Merchant Marine.
This idea of a kind of mobility,
and this idea that people
of color in these sea spaces
move between different nations.
So in a way, they find a power
from not being a permanent
citizen, but being able
to play different nations
off each other and to take
different kinds of allegiance,
when they need it and where they find it.
So Landers and Berlin call these people
Atlantic Creoles.
So in effect, their vision
of these 1000 or so black
sailors in Dartmoor
would look very different
from this other vision
of Nathan Perl-Rosenthal,
you know, that would see being a sailor
as kind of a cradle of
your American identity.
Landers and Berlin would be like, no.
Actually it's constraining
to think that these 1000
sailors of color were
all African Americans
waiting to be US citizens.
Actually, I mean, I know this
from looking at the records,
at least 100, maybe 150 are
not from the United States.
They're from all kinds of other places.
But they are put in the
black prison in Dartmoor,
and are treated like Americans.
Are they actually going
back to the United States?
That's a massive challenge for me to try
and figure that out.
How do you trace all these
thousand black sailors
who were released?
And if you can find them,
does that help you to resolve
this question of whether
in effect they're all,
why do they want to be Americans?
They want American citizenship.
This is gonna be a kind of crucial moment
for them to establish their American-ness.
Or do they blend into other places?
Go to to other nations?
Claim other allegiances once they get out
of this horrible prison.
And I think that's such a key question.
And also one that resonates with us today,
in terms of the way that
we structure our politics
around claims to national belonging,
but also thinking about
people moving between
different national belongings,
different national allegiances
and different worlds.
So it's kind of tempting
to say that we should think
about Dartmoor as the place
where African Americans
stake their claim to US citizenship.
Is that completely accurate?
Does that hold for all African Americans?
Maybe not.
Okay, let me sum up or try and conclude
just by sort of taking that
question of thinking about
African Americans and what this
whole thing means for them.
Taking it ahead of times.
I've been talking a bit
about the Boston Massacre
and also about the Dartmoor Massacre.
One of the people that kind
of invents the Boston Massacre
as a historical event in the 19th century
is an African American abolitionist,
a writer, an activist,
called William Cooper Nell.
He lived in Boston, in
the sort of second quarter
of the 19th century, that
was his kind of big moment.
And he played a central role
in the 1840s and the 1850s
in trying to recover the
story of the Boston Massacre.
And he did so by foregrounding
an African American
called Crispus Attucks, who
was the first person to die
in the protests in Boston.
Now we don't really know
much about Crispus Attucks,
and neither did Nell.
One thing we do know about
him is he wasn't just
African American.
He was also part Native American.
But that part of the story, Nell took out.
Nell invented or embellished
what we knew about him.
Turned up the kind of bravery dial to 11,
you know making Attucks
seem like he was the guy
who got the whole thing started.
And he sold this to the American public
as an indication that black
people had always been there
whenever there was a fight with Britain.
Whenever there was a struggle
to defend the nation.
Black people were always there.
He tried to do the same
thing with Dartmoor.
He went off and tried to look for a figure
that would do the same kind of thing.
He ended up copying out in
his book, Colored Patriots,
the colored patriots of
the American revolution,
which contains a big
section on the war of 1812.
He ended up copying out a
passage about black people
at Dartmoor, which had
been written in 1816,
by a racist white author
who'd never been to Dartmoor.
And who actually told
stories about black people
in the prison that
discussed their strength
and their bravery in governing themselves.
Not in helping the white
Americans to try and escape,
or celebrate the 4th of July.
So Nell went off, I
think he didn't realize
that this source was
written by this person
who was a big white racist.
This guy actually was the
guy who went down to the,
the guy who wrote the story
in 1816, is the guy who went
down to Thomas Jefferson's house in 1801
and inoculated Jefferson's slaves.
So he was from Massachusets of course.
But he had this connection
to the slave world,
which again Nell didn't know about.
So Nell, in trying to search
for a way to make the Dartmoor
Massacre work for African
Americans in a way that
the Boston Massacre did,
he ended up reproducing
a big paragraph of stuff
about how black people
are super authoritarian, you know,
they govern with a big stick,
you know in this prison
of theirs, they're doing
all kinds of things,
you know, to each other in
terms of like trying to maintain
a strong man's rule.
All of those stories he told.
And unsurprisingly, that
didn't give either Dartmoor
or the kind of African
American citizenship struggle
the same traction that the
story of Crispus Attucks,
this brave black man at the
Boston Massacre in 1770,
that that story offered.
So in a way I think,
one of the challenges,
and this is where I'll leave things,
one of the challenges I'm facing,
is whether to try and
structure the story I'm telling
as a story of a kind of
triumph and claim to American
nationality on the part of black people.
Is that what this is about?
These 1000 brave black sailors,
demonstrating their allegiance
to the United States.
Or is that to hijack them
and all of their wonderful
kind of stories, and all their
kind of options, in effect
and put that in a straight jacket?
A straight jacket of US history.
Not thinking about the
wider worlds of the Atlantic
and beyond, in which some
of these black people
may have actually lived
their lives after Dartmoor.
So figuring out a way not
to dismiss the significance
of this for the black
freedom struggle in the US.
But to make sure it's not just about that,
is one of the many challenges I have
in trying to write this book.
I'll stop there, thank
you very much everyone.
- [Woman] Sorry, I was just
curious, like you talked
about going, so I'm gonna ask
you about the process really
like, of like tracing these
men was from the sailors,
'cause as they're coming,
like the ships that they're
coming back on presumably,
they traveled over a period
of months on different ships
and going back to different
places, like how on Earth
do you begin to even
kind of like find their
stuff and their memoirs?
- Yeah, I mean it's hard.
Thank you for the question.
It's hard.
One thing about maritime history,
sort of writing about the sea, oh my God,
the nerds who are drawn
to maritime history,
it is the geekiest, nerdiest place.
By which I mean, not just now as well,
like in the 19th century,
like a 19th century nerd
loved maritime history.
So the ships are a really
good way of doing it.
Like if I know that one of these African,
okay, this is a trick of the trade.
Just keep this between
us everyone, and YouTube.
So if you wanna write a
really dramatic passage
about an African American,
you can actually find out
about one of these ships,
and all the battles it had,
and you know from the
register they were there.
So just tell the story,
'cause you've got someone
who's told it later in the century,
you've got another
narrative for what happened
to that ship.
That part is fairly easy.
The really hard part is
finding the kind of black
voices if you like, but there
is one really cool source
I found recently, which
I'll tell you briefly about.
Which as I mentioned, I
was down in the national
archives in Maryland.
If you were an impressed
sailor, so let's say in 1806,
you were just sailing out of Philadelphia
and on the seas a Royal
Navy ship stops your ship
and just took you off and then
put you into the Royal Navy.
Here's what you would hope.
You would really hope that
your wife or your daughter
or your sister would write
to the State Department
in Washington and be
like, hey Henry the sailor
has just been kidnapped
and this is terrible
and could you help us?
So down in the national
archives in Maryland,
I mean, talk about emotional labor,
there are 900 letters
written to or written from
family members and the State Department
about these individual Americans.
And again, in terms of my own nerdery
with that big register,
what I could do is just
go through the 6500 names
and figure out which ones
were at Dartmoor.
So most of those, in fact all of them,
would have been before Dartmoor.
So these impressment experiences
would have taken place
before they wound up in Dartmoor.
But I went off and I found
probably no more than a dozen.
But a dozen letters, either
from black people that wound
up in Dartmoor, or from their families.
And again, there are a number
of ways in which gender
and women come into the story.
But I cannot tell you how
kind of affecting it is,
to see the mechanics
of what these women did
to try to get their husbands out.
'Cause before the war
started, if you, so in 1812,
if you could convince
the State Department,
and by the State Department
I mean, actually like
the Secretary of State,
like James Madison,
is signing all these.
So there are black people
writing to James Madison,
saying help my husband.
If you can convince him
that the person that you're
married to or the person who's your Father
is really American,
he's gonna sort it out.
He's gonna write to the British
and get that person released.
So those stories are really affecting.
And when you get the
guys, the guys are like,
I've written to you 11 times.
Why haven't you written back to me?
(laughs)
And of course, the letters
haven't gotten through.
But, do you not love me, my wife?
You know, I've written to you 25 times,
I'm still stuck in this God-awful
ship, please help me out.
So there's a wonderful paper trail there.
I have about 50 Dartmoor prisoners,
and about 12 of them are black.
So that's one place.
But I need more, yeah.
- [Woman] Thank you.
- Thank you.
- [Woman] My question is that
they've been in the prison
for so long, so how credible
are their references?
- Yeah, that's an excellent question.
I mean, I guess one thing
you can do is see how many
of the accounts line up.
But there are also ways in
which, you remember I said
there were the accounts that
were published straight away,
then there're also accounts
and diaries and journals
which are never published,
or were published in like
some obscure historical society
journal 100 years later.
I find those much more reliable,
'cause the stuff that people
actually wrote down during
the prison, I don't know,
it just kind of feels like
there's something immediate about that.
But here's the funny thing
about some of the stuff
that's written in the 30s and the 40s,
and particularly the stuff that's written
by Benjamin, uh, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
So you guys probably know
a tiny bit about the genre
of Jim Crow, minstrelsy,
so this kind of like way
in which in, especially in
the 1830s and the 1840s,
black people become
caricatured kind of mocked,
and to some extent
dehumanized by white people
wearing black face paint,
and exaggerating their version
of what African Americans
look like.
And that term, Jim Crow,
which we later use in the 19th
and 20th century to refer
to segregation in the south,
it actually begins as a
character, one of these white guys
who invents minstrel shows.
His character is called Jim Crow.
So in effect, it's a way of mocking
African American culture,
and undermining, both black equality
and the idea of black
belonging in the United States.
Here's the funny thing.
Those stories which are
written in the 30s and the 40s
about Dartmoor, they have
a kind of different view
of African Americans in the prison,
than the journals and
diaries that are written
in 1815 or 1816.
What's been upped, what's been increased,
like amped up in these later accounts,
is the idea that black people
were just great at entertainment.
Always amazing.
If you went to the black prison,
they'd be putting on Othello, you know.
They'd be having boxing matches.
There'd be dancing lessons.
I think some of that
stuff is true, actually.
But the way it's written about
suggests that the two things
you can get from African Americans
are entertainment and violence.
Or authoritarianism.
Again, talk about our
contemporary moment right?
I mean, this is one of the ways in which
black culture has still been represented
into the 21st century, right?
It's entertainment, or it's
sport, or it's violence.
You can see the roots of
that in this Jim Crow moment,
in the 30s and the 40s.
And even in these accounts
that are just 30 years apart,
you can begin to see it
kind of working its way
into what happened at Dartmoor.
So I would, to answer the
question very shortly,
I mean I would say the
contemporary accounts,
we've got lots of them from 1815/1816,
you can kind of cross-reference
them against each other.
But if you've got the register,
you can also figure out
whether they're just making people up.
Whether they're lying, right?
Which is really helpful.
- [Woman] I'm fascinated
with these French people.
- Oh yep.
There's a surprise.
- [Woman] No but like, first of all,
have you looked at any (mumbles).
- Yeah.
- [Woman] And secondly,
do you think that maybe,
'cause I've seen this
in other groups right,
so like the collective insanity.
Could it have been
(mumbles) with something?
- Oh right.
- [Woman] Like letters, something.
- Yeah.
- [Woman] That was (mumbles) making them
this really (mumbles).
- Always looking for an excuse
to whitewash the French.
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I don't know, that's
something I need to look into.
There is one French prisoner
called Louis Cartell
who publishes a memoir
about the French experience
in Dartmoor in the 1840s.
So he's our kind of principle source.
It hasn't been translated into English,
but you know, some of this
stuff is quite florid.
You don't need great French
to realize what's going on.
I'm guessing there probably
are troves and troves
of letters, in the
French national archives.
I've not gone looking for them,
partly because this project
is already kind of big enough.
But I think one thing I do have to do,
and I appreciate you bringing this up,
'cause this has reminded me to do it,
when I went off and looked
at the prison records,
I kind of started with the
records when the Americans
arrived in 1813.
So what I think I ought
to do is go back to 1808,
when the prison opens
and see how, if you like,
you know, you've got these
two things that are similar,
how did British people
write about French people?
And how did they write about Americans?
If I can do the whole thing,
that's much more manageable
than heading off to the archive in France
and looking for a ton of material
that would be quite hard to find.
But yeah, the Romans
were so kind of obviously
caricaturable, like
they were so obviously,
they were like larger than life,
that you instantly wonder, right?
Did they really try and
eat two horse alive?
Did they mostly succeed?
I mean like stuff like that.
- [Woman] Well it would
be interesting to go back
yeah, to the Napoleonic wars
and see the ways that we can
potentially get more characterizing.
- Yep.
Yep.
- [Woman] That they weren't all white.
- Yeah, there were black French prisoners
in another British prison in 1798.
So actually people who were prisoners
from the various wars in Guadalupe,
that were brought to
another prison on the coast.
There were very few black
French prisoners in Dartmoor
and I haven't found any evidence of black
in the kind of race column, if you like.
But who knows if they
just started to use that
when they began getting lots
of black faces coming in,
when the Americans
arrived, I'm just not sure.
- [Woman] And then the (mumbles).
- Yeah.
- [Woman] Does that shape (mumbles).
- Oh my God, yeah.
So I haven't talked about this guy,
everyone who writes about this,
I mean not saying that you're
gonna go to a lot more talks
here about the Dartmoor Massacre,
but let's say you did.
Everyone who talks or writes
about this is obsessed
with this one character in
the so-called black prison,
who's name was King Dick.
That's his name.
And his real name was Richard Crafus,
he was a sailor from Maryland.
He winds up in Massachusets after the war
and becomes a boxing coach.
Anyway, listen, I mentioned
to you that I'm very nervous
of these kind of orientalizing,
racialized visions
of black people as kings of entertainment,
kings of strongman violence.
That was him, right.
So when the white prisoners
wrote about the black prison,
they could go into it,
and in fact white people
are in the black prison all the time.
Like in, a sense it is the kind
of social hub of the prison.
So the segregation regime
doesn't actually stop
white people and black people from mixing,
it just stops them from
sharing political power.
But when white sailors
wrote about politics
in the black prison, they said oh yeah,
strongman King Dick, he
keeps order with his club
and his two attendants.
So all of the white prisons,
they're all governed by
these committees, you know,
like democracies basically, right?
But the black prison,
oh no, that's King Dick
and his club.
There's a whole bunch of reasons
to be suspicious about this.
Partly because the
tradition of electing a king
is something that was
actually happening in black
communities in New England.
This actually is a kind of
politics that white people
in the prison didn't recognize
as authentically black,
nor authoritarian, but
something that black people
had always been doing,
alongside white elections
from which they'd been excluded.
But then there's also
the fact that King Dick
doesn't arrive in the prison
until October of 1814.
There'd been black people
in the prison for more
than a year before his arrival.
So what, he suddenly arrived
and everything changed?
So yeah, one of the real
challenges is telling
all these awesome stories
about racial interaction
within a prison, but taking
off this filter of racism
that sees black people as
entertainers and autocrats.
(audience member asks question)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(audience member asks question)
Yeah, yeah, so in the prison,
this is the weird thing
about prisons, war
prisons, POW facilities.
Like, if you guys end up in
prison, let's not go there.
Like if I ended up in prison in Britain,
then there would be an
assumption that whatever
I'd done wrong, the prison
would try to reform me, right?
So in effect, our, I know this
is crazy and that's not what
prisons do and I don't know,
prisons are bad in lots of ways
but that's the assumption
behind the prison.
That rather than it just being
a place you put bad people,
it's a place where the state attempts
to reform bad people.
Now again, you don't have to be Foucault
to question whether that's
actually how prisons work,
but that crucial
principle that the guards,
the governor, the staff, have
an interest in changing you,
makes regular prisons really different
from a place like Dartmoor.
So at Dartmoor, the prison
governor, the agent,
had no interest in
reforming these prisoners.
Because they weren't
there because they'd done
anything wrong, right?
They were there because they
just happened to be on ships
that Britain happened to be at war with.
So actually the whole
purpose of building Dartmoor,
is let's have this big humane facility,
really large, on a beautiful moor, okay,
it's absolutely freezing,
but that, you know,
it's beautiful, healthful,
it won't be a prison ship,
and we'll just leave them there,
and we'll try and treat
them as best we can.
We'll let them govern themselves.
There's a market every day in the prison,
so between nine and 12 every morning,
people come in from the local community
and sell the prisoners things.
Crazily, the prisoners
who'd been impressed
on Royal Navy ships, they
actually got paid in the prison
by the Royal Navy.
So when those ships ended up dividing up
all the ships they'd captured,
some of the plunder from the Navy ships
would just come to the
sailors in Dartmoor.
There's a ton of money swilling
around the prison, right.
Now the guards back off,
so the crucial distinction
between Dartmoor and a regular prison
is those guards are not acting
like the ship's officers,
when you're talking about the ships
these sailors have come from.
So they're not acting every
moment, to discipline,
to oversee, to shape, to
regulate, that doesn't happen.
The prisoners have a lot
of freedom themselves,
to do that, and that's where
I think the wheels come off,
the whole racial equality thing, right?
Like you can show some forms of respect,
have some forms of
equality with black people
if you're a white sailor with
like a tyrannical sea captain.
But when you're actually
asked to share your politics,
to live in the same place and
try to govern it together,
that's where things really get, get tough.
So the prison is different, I think.
