Princetown Prison at Dartmoor
The great war prison of Princetown on the wilds of Dartmoor was erected in 1806. The American prisoners were held here, during the War of 1812, and among them was a large contingent of colored men. At this time the prison held war prisoners from many countries, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Swiss, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Dutchmen, and Orientals.
prisoners. The general plan of the new buildings consisted of a series of stone blocks radiating from a central point. Each block was of three stories, two of them intended for long sleeping rooms, the third or top story being used for a living room during the day and for exercise when the weather, often inclement, forbade it in the open air. The floorings of rooms and passages resembled those of a ship and were made of hard timbers with caulked seams. These blocks or main buildings, seven in number, were enclosed at a distance of forty feet by a circular line of palisading, composed of stout iron bars with sharp points. As a further obstacle were two granite walls fourteen feet high and twenty two feet apart, and around the whole exterior ran a military road on which were erected at intervals high stages overlooking the yards, for the sentries, always on duty.
The original edifice and the boundary walls cost about £130,000 and were completed in December, 1808. The several buildings were allotted as far as possible to the various nationalities of which there were many, including representatives of almost every European country, bearing witness to the extent and diversity of the empire over which Napoleon ruled. There were Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Swiss, Germans, Poles, Swedes, Dutchmen, and Orientals in the service of Holland, which was then closely allied to France, some of them Malays and Chinese. Later on a large influx of American prisoners swelled the total and among them as many as a thousand coloured people, who, in deference to the strong national prejudice, were kept entirely separate and always restricted to a distinct block, that known as Number Four. All sorts and conditions of men were included in this heterogeneous collection which amounted at one time to ten thousand souls, members of every conceivable trade and profession. Soldiers and sailors were in the majority, of course, and the crews of merchant ships taken as prizes were very numerous; there were artists of every category, painters and actors, literary men and men of scientific pursuits, and many who had been priests but had left the church in the troublous times. The permanent garrison to overawe this despairing multitude so easily intimidated, constantly discontented and quick to rise into insubordination, was seldom more than a single regiment of militia or line serving practically on a war footing, with an army of guards, patrol and pickets, forever on duty and ready to turn out at a moment’s notice to quell disturbances, give chase to fugitives and hunt them down to the utmost limits of the moor.
There was an aristocracy of the prison; one of its blocks, to which the French inmates gave the name of “le petit cautionnement” and which the Americans called “the Commodore,” was set aside for the officers of merchant ships, state officers who had broken parole and had been retaken, and many of those (among them a negro general) attached to the expedition against San Domingo under General Rochambeau, in 1803. These West Indian officers had in their prison an excellent military band, which was permitted to play daily.
As soon as the prisons were filled the French of their own accord proceeded to organise a constitution. First of all, the inhabitants of each prison elected a president, and then each separate apartment chose its own commissary who was to exercise authority under the former. The suffrage was universal and the election by ballot. As a necessary consequence bribery and corruption were altogether banished from this retreat of equality and fraternity. The authority of the presidents and commissaries extended to every point on which it could possibly be exercised. They were at once magistrates, judges and policemen, and sometimes had to carry their own judicial sentences into execution. On one occasion the cooks of a certain ward were condemned to death by the president and the commissary because, unfortunately, a number of rats were found boiled in the soup. They were respited, however, on making a sufficient apology and laying the crime of the unhappy pottage to the door of the perfidious British guard. At another time a prisoner convicted of having stolen a shirt, was deprived of his political privileges, declared incapable of voting at any elections, and finally sent to Coventry for a period of six months. He was taken to the hospital and died there of “langueur,” a disease common enough in the place, a sort of loss of hope and fatal fading away. We will add that all offenders did not escape so easily as the cooks. It is known that very many murders,—judicial or otherwise,—took place within the prisons. Among their inmates were men well acquainted with various methods of secret despatch, so that the judges of the Dartmoor Vehm-Gericht had no difficulty in finding officers who could carry out their sentences with scarcely a mark of external violence.
The prisoners were self-arranged under the following heads:—
“The Lords:” These were the richer prisoners, who received regular supplies from home, and carried on a traffic within the walls, making their own purchases at the grating of the market square. They had from sixty to eighty shops in each prison, where they sold tobacco, thread, soap, coffee, etc.
“The Labourers:” Those who worked at different trades, thereby supplying themselves with the means of procuring something more than the ordinary prison comforts.