Self-Help in Dartmoor: Black and White Prisoners in the War of 1812
Self-Help in Dartmoor is volume 9 of the Journal of the Early Republic, which was written by Robin F. A. Fabel in the summer of 1989. He starts out the journal entry by giving some statistics about the Prisoners Of War detained in Dartmoor, approximately 14.5% of which were not white. It is interesting how he would make an emphasis about this, to show that white men were not the only ones suffering in the prison camps. The prison itself was settled atop a high moor, a desolate wasteland which was devoid of life, with constant rain and mist throughout the year. Using this background, Fabel sets the stage of a very depressing scenario, as the POW’s marched fifteen miles from the coast to the prison. He…show more content… The main reason for this was that when Congress declared war on Britain on June 18th, 1812, the Navy of the U.S. was miniscule in comparison to the Royal Navy. To counter this, Congress authorized large scale privateering, meaning that any armed ship owned by private individuals with a government commission were permitted to engage in war against any enemy merchant ships. Basically, it was a legal form of piracy endorsed by Congress to combat the British merchant shipping. Of course, privateer ships were neither as powerful nor as well armored as a frigate or British man-of-war. What they lacked in firepower and protection they made up for in vast numbers. Similar to Germany and Russia’s tank doctrines in the Second World War. Germany had a decent amount of robustly armored, precision fighting vehicles, that were expensive to maintain and operate, but were absolutely lethal on the field of battle. By contrast, Russia’s answer was to thinner armor plates on their tanks, but to angle it by forty-five degrees or to create a “pike nose” shape in the armor. By angling it, they increased the effective armor thickness, while using less metal
