Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807 [1 ed.] 9781609172077, 9780870138690

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Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

EXECUTING Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

DEMOCRACY

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

RHETORIC AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS SERIES • Eisenhower’s War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership, Martin J. Medhurst, editor • The Nuclear Freeze Campaign: Rhetoric and Foreign Policy in the Telepolitical Age, J. Michael Hogan • Mansfield and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation, Gregory A. Olson • Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, Robert P. Newman • Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, editors • Rhetoric and Political Culture in NineteenthCentury America, Thomas W. Benson, editor • Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice, 1818–1845, Gregory P. Lampe

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• Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination, Stephen Howard Browne • Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science, and Politics in Missile Defense Advocacy, Gordon R. Mitchell • Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid, Kimber Charles Pearce • Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination, Robert Asen • General Eisenhower: Ideology and Discourse, Ira Chernus • The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870–1875, Kirt H. Wilson • Shared Land/Conflicting Identity: Trajectories of Israeli and Palestinian Symbol Use, Robert C. Rowland and David A. Frank • Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer, editors • Religious Expression and the American Constitution, Franklyn S. Haiman

• Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation, Quentin J. Schultze • Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic, Randall L. Bytwerk • Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment, Robert E. Terrill • Metaphorical World Politics, Francis A. Beer and Christ’l De Landtsheer, editors • The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Angela G. Ray • The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln, Michael William Pfau • The Character of Justice: Rhetoric, Law, and Politics in the Supreme Court Confirmation Process, Trevor Parry-Giles • Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials, Marouf A. Hasian, Jr. • Judging the Supreme Court: Constructions of Motives in Bush v. Gore, Clarke Rountree • Everyday Subversion: From Joking to Revolting in the German Democratic Republic, Kerry Kathleen Riley • In the Wake of Violence, Cheryl R. JorgensenEarp • Rhetoric and Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices, Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman, editors • Invoking the Invisible Hand: Social Security and the Privatization Debates, Robert Asen • With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 1985–1995, Erik Doxtader • Public Address and Moral Judgment: Critical Studies in Ethical Tensions, Shawn J. ParryGiles and Trevor Parry-Giles, editors

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

EXECUTING DEMOCRACY VOLUME ONE

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Capital Punishment & the Making of America, 1683–1807

Stephen John Hartnett

Michigan State University Press • East Lansing Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

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SERIES EDITOR

Martin J. Medhurst, Baylor University EDITORIAL BOARD

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Denise M. Bostdorff, College of Wooster G. Thomas Goodnight, University of Southern California Robert Hariman, Northwestern University David Henry, University of Nevada, Las Vegas J. Michael Hogan, Penn State University Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University Mark Lawrence McPhail, Southern Methodist University John M. Murphy, University of Illinois Shawn J. Parry-Giles, University of Maryland Angela G. Ray, Northwestern University Kirt H. Wilson, University of Minnesota David Zarefsky, Northwestern University

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Hartnett, Stephen J. Executing democracy : capital punishment and the making of America, 1683–1807 / Stephen John Hartnett. p. cm. — (Rhetoric and public affairs series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87013-869-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Capital punishment—United States— History. 2. Crime—United States—History. 3. Rhetoric—Political aspects—United States —History. 4. Debates and debating—United States—History. 5. United States—History— Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 6. United States—History—1783–1865. I. Title. HV8699.U5H374 2010 364.660973—dc22 2009014695 Cover and book design by Charlie Sharp, Sharp Des!gns, Lansing, Michigan Cover art is an original woodcut ©2009 Rosemary Covey and is used with permission of the artist. For more of Rosemary Covey’s work please visit www.rosemarycovey.com.

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Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

Contents •

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Illustrations · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · vii Preface · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ix Acknowledgments · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · xvii

INTRODUCTION. The

Rhetorical History of “A Very Hard Choice” · · · · · · · 1

CHAPTER 1. Settler

Debauchery, Capital Punishment, and the Theater of Colonial (Dis)Order, 1683–1741 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 41

CHAPTER 2. The

Paradox of a Republican Revolution Using Executions as Pedagogy, 1768–1784· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 79

CHAPTER 3. The

Hanging of Abraham Johnstone and the Turning of Terror into Hope, 1797 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 123

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CHAPTER 4. Enlightenment,

Republicanism, and Executions, 1785–1800 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 161

CONCLUSION. The

Hanging of John M’Kean and the Perils of Sinning in an Age of Reason· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 211

Notes · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 219 Bibliography · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 275

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Index · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 303

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

Illustrations •

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FIGURE 1.

Frank Hazenplug’s drawing of the seventeenth-century practice of “laying by the heels in the bilboes” · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 53

FIGURE 2.

“Whipping at the Cart’s Tayle,” by Frank Hazenplug· · · · · · · 55

FIGURE 3.

The front cover of Daniel Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy (1744) · · · · · · · · · · · 67

FIGURE 4.

First page of the record of punishments assigned, from Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy (1744) · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 68

FIGURE 5.

Detail from the masthead of the first issue of The Hangman, 1 January 1845 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 92

FIGURE 6.

Major John André’s march to the gallows on 2 October 1780, by F. O. C. Darley · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 99

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FIGURE 7.

“Benedict Arnold and The Devil,” Charles Willson Peale’s woodcut of the rogue’s march (and eventual burning in effigy) of Arnold and André in Philadelphia on 4 October 1780 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 103

FIGURE 8.

Abraham Johnstone’s “Dying Words,” a section of The Address of Abraham Johnstone, a black man, who was hanged at Woodbury, in the county of Glocester, and state of New Jersey (1797) · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 135

FIGURE 9.

A mathematical formula offering “perfectly rational” proof of the likelihood of salvation, from Joseph Bellamy’s The Millennium (1758) · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 175

FIGURE 10.

The cover of Benjamin Rush’s Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and upon Society (1787) · · · · · 181

FIGURE 11.

The title page of Philadelphia’s American Museum · · · · · · · 189

The cover of Benjamin Rush’s Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death (1792) · · · · · · · 203

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FIGURE 12.

FIGURE 13.

The front cover of The Execution of John M’Kean, for the Murder of His Wife (1807)· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 214

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

Preface

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•

A

fter a rough fifteen years of getting into, out of, and back into trouble while agitating for revolution across the European continent, Thomas Paine returned to America in 1802. By then his hell-fire radicalism had faded out of fashion, his drinking had become epic, and his purportedly atheistic rantings in Age of Reason had turned many in the United States against the man whose polemics had stirred them to heroic efforts. The Federalist press hounded Paine as a sinner and Jacobin, with one Boston paper howling that he was “a lying, drunken, brutal infidel, who rejoices in the opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation, bloodshed, rapine and murder, in which his soul delights.” And so upon his landing, Paine reintroduced himself to his countrymen by writing public letters explaining his actions on the continent, attacking his Federalist foes, and reminding his readers of his proper place in the revolutionary pantheon. As a mark of his contributions to republicanism, Paine boasted that “the Government of England honoured me with a thousand martyrdoms, by burning me in effigy in every town in that country.” As we shall see in the pages that follow, Paine, like most

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of his peers, possessed a complicated and even contradictory set of ideas about crime, violence, and punishment, yet it is important to open this study of the history of capital punishment and the making of America by noting that for Paine, being burned in effigy was an honor. The threat of hanging was not a deterrent to further political action; it was not a mark of shame; it did not frighten him out of producing additional polemics; rather, it was an act to boast about and be proud of—damn the king, bring me a beer, that addlebrained bastard tried to hang me!1

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•

•

•

In Executing Democracy I offer a two-volume rhetorical history of public debates about crime, violence, and corporeal—especially capital—punishment in America from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Volume 1 begins in 1683, when William Penn first struggled to govern the rowdy indentured servants of Philadelphia; volume 2 ends in 1843, at the close of one of the nation’s most heated periods of debate regarding executions. I argue in both volumes that crime, violence, and punishment are not peripheral issues triggered by aberrant behaviors but central components of how our society has functioned ever since the first European settlers came to the New World. As the subtitle of the work suggests, studying the history of capital punishment amounts to an opportunity for revising some of our core notions about the making of America. To prove this thesis I offer two thematically linked, chronologically ordered, yet methodologically different volumes. Volume 1 consists of an introduction and four chapters examining public debates from 1683 to 1807. These materials offer readers a macro-historical overview of how questions of crime, violence, and punishment influenced the settling of the New World, the eventual American Revolution, and the frantic political scramble following the revolution to establish the norms that would govern the new Republic. Within that broad sweep of events, debates about crime, violence, and punishment helped colonials and then Americans focus their thinking on six key themes, including identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, the tug between religion and modernity, race and slavery, and the links between the Enlightenment and democracy. Volume 2 consists of an introduction and two case studies demonstrating how the broad themes addressed in volume 1 were played out in the New York death penalty debates of 1835 and 1843. I focus on the celebrated battles between the pro–death penalty

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Calvinist minister George Barrell Cheever and the abolitionist magazine editor John O’Sullivan, and use these debates as springboards to consider related cultural events and texts, including the slew of political poems and stories, dueling newspaper editorials, and warring manifestos produced in response to Cheever’s and O’Sullivan’s engagements. By juxtaposing a macro-historical overview (volume 1) and a micro-historical case study (volume 2), and by filling the arguments with voices representing as many different political camps and communicative genres as possible, I provide readers with multiple perspectives for understanding the centrality of public debates about crime, violence, and punishment in the development of American democracy. Indeed, I hope to demonstrate that the history of democracy, and what our national ancestors called republicanism, cannot be understood without comprehending our forebears’ arguments about the politics, metaphysics, and deep cultural significance of the death penalty. To begin addressing these claims, the introduction to volume 1 opens with historical observations based on a close reading of an article in the American Weekly Mercury from the summer of 1737. By tracking the fate of the criminals noted in the story—Catherine Connor, Henry Wilemon, Joseph Beven, and Isaac Bradford, the first three of whom were executed, two at the hands of Bradford—and by delving into historical clues buried within the story and the advertisements and other news items surrounding the story, I demonstrate how colonial settlers used capital and other corporeal punishments as ways of making sense of the widespread cultural confusions attendant upon settling the New World. Spinning a sweeping historical argument by means of detailed rhetorical criticism, the introduction also serves as a methodological model for the reading practices that drive both volumes. After establishing these historical themes and methodological practices, the first two chapters of volume 1 reconstruct the grisly trajectory of crime, violence, and corporeal punishments by focusing on the whipping of Anthony Weston, an indentured white servant in Philadelphia, in 1683; the torture and banishment of Toney and Quashy, “Negroe Slaves” from Philadelphia, in 1707; the overturned death sentence of an unnamed Philadelphia arsonist known to the courts only as “A Negroe Man,” in 1737; the mass execution of supposedly rebellious slaves, indentured servants, and their poor white collaborators in New York City, in 1741; the execution of “Arthur, a Negro Man,” in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1768; the

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hanging of Moses Dunbar, a supposed traitor, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1777; and the scandal surrounding the hanging of Major John André, the chief collaborator with Benedict Arnold, in 1780. These case studies illustrate the interplay of my six main themes in constructing Americans’ sense of themselves as a destined people with a special relationship to violence. Indeed, considering these case studies chronologically enables us to watch how New World settlers progressed from colonial subjects to revolutionary insurgents to nation builders in part by managing economies of violence in general and the death penalty in particular. I should note that while the archival record from this period privileges the words of white men of high status, I rely upon court records, gallows statements, broadsides, poems, letters, and other historical documents to help recover the lost voices of those whom men of means called “the great unwashed,” those poor women, slaves, servants, migrants, backwoods farmers, and other marginalized populations who often suffered—and sometimes celebrated—the consequences of the death penalty. The third and fourth chapters of volume 1 step back from this avalanche of violence to study how Americans debated these events, their causes, and their implications for the new nation. Chapter 3 tackles the 1797 hanging in south New Jersey of Abraham Johnstone, a (likely innocent) black farmer whose neck was snapped because of a land squabble with his white neighbors. Johnstone’s friends in the local Quaker community rallied around him, however, and helped to produce a remarkable document, The Address of Abraham Johnstone, that stands as one of the nation’s first African American–authored attacks on the death penalty in particular and slavery in general. A never-before-studied document, I use Johnstone’s Address to examine how our forebears tried to turn terror into hope. Chapter 4 then focuses on the thorny question of how, in light of their commitments to both revolutionary republicanism and the Enlightenment, Americans could justify the systematic barbarism outlined in previous chapters. Tracking these questions enables me to discuss the work of leading intellectuals and reformers, including John Gardiner, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, William Bradford, Cesare Beccaria, Joseph Bellamy, and David Rittenhouse. Examining their speeches, manifestos, editorials, and letters opens up the question of how the founders understood the relationships among republicanism and violence, rhetoric and force, and citizenship and criminality. Focusing on the difficulties of settlement, revolution, and nation formation, proceeding

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with my six themes in mind, and shuttling back and forth from the spectacular brutality of violence to the quiet intelligence of reform, volume 1 thus provides a sweeping overview of our nation’s obsessions with and arguments about crime, violence, and corporeal and capital punishments from 1683 to 1807. Volume 2 steps forward to the antebellum period and opens with an introduction detailing the ubiquitous intermingling of political and religious rhetoric in the age of the Second Great Awakening. Addressing this popular cross pollination of genres is an important first step in understanding the role of death penalty debates in antebellum America, for arguing about capital punishment has always meant tackling other larger matters, including how democracy’s secular laws should coexist with God’s heavenly mandates. The fact that secular and sacred laws were themselves the subjects of ferocious disagreements—whose law? whose Bible? which party’s understanding of them? on what grounds and to what ends?—renders debates about capital punishment especially complicated, for they inevitably involved not only penological and political questions but also confusions about the most pressing cultural, philosophical, and theological matters of the day. Having established this historical and rhetorical context, and building upon the themes addressed in volume 1, volume 2 examines the public debates between John O’Sullivan, the young cosmopolitan Democrat who edited the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and George Barrell Cheever, the right reverend of Calvinist orthodoxy. First in 1835 (in Albany) and then again in 1843 (in New York City), O’Sullivan and Cheever engaged in heated, often acrimonious debates regarding the death penalty. Each of their debates quickly became a cause célèbre complete with corresponding culture wars carried out in New York City’s leading papers, the nation’s leading magazines, and pulpits everywhere. For O’Sullivan and his Who’s Who list of allies—including, among others, Walt Whitman, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, Margaret Fuller, Edward Livingston, Robert Rantoul, Fanny Fern, and George Combe—supporters of the death penalty perpetuated nothing less than a pro-monarchical, superstition-based attack on both modernity and democracy. For Cheever and a group of then-powerful but now largely forgotten church leaders—including, among others, the Reverends William Patton, John McLeod, William Buddington, John Breckenridge, and Tayler Lewis—the equation was reversed: supporters of the death penalty

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honored God’s universal commandments regarding the necessity of retribution, leading to an orderly and civil society. In this vision, abolitionists were nothing less than rabble-rousing, crime-producing, sinful anarchists. These antebellum death penalty arguments are additionally fascinating because they served as a testing ground for many of the reformers who would eventually become leaders of the antislavery movement, and because they offer suggestive glimpses of the foundational relationship between a rising culture industry and the nation’s obsessions with crime and violence. O’Sullivan and Cheever’s debates are particularly significant for students of rhetorical criticism, public address, argumentation, persuasion, and American studies, because as the debates progressed they focused on questions of rhetoric and argumentation: What counts as evidence? What makes an argument persuasive? What are the acceptable grounds of attack and counterattack? Are biblical hermeneutics relevant to social policy? What roles should the media play in such debates? In asking pressing political questions regarding nothing less than the principles and policies legislating life and death, the disputants revealed a culture deeply attuned to the nuances of rhetoric and argumentation. Executing Democracy therefore tackles the complicated relationship between rhetoric and violence, and argues not only that the two are intertwined but that they are constitutive of each other: that is, whereas rhetoric’s persuasive force is often based on the assumed power—and hence the assumed ability to inflict violence—of those who wield it, all acts of violence entail the production of public gestures, signs, messages for those who have witnessed the violence. Rhetoric is shadowed by violence; violence is always rhetorical. Moreover, the antebellum disputants addressed in volume 2 repeatedly drew argumentative strength from the work of their Revolutionary and Federalist era forebears, thus showing readers how the materials from volume 1 are embedded in the arguments engaged in volume 2. My hope is that as these books demonstrate how arguments about crime, violence, and punishment were wielded from period to period and place to place, serving historically discrete needs that nonetheless link to form an overarching narrative, so I will be able to map how our nation’s debates about the death penalty influenced thinking about identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, religion and modernity, race and slavery, and Enlightenment and democracy. Ideally, then, the cumulative power of these two volumes should provide a historically inflected sense

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of some of our most important national narratives, the cultural fictions that give everyday life meaning and purpose. Accordingly, I proceed into my case studies with the assumption that we may gather a more nuanced, contested, and ultimately realistic understanding of the making of America by watching how our forebears debate the causes of, responses to, philosophical meanings embedded in, and political implications of crime, violence, and punishment. I should alert readers to some mechanical issues. First, so as not to clutter each paragraph with numerous citations, all of the quotations in a paragraph are given in one note. Citations within these notes fall in consequential order, so that the first quotation in the text is referenced in the first citation in the note and so on. Second, because the titles of many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materials used herein extend to extreme and sometimes even absurd lengths, I have cited some materials using abbreviated titles; I offer enough information for scholars to find my sources, yet in an effort to save space I have cut some subtitles and subtitles of subtitles. Third, because I find our forebears’ linguistic habits charming, and because I want to convey their voices as fully as possible, all quotations appear here as they appeared then, without my updating their spellings, editing their grammar, or cluttering the text with sic and other indications of editorial hubris. Finally, I should admit at the outset that this project of historical sleuthing and rhetorical reconstruction aspires to contribute to contemporary arguments about the death penalty, for we cannot make sense of that practice in the twenty-first century without studying its histories and justifications, its cultural fictions, its deeply rooted and violence-saturated means of imagining America.

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Acknowledgments

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•

T

he idea for this book was first hatched on a windswept and hardraining night in the spring of 1999, when I found myself standing with thousands of other death penalty abolitionists outside California’s San Quentin Prison, where we were protesting the execution that was scheduled to occur at midnight. On that and too many other occasions, I found myself disappointed in the quality of arguments being offered both in favor of and against the death penalty, and so it struck me that I should study the history of public arguments about hangings, perhaps thus uncovering the better but forgotten argumentative strategies used by our forebears. I wanted evidence, I wanted examples, I wanted compelling stories and songs and poems and speeches, something to demonstrate that debates about life and death had once been more than dueling dogmatisms and shouted slogans. At the time, I was teaching college courses both inside San Quentin Prison and on the beautiful campus of the University of California, Berkeley; at both sites, my students responded to the proposed project with enthusiasm, and so I was off and running, reading everything I could find about the history of the

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Acknowledgments

death penalty and how our national ancestors argued about it and the underlying questions of crime, violence, and punishment. That was eleven years ago, and so I am relieved to finally see this first volume of Executing Democracy into print (volume 2 is forthcoming next year). During the eleven years that it took to complete these volumes, I had the good fortune of spending considerable time in some of the nation’s premier historical archives and libraries, including the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum (New York City), and the New York Historical Society; the Special Collections and University Archives of the Alexander Library, Rutgers University, and the New Jersey State Archives (Trenton); the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia); the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester), the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston), the Boston Athenaeum, and the Special Collections Library of the Harvard Law School; the Newberry Library (Chicago), and the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). At each of these marvelous institutions, my work was aided by resourceful and generally cheerful librarians who helped track down rare broadsheets, long-forgotten diaries, dog-eared treatises and chapbooks, dust-covered tomes, leather-bound magazine collections, and the always dreaded rolls of microfilm and those little informationpacked plastic cards known as micro-sheaf. I hope the many librarians with whom I worked recognize in these pages their own love of archival stewardship and the thrill of intellectual discovery. My adventures at these institutions were made possible during the summer of 2000 by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend; my work at them in the summer of 2001 was facilitated by a Humanities Release Time Grant from the University of Illinois’ Scholars Research Board; and my research at them in the summer of 2002 was made possible, in part, by the generosity of Professors E. Ann Kaplan and Marty Hoffmann, who offered their apartment in New York City’s Village to me and their daughter, Brett Kaplan, hence enabling us to spend each week of the summer doing research in the capital of the world, and each weekend traveling up and down the eastern seaboard. Whenever I was working at sites in New Jersey, I did so with the added joy of ending the day by cooking dinners with my mother and then discussing the day’s work with her and my father—I continue to marvel at their grace and continue to be pushed by their insightful comments on my work. When researching at sites in Massachusetts, I did so while crashing at night in

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the gorgeous home of Stellio Sinnis and Brigitte Duffy, dear friends, strong runners, and powerhouse lawyers who always made venturing northwards a joyous occasion. Writing up my notes from these three summers’ archival research was facilitated in 2002–2003 by a departmental research leave, in 2003–2004 by my appointment as a Research Fellow of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and in 2005–2006 by a similar appointment from the University of Illinois’s Mellon Faculty Fellows Program. Research assistance was provided during the early stages of this project by Donovan Conley, who has since become an assistant (and soon to be associate) professor of communication at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, and by Gregory Goodale, who has since become an assistant professor of communication at Northeastern University. Two of my other former advisees, Jennifer Mercieca, now an associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University, and Jeremy Engels, now an assistant professor of communication at the Pennsylvania State University, read early drafts, offered helpful commentary, and shared many pizzas and pitchers of beer at Jupiter’s, where many of the ideas in this book were first tested in heady conversations. Daniel Larson also provided a summer’s worth of excellent research assistance; along with joining me as a coauthor on some essays about the death penalty in contemporary America, I anticipate his completing his dissertation soon and becoming a formidable scholar in his own right. Since those days in Illinois and New York City, I have relocated to the University of Colorado, Denver, where this project was finally shepherded toward completion; the gorgeous woodcut by Rosemary Feit Covey that adorns the cover of this book was made possible, for example, by the generous support of the UCD Center for Faculty Development and the Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. Lauren Archer drafted the bibliography, and her work was likewise supported by research funds from UCD, a growing and vibrant campus that is earning its place among the nation’s premier urban universities. Thus spanning eleven years of research conducted across the nation, stretching from California to New York City, with stops at UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois, and now UCD along the way, this book embodies the support of an extended community of research institutions, public and private libraries, special archives, humanities centers, grant agencies, research assistants, and friends and family. I am deeply grateful to everyone mentioned here, and thank them both for their assistance with this book and for maintaining the infrastructural and existential

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supports necessary for keeping free and independent intellectual inquiry alive in America. I want to thank in particular some of my colleagues from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, where I spent a full academic year engaged in heavy conversation with Professors Rob Rushing, Ellen Moodie, Andrea Goulet, and the IPRH’s director, Matti Bunzl. Professors Zohreh Sullivan and Jed Esty, of the University of Illinois Department of English, were rock-solid friends and insightful readers whose advice left me wondering how they seemed to know more about the subject than I did. I spent many nights talking about this book at Zohreh’s house, either out on her back porch with Jim Hurt, or while goofing around in her garden, and so owe Zohreh and Jim a special debt of gratitude for their intellectual guidance and their relentless love and support. From my former home department at the University of Illinois, I want to thank Professor Cara Finnegan, who spent nine years modeling collegiality and professionalism, all while finding time for microbrews at the Blind Pig and runs through the leafy backstreets of Champaign. My department chair, Professor Barbara Wilson, was always gracious about supporting my research leaves and arranging my teaching and service commitments to enable me to maximize productivity; her husband, Professor John Lammers, was a constant source of funny stories, keen insight, and collegial support. I was so deeply buried in the writing of these books that I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how hard Professor Dale Brashers was working on the department’s behalf, and so I hope he will accept this tardy yet heartfelt thank you. My colleagues Professors Christian Sandvig and Lisa Nakamura opened up their home to me and provided friendship, awesome cooking, and almost nightly intellectual exchanges—including one night when Professor James Hay brought over Cuban cigars that smelled like chocolate—that left me wishing my own thinking was as sophisticated and sharp as theirs. Throughout it all, Professor Norman Denzin offered encouragement and direction, always reminding me to stay focused on social justice, and always riding his nifty red bike through the harsh Illinois winters. Along with the wonderful colleagues cited here, my other main source of intellectual camaraderie at the University of Illinois was provided by the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society, where I was always pushed by the genius of David Roediger, Kent Ono, Jorge Chapa, James Anderson, and Bernice Barnett. I was especially lucky to have the opportunity to team-teach a graduate seminar on the

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Enlightenment one semester with Professor Adam Sutcliffe; we would teach from 5:00–8:00 P.M. and then retreat to long dinners that left us happily arguing the finer points of eighteenth-century history and philosophy long into the night. I still think Adam is wrong about my man Ben Franklin (whom I adore, and whom Adam claims to loathe, although I still cannot believe it), but I have come to learn that he is generally right about just about everything else. Since moving to UCD, I have learned that ideas bounced off of Professor Sonja Foss and her brilliant husband, Anthony Radich, always come back better for the exchange, especially when the conversation takes place at the Wazee Supper Club on a roaring Friday night. Death penalty talk works best with Professor Barbara Walkosz, on the other hand, when conducted on a chair lift while ascending to the Continental Divide–straddling magnificence of “the legend,” A-Basin, one of our favorite skiing spots. Whereas my best talks with Professor James Stratman often seem to unfold over at Wahoo’s Fish Tacos, my conversations with Professor Larry Erbert always have a happy edge when we are running along the urban trails that snake around Denver. My workdays are made better by a remarkable team of intellectual and administrative leaders at UCD, including Dean Dan Howard and Associate Deans Brenda J. Allen, Mary CoussonsRead, Tammy Stone, and Laura Argys. Without Sally Thee, an uncommon force of nature, I am convinced the world would crumble. Heading northwards, I want to thank my Boulder-based running mate, Professor Pete Simonson, with whom long mountain runs always combine scholarly talk, friendly banter, and more than our fair share of spiritual reverie. Also from Boulder, Professor Larry Frey has been a rock-solid supporter of this work and a dear, dear friend ever since this project’s inception, while Professors John Ackerman and Marlia Banning have become stalwart hiking mates and cheerful intellectual foils. Our front-range colleagues farther to the north, including Professors Brian Ott and Greg “Mount” Dickinson, anchors of the communication department at Colorado State, have proven that intellectual debate works especially well on those sun-kissed Ft. Collins afternoons when Long’s Peak towers over the purple horizon. For the Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series, I want to thank Professor Martin Medhurst, who contracted this book, edited it hard, and stiffed me on my usual 10K signing bonus. Still, for as long as anyone can remember, Marty has been a champion of the field of communication and a keen supporter of free speech and intellectual debate. In founding this

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book series and his exceptionally good journal, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, he has done as much as anyone to advance the cause of our field and interdisciplinary scholarship more broadly. At the Michigan State University Press, I would like to thank Kristine Blakeslee, Annette Tanner, Dawn Martin, and Martha Bates for their handling of the manuscript, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Versions of the material included here have been presented at multiple conferences hosted by the National Communication Association, the Rhetoric Society of America, the Western States Communication Association, the Rocky Mountain Communication Association, and Critical Resistance (thanks Rose!); invited lectures derived from this book were delivered at the University of Illinois, the University of Texas (thank you Rod Hart), the University of Indiana (thank you John Lucaites and Bob Ivie), and Northwestern University (thank you Dilip Goankar, Bob Hariman, and David Zarefsky). At many of these events, I worked in conjunction with my colleagues in P-CARE (Prison Communication Activism Research and Education), a national group of scholars, teachers, artists, and activists, from which I owe supreme thanks to Jennifer Wood, Bryan McCann, and Ed Hinck. These conferences, invited lectures, and other adventures often overlapped with soul-fulfilling visits with a loose national network of anti-prison activists and scholars, including Professors Buzz Alexander and Janie Paul in Ann Arbor, the novelist Judith Tannenbaum in Berkeley, Professor Jon Rutter in Garden City, the artist Richard Kamler in San Francisco, the activist Robin Sohnen in Pacifica, Professor Lori Pompa in Philadelphia, and Professor Erica Meiners in Chicago—thank you all for the love and support. Finally, I want to close by thanking my existential soul-mate, life partner, and hiking buddy, Dr. Lisa Keränen, whose unconditional love and radiant joy-for-life make each day together a blessing. Her tender care has renewed me, while her ferocious editing has saved this book from more foolishness than I care to remember. She is my everything, and so this one is dedicated to her. Between the boundless love of my daughters, Anya and Melia, the life-saving generosity of Lisa, and the support from the cast of luminaries cited here, I now know what the Subdudes mean when they sing “No man / has ever / been loved as much / as I, oh I . . .” And so I offer these acknowledgments as one small token of thanks to those who have made this book possible and who make each day a joyous adventure.

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INTRODUCTION

The Rhetorical History of “A Very Hard Choice”

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•

On Saturday last, just before Twelve, Henry Wilemon, a Nailer, and Catharine Smith, alias Connor, were Executed here, for Burglary. . . . Wilemon was born in the Parish of Himley in Staffordshire in England. . . . The woman . . . was born in King’s-County in Ireland, and died a Catholick. At the Place of Execution, as well as in Prison, they neither of them behav’d so conserned as might have been expected from persons in their Circumstances. One Isaac Bradford receiv’d Sentence of Death at the same Time for a Robbery, and was to have been executed with them, but he was Repriev’d, and did the Office of the Executioner. A very hard Choice. The same Day, one Joseph Beven was executed at Chester.

T

hus the news from Andrew Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury on 7 July 1737. The second regularly published newspaper in the New World and the most important newspaper in Philadelphia at the time, the American Weekly Mercury offers a window into the complicated choices of colonial life. The block of text quoted above appears on page

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3, immediately above notices of ships having arrived from and departed for Jamaica, Boston, Cadiz, Barbados, and Bristol; it is three short blocks of text removed from an advertisement for Archibald Cummings’s The Danger of Breaking Christian Unity: In Two Sermons Preached at Christ’s Church, “Published by reason of the gross Misrepresentations made of them in a public extraordinary manner”; and it appears next to a series of notices, including news of Joseph May’s absconding wife, Jane, and Jonathan Robison’s offer of a “Forty Shilling Reward for each” for the capture of his two runaway indentured servants. The lead story on page 1 describes a battle outside London between “some Officers” and “some Smugglers” over “a large Quantity of Tea.” By delving into these stories, notices, and advertisements we may gather glimpses of our national ancestors’ concerns regarding identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, religion and modernity, the death penalty, and the travails of a dysfunctional criminal justice system.1 The Mercury’s observation that Catharine Smith used an alias, Connor, provides our first historical clue, for it demonstrates a society yet to generate the extensive security and identity industries that mark postmodern nation-states. Free from the technologies of photographs, eye scanners, fingerprints, social security numbers, passports, health insurance cards, driver’s licenses, tapped phones, traceable emails, video cameras everywhere, and multiple credit cards, all interlinked in an omnipresent web of surveillance, Smith and her fellow colonial criminals were frequently able to begin new lives simply by changing towns and names. At its most mundane, such uncertainty about identity resulted from the random nature of spelling in a world not yet populated by dictionaries and state-run databases: Smith’s first name is spelled as Catharine in the text cited above, but it is listed as Katherine in the Minutes of the Provincial Council; her alias appears in 1737 as Connor, yet a year earlier the American Weekly Mercury referred to her as Conner. Likewise, her accomplice, named Henry Wilemon above, appears in the Provincial Council’s records at different times as Wilemon, Wildman, and Wildeman. Names were thus spelled catch-as-catch can, aliases were rampant, and records were shoddy, rendering the identification of the New World’s settlers, let alone its criminals, a suspect process at best. Even as late as 1833, Gustave de Beaumont observed that in the United States “the courts condemn, almost always, without knowing the true name of the criminal, and still less his previous life.”2

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“A Very Hard Choice”

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Such complications with confirming identities produced a culture obsessed with strangers. In 1784, in his “Information To Those Who Would Remove to America,” Benjamin Franklin sought to persuade Old Worlders to emigrate to the New World by claiming that in the sunny colonies “strangers are welcome.” Hoping to rectify the New World’s chronic labor shortage, Franklin tried to lure potential immigrants with the promise that in America “people do not inquire concerning a stranger, What is he? but What can he do?” Franklin thus entices possible workers with the cheery claim that everyone gets a clean slate in America: “if they are sober, industrious, and frugal, they soon become masters, establish themselves in business, marry, raise families, and become respectable citizens.” An even rosier portrayal of upward mobility was offered in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, where he promised nothing less than economic and spiritual “resurrection” to those willing to come work the fertile lands and tread the open paths to wealth in the New World. To a large extent, Franklin’s and Crèvecoeur’s claims were true, as hundreds of thousands of impoverished Europeans emigrated to and became successful in America. Russell Menard’s meticulous analysis of immigrants who arrived in Maryland in the mid-seventeenth century confirms the once-but-no-longer-true basis of Franklin’s and Crèvecoeur’s pitch, for it shows that the earliest generations of immigrants found “abundant opportunity” and enjoyed “impressive status mobility.” The picture begins to change after the 1660s, however, by which time new political hierarchies had begun to solidify, hence freezing out poor newcomers. David Galenson shows in White Servitude in Colonial America that this shift from an open to a more closed society occurred slightly later, in the final two decades of the seventeenth century. By the Revolution, John Alexander argues, “for the great mass of the poor, economic mobility could be no more than an impossible dream.” Menard’s, Galenson’s, and Alexander’s researches thus mark Franklin’s and Crèvecoeur’s happy words as roughly a century out of date. This fact does not diminish the allure of their claims; rather, it may help us to understand the need to cling to myths of opportunity in the face of a society rapidly closing its avenues of access to wealth and power.3 More important for my argument about character and identity, the influx of immigrants celebrated by Franklin and Crèvecoeur led many colonial settlers and then the first generations of Americans to live in constant fear of the ability of people like Smith and Wilemon to engage

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Introduction

in self-disguise. Franklin pledged that Americans cared not from whence strangers come, Crèvecoeur offered nothing less than the welcome embrace of salvation, and Thomas Paine gushed in Common Sense that the New World would offer “an asylum for mankind,” a safe haven from whence “to begin the world over again.” Yet historical records show that Franklin’s and Crèvecoeur’s and Paine’s neighbors were likely to wonder, Is my new neighbor an absconding felon or the gentle seamstress she purports to be? Is that new farmhand really a son whose father left him without land or is he a throat-cutter in disguise? Such questions led many colonial settlers and then Americans to respond to strangers with aloof stares of incredulity, or with shunning and rumor-mongering, or with the more violent reactions that make up many of the case studies addressed in this book. Thinking about Smith’s use of an alias (and there were hundreds if not thousands more who did so) and her neighbors’ accordingly wary and sometimes violent response to strangers means, despite Franklin’s and Crèvecoeur’s and Paine’s cheerful spin on the problem, that writing a history of crime, violence, and punishment in the New World from 1683 to 1843 in turn means addressing our national ancestors’ fascination with the available means of constructing, interpreting, falsifying, and disciplining identity.4 For example, on the one hand identity could be discerned largely by dress, comportment, language skills, letters of introduction, family ties, property holdings, and other ways of marking what colonial settlers and then early Americans called character. On the other hand, some of these markers could be faked easily, making any exchange with any stranger a possible occasion for duping or being duped. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation, an American Tale (1798), one of the earliest novels written in the New World, and a tale chock full of crime, violence, and ultimately a hanging, the fine and upstanding narrator, Clara, is puzzled by an alluring yet odd stranger. Carwin’s dress is suspect—he wears a “slouched hat, tarnished by the weather,” rough clothes, and shoes “which brush had never disturbed”—but his silky language skills, polite manners, and impressive knowledge mark him as a fellow member of the privileged class. Nonetheless, something about Carwin is not right, leaving Clara “wholly uncertain whether he were an object to be dreaded or adored.” In light of such confusions about identity and character, the New World’s settlers resorted to branding criminals to facilitate Clara’s and her contemporaries’ attempts to reach the right conclusion about strangers: A meant adulterer or adulteress; B meant blasphemer or burglar; D meant

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drunkard; F meant forger; H meant hog thief; M meant manslaughterer; R meant rogue; S. L. meant seditious libeler; T meant thief; and so on in a virtual catalogue of sins and crimes made visibly manifest. Unlike Smith, who died on the gallows, Carwin commits a series of dirty deeds only to escape to the unpoliced hinterlands. Clara reports with disgust that “it was easy for Carwin to elude the persecution” of his would-be captors, for “it was merely requisite to hide himself in a remote district of Pennsylvania.” That merely tells us much about the scene, suggesting that escaping the snares of the law was as simple as leaving town, merely a question of finding a place where no one knows your face. The factual story of Smith in 1737 and the fictional story of Clara and Carwin in 1798 thus both point to the ways colonial settlers and early Americans worried about, responded to, and eluded the confines of identity and character. Within this unsettled context, physical punishment and the death penalty were employed as public spectacles of seeing and knowing, as means of drawing clear lines to demark values, identities, and the cost of transgressing community norms.5 The second historical clue embedded in the materials from the American Weekly Mercury of 7 July 1737 is that Wilemon and Smith were working as a team of burglars. This cross-gender criminal alliance makes both narrative and historical sense, for as the earliest novels, poems, songs, broadsides, and pamphlets on crime and punishment in the New World demonstrate again and again, just about everyone has been fascinated with both wronged women and women who do wrong, from Smith up to the present batch of television harpies. This long-standing narrative fascination reflects historical conditions, for opportunities for most women were few and far between in the colonies, especially for those who had bad luck with rotten husbands—which may have been the case with Jane, Joseph May’s runaway wife—which left large numbers of young women out on the street, struggling to survive as best they could. Like Smith, who was twenty-three when she was executed in 1737, some of these women turned to careers in crime, often partnered with an older, more experienced male (like the fifty-year-old Wilemon). When caught, such women were frequently portrayed either in bawdy gallows narratives rich with sexual imagery or in condescending editorials and speeches offering didactic moral lessons. By 1833 the relationship between crime and gender was so well established that New York City’s Francis Lieber concluded that “most criminals have been led on to crime . . . by the unhappy influence

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Introduction

of some corrupted female.” While women as agents of their own crime and as causes of others’ crimes proved remarkably flexible as the narrative materials from which to fashion sermons, poems, novels, speeches, and reports like Lieber’s, women as victims of crime also proved useful as the subject matter for both elitist lecturing and proto-popular-culture trash. Indeed, I have been struck by the prevalence in the available historical materials not only of victimized young women whose violation is so egregious that outraged men call for the execution of the perpetrator, but also of tales in which such acts are portrayed in pointedly sexual ways. Karen Halttunen calls such stories “sexual tales of murder,” in which sex and violence are portrayed in “a pervasive tone of prurience.” Whether as a monster transgressing social norms—like Smith—or as an angel whose victimization prompts righteous cries for retribution—like Clara in Wieland—questions about women’s morals and sexuality are at the center of many of the debates addressed here, meaning that my study of crime, violence, and punishment is also a study about the formation, representation, malleability, and disciplining of gender.6 Kathleen Brown reminds us, however, that one of the chief tasks of feminist-inspired scholarship is “to debunk a universal and essential definition of woman.” While I will nonetheless use Smith and her sisters in crime and violence to make generalizations about certain kinds of women in the colonies and new Republic, Brown cautions us that there was not one set of gender roles but many of them, often in conflict, and always in transition as notions of class, race, nation, religion, family, and work exerted pressures on women. Merging this sense of the multiplicity of possible gender roles with an awareness of how imperial expansion influenced the possibilities and obligations of women’s lives in the eighteenth century, Brown asks us to situate specific political scenarios within larger “gender frontiers.” The term indicates those geographically liminal and culturally loose zones of encounter and exchange where battles over gender roles, in combination with and in contrast to notions of class, race, nation, religion, family, and work, were central to “construct[ing] and communicat[ing] power relations.”7 Smith offers heartbreaking insights into these questions about how crime and gender contributed to the negotiation of “power relations” along the New World’s “gender frontiers.” For example, when she first appeared in the Minutes of the Provincial Council in 21 April 1736, Smith had been convicted for committing unspecified crimes and was sentenced

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“A Very Hard Choice”

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to hang in Philadelphia alongside John Watnell and Michael McDeirmatt. The Boston News-Letter reported a week later that Smith, Watnal, and Mac Dermot (notice the spellings) were “condemned last week for Housebreaking,” suggesting that the “three Malefactors” may have been a team working the same job or jobs. The American Weekly Mercury then reported, however, that while Whatnell and McDiermat (more spelling variations) were executed on 5 May 1736, Smith was spared because “his Honor the Governor was pleased to grant her a reprieve.” The reason for that reprieve was revealed a year later, when, in a story prompted by Smith’s execution in 1737, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that she had eluded the noose in 1736 because she was pregnant. (One of her sisters in crime, an unnamed “Woman,” was likewise spared that same week in New York City, where she “pleaded her belly.”) Spared in 1736 but executed in 1737, Smith “left a young Child behind her.” Is it too far to speculate that the father of that child was either Wilemon, or Watnell, or McDeirmatt?8 In fact, the marriage records of Christ Church in Philadelphia indicate that on 27 October 1735, six months before he was first arrested for “House-breaking,” John Whatnell married Catherine Davis. Given my comments on the fluidity of identity, it is possible that this Catherine Davis, perhaps to facilitate her new life as John Whatnell’s wife and partner in crime, soon thereafter changed her name to Catherine Smith or Connor. Regardless of these intrigues, Smith’s (and perhaps Davis’s) plight is clear: to a young woman on the loose with few options, older and more experienced criminals such as Watnell/Watnal/Whatnell (who was twenty-seven in 1736), McDeirmatt (who was twenty-three in 1736), and Wilemon (who was fifty in 1737) likely offered criminal mentoring, friendship, and perhaps even love. Yet sharing in their exploits led to Smith’s execution, leaving her orphaned bastard child—a poor babe doubly doomed—to begin the vicious cycle anew. We may gather from these speculations a glimpse of how colonial norms of gender constrained the options of women like Smith. Indeed, in the following decades the avalanche of speeches, novels, stories, songs, broadsides, and execution sermons about women like her (and those unlike her, as well, in terms of class, race, nationality, and so on) would play seminal roles in orchestrating and enforcing the ever-changing boundaries of colonial, Revolutionary, post-Revolutionary, and antebellum gender.9 The third important slice of historical information contained in the American Weekly Mercury story is the fact that Wilemon and Smith

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Introduction

were hanged for burglary (like Mr. Bradford as well, who was hanged for “a Robbery”), for this reveals a society in which the death penalty was handed out for the most trifling of property crimes. Soon after the Revolution some states in the new Republic changed their laws to make the death penalty applicable only for murder, arson, or treason, yet in American history it has been clear that one of the chief functions of the death penalty is to punish those who show too little respect for the sanctity of their neighbors’ property. As John Laurence observed in 1932 in his classic History of Capital Punishment, “property, even more than person, was under the guardianship of the gallows.” This means that my history of executions in the New World is also a history of the slow transformation from rural barter economies of local and regional scale to urban money economies of national and global scale. For example, the story on page 1 of the American Weekly Mercury of the battle outside London between smugglers and officers over some tea, that quintessential booty of the British Empire, illustrates one of the many complications of trying to regulate a global market of goods; on the other hand, the shipping news on page 3 celebrates the opportunities of trading raw materials and finished commodities on a global scale. The cover story and the shipping news both point to the complicated ways the march of empire, capitalist development, and the daily realities of crime are interwoven. As Cesare Beccaria observed in 1764 in his essay On Crimes and Punishments, “disorder grows as the boundaries of empires expand.” Having violated the new norms of possession and property via their burglaries and robberies, the Philadelphians hanged in 1737—like their criminal counterparts outside London—illustrate local crises within the global process of producing property and its thieves, capital and capital punishment.10 Within another thirty years such skirmishes over property would be interpreted both as criminal (by locals) and criminally anti-imperial (by elites in London), thus lending to offenders a veneer of political purpose. In fact, by the time the American Revolution kicked into full gear, numerous observers equated burglary and other criminal violations with political crimes, meaning that studying crime, violence, and the death penalty during this period in turn means thinking about the complicated dynamics of colonial control and anti-imperial resistance. Perhaps the best example of such confusion is the Boston Tea Party of 16 December 1773, when revolutionaries tossed 342 chests of tea into Boston harbor. To some observers the Tea Party represented a stunning guerrilla strike at

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the commodity that had fueled the rise of the British Empire, and hence a political act of anti-imperial resistance, yet to other observers it was simply a criminal act against goods—hence the desperate response of Boston’s Tories, who tried to placate the king by offering to pay for all the destroyed tea. When Lord North raised the question of indemnification in Parliament, Mr. Van exploded: “I am of opinion you will never meet with that proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” Illustrating how the age of mercantilism inextricably linked capitalism and empire, commodities and politics, Mr. Van and Boston’s “locusts” both operated with the understanding that there was a direct link between property crimes and political crimes. Dumping tea into the harbor, not paying taxes, and raising an anti-imperial political revolution were hence deeply entwined.11 Within a year of the tea party, colonials were singing of their ambitions to replace England as the world’s capital of political and commercial power, imagining in “Free America” how Some future day shall crown us The masters of the main, Our fleets shall speak in thunder To England, France, and Spain; And the nations over the ocean spread Shall tremble and obey The sons, the sons, the sons, the sons, Of brave America.

But even while they sang boastful songs like this one, the sons of brave America soon found themselves in a Revolutionary-era bind: they had to find ways to justify anti-imperial crime and violence, like the Boston Tea Party, even while imagining themselves as about-to-be imperial masters, and even while still using corporeal and capital punishments against criminals whose actions violated local cultural norms and property relations. In short, they were learning how both to behave criminally (in the eyes of the King) and to police criminals. The history of crime, violence, and punishment in America is thus intimately bound up in the history of a specific political revolution, the ebb and flow of empire, and the more general normalization of new means of making money, many of which were by no means self-evidently legitimate.12

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Introduction

In fact, considering the prevalence of slavery, indentured servitude, convict labor, and various dubious means of colonial mercantilism, the ethics of early-modern capitalism were by no means obvious; to many observers, hanging petty thieves like Smith and Wilemon while nominating slaveholders to public office was an intolerable hypocrisy. As late as 1842, one group of Philadelphia death penalty abolitionists thus asked, “is it just” to imprison and execute those who commit property crimes “under the pressure of want, while subtle fraud and covert villainy . . . may be refined into a science, and practiced under a thousand guises, with impunity?” For these death penalty abolitionists, slavery and some forms of early-modern capitalism were at least as violent and villainous as petty crime. Executing property offenders was therefore loathsome because such acts seemed to justify and certainly protected an economic system that many observers found deeply flawed. Analyzing the executions of those sentenced for property crimes thus enables me to study the gradual institutionalization of the economic practices, cultural norms, and legal defenses of early-modern capitalism.13 The fourth historical clue from the American Weekly Mercury regards the portrayal of Smith as “a Catholick,” for this demonstrates a culture caught in the throes of bitter religious factionalism. Smith was doubly damned, for while being a Catholic in Philadelphia put her on the outside of the then-dominant Quaker majority, being Irish meant that she was considered an ethnic outsider closer in character to African slaves than to white freemen or women. As Joel Ignatiev argues in How the Irish Became White, “in the early years, Irish were frequently referred to as ‘niggers turned inside out’; the Negroes, for their part, were sometimes called ‘smoked Irish.’” Likewise, David Roediger argues in The Wages of Whiteness that up until the antebellum period, “the varieties of economic dependency, white and Black, along with the perception of Native Americans as overly dependent, made equations of color and servility problematic.” This instability of reference, wherein modern racial hierarchies were still in flux and the many modes of servitude overlapped in confusing ways, meant that Smith’s status as an Irish Catholic would have left her in a liminal zone of uncertainty, tainted as both a religious and ethnic outsider. Moreover, by 1796, Philadelphia’s mayor’s court reported that 39 percent of its convictions involved Irish immigrants, hence contributing to the popular perception that the Irish, whether considered “white” or “black,” free or indentured or enslaved, were certainly criminal—Smith would

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“A Very Hard Choice”

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therefore have been both perceived through, and held as confirmation of, this dense web of fears and prejudices.14 While questions of nationality, ethnicity/race, and labor status fascinated colonials, emotions ran so high regarding religion that an ill-worded sermon or dinner comment could lead, as in the case of Mr. Cummings and his The Danger of Breaking Christian Unity, to the need to respond to the “gross Misrepresentations” made in “a public extraordinary manner” by those who took umbrage at one’s controversial words regarding the Good Book. The currents of religious affiliation in America have changed so rapidly through the years that it is difficult for even the best historians of religion to explain the shifting fates of Quakers, Unitarians, Universalists, Calvinists, or any of the other hundreds of sects that have cropped up over the years. Regardless of denominational allegiance, however, religion has been at the center of every debate about crime, violence, and punishment in our national history, meaning that my study of our forebears’ public debates about capital punishment in turn offers a history of how the Bible has been marshaled as evidence both in favor of and against executions.15 The theological nuances and denominational intrigues surrounding this question are overwhelming, yet the thinking of those who supported capital punishment on biblical grounds was driven largely, even haunted, by the belief that the sins of the lowly, if left unpunished, would not only tarnish the glory of the mighty but also lead to the destruction of the community at the hands of an Angry God. In 1993 Wendy Lesser observed in Pictures at an Execution that “a story about murder, whether real or fictional, is also, obliquely, a story about the existence or absence of God”; in the periods addressed in this book, stories about murder were not obliquely but explicitly about God. Moreover, Calvinism was based in large part on what Daniel Cohen has called “a coherent chain of misconduct”: that is, the belief that each sin and each sinner was connected, that the sins of one were somehow based upon the larger sinfulness of the many, and that crime was therefore an almost organic pathogen, a condition that could spread rapidly throughout a community. Given this worldview, harsh treatment of criminals was understood not so much as an individuated juridical response to bad behavior as a central component of a community-wide and theologically driven inoculation against imminent dissolution—for one unpunished sin could activate the “chain of misconduct,” leading to the unraveling of order on a catastrophic scale. For example, in the laws passed in England in 1682 and intended to help

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Introduction

William Penn govern his colony, section 37 warned “that as a careless and corrupt administration of justice draws the wrath of God upon the magistrates, so the wildness and looseness of the people provoke the indignation of God against the country.” At both theological and political levels, then, sins against God and crimes against the state required severe responses, for it was believed that anything less would likely lead to political destabilization and, in a worst-case scenario, could even provoke an Angry God to wreak his horrible wrath.16 No less of an authority on such matters than Increase Mather warned in his scathing 1674 jeremiad, The Day of Trouble is Near, that sinners were bringing upon the nation “sanctified afflictions.” “The Lord hath been whetting his glittering Sword a long time,” Mather intoned, “the sky looketh red and lowring. . . . Therefore we may conclude that he will scourge us for our backslidings.” As described by Perry Miller, it was widely believed that such scourging would entail the end of the world:

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Then the trumpet would sound, motion would cease, the moon turn to blood, the stars fall like withered leaves, and the earth would burn. . . . In the midst of this scene, the dead would rise: out of the flames would speak absolute justice and by the lurid light of universal conflagration, speedily and unerringly, the one supreme court of law would pronounce sentence on each and every transgressor.

Given the high stakes involved in responding to sin and crime—amounting in Miller’s dramatic reading to nothing less than the fate of the planet—it comes as no surprise to learn that the earliest attempts to produce law and order in a rowdy imperial outpost stocked with mercenary adventurers, banished convicts, indentured white servants, and enslaved Africans— sinners all—led to the production of spectacles of terror, to the creation of public theaters in which troublemakers were brutally punished and executed in order both to demonstrate the inescapable rule of law and to forestall the ferocious judgment of an Angry God. “In a world terrorized by cruel deities,” David Morris observes, “the ritualized pain of human sacrifice served to buy peace. It offered to the gods a measured, symbolic quantity of pain in order to limit the truly immeasurable suffering that the gods in their anger or whimsy might decide to pour down.” The “chain of misconduct” had to be severed, decisively if possible, violently if necessary.17

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Addressing these questions about the relationships among religion, crime, and violence in turn points to what can only be described as postRevolutionary and antebellum culture wars regarding the tensions between religion and modernity. Among the many figures to be considered in this regard, Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a typically passionate example of how some antebellum Americans sought to portray certain religious tendencies as hopelessly outdated. In his 1841 essay “Self Reliance,” Emerson argued, “If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. . . . Whence this worship of the past?” Thinking about the role of religion in explaining crime, violence, and punishment thus enables me, as witnessed in Emerson’s passage, to think about the relation of religion to modernity, that unnamed yet implied Now against which Emerson juxtaposes the dead and moldered past. Similar sentiments were expressed in an undated poem by William Burleigh, one of antebellum America’s tireless death penalty abolitionists. In a collection of his writings full of arguments for the abolition of executions and slavery alike, yet also full of encomiums to a life dedicated to “the sunlight of pure Christian civilization,” Burleigh observes that The Past has done its work! How well, How ill, it matters not to say; For Lo! Upon our ears doth swell The summons of To-Day.

Emerson and Burleigh help us understand how debates over crime, violence, and the death penalty in particular triggered arguments about the role of religion in everyday life, about the larger question of how religion fits into the sweeping historical train of modernity—The summons of ToDay—and how the changing relationships within and between competing religions and modernities affected our forebears’ responses to crime and violence.18 The fifth historical clue from the American Weekly Mercury points toward our national ancestors’ ambivalence about the death penalty, which is expressed in three contradictory moments. First, we are told that neither Wilemon nor Smith “behav’d so concern’d as might have been expected” at their hanging, thus demonstrating that the two, like so many of their

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Introduction

gallows mates, apparently marched to their deaths with nonchalance if not bravado. In fact, much to the consternation of death penalty advocates, who argued that executions would terrify both would-be criminals and the masses more generally into obedience, it appears that hangings often left their victims and audiences less than impressed. Second, while we are told that “Joseph Beven was executed at Chester,” no additional information is offered; some stooge was hanged and that’s that—there is no need to know the crime, the victim, the evidence, or any of the other surrounding circumstances. This vacant sentence demonstrates a culture so familiar with and so numbed to state killings that some hangings are simply noted but not noticed; they are remarked upon but not remarkable. For example, fifty-one years earlier, in colonial Boston, a town smaller than Philadelphia and assumedly slower of pace, the execution of James Morgan on 11 March 1686 elicited this nondescript entry in Samuel Sewall’s diary: “Morgan was turn’d off about ½ an hour past five. The day was very comfortable, but now 9 aclock rains and has done a good while.” This casual juxtaposition of a sentence about an execution and a sentence about the weather, the latter receiving more attention than the former, reveals a culture so familiar with executions and public punishments that they are not worthy of extended commentary, even, in this case, in the diary of an important judge. In fact, the ninety-four-page-long execution sermon delivered that day by Cotton Mather, New England’s most famous Calvinist minister, did not bother to address the about-to-behanged Morgan until page 93, when Mather offered a few desultory words to “this bloody sinner.” Morgan’s hanging was of so little significance to Mather that he spent ninety-two of his pages not talking about the death penalty, instead warning his audience that they were “a ruin’d Race of Sinful men.” Morgan may have hanged that day in the town square, but for Sewall the weather was more interesting; for Mather, it was another day to try to save the souls of his malingering flock.19 The story’s third clue regarding colonial ambivalence about the death penalty contradicts the first two points, for it illustrates a culture very much afraid of death and its dealers. We are told that Isaac Bradford escaped the gallows by agreeing to perform “the Office of Executioner”— that is, he hanged Wilemon and Smith in exchange for his freedom—and that this was “A very hard Choice.” We might assume that it was not a hard choice, yet the death penalty was so contested a ritual that those who performed it were frequently shunned as pariahs, as if by executing

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criminals the executioner became tainted with death itself. This ambivalence about executioners is as old as executions. For example, in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (first presented at Court on 26 December 1604) the condemned yet clownish Pompey happily trades his death sentence for becoming the “helper” to Abhorson, the axe-wielding executioner with the suggestive name. Yet as the reporting of Bradford’s trading his execution for becoming the executioner demonstrates, in the colonies such role transformations were the subject of considerably less levity, perhaps because the authority leveraging the punishments was less stable, thus making the trade more complicated. Consider that in October 1726, eleven years before Wilemon and Smith went fearlessly to their deaths at the hands of the criminal-turned-hangman Bradford, their fellow Philadelphian Patrick Gordon reported to the Provincial Council that he “had observed frequent Riots and disorderly Practices . . . an instance of which appeared in the burning down in the open Market Place the Pillory and Stocks.” Despite Pompey’s good cheer, then, escaping death by aligning oneself with punishment practices so dubious that locals were prone both to attack their machinery (pillories, stocks, gallows) and to shun those burdened with handling the duty was clearly a gamble—A very hard choice indeed.20 Executioners were thus subjected to the biblical double whammy driving Measure for Measure, which took its title from Matthew 7:1–2: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” Whether doing the bidding of kings or priests, sheriffs or judges, executioners were measured by their deadly deeds, marking them as outcasts. Predating Shakespeare’s England and Bradford’s Philadelphia, Gerald Robin reports that “among the ancient Romans, the carnifex, or public executioner, was held in such contempt that he was not permitted to live within the city.” Executioners have thus served historically as concise examples of Elaine Scarry’s argument in The Body in Pain that the political power of those who wield violence derives largely from their controlling the designations of tools and weapons. Is the executioner a servant of the law, an instrument of juridical authority, and hence a tool like others (a hammer, a saw, or a pair of scissors) that may be put safely away when a job is done, or is he a more menacing weapon, a killing machine loaded with violence that transcends the particular confines of a task? Scarry observes that political power accrues to those who control weapons, for

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Introduction

the alchemy of fear turns weapons (rather than their users or manipulators) into objects of dread. Controlling such weapons thus both reinforces power materially and symbolically justifies the further use of weapons to achieve political ends. Of course power enables elites to redistribute responsibility for the damage done by their weapons. For example, the transference of responsibility from the king or priest or sheriff or judge who hands down a death sentence to the hangman who carries out the order enables the law and its makers to appear reasonable and just while the hangman becomes loathsome (as I will demonstrate later, the process reaches yet a higher stage of transference when the criminal is made to confess on the gallows, often even asking for death, hence turning the victim of an execution into the agent of the execution). Bradford’s choosing to escape death by hanging Smith and Wilemon was therefore a “very hard choice” because in doing so he was adding to his resume of shame, becoming a man/weapon marked not only by criminality but by the fear that traditionally clung to hangmen.21 Death penalty abolitionists have sought through the years to reverse this process of transference by arguing that fear of the hangman is a confused, perhaps even inarticulate, yet nonetheless heartfelt expression of opposition to executions. Abolitionists have thus sought to demystify the separation of tool and weapon, law and death, arguing that citizens loathe the hangman because they in fact loathe the death penalty. For example, in the eighth essay of Veritas’s 1844 pamphlet, Brief Statement of the Argument for the Abolition of the Death Punishment, the pseudonymous author asks a question meant to illustrate this ambivalence regarding the death penalty’s “helpers”: “Why is it that we regard the executioner with such horror?” To which Veritas replies: “In every age and country he has been an object of abhorrence . . . and has been looked upon with terror and disgust.” Veritas was an abolitionist whose question was rooted in historical experience. For example, an anonymous letter-writer reported that on 18 January 1762 two New York criminals on the verge of execution “were reprieved until February 19 because ‘the sheriff cannot find any person to act as a hangman.’” Likewise, the Honorable John Nanfan, Esq., released a proclamation on 29 March 1702 offering sixty pieces of eight “for detection of the person or persons who have cut down the gallows in New York.” For Veritas, these stories about the deep fear of fulfilling the function of the hangman and about violence directed toward the tools/weapons of death (whether the gallows or the hangman)

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point to opposition to the death penalty. Indeed, the broad set of historical examples discussed here—including passages from the American Weekly Mercury, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the Pennsylvania Provincial Council, ancient Rome, Veritas’s Brief Statement, and New York in both 1702 and 1762—demonstrate that even those citizens who support the death penalty have been wary to risk contamination by playing the role of executioner, that the ritual has been so contested that opponents have sought to eliminate the practice by ransacking gallows and the other machinery of punishment, and that the hangman has come to stand as a deadly condensation symbol, a holder wherein we place our fears and doubts about executions.22 The sixth historical clue offered in the American Weekly Mercury points to colonial ambivalence about the efficacy of punishment itself, for by delving into the details of the story’s characters we confront a pattern of legal bungling, police inefficiency, and repeat offenders—that is, we enter a world where the law does not repress crime so much as redistribute it. Consider these four facts: first, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported after her 1737 execution that Smith “had been formerly transported from Ireland to Virginia.” This means that Smith was convicted of a crime in Ireland and “transported” to Virginia as an indentured servant; getting arrested in Pennsylvania suggests that she likely broke her contract of servitude in Virginia and hit the road, now as a double offender (a criminal in Ireland, a runaway in the colonies). The British authorities therefore marshaled the law not to deter crime so much as to displace it onto other shores, essentially sending trouble to Virginia that then migrated to Pennsylvania. Second, while the American Weekly Mercury reports that Joseph Beven was executed the same day as Smith in Chester, the Pennsylvania Gazette noted in its follow-up story on the executions that Thomas Beven (probably our Joseph) was likewise transported from England to Maryland; we are told that his first crime consisted of “stealing a pack of Cards” and that “many other” crimes followed. While religiously minded readers would draw a direct line from stealing a pack of cards in England to hanging in America, concluding that Beven was incurably sinful, a wretch preordained to die for a life of transgressions, some readers would also detect here a tragedy long in the making and accelerated at every stage by a criminal justice system that does not deter crime or reform criminals so much as prod them along an ever more dangerous course by sending them to regions with even less efficient crime control, fewer social institutions, and none

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18

Introduction

of the moderating influence of family and friends. Third, Smith’s partner in crime, Wilemon, is reported in the same Pennsylvania Gazette story to have been “imprisoned here for a fact of the same kind about two Years ago,” hence making him yet another repeat offender, another product of a terribly inefficient criminal justice system. Fourth, although Isaac Bradford, who escaped death in 1737 by agreeing to serve as the executioner of Smith and Wilemon, appears to Philadelphians as a stranger—there is no news of him in the Minutes of the Provincial Council, the American Weekly Mercury, or the Pennsylvania Gazette—we learn from William Stephens’s Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia that in May 1739, local authorities apprehended that “notorious Thief, Isaac Bradford.” Captured while captaining the escape of “Divers Servants” fleeing their “Masters,” Bradford is taken to Charlestown for interrogation, but the “notorious Rogue” soon “found Means to break out of Prison” and thereafter disappears from Stephens’s narrative. We have no way of knowing if Georgia’s Bradford of 1739 is Philadelphia’s Bradford of 1737, yet the similarity suggests that the incompetence of the justice system in Philadelphia helped to fuel the incompetence of the justice system in Georgia, with Bradford escaping both jurisdictions to ramble on a path on which, Stephens laments, “more Mischief would be done.” New World settlers who pieced together the kinds of evidence addressed here would be left to form a disheartening conclusion: the authorities were hapless. From this perspective, hanging even the marginally dangerous now was a commonsense response better than awaiting the repeated, and perhaps more dangerous, offenses of criminals that were likely to follow later.23 Tracking the cast of characters introduced in the American Weekly Mercury for 7 July 1737 thus enables us to watch as our national forebears grapple with their concerns regarding the construction of identity and character, the production and disciplining of gender, the transformation of their world at the hands of imperial power and modern capitalism, the relationship between the heavenly word of God and the secular march of modernity, their ambivalence about the death penalty, and their doubts about a criminal justice system (including the practice of transportation, which I address in chapter 1) that seemed less capable of catching criminals than of redistributing them to new locations, often with escalating consequences. In following the public debates about crime, violence, and punishment in the colonies and then America from 1683 to 1843, it is important to supplement this list of key issues with two others. First,

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American death penalty abolitionists have argued ever since Benjamin Rush first broached the topic in 1787 that hangings were part of the machinery of violence required to keep slaves in place and slavery secure. As I demonstrate in volume 2, this argument became ubiquitous by the 1830s and 1840s, when many of the nation’s most ardent death penalty abolitionists published their essays in the nation’s leading slavery abolitionist paper, The Liberator. More recently, Jesse Jackson and Bruce Shapiro have argued that the entwined histories of slavery, racism, and state violence render capital punishment little more than (as their book title suggests) Legal Lynching. Indeed, the cascade of racially tinged executions addressed herein leaves little doubt that democracy in the New World was built in large part on necks snapped, backs scarred, and fortunes made in the service of producing and securing racial order. No history of crime, violence, and punishment may proceed, then, without attempting to demonstrate how heavily these issues have been affected by America’s long dilemmas regarding both slavery in particular and the nation’s tortured beliefs about race in general.24 It is important to observe, however, that capital punishment has been practiced over the years not only in a manner that is racist, but that produces racism. Rather than simply relying upon firmly held racial stereotypes to justify their actions, our nation’s early proponents of executions used them to create such stereotypes. Indeed, historians recognize that contemporary notions of race are relatively recent constructions dating from the early eighteenth century. As Joyce Chaplin argues, “for medieval Europeans, the paramount categories for humans had to do with religion . . . language, custom, political identity, and climate . . . These bundles of ideas—too polyvalent and flexible to form ideologies comparable to modern racism—continued throughout much of the eighteenth century.” This slippery “bundle of ideas” migrated to the New World, meaning the colonies were teeming with immigrants representing various states, tribes, ethnicities, religions, and dialects, most of them unreadable via our modern and now postmodern versions of race. George Fredrickson has shown, in fact, that while “racial prejudice” is as old as the first human societies, “racism—defined here as a rationalized ideology grounded in what were thought to be the facts of nature—would remain in an embryonic stage [in the United Stated] until almost the middle of the nineteenth century.” Following the suggestive leads provided by Chaplin, Fredrickson, and other historians of the production of race and racism, I argue

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20

Introduction

that one of the functions of the death penalty and its related forms of corporeal punishment was to create race: to segregate the myriad social positions of the New World into hard and fast categories of white and black, free and enslaved. This means that the mélange of early-modern racial ambivalence was given a sense of cohesion and purpose not only by enforcing who punishes and who is punished, but by mobilizing raceencoding categories of punishment: Who is whipped, who is hanged, and who is burned at the stake? Who is punished with contracts of indentured servitude, who is imprisoned, and who is permanently enslaved? Rather than simply arguing that punishment is an effect of racism (although it was that too, starting around the Revolution), I argue that in its early phases, New World notions of race were also an effect of punishment.25 In addition to these arguments about the production of race and racism, it is important to notice how the period’s debates about crime, violence, and punishment were implicated in and influenced by the Enlightenment. By the late eighteenth century most well-read Americans were familiar with the works of English and Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, including, among others, John Locke, David Hume, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and William Wollaston. Soon thereafter Americans began devouring works by continental figures such as Cesare Beccaria, Montesquieu, Volney, Condorcet, Voltaire, Rousseau, and a host of other prominent thinkers, many of them linked loosely to the French Revolution. While these figures and the movements they represent were riven with personal animosities, intellectual tensions, and political grudges (the French philosophes, for example, fell out of favor in America following the acrimonious summer of 1798), when considered together they provided the raw materials from which Americans constructed their sense of modernity, their chokehold on progress, their enlightened place in the world of ideas and science. Furthermore, from Rush, Franklin, and Jefferson in the Revolutionary era (as seen in chapter 4 of this volume), to Lyman Beecher, Calvin Colton, and John Adams in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (as discussed in the introduction to volume 2), to John O’Sullivan, Walt Whitman, and Lydia Maria Child in the antebellum period (appearing throughout volume 2), just about every American who has written about the new nation’s handling of crime, violence, and punishment has done so by discussing how America inherited, supposedly embodied, and was purportedly advancing the hopes of the Enlightenment.26

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Nonetheless, one of the complications with this long tradition of invoking the Enlightenment to explain crime, violence, and punishment is that there was not one Enlightenment but many. For example, although he was not born in the United States, George Combe became one of its most celebrated Enlightenment figures. In 1828 Combe published The Constitution of Man, a blockbuster work of moralizing pretense packed inside a scientific treatise on phrenology. Then in 1838 Combe began a popular lecture tour throughout America; he gave no less than sixteen lectures in Boston alone in October and November 1838, and claimed in his Notes on the United States of North America, During a Phrenological Visit that his talks averaged over 300 attendees per night. As much as any figure from the period, Combe practiced the frantic mingling of identities—part professor, part cultural star, part priest, part huckster—and genres—scientific tract, highbrow jeremiad, popular cultural manifesto, utopian scheme, and so on—that makes studying the Enlightenment in America so fascinating. Like his fellow enlightened social reformers, Combe was appalled by hangings; thus his 1847 Thoughts on Capital Punishment, a treatise full of conjecture about the psychology of deterrence and the assumed mental capacities of criminals. For a more personal insight into Combe’s position on executions I turn to a story from his childhood, recounted by Charles Gibbon in his Life of George Combe, in which Combe remembers walking home from “Mr. Swanston’s writing-school” only to be swept up in “a dense stream of people, all going in the same direction.” The dense crowd was jostling for a better view of an execution, at which “a strange conflict of feeling arose within me. All my moral sentiments condemned me for being there, yet there was an intense interest which made me pleased with being present . . . the excitement was intense.” Moreover, Combe remembers that neither in myself . . . nor in the other spectators, so far as I could discover by their talk, did this spectacle excite one thought of a nature calculated to deter us from crime. From some there proceeded coarse savage jokes indicating that they enjoyed the execution; from others, compassion for the sufferer and his relations; and in my own case there was a chaos of emotions.27

Combe thus foregrounds “a strange conflict of feeling” that oscillates around his simultaneous moral repulsion and sensational pleasure; indeed, Combe’s “intense interest” and pleasure—the excitement was intense—leaves

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Introduction

him swimming in “a chaos of emotions.” As in all confessions, then, Combe admonishes himself for his guilty pleasures while reliving them in copious detail. This denouncing of guilty pleasures in terms that embody guilty pleasures illustrates one of the key rhetorical strategies that we will encounter in the jeremiads, sermons, and lectures considered herein. In comparison to this risky gesture of appropriating that which you censor, Combe’s attitude is more traditionally condescending when describing on the very next page how as a child he was “filled with terror” by the “still general belief among the lower classes” in witches, “ghosts, and the bodily appearance of the devil.” It is often hard to tell when Gibbon is writing about Combe or simply lifting extended passages from Combe’s diaries and memoirs; nonetheless, the fact that these observations sit next to one another is significant, for by commingling memories of witches and goblins with memories of a hanging, Combe/Gibbon associates the two. Indeed, like believing in witches, hangings were widely considered to be relics of the murky past, part of a world still steeped in the brutal mysticism that Enlightenment men like Combe and Gibbon hoped to wash away with clarifying reason.28 As these passages from Combe/Gibbon indicate, many observers understood the Enlightenment to promise a break with the past. Seen as nothing less than a radical transformation in ways of being in the world, the Enlightenment’s commitment to science and reason in the realm of ideas, and freedom and justice in the realm of politics, seemed to many observers to demand a rejection of Old World monarchies, religions, myths, and rituals of violence, including the death penalty. Many death penalty abolitionists accordingly draped themselves in the rhetoric of Enlightenment: they opposed executions because hangings stood, like believing in witches, for all the mind-clouding superstitions and bodydestroying oppressions that made life in the Old World unbearable. The thundering Calvinists who called for hangings to assuage an Angry God were thus, from this perspective, nothing less than dinosaurs clinging to a dying order, Old World relics choosing mysticism and brutality over reason and deliberation. On the other hand, many reformers, intellectuals, and clerics of the period believed that religion and enlightenment were perfectly compatible and that the only way to enable America to achieve its full glory was by worshipping at the dual altars of God’s word and the Enlightenment’s reason. For example, the Quaker John Bartram supposedly claimed in the

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1760s that “it is through the telescope I see God in his Glory.” As Gordon Wood describes the situation,

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for those who continued to confront the world in religious terms, the revelations of scripture and the mandates of covenant theology possessed a special force that scarcely contradicted but instead supplemented the knowledge about society reached through the use of history and reason. It seemed to be a peculiar moment in history when all knowledge coincided.

Much of that knowledge “coincided” in and around Benjamin Rush, the famous signer of the Declaration of Independence, conflicted abolitionist, controversial revolutionary doctor, friend of the high and mighty yet advocate for the lowly, and celebrated Enlightenment man-about-town. Deeply religious and committed to the Enlightenment, Rush believed that “the truth is an unit. It is the same thing in war, philosophy, medicine, morals, religion, and government; and in proportion we arrive at it in one science, we shall discover it in others.” What makes this coincidence of all knowledge—truth is a unit—so complicated is the fact that agreement on the meaning of either the Enlightenment or Scripture was difficult to come by. Indeed, from 1683 up through 1843, British colonials and then Americans were entrenched in endless religious debates; from the safe distance of historical remove they can appear to be little more than political turf battles couched within disagreements over hair-splitting nuances of biblical interpretation, yet at the time these religious debates served as the enabling cultural fictions for debating a host of other political topics. Likewise, the proponents of the Enlightenment, including Rush, demonstrate time and time again that that term can mean many things to many people depending on many needs, many of them apparently having more to do with ego and the pursuit of power than with anything approaching scientific methodology.29 Thus, when noticing how activists argue about the death penalty by mobilizing notions of Enlightenment, either as an antidote to religion or as its partner, I am obliged to delve into the deeper cultural assumptions that lay beneath the terms and to ask: Whose Enlightenment? Whose Bible? Which Enlightenment? Which Bible? And whose version of the relationship between the two? In this sense, tracking debates about crime, violence, and punishment offers a window into the simultaneously epistemological and rhetorical problem of how Americans struggled to

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Introduction

produce vocabularies and argumentative structures capable of articulating their worldviews, not simply as political preferences but as part of the grand intellectual and spiritual movement of the age.

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Genealogies and Methods I have thus far used some fragments from the American Weekly Mercury of 7 July 1737 to begin addressing colonial and early American uncertainties about identity and character, the production and enforcement of gender, the relationships between empire and capitalism, the proper roles of religion, ambivalence about the machinery of death, and concerns about a hapless justice system. I then supplemented these six areas of inquiry with preliminary comments on assumptions about race and crime and an introduction to the period’s debates about the status of the Enlightenment. And I have argued that all of these topics are entwined in questions about the promises and practices of early modernity. Having thus introduced the eight overlapping themes around which volume 1 is structured, and having done so by working my way from specific rhetorical artifacts up to overarching historical claims, I will now reverse my method to engage in some macro-historical generalizing, suggesting that debates about crime, violence, and punishment in the colonies and then America from 1683 to 1843 evolved in a discursive environment marked by, but not limited to, two extreme poles in the range of opinion regarding the use of statesanctioned violence. On one side of the argument, proponents of capital punishment framed executions as the logical extension of the verb to execute, which they saw as synonymous with good management and strenuous effort: one executes a plan by following directions, thus achieving some common good. For example, in the second, 1756 edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (the first was published in 1754), his first two definitions of to execute are “1. To perform; to practice. 2. To put in act; to do what is planned.” An even earlier example of this line of thinking may be found in David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, where in his long chapter “Of Justice and Injustice,” first published in 1740, he argues that “when men have once perceiv’d the necessity of government to maintain peace, and execute justice, they wou’d naturally assemble together, wou’d choose magistrates, determine their power, and promise

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them obedience.” Although no mention is made here or elsewhere in the text of the violence needed to “execute justice,” Hume’s administrative use of the word would be adopted by death penalty proponents. In this sense, hangings, burnings, and other methods of killing and publicly shaming criminals were understood as the necessary means of executing law and order, as the violence needed to protect the nation from the threat of crime-spawned anarchy. Executing democracy, then, meant using the full force of the law, including capital and other corporeal punishments, to protect the law-abiding many from the violence of the depraved few. As Paul Ricoeur observes in The Symbolism of Evil, where he traces the entwined and ancient histories of violence and belief, “violence is inscribed in the origin of things, in the principle that establishes while it destroys.” From this position, executing criminals encouraged the obedience of the masses to the rule of law, for such violence “establishes while it destroys,” thus enabling leaders to execute democracy.30 On the other side of the argument, opponents of capital punishment understood executions as nothing less than state-sanctioned murders: the state executes criminals as a means of demonstrating its ultimate—and both politically and ethically dubious—monopoly on violence. From this perspective, killing criminals was one of the more extreme means elites used to eliminate outsiders who threatened the stability of time-trusted hierarchies. Executing democracy, then, meant manipulating the law for politically motivated purposes, yet by demonstrating through the use of capital punishment that the state would kill those it found troublesome, the violence-wielding elites who ran the state killed democracy itself by destroying any semblance of justice and equality. In fact, while Johnson’s first two definitions of to execute and execution illustrated and institutionalized the utilitarian line of thinking described in the paragraph above, his fourth definition of execution put the matter succinctly as “destruction; slaughter.” From this perspective, executing criminals demonstrated the inability of elites to win the consent of the masses via properly political means of persuasion, leaving them instead with the more grisly task of proving their strength by killing those who were least able to defend themselves—organized “destruction” and “slaughter” indeed.31 There are obviously a large number of nuanced positions shuttling between these two extremes, including those commentators who use both meanings of the word—execute as a verb of steady vigor; execution as a noun marking injustice—at the same time. For example, recall

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Introduction

Shakespeare’s cheeky dialogue from Measure for Measure, where in a play about the abuse of state-sanctioned violence, the good Duke bids farewell to his corrupt and death-penalty-wielding second-in-command, Angelo, by saying, “To the hopeful execution do I leave you / of your commissions.” Shakespeare’s punning aside, debates about capital punishment tended to fall somewhere within this great divide between those who thought the state must kill criminals to protect itself from anarchy and those who thought that by killing criminals the state revealed itself as a capricious machine of brutality. One particularly consistent theme within these competing poles was that national security transcends humanitarian commitments; thus even those opposed to the death penalty sometimes supported a hanging (as we shall see in chapters 2 and 4) when they were persuaded that national security was at stake. Of course, as we shall see in the strange case of Major John André, the executed British spy who worked with Benedict Arnold, even national-security-driven support for the death penalty could be compromised by a malefactor’s good looks and golden tongue. As ever, then, making historical generalizations is tempered by a sense of the remarkable complexity of daily life.32 Nonetheless, to track the ways colonists and then Americans argued about these different understandings of to execute and execution, I offer rhetorical analyses of execution sermons and gallows confessions, scientific and philosophical treatises on crime and violence, activist manifestos and artistic salvoes, public orations in favor of and opposed to capital punishment, and the hundreds of newspaper articles, broadsides, and chapbooks that both chronicled and participated in these debates. As demonstrated in my reading of the stories, notices, and advertisements from the American Weekly Mercury, I assume that by studying how individuals argued about crime, violence, and punishment we in turn learn a great deal about their culture’s assumptions about identity, gender, capitalism, religion, race, modernity, and the Enlightenment. In this regard I am following the advice of that antebellum gadfly and omnipresent cultural critic, Edgar Allan Poe. His 1841 mock horror/detective story, “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” depicts the attempt to explain the grisly murders of a mother and her daughter in their Paris apartment. While trying to solve the mystery of the crime, the story’s lead character, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, wisely suggests, “as for these murders, let us enter into some examinations for ourselves, before we make up an opinion respecting them.” Poe here employs a narrative gesture that will eventually become central to detective fiction: the brilliant and iconoclastic investigator must work around

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the cumbersome and plodding theories of the police to arrive at a startling truth that can only be produced by approaching the problem from a strange, even counterintuitive perspective. To avoid being duped, Dupin must think outside the box. In fact, in a passage that clearly amounts to a heuristic directive, Poe’s narrator advises readers that the most productive way “to look at a star [is] by glances—to view it in a side-long way.”33 Combining Poe’s dictum to look at the situation in a “side-long” manner with Dupin’s suspicion that one must approach the matter with fresh perspectives disentangled from official narratives suggests that much discourse about crime and violence is little more than a projection of assumptions regarding those outsiders our society teaches us to fear. From this perspective, we may proceed with the hunch that arguments about crime, violence, and punishment are frequently less about a specific act of violence or localized juridical questions than about the larger cultural conditions both fueling and contradicting our stereotypes about ourselves and others. As Randall McGowen suggests, “we read with alarm the criminal statistics in order to discover in them some message about the condition of our civilization.” Indeed, as Poe suggested in 1841, as McGowan observed in 1989, and as literally every one of the documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries examined in this volume attests, we cannot talk about crime, violence, and punishment without in turn talking about the ways race, class, and gender affect notions of identity and citizenship, about the relationship between distinctly American notions of place and promise and the broader intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment, about the ways violence shapes our understanding of humanity, or about the relationship between local practices of democracy in America and the broader questions of how modernity and capitalism have transformed every aspect of life itself. As Poe’s Dupin suggests, then, I use debates about crime, violence, and punishment from 1683 to 1843 as hieroglyphics enabling me to “enter into some [“side-long”] examinations for ourselves.”34

Power The debates encountered in these sidelong examinations are remarkably complex and are layered with such oxymoronic themes as revolutionary obedience, secular millennialism, God-loving vengeance, enlightened torture, forced freedom, humble arrogance, criminal honor, uplifting humiliation,

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condescending empowerment, and scientific theology. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the political and cultural issues tackled in these oxymoronic themes all revolve around competing notions of power: what is it, who has it, how is it wielded, against whom, and to what effect? For example, consider John Hurt’s April 1777 sermon, “The Love of Our Country.” Preached before the fourth, fifth, and sixth battalions of the Virginia Troops while they were fighting in New Jersey, Hurt’s sermon hinges in part on his many uses of the phrase to execute, and is therefore bound up in a series of assumptions about class power, state violence, and the relationship between God and nation. Because God is just, Hurt argues, he smiles upon those committed to “carrying on the great work of social happiness,” meaning in this case the overthrow of England’s tyranny. Like many of his fellow Calvinists during this period, Hurt portrays the Revolution as one small part of God’s plan for the new Jerusalem; the War for Independence is therefore less about transforming the world than restoring it to its proper order, for “The liberty we contend for is not the license of a few to tyrannise over multitudes, but an equal freedom to all, so far as is consistent with the present circumstances of our country, good order, the constitution, and peace of government.” The freedom for which the troops risk life and limb is thus heavily conditional, for it is premised upon respecting established norms of decorum, class privilege, and “good order.” As Jay Fliegelman has observed, “revolutionary separation need not mean abandoning a politics of deference.” Indeed, Hurt argues that the Revolutionary War aside, “peace of government” should not be disturbed; nonetheless, the war must be fought, for “Liberty with danger is better than slavery with security.” Hurt therefore argues that love of God and nation—even, in this case, a nation yet to be formed—obliges all good men to support “the execution or management of our glorious cause.” Thus Hurt urges the troops to execute a revolution to replace the king’s poor execution of the laws with what is assumed will be colonial elites’ salutary execution of different laws, all in the hope of achieving God’s grace—for as Henry F. May has observed, for preachers like Hurt, “George III was the Great Beast himself.” Hurt thus asks his listeners to execute one class of oppressors in order to support the aspirations of a different class; he prods them to execute an existing state in order to produce a new state; he sanctifies their execution of British sinners in order to execute God’s American plan—and so the troops are urged to commit revolutionary violence in the name of higher Love.35

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Along with offering this complicated argument for heavenly sanctioned earthly violence, Hurt’s sermon is also a remarkable example of projection, of creating a national fantasy that fulfills two major tasks. First, it envisions a “nation” where, as of 1777, there is none, thus illustrating how powerfully the dream of nationhood as eventual empire drives political consciousness. Indeed, we saw in the lyrics to “Free America” how as early as 1774 colonial revolutionaries imagined themselves, subjects of the king, second-tier citizens of a wilderness outpost, as soon-to-be imperial masters of the world. By the end of the war in 1783, in a moment of boastful fancy, George Washington gushed about “the foundation of our Empire.” The second sentence of the first Federalist essay, originally published in New York’s Independent Journal on 27 October 1787, confidently proposed to address “the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.” A classic example of this trope of arguing in favor of national independence by imagining the not yet secured nation as an about-to-be empire, much of Hurt’s sermon strives to make clear to the troops how love of God is deeply intertwined with love of their yet to be consecrated country and soon-to-be empire, hence by implication elevating the nationalist dream of the moment into a higher struggle to achieve God’s vision of a just world. And so Hurt—fulfilling the rhetorical function Sacvan Bercovitch has described as “turn[ing] the jeremiad into a lesson in national genealogy”—projects incipient nationalism as the preordained earthly embodiment of heavenly righteousness, thus portraying violence as a necessary and even noble tool in the dual cause of building the nation and honoring God.36 Second, having offered this sweeping millennial, revolutionary, and nationalist/proto-imperialist vision, Hurt then constrains it within the obligations of “Christian fortitude.” Indeed, while Hurt strives on the one hand to lather the troops into the killing frenzy required to execute God’s plan by executing Red Coats, on the other hand he preaches a theologically driven form of revolutionary obedience, commanding the troops to obey those above them in social station. The politics driving this “Christian fortitude” are expressed most clearly in the closing paragraph of the sermon, where, under the heading of “The Soldier’s Prayer,” Hurt leads the troops in a prayer wherein they pledge to “be content with our wages, that whenever death approaches we may joyfully give up the ghost, pronounce this saying, I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” Hurt’s caveat about not complaining about one’s

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wages (a common lament that threatened the order of the troops throughout the war and then after it as well) makes his point clear: “the execution or management of our glorious cause” amounts to an obligation for the troops to support the political ambitions of local elites, those who control the “present circumstances of our county”—even if they cannot pay the troops’ wages!—by engaging in sanctioned political violence. As we will see below, Calvinists such as Hurt would argue for the next seventy-five years that capital punishment was among the most important weapons in this ongoing struggle to execute “our glorious cause” while not sliding toward chaos. In fact, executing the glorious cause of both national liberty and personal salvation was understood by Hurt’s Calvinist colleagues to entail unflagging support for executing those criminals whose misdeeds tarnished the community’s march toward goodness. For Hurt and his fellow elites, then, the rhetorical task was to manage the boundaries of violence, to produce cultural fictions in which executing rival elites and their troops—to say nothing of appropriating Tory property—was heroic work bathed in the theological light of God’s plan, whereas prestige-andprivilege-threatening forms of criminal violence would be met with statesanctioned executions.37 Hurt’s vision of revolutionary obedience to both God and local elites was unfulfilled following the war, for as a host of observers have noted, the period between the close of hostilities with England and the passing of the new Constitution was marked by considerable social unrest. Writing under the pseudonym of “A Farmer” in 1784, David Cooper argued that the period’s “flood of corruption” stemmed from “A Want of A Due Execution of Laws.” Merging the notions of execution as management and as state-sanctioned violence, Cooper railed in his temperance tirade that the young nation was on the road to damnation, advising, “if you fear your God, and love your country, demonstrate it by using the sword of justice as a terror to evil doers.” Heated talk of justice as a sword and justice as terror was common in the period, however, meaning readers should not mistake Cooper’s argument for a “due execution of the laws” as calling for executing criminals. In fact, Cooper’s standing as an early opponent to slavery would suggest that he, like so many slavery abolitionists, was likely also a death penalty abolitionist. As I demonstrate, one of the central arguments of death penalty abolitionists was that hangings (and the related executionary practices of burnings at the stake and gibbeting) were part of the systematic violence required to keep slaves and

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slavery in place. Even when used in the North, the argument went, such violent tactics both naturalized the brutality used to oppress millions of chattel in the South and intimidated abolitionists in the North. For slavery abolitionists like Cooper, then, opposition to slavery often led to opposition to hangings. Attempting to understand the period’s arguments about crime, violence, and punishment is therefore complicated by the tricky historical task of knowing when someone calling for ready use of “the sword of justice” is engaging in culturally sanctioned yet politically vacant rhetorical bombast or actually calling for an execution.38 Writing two years later under the name of “Honestus,” Benjamin Austin argued that the nation was in jeopardy neither from too lax an execution of the laws nor from the threat of slavery contaminating the new Republic, but from the laws becoming unnecessarily complicated by the “order” of lawyers. A follower of Samuel Adams’s brand of revolutionary republicanism, a wealthy mechanic, and the future author of the polemical Constitutional Republicanism, in Opposition to Fallacious Federalism of 1803, Austin was a Boston-based thorn in the heels of Federalists, elitists, and other prerogative men. Indeed, his Observations on the Pernicious Practice of the Law (1786) offers a blistering critique of those who use the law to squelch fledgling equality. “Laws are necessary for the safety and good order of society,” Austin writes, “and consequently the execution of them is of great importance to be attended to.” But for Austin the “order” of lawyers, then just beginning to become professionalized, was turning the laws into baffling jargon, hence rendering the courts places of privileged discourse, thus destroying republicanism by denying equal access to the law. Marshalling a set of arguments with both oppositional British and Revolutionary American roots, Austin compares the “order” of professional lawyers to secrecy-shrouded “Romish priests,” calls them “a useless body,” and wonders “to what purpose are laws without a due execution?” From Austin’s perspective, “the genuine principles of Republicanism” were so clear that Americans did not need “the wonderful misery of law craft” to uphold them. Austin’s argument thus assumes that by removing undue power from the hands of lawyers, Americans would be more capable of executing the local justice that makes republicanism work.39 Austin’s argument tells us much about his antipathy toward Federalists and other (in his eyes) republicanism-destroying elites, yet his analysis of the law seems cranky if not naive. Indeed, much of my work below

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demonstrates—counter to Austin’s assumption—that one of the chief functions of institutionalized and professionalized legal practices was not so much to enslave the stupid masses as to serve as a buffer between violence-prone majorities and defenseless minorities. For the “genuine principles of Republicanism” have tended throughout our national history to be less than generous with outsiders, with anxieties about them frequently finding expression in explosive acts of mob violence and vigilante “justice.” While Austin protests the cluttering of the law with professional jargon, thus removing the practice of the law from the hands of the people, the “due execution” of the laws in American history has in fact often led to that brutal form of direct participation in executing customary laws known as lynching. Although many death penalty abolitionists have argued through the centuries that the law is little more than bureaucratized state violence, with executions as the pinnacle of this machine of oppression, we do well to remember that for many Revolutionary-era American theorists and judicial practitioners, the utopian dream of the law was to level the political playing field, to restrain customary forms of violence, and thus to enable New World republicanism to take root free of the caprice of Old World judicial favoritism and abuse. Austin’s version of this argument is made even more poignant by the fact that on 4 August 1806, Thomas Selfridge, a prominent Boston Federalist and arch-enemy of both Austin in particular and Jeffersonian republicanism in general, shot and killed Austin on the street. The men had been engaged in an increasingly ugly row regarding a comment Austin had made regarding Selfridge; the latter, in a sneering memoir—after being acquitted on the grounds of killing Austin in self-defense—called Austin one of “THE FEROCIOUS, BLOODY MINDED JACOBINS OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL.” Selfridge then invoked social contract theory, God, family, and the worries of his creditors as reasons for having to murder Austin. And so the radical critic of too much state power was murdered by a highbrow vigilante.40 I return to these debates about law and order throughout volume 1; my point for now is to show that the distance between “A Farmer” and “Honestus” demonstrates both the complicated nature of early-modern debates about crime, law, and democracy, and the centrality to these debates of competing notions of what it means to execute. “A Farmer” sees the nation sliding toward chaos because of a lack of executing the laws, “Honestus” sees the nation sliding towards inequality because of the nondemocratic way the laws are being executed, yet despite their political

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differences both Cooper and Austin understand that executing the law stands as a metaphor for enabling liberty and justice for all. In both cases it is understood that democracy and the management of violence go hand in hand, that the word execute stands as a shorthand for the congealed political power of local elites to make assumptions about their neighbors’ obligations to God and state and to make decisions about the terms of their life and death. Austin’s killer, the Federalist Selfridge, was in fact acquitted by a jury of his peers only to then face the fury of Republican mobs who, much like Austin had argued, assumed the courts were too biased to slap a guilty charge on one of Boston’s elite gentlemen. And so the tenuous authority of the new Republic’s courts exercised one form of power while the streets teemed with another, with the threat of violence hovering over both.

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Ambiguous Performances The prevalence of a sense of performativity during this period of American life is striking. For in the absence of mass media, demonstrations of power, privilege, and protest were enacted largely via embodied events such as marches or riots or rallies. The rich paraded their wealth on streets shared by the beggarly, who were taught to stand aside and bow, perhaps while sneering under their breath, unless of course they were throwing bricks at fancy carriages or torching the homes of their betters. Class differences were lived in close proximity, meaning the traffic of gossip, sex, favors, and resentments between the rich and the poor, the blessed and the damned, was both intense and constant. While work relations and daily exchanges were governed by long-standing, albeit ever-shifting, norms of decorum, incidents regarding crime were especially fraught with powerful emotions, for their consequences affected not only the specific players involved but also the entire community, which read each incident of crime and punishment as loaded with larger social patterns. Crime, violence, and punishment were understood, then, as condensing juridical, political, and cultural meanings, all of which, in the absence of a corporate mass media, had to be both performed for the public and then interpreted by different audiences. As Dwight Conquergood has argued, hangings accordingly offered “cosmic spiritual dramas of sin and salvation.” While these dramas created public occasions that were unstable at

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Introduction

best, elites nonetheless hoped their staged instances of power and righteousness would be read as evidence of benign management, heavenly sanction, or, at the least, inviolable authority.41 For example, consider Alexander Hamilton’s remarkable claim in Federalist no. 17. Writing as “Publius,” he argued that

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There is one transcendent advantage belonging to the province of the State governments . . . I mean the ordinary administration of criminal and civil justice. This, of all others, is the most powerful, most universal, and most attractive source of popular obedience and attachment. It is this which, being the immediate and visible guardian of life and property, having its benefits and its terrors in constant activity before the public eye, regulating all those personal interests and familiar concerns . . . contributes more than any other circumstance to impressing upon the minds of the people affection, esteem, and reverence toward the government.

This ability to “regulate” everyday life, to rule through the theatrical display of “terror,” and hence to produce not only “obedience and attachment” but also “reverence,” amounts to what Hamilton later calls “this great cement of society.” Hamilton thus proposes that the everyday mechanics of social control require combining physical force and rhetorical manipulation; republicanism’s consenting citizens appear here less as agents exercising free will than as clods entrapped in the cement-like mixture of terror-producing violence and esteem for elites. As I have indicated already, however, while these dramas may sometimes have functioned as inducements toward swelling “obedience and attachment” to elites, the great unwashed were just as likely to see them as moments of illegitimate power, if not tyranny.42 Whereas Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, and their peers dreamed of an enlightened and benign government earning—even if, for Hamilton, through the use of “terror”—the respect of its enlightened and benign citizens, the fact is that the period’s notions of law and order were based not only on Enlightenment principles of democratic justice and rationalized jurisprudence but also on much older notions of the power of public ritual. The performative nature of ritualistic punishments was supported in large part via examples provided in the Bible. For example, 2 Kings admonishes readers that “the Lord said by his servants the prophets, ‘Because King Manasseh of Judah has committed these abominations . . . I

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am bringing upon Jerusalem and Judah such evil that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.’” Whether marking the bodies of some sinners in graphic ways (whether brandings, whippings, cartings, chainings, the cutting off of ears or boring of tongues, etc.) or executing other sinners in other graphic ways (whether burnings at the stake, drownings, hangings, beheadings, stonings, etc.), the public theater of colonial punishments was understood, as suggested by 2 Kings, primarily as targeting the eyes and ears of other, nonpunished viewers. Indeed, many of the punishments described in this introduction were spectacular rituals of destruction concerned less with judicial logic than with staging signs, embodying tropes, enacting deadly performances meant to be so terrifying that “the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.” For example, in 1694, in Monmouth, New Jersey, a judge offered this sentence to a slave convicted of murder: “Thy hand shall be cut off and burned before thine eyes. Then thou shalt be hanged up by the neck until thou art dead, dead, dead; then thy body shall be cut down and burned to ashes in a fire.” The brutality of the torture and the revealing repetition of “dead, dead, dead” indicate acts of violence less concerned with impartial justice than with producing a spectacular ritual of destruction. This New Jersey slave is not only to be killed, but to be killed again and again and again; he must not only be dead, but dead, dead, dead—he shall be tortured, hanged, and then publicly torched. There are many ways to kill a man; burning him at the stake is meant not simply to terminate him, but to do so while sending a message to others: this is the fiery fate awaiting those who disobey. Hangings, then, are shows, dramas that have less to do with punishing past deeds than with producing cultural fictions regarding the future of power—the bodies of the hanged (and burned) are therefore employed by elites to teach gruesome lessons about who wields violence, who justifies it, who will suffer its fury, and who will benefit from it uses.43 While many public punishments and executions no doubt fulfilled the biblical and then Federalist goal of setting the ears of others tingling with fear and even awe, it is difficult to know how effective the theater of violence was in deterring would-be criminals. In his epic song “The Unhappy Transpored Felon,” James Revel recounted some of the adventures encountered in his years as an indentured servant in Virginia (roughly 1656–1671). Revel was particularly impressed by the ease with which Virginia masters hanged lawbreakers and by the impact such violence had on servants, referred to below as “they”:

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First published in England in 1725, Revel’s account was widely distributed for the next seventy-five years, standing along with Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders as one of the eighteenth century’s most popular cautionary tales regarding the difficulties and dilemmas of leading a life of crime. But whereas Revel’s account portrayed the threat of the gallows as a viable form of deterrence, as a spectacle used to keep servants “in awe,” Moll Flanders encountered criminals either so hardened that they welcomed executions or so daft that they couldn’t care less when it was their turn to hang. In one particularly creepy scene Moll speaks with a woman scheduled for hanging:

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Well says I, and are you thus easy? Ay, says she, I can’t help myself, what signifies being sad? If I am hang’d there’s an End of me, says she, and away she turns Dancing, and Sings as she goes the following Piece of Newgate wit, If I swing by the String, I shall hear the Bell ring. And then there’s an End of poor Jenny.44

As I demonstrate again and again in the work that follows, as portrayed in Jenny’s death dance, and as witnessed in the gallows performance of Wilemon and Smith in 1737, Revel’s “stand[ing] in awe” of the gallows was not matched by many of his fellow criminals. In fact, time and time again we find those sentenced to die, witnesses at hangings, and other commentators observing that the threat or even imminent practice of capital punishment left them unimpressed. This point received much attention in 1793 in William Bradford’s Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania, where he observed that “the prospect of death can be no restraint to the wretch whose life is of so little account, and who willingly risks it to better his condition.” A similar critique of the death penalty as a deterrent was raised in 1828 in On The Punishment of Death and The Means of Preventing Crime, where the anonymous

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author observed that “criminals accustomed in a long career of guilt to stifle all reflection and compunction” will never be deterred by the threat of executions because “they have never viewed it [life] as a prelude and preparative to another, or perceived the eternal consequences involved in their exit from the world.” Thus, “the assumption that a reprobate apprehends death as the greatest punishment, betrays an equal ignorance of human nature generally, and recorded cases of fact.” This argument was repeated seven years later by Arthur Caverno in his 1835 anti-deathpenalty Sermon on the Subject of Abolishing Capital Punishment, and then again the following year in Thomas Upham’s Manual of Peace, where we are told that “the most hardened villains” do not fear death, for they have seen that “in a mere moment of time, the consciousness . . . is extinct, and the suffering actually endured is not worth naming.”45 These arguments were summarized and popularized in the late 1830s and early 1840s by John O’Sullivan, perhaps the most famous death penalty abolitionist of the antebellum period (and thus one of the central characters in volume 2). In his canonical “Report on the Subject of Capital Punishment” from 1841, O’Sullivan observed that factory workers, sailors, soldiers, and hard drinkers all engage in activities surely bound to lead to bodily harm if not death, yet such men are in no short supply and happily manifest “a disregard of life the most reckless.” Much like factory workers, sailors, soldiers, and hard drinkers, O’Sullivan argues, criminals with few prospects of economic advancement, little regard for their lives, and few entangling dependents to moderate their behavior have no reason to fear the death penalty. Bradford, Caverno, Upham, the anonymous author of On the Punishment of Death, O’Sullivan, and a host of their fellow abolitionists thus argued, in contrast to Revel’s ballad and Hamilton’s hope, that the death penalty was not feared by those members of society—like Catherine Smith, Henry Wilemon, Isaac Bradford, and Joseph Beven—who were already predisposed to live dangerously and who were therefore thought of as most likely to commit violent crimes. In short, these activists argued, executions are not a deterrent.46 I am led then to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where, after chronicling in grueling detail the many ways prisons fail to reduce crime, to rehabilitate criminals, or to make society safer, he famously suggested that “for the observation that prisons fail . . . one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency,” what Foucault later called “controlled illegality.” Rather than

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Introduction

eliminating crime, Foucault argued, the death penalty in particular and the justice system in general was a ruthless machine used for compartmentalizing different forms of violence, for structuring different modes of entrepreneurial energy, and for establishing different realms of expertise, all the while fueling the “circuits of profit and power of the dominant class.” As Kai Erikson argued in Wayward Puritans (published before Foucault), the deviant “is not a bit of debris spun out by faulty social machinery, but a relevant figure in the community’s overall division of labor.” Following Foucault and Erikson, Executing Democracy hopes to show that the death penalty fits this description perfectly, for we have known since at least the early eighteenth century that the death penalty is a penological failure: it does not lower violent crime rates, it does not terrify would-be criminals, it teaches no useful lessons about law and order to its witnesses. Instead, it functions as a spectacular machine for producing and disciplining norms of identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, and race and slavery, in turn modulating the tugging between religion and modernity and serving as an occasion for debating the links between the Enlightenment and U.S. democracy. By thus removing crime, violence, and corporeal and capital punishment from the discreet realm of penology and situating them instead as central components in the broad historical questions asked above—as foundational aspects of our national “division of labor”—I hope to revise a crucial aspect of our national history by showing how our democratic experiment has been underwritten by violence, how rhetoric and violence are interwoven, and how executing democracy has relied upon the spectacle of executions.47

The Chapters To watch how disputants used debates about crime, violence, and punishment as occasions for addressing these larger issues, volume 1 offers four chapters. The first tracks the transformations in means of punishment that followed the New World’s gradual shift from relying for its forced labor on banished convicts and indentured servants to African slaves. This chapter addresses the political economy of bound labor, the colonial elites’ struggles to devise means of punishment suitable to this economic and political system, and the escalation of violent punishments enabled by turning for forced labor away from indentured Europeans to enslaved Africans.

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The second chapter examines how chapter 1’s concerns with the relationships among race, class, and forced labor were made even more complicated by the Revolutionary period’s world-changing rhetorical commitments to justice and equality. After establishing the broad contours of the political debates regarding these revolutionary commitments, complete with a discussion of the conservative backlash against those Americans who took the promises of the Revolution too far for the comfort of New World elites, I examine the Calvinist thunder of some Revolutionary-era execution sermons, thus demonstrating how the death penalty was used to solidify Old World political order in the face of New World republicanism. I also examine the case of John André, whose execution in 1780 was greeted with widespread dismay, hence showing that even an imperial foe sentenced to death could charm his way into the hearts and minds of Americans. As a counterweight to the Calvinist sermons studied earlier, and following the explosion of materials depicting André’s death, this second chapter closes by considering the rise of the culture industry, which even as early as the end of eighteenth century was finding ways to cash in on crime, to profit from punishment, to sell sin under the guise of salvation. The third chapter offers a case study of the complicated economic, political, and cultural circumstances surrounding the execution of Abraham Johnstone, a (likely innocent) black farmer from New Jersey. Johnstone’s case is particularly compelling because after he was hanged in 1797, local Quakers attempted to turn the tragedy to their advantage by publishing an Address wherein they argued, sometimes in their own voices and sometimes in Johnstone’s voice, for the abolition of slavery. This chapter situates the multivocal Address within a wider field of historical documents to argue that white supremacists, trembling in 1797 from the successful black revolution in Haiti, were attempting to use the death penalty to reassert control in an age of post-Revolutionary turmoil, whereas Quakers rallied against the death penalty as a means of arguing for racial justice. Analyzing the Address thus reveals both the particular circumstances of Johnstone’s hanging and larger issues of race, class, crime, and violence in the new Republic. Chapter 4 extends this dialogue about the relationships among race, class, democracy, and violence by examining how Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era reformers marshaled the broad principles of the Enlightenment to rethink the new Republic’s commitment to the death

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penalty and slavery. Studying these questions in turn enables me to track the course of modernity, for whereas proponents of the death penalty portrayed themselves as guardians of a theological order threatened by the anarchy launched by notions of free will and republicanism, opponents of the death penalty portrayed themselves as heralds of a new and modern age of enlightened justice. The period’s arguments about crime, violence, and punishment were therefore frequently less about the specific judicial questions of a given case than about clashing worldviews. Indeed, it would appear that the period’s debates about crime, violence, and punishment enabled disputants to clarify their positions on larger issues regarding the pace of modernity, the promises of the Enlightenment, the status of God, the role of slavery, and, ultimately, the fate of the Republic. Taken as a whole, volume 1 thus demonstrates that how our forebears argued about capital punishment was a central part of the making of America.

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CHAPTER ONE

Settler Debauchery, Capital Punishment, and the Theater of Colonial (Dis)Order, 1683–1741

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•

I

n 1758 English troops stormed Senegal, seizing property valued at more than £250,000. According to Peter Linebaugh, one of the seamen who fought for the Crown in the battle, John Ward, was soon thereafter “hanged [in London] for stealing a watch.” Linebaugh thus shows how empires plunder and pillage with impunity while working stiffs, including those trained in the ways of violence by the Crown, are hanged for committing the most trifling crimes. Ward would appear to have been particularly unlucky, for Eric Williams observes that “in 1745 transportation [the euphemism for banishing convicts] was the penalty for the theft of a silver spoon and a gold watch”—such transportation would have saved Ward’s life. Although expelling the dangerous classes was seen in 1745 as an alternative to the death penalty given to Ward in 1758, the process of transportation was so deadly that it was seen by some observers as little more than a delayed death sentence. For banished convicts had few defenders among the legal and political classes, and they would not contract themselves to masters until they arrived in the New World, meaning that ship captains were under no pressure

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to treat their cargo as anything other than expendable. As a result, the vessels transporting England’s unwanted masses to the Americas were floating machines of death. In fact, Marcus Jernegan estimates that in the first half of the eighteenth century the mortality rate on ships stuffed full of convicts and indentured servants was “sometimes more than half.” There can be little wonder, then, that the mainland colonies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were wracked with serious problems regarding unruly workers. Arrested in England for petty crimes, rushed through shoddy trials (if at all), crammed aboard vile vessels, and sold off to the highest bidder upon landing in the New World, the colonies’ banished convicts were understandably an ornery bunch.1 Indeed, Britain’s initial attempts to establish colonies in North America were fraught with complications. Along with the initially successful resistance of Native Americans to colonization, these challenges included failing crops, devastating plagues, murderous famines, terrible storms, disappearing convoys, and, perhaps most troublesome to many observers, ill-behaved settlers. Of this latter group, “the councilors quarreled and conspired against each other, the planters ran riot,” and the less decorous rabble, dismissed by skeptics in the mother country as “the scum of England,” proved themselves more than capable of sinning on multiple continents. Taken together, “all gave conclusive testimony to the awful truth of innate depravity.” Thus Perry Miller describes some of the difficulties of establishing a settlement in Virginia in the first decades of the seventeenth century. The situation in William Penn’s Philadelphia was no less difficult, for many of the European immigrants who came to the New World during its opening periods of conquest and settlement were indeed the scum of England. According to Abbot Smith, this migrating wave of scum included “rogues, vagabonds, whores, cheats, and rabble of all descriptions, raked from the gutter and kicked out of the country.”2 Many of those “kicked out” of England and shipped off to the colonies were convicts. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have shown that transportation as punishment dates back to the Beggars Act of 1597, which resulted in “the first known English felon [being] transported . . . to Virginia in 1607.” Banishing criminals to the colonies eventually became one of the major engines of colonization. In fact, A. Roger Ekirch argues that “convicts represented as much as a quarter of all British emigrants to colonial America during the eighteenth century.” Smith’s analysis of Old Bailey records from 1729 to 1770 suggests that “at least 70% of

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those convicted at the Old Bailey were sent to America,” thus “bestowing upon America a total of 30,000 felons during the eighteenth century.” The peopling of the mainland colonies with transported convicts was so ubiquitous a feature of England’s early efforts at colonization that one London wit later quipped: “Beware the complicated cunning of that race whose Adam and Eve emigrated from Newgate,” England’s most feared prison. Likewise, in Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders (1722), Moll’s mother, who was transported to Virginia from Newgate, railed bitterly against “that cursed Place [Newgate prison] . . . that half Peoples this Colony.”3 Benjamin Franklin was so appalled by the transportation system that in 1751 he wrote a brilliant satire on the subject. Representing a widely held belief in the colonies at the time, and writing under the pen name “Americanus,” Franklin surmises that banished convicts are the cause of “Housebreaking, Shoplifting,” and “Highway Robbing,” and that their presence contributes directly to “a Son now and then corrupted and hang’d, a Daughter debauch’d and pox’d, a Wife stabb’d, a Husband’s Throat cut, or a Child’s Brains beat out with an Axe.” Wondering how the colonies could return the favor, Franklin suggests, “Now all Commerce implies Returns: Justice requires them. . . . And Rattle-Snakes seem the most suitable Returns for the Human Serpents sent us by our Mother Country.” In a venomous passage that must have left his readers howling with laughter, Franklin even specifies that the New World’s rattlesnakes should be distributed throughout the parks of London, “but particularly in the Gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament.”4 While Franklin’s position as a colonial subject left him little room in 1751 for engaging in anything other than satire, Bernard Mandeville was a celebrated (or notorious, depending on one’s politics) essayist whose The Fable of the Bees (1714) had made a splash in England, persuading Mandeville that he could engage the subject of transportation from a position of some authority. Thus, in contrast to his fabulous Fable and Franklin’s hilarious satire, Mandeville’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn of 1725 contains pragmatic proposals for reforming England’s botched criminal justice system, including the practice of transportation. Mandeville wrote in the tone of a disappointed investor, as he observed that “those that are forced to stay [in the colonies], do very little Service themselves, and spoil the other Slaves, teaching the Africans more Villainy and Mischief than ever they could have learn’d without the Examples

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and Instructions of such Europeans.” Transportation does not enhance profits; rather, it schools otherwise good workers in the ways of mischief and villainy. By linking indentured servants and banished convicts to “the other Slaves,” Mandeville demonstrates how, from the perspective of elite Londoners, indentured servants, banished convicts, and stolen Africans were politically alike: they were all slaves. But they were racially different slaves, as Mandeville indicates by italicizing the difference between Africans and Europeans. This racial difference is significant because it is the whiteness of European slaves that leads colonial masters “to treat them with less Severity than . . . Blacks.” Transportation therefore teaches African slaves the ill manners of Europe’s losers and leads colonial masters to engage in a two-tiered disciplinary system where “Black” Africans are dealt with more harshly than white Europeans, hence destabilizing colonial law and order. To avoid this problem, Mandeville proposes a system of “Redemption” by which transported convicts and other “Vermin of Society” would be sent not to the New World’s colonies but to “Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and other Places on the Coast of Barbary,” where they would be traded as ransom for British sailors who had been captured on the high seas and enslaved by the “Mahometans.” Thus illustrating the complexity of early eighteenth-century notions of race, class, religion, and nation, Mandeville’s Enquiry proposed a bizarre—and not implemented—alternative to transportation.5 Despite Franklin’s scalding critique of the practice, and continuing regardless of Mandeville’s proposals, dumping much of England’s brawling class on the colonies served four interrelated purposes for the empire. First, selling convicts to the various companies exploring the Americas lowered the cost of maintaining England’s prisons, including its feared Newgate, hence saving the British tax dollars that could be spent elsewhere—we may think of this as a budgetary benefit. Second, transportation enabled elites to rid themselves of troublesome agitators from the “dangerous classes,” thus using claims of law and order to debilitate both working-class solidarity and potentially radical organizing among the downtrodden—we may think of this as a political benefit. Third, ridding England of its unwanted scum provided the cheap labor necessary for the initial waves of development in the worker-hungry colonies, thus enabling elites to at least hope for some return on their New World investments—we may think of this as an imperial benefit. And fourth, filling the colonies with transported convicts enabled England’s champions of

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imperial dominion to discount the political claims of New World rebels, who, because of transportation, could be derided as ungrateful scum—we may think of this as a rhetorical benefit. For example, ever the champion of imperial law and order, Samuel Johnson allegedly blustered in 1769, when questioned about troublemakers in the colonies, “they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” Considering the ways transportation produced these budgetary, political, imperial, and rhetorical benefits, and remembering the venom with which men like Johnson spoke of New World immigrants, it is little wonder that Franklin, Mandeville, and other critics of the system had no effect in London.6 But transportation-supporting imperial elites were not the only ones who saw the Americas as a golden land of opportunity, as English, Irish, Scottish, and German peasants, paupers, and poverty-stricken workers were willing to ship out for the colonies, often as indentured servants. Eric Williams argues that “two-thirds of the immigrants to Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century were white servants,” amounting on his calculations to 250,000, or “one-half of all English immigrants.” Gary Nash has shown that between 1737 and 1754 as many as 40,000 Germans arrived, of whom roughly two-thirds were indentured servants; likewise, indentured servants made up a large proportion of the 30,000 Scots-Irish immigrants who arrived in Philadelphia between 1730 and 1750 to sign labor contracts that bound them to a master for anywhere from four to seven years, or until they could purchase their freedom. While the exact number of these new arrivals is hard to pinpoint, it is nonetheless clear that such immigrating indentured servants eventually replaced banished convicts as the New World’s preferred form of forced labor.7 Especially in the North, these indentured European servants were initially more popular than enslaved Africans. In fact, Ekirch notes that during this period indentured servants generally cost New World capitalists around £13, whereas slaves cost as much as £35 to £44. In addition to their cheaper cost, the terminal nature of their contracts and the relative ease of their eventual socialization made temporarily indentured Europeans less of a long-term management problem than permanently enslaved Africans. Hence, prior to the sweeping rhetorical claims of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then the equally world-changing economic transformations triggered by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793— which, taken together, forever changed the young nation’s perspectives

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on citizenship, race, and their relationship to servitude and slavery— many of the colonies’ business elites preferred to rely for their laboring “scum” on indentured white servants. Given these circumstances, in which Europe was mingling massive amounts of expelled lawbreakers with indentured servants with stolen slaves and other desperate adventurers in an immense wilderness for the most part bereft of sophisticated political, juridical, and criminological institutions, it comes as no surprise to learn that the colonies were wracked with difficulties regarding crime and punishment. In fact, Jack Marietta and G. S. Rowe have compared homicide rates in Philadelphia and London from 1720 to 1780, concluding that the colonial city’s rate was “two and a half times” that of the empire’s capital. The Old World’s sneering wits were therefore not wrong when they portrayed the New World as a brawling den of miscreants.8

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Production, Persuasion, and Punishment To illustrate how the economic needs of elites for cheap labor collided with their political need to discipline the unruly masses, I turn to a story from Governor William Penn’s Provincial Council. When Penn called the council to order on 16 November 1683 it faced two related issues: first, the question of how to punish Anthony Weston; second, the need to recognize the contracts drawn up between three local gentlemen and their indentured servants. These two issues were related because the punishment of Weston was meant to reinforce the authority of both the state and individual masters over the colony’s misbehaving indentured servants, of whom Weston was an example. It is important to observe that the Minutes of the Provincial Council clearly differentiate those who contract themselves to a “Terme of Servts Servitude” from those who are “Negroe Slaves.” We may conclude from this pattern of characterization that Weston, who is lumped in the former and not the latter class, was not an African stolen into slavery but a European either banished from the continent as punishment for some crime or contracted into servitude as a means of escaping Old World poverty. Whether he began his adventure as a banished convict or an emigrating pauper, Weston was not alone in serving his New World contract in dubious fashion, as records from the seventeenth century show colonial masters struggling to make their charges work hard and obey the law. Considering, then, that the

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New World was blanketed with what Michael Zuckerman has called “an aura of outcast infelicity,” it comes as no surprise to learn that colonial masters believed violence offered a logical course of action against men like Weston. Indeed, John Winter, an agent brokering indentured servants in Maine, complained that on the whole his workers were “unrued [unruled] peepell” who were “stubborne” and “lasy.” Remarking on the problem of how to encourage servants to work, Winter lamented that “if a faire way will not do it, beatings must.”9 In judging the case of Weston, Penn was confronting a problem shared by elites throughout the New World: like Winter in Maine, Penn in Philadelphia was faced with the problem of demonstrating his political authority to the colony’s rapidly increasing laboring classes while, at the same time, finding a way to prod them toward acceptable levels of economic production—he was left balancing the available means of production, persuasion, and punishment. Penn’s task was especially difficult in 1683, for Philadelphia received twenty-one ships full of immigrants in 1682 and another twenty-three ships in 1683, accounting for as many as 4,000 new souls in a colony that as late as 1690 had a population of but 8,000. This massive influx of bodies was in part the result of Penn’s effective marketing skills, for he and his staff published advertising brochures in Europe written in German, English, and Welsh. In addition to portraying the New World as a land of golden opportunity, Penn’s materials offered sweet deals on real estate, which was available via long-term installment plans that must have seemed heaven-sent to those Europeans accustomed to an Old World were the land was already too densely populated, too costly to purchase, and largely wrapped up in aristocratic inheritances. One result of Penn’s inducements was that he was left presiding over a rapidly expanding colony consisting largely of recently arrived immigrants whose allegiance to the law in general and his authority in particular would have been tenuous at best, but whose labor power was nonetheless desperately needed. As Zuckerman observes, these immigrants embodied a strange combination of “indispensability,” for their bodies were useful commodities, and “expendability,” for their bodies could be broken for committing even the most trifling of crimes. Penn’s task, then, was to manage this curious scenario, to find a way, sometimes via the use of corporeal or capital punishment, to make the expendable act indispensably.10 Penn begins the council meeting by acknowledging the new contracts of servitude arranged by John Stone (for Thomas Dare), Henry Comely

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(for George Sheave), and William Clayton (for Thomas Stephens), all of whom agreed to a “recognizance of fifty pounds a piece for their good behavior duering the Terme of his Servts Servitude.” One of the many indications of the prevalence of the brutality of masters toward servants, paying this “recognizance” was a common colonial tactic, almost a form of taxation, meant to discourage masters from abusing their servants. Such economic incentives were necessary because the disciplinary excesses of masters, like the crimes and other misbehaviors of servants, threatened the social order by destabilizing the workforce and flouting the rule of law. Penn’s rules governing the contracts between masters and servants thus bound both parties to good behavior. Penn then turns to Weston, who is charged with demonstrating “great presumption and Contempt of this Governmt. and authority.” Apparently leery of disciplining Weston too harshly for fear of calling his recognizance into question, Weston’s master has brought his ill-behaved servant before the council for punishment. The threat of losing his fifty-pound recognizance thus encourages Weston’s unnamed master not to discipline his servant privately but to have him punished publicly by the state, hence both demonstrating and reinforcing the rule of law in an unruly land. Penn orders the punishment as follows: “Anto. Weston be Whypt at ye Market place on Market daye three times, Each time to have Tenn Lashes, at 12 of the clock at noone, this being ye first day.” While Weston is to be flogged in the town square his master is also punished, as Penn orders him to deliver an additional recognizance of fifty pounds (which, it should be noted, was a considerable sum at the time). And so Penn binds master and servant in a dangerous dance of dependence in which further unruly behavior will result in yet more public whippings for Weston and additional recognizance/fines for his master.11 We gather from this scene a sense of the competing impulses compelling Penn’s decision, by which he hopes to demonstrate to an indentured servant that misbehavior will not be tolerated, to a master that his economic needs are important yet not more important than those of society at large, and to both parties that their fate depends upon their compliance with Penn’s “Governmt. and authority.” It is important to note here that Penn was no thug: he was a well-read, fair-minded, evangelically motivated man. In the summer of 1670 he was arrested in London for preaching to a gathering of Quakers and was charged with violating the Conventicle Act. In the show trial that followed, Penn proved himself both an

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ardent champion of religious freedom and a quick-witted master of retorts so stinging that at one point the presiding judge responded, somewhat flabbergasted, “You are an impertinent fellow. Will you teach the court what law is?” Impertinent to the old order indeed, this classmate of John Locke and victim of state repression was a progressive, forward-thinking intellectual. In fact, William Bradford, the Revolutionary era activist and death penalty abolitionist, glowingly described Penn in 1793 as “a philosopher whose elevated mind rose above the errors and prejudices of his age, like a mountain, whose summit is enlightened by the first beams of the sun.” Weston’s story is significant, then, because it demonstrates how even for an enlightened, mountain-like man such as Penn, corporeal punishments were useful public performances, literally theatrical plays demonstrating that elites would use violence to create political order. Indeed, Weston’s story teaches us that during William Penn’s complicated tenure the law and its attendant punishments—despite long-standing Quaker prohibitions on violence—were nothing more nor less than weapons for teaching adventurers, convicts, and servants how to obey their betters. Granting the representative quality of Weston’s story in turn suggests that the history of the settlement of the New World is in large part the history of the production, management, and staging of violence.12 Nonetheless, compared to his Old World counterparts, Penn’s decision of 16 November 1683 was both enlightened and lenient, for late-seventeenth-century London was a grisly town brimming with state-sponsored death. Linebaugh and Rediker estimate that “eight hundred went to the gallows in each year of the seventeenth century.” As late as the third decade of the eighteenth century, Mandeville lamented “the Multitudes of unhappy Wretches, that every year are put to Death for Trifles in our great Metropolis.” The severed heads of especially notorious wretches were frequently “stuck on pikes and lodged for display at the southern end of London Bridge.” By the time of the Revolution, Americans gleefully portrayed London as the global capital of state-sanctioned brutality; in John Trumbull’s M’Fingal, his mock-epic poem both spoofing and celebrating the Revolution, one of his characters claims to . . . see afar the sack of cities The gallows strung with Whig committees; Your moderators triced, like vermin, And gate-posts graced with heads of Chairmen

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London was thus a town where life was cheap, the gallows were busy, and gibbets were common. And so, in comparison to the horrible fate that certainly would have befallen him in London, Weston’s punishment in Philadelphia was moderate. While Penn was obviously loath to kill servants in the labor-starved New World, custom also would have allowed him to punish Weston by extending the length of his contract, yet Penn eschews this punishment as well, probably because he knows that the economic and political interest of his colony requires Weston to complete his contract and become a free man as quickly as possible, thus, in the long run, contributing to the stability of the colony. Penn’s 1683 decision regarding Weston therefore illustrates the predicament of New World elites whose desire to punish the unruly conflicted with their need to sustain a functional laboring class and a stable political order.13 Penn’s ability to punish indentured European servants was thus constrained in 1683 both by his colony’s short-term labor needs and by his long-term hope that servants such as Weston would eventually become productive members of the community. But it would appear from the Colonial Records that no matter what forms of punishment Penn handed out, no matter how delicately he handled the dilemma of trying to coerce unruly workers into obedience, he was repeatedly confronted with the intractable problems caused by expecting bound laborers to show respect for the same political system that was exploiting them. For example, despite his best efforts to create allegiance and orderliness in the colony, Penn bemoans in a letter to the council on 9 February 1698 that “there is no place more overrun with wickedness, Sins so very Scandalous, openly Committed in defiance of Law and Virtue.” Scolding the council for not doing enough to check the explosion of “Lewdness and Idleness” and “facts so foul, I am forbid by Comon modesty to relate,” Penn charges the council “for my sake, yor own sakes, and above all for God’s sake,” to do something. Penn’s lament illustrates that the desire of elites for the working masses to obey their laws and respect their norms was compromised, then as now, by the fact that without any tangible evidence of a realistic chance at upward mobility, let alone achieving equality, society’s toiling many had little reason to assent to the elites’ vision of law and order. As the Virginia minister Paul Williams observed in 1680 in The Vain and Prodigal Life, and Tragical Penitent Death of Thomas Hellier, his pamphlet describing a transported servant who killed his master with an axe, “This contradiction between the aims and ends of Master and Servant, renders

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both at once unavoidably miserable.” Men like Penn were thus reduced to producing tirades like the one quoted above, where they castigated the wickedness and defiance of the many while never understanding that such acts reflected a social order with too few options for economic mobility and political empowerment. Indeed, as we shall see below, the difficulties faced by Penn and his council would only be exacerbated in the coming years by the influx of more indentured servants and African slaves, many of whom had little incentive for obeying the laws of their oppressors. Faced with this dilemma, New World elites turned to increasingly violent forms of punishment.14 To demonstrate how the young colony’s troubles with crime, violence, and punishment were affected by rising numbers of African slaves, I turn to another council meeting, this one convened on 25 February 1707—nine years after Penn’s pathetic letter of 1698—with Lieutenant Governor Jonathan Evans presiding. The topic of debate on this day is the fate of “Toney, a Negroe Slave” of William Righton, and “Quashy, a like Slave” of Robert Grace. Both slaves had previously been “condemned to Death for Burglary” and were scheduled to hang on this day, yet their masters had complained about such harsh punishments, which would have cost them dearly, and so the council is meeting to acknowledge that “there is no provision in this Govmt. as is Usual in other places, for a Competent restitution to the Owners who lose their Slaves by the hand of Public Justices.” Whereas punishing misbehaving white indentured servants too harshly threatened a master’s “recognizance,” misbehaving black slaves could be punished with impunity. But while a master could kill a slave with few questions asked, it was economically advantageous to have the state do the killing for him, because if the state executed one of his slaves then, in most colonies, the state paid the master market value for his lost property. As John Brickell wrote in 1737 in his Natural History of North Carolina, this practice of reimbursement “prevent[ed] the Planters being ruined by the loss of their Slaves, whom they have purchased at so dear a rate.” White masters were therefore economically encouraged to allow the state to demonstrate its power (rather than their own) to inflict public pain upon slaves in the name of the law.15 Encouraging this process of transferring the power to punish from individual property owners to the state, and facilitating the transformation of punishment from physical beatings as private retribution to physical beatings as public spectacle, the council agrees with Righton and Grace

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that whereas “the death of these Slaves would be a greater Loss to the Owners than they could well bear,” so the slaves’ death sentences will be converted into “such Corporal Punishmt. as may be requisite, for a Terror to others of their Colour.” As if the political function of this decision is not clear enough, the council repeats itself: “it may be convenient to make the Slaves Examples of Terror to others of their Complexion, by a most Severe Corporal Punishmt.” The terror-producing punishment is then ordered as follows:

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They shall be led from the Market place, up ye Second Street, & down thro’ the front street to ye Bridge, with their arms extended & tied to a pole across their Necks, a Cart going before them, and they shall be severely Whipt all the way as they pass, upon the bare back and shoulders; this punishmt. shall be repeated for 3 Market days successively; in the meantime they shall lie in Irons, in the prison, at the Owners Charge, until they have such an Opportunity as shall best please them for transportation; All which being duly perform’d, the Sentence of Death shall be intirely remitted.16

The council thus merges three traditional means of punishment. The first, whipping offenders who are tied to a cart that parades through town, was known as “whipping at the cart’s tail” (see figure 2). The second, referred to here as “lie[ing] in irons,” was a modern version of what was known throughout Europe as “laying by the heels,” or sometimes simply as “the Bilboes.” The name supposedly entered the English language in 1588, when captured British sailors found themselves shackled on ships of the Spanish Armada, which featured especially painful leg irons manufactured in Bilbao (see figure 1). Third, the council stipulates that at the end of the punishments the slaves are to be the objects of “transportation,” meaning sold out of the community. While the two forms of physical punishment described here certainly would have been painful, the real terror in the order entails this command for transportation, for while life was hard for slaves in Philadelphia in 1707, the conditions of slavery were much worse on southern and island plantations, the likely destinations of the sold slaves. In fact, a popular saying at the time warned “whoever desires to die soon, just go to Carolina.” The council’s sentence of 25 February 1707 therefore merges the brutal spectacle of ancient forms of ritualistic violence with the ominous promise of forthcoming but indeterminate hardships, hence

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Frank Hazenplug’s drawing of the seventeenth-century practice of “laying by the heels in the bilboes.” (From Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, courtesy of Applewood Books.)

FIGURE 1.

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creating a punishment that is both physical and psychological, immediate and delayed. For while the sentence suspends an immediate death penalty, it nonetheless condemns Toney and Quashy to a life-threatening journey into the hinterlands, but not before beating them in public for three days. And whether the two hang now or are sold later, the council demonstrates, their white masters will be economically covered, either in the form of restitution (from most colonies but not Pennsylvania), or, in this case, through the price of sale to some other master. Slaves would not have missed the decision’s stern warning: we will kill you now if we like, or we will kill you later if we like, but either way we will make a painful public example out of you now.17 Scholars have noted, however, that such spectacles were (and are) inherently unstable occasions. For Elaine Scarry, this instability derives from the sheer inexpressibility of pain itself:

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For the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that “having pain” may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to “have certainty,” while for the other person it is so elusive that “hearing about pain” may exist as the primary model of what it is “to have doubt.” Thus pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.

Because of its paradoxical undeniability (for the sufferer) and unknowability (for the witness), pain’s “resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental attributes but essential to what it is.” Language about pain therefore addresses “an inherent instability” triggered by what Scarry calls the “referential instability of the body.” This referential instability means that public punishments like those used against Toney and Quashy were dicey affairs from which witnesses drew multiple and even contradictory political messages. Moreover, Michel Foucault argues that this referential instability is a large part of what made public punishments, especially hangings, such popular moments of theater, for witnesses were intrigued to see what meanings might emerge from the show. “There is therefore an ambiguity in this suffering,” Foucault argues, “that may signify equally well the truth of the crime or the error of the judges, the goodness or the evil of the criminal, the coincidence or the divergence between the judgment of men and that of God. Hence the insatiable curiosity that drove the spectators to the scaffold.”18

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FIGURE 2. “Whipping at the Cart’s Tayle,” by Frank Hazenplug. (From Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, courtesy of Applewood Books.)

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This insatiable curiosity was active, however, on many occasions, not just hanging days. For example, in a letter to his wife, Julia, dated 22 August 1787—some eighty years following the story of Toney and Quashy—the leading death penalty abolitionist Benjamin Rush recounted the following curious event: We had yesterday an high scene before our doors. One of the wheelbarrow men (who were all at work in cleaning our street) asked me for a penny. I told him I had none but asked him if a draught of molasses beer would not be more acceptable to him. He answered in the affirmative. I called Billy, who cheerfully (honest soul!) ran to the cellar and brought up one of his black gugs (as he calls them) full of beer, and poured him out a quart mug full. He drank and commended it—a second asked to partake of it—and a third—till at last the whole company consisting of 12 or 13 partook of it to the amount of three jugs full. The keeper of the poor fellows stood by and in a good-natured way indulged them in a little rest while they drank their beer. A crowd as usual gathered round them. One of them struck me above the rest. He took a large dog in his arms and played with him in the most affectionate manner. “This dog,” said he “came from England with me and has been my constant companion ever since.” A heart is not wholly corrupted and offers at least one string by which it might be led back to virtue that is capable of so much steady affection even for a dog. The conduct of the dog excited my admiration and conveyed a faint idea by his fidelity of that infinite love which follows the human species however much reduced by distress, debased by crimes, or degraded by the punishments of a prison, of ignominy, or of pain.

The wheelbarrow men were Philadelphia convicts sentenced to perform public labor; like their criminal forebears Toney and Quashy, they were supposed to endure their sentences in public, hence physically demonstrating the rigor and majesty of the law. Here are bodies in pain, the law written onto and into criminals whose public labor leads them back to decency and shows the world that the law is both restorative and productive. But as Rush’s sweet story illustrates, he, his slave Billy (William Grubber), and their neighbors gathered round the wheelbarrow men on this August day and found not the stern visage of the law but the happy tail-waggings of a lovable pup and a convict full of such “steady affection” that Rush found

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himself wafting off into misty thoughts about human nature. Michael Meranze, one of our best historians of the eighteenth century’s experiments with public labor and punishment, concludes that “rather than a theater of tragic sobriety and submission, public labor appeared a black comedy, subverting the very distinctions of vice and virtue.” Indeed, here is a founding father offering beer to the very criminals he is supposed to despise; moreover, for the beer to be distributed by Billy, an African slave, only complicates the scene further, as two forms of bondage (slavery and forced convict labor) meet face-to-face in the street, united by their love of beer, a friendly pup, and Dr. Rush’s enjoyment of the scene.19 Scarry, Foucault, Rush, and Meranze demonstrate that public punishments were inherently unstable affairs—less strict penological events then confusing theater-like performances, they were layered with ambiguities that mirrored the concerns of their day. Indeed, by considering the punishments addressed herein as public theater, as palimpsests emptied of their penological meanings yet overwritten with other historical factors, we may use them as windows into the New World’s changing norms of, in this case, race and class. For whereas the white indentured servant Weston was punished in 1683 in a way that left room for his eventually becoming a free and productive member of the community, even if a once humiliated one, the African slaves Toney and Quashy were punished in 1707 in ways that emphasized their nonnegotiable Otherness, the impossibility of their ever being anything other than slaves. For further comparison, consider the fact that at the same time in Europe (but not England) some towns punished offenders by leaving them in pillories in the market square, where locals were encouraged to shower them with human feces and animal dung (sometimes provided for the occasion by the town council!). This punishment emphasizes humiliation, literally smearing offenders in shit, forcing them to work in the future to reclaim their dignity through good deeds. But in the New World colonies, where African slaves were increasingly thought of as less than human, such humiliation would have been gratuitous, for there is little point in humbling those who are already most low. Thus denied the option of such theatrical humiliation, New World elites ratcheted up the level of violence. It would be a mistake to draw too firm a conclusion from the stories discussed above, yet my sense is that by comparing the fate of Weston with that of Toney and Quashy, and by comparing their punishments with those employed against peasants and other class but not racial

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outsiders in Europe, we may sense the New World becoming more familiar with public violence and more inclined to use it against racial others.20 Studying the history of crime, violence, and punishment teaches us, however, as indicated in Rush’s charming letter, that brutality makes a poor teacher: increasing state-sanctioned violence in response to crime fails time and time again to render the dangerous classes more compliant or the law-abiding classes more prone to sanction state violence. It comes as no surprise, then, to notice that over the course of the next thirty years the Minutes of the Provincial Council read less like the judicial commandments of righteous punishers confidently employing calibrated forms of violence to curb sinful behavior than the melancholy confessions of befuddled gentlemen groping with the ongoing dilemmas caused by slavery. And slavery was indeed spreading in Philadelphia in the first third of the eighteenth century. In 1729 the city’s 700 slaves and 598 indentured servants accounted for 37 percent of its labor pool; but then 498 new slaves were imported between 1729 and 1733, bringing the city’s enslaved population to over 1,000 for the first time. While the slave population was rising, many white servants’ contracts expired and then, in 1739, adventure-seeking servants began skipping out on their masters to enlist in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, thus dropping their numbers to less than 400 by 1748. Philadelphia was therefore undergoing wrenching social transformations regarding the racial and political constitution of its forced laboring class. Despite these shifts among bound laborers, the city’s continuous growth meant that by the opening of the Revolution it ranked, according to Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh’s calculations, “as the second largest city of the British empire, surpassed only by the metropolis of London.” As has been the case throughout our national history, the response to these changing demographics regarding race, the working and immigrant classes, and explosive population growth ranged from the brutal to the enlightened, from the narrowly legalistic to the broadly philosophical, from the terrified to the hopeful.21 For example, in September 1737—six months following the execution of Catharine Connor/Smith, with which I opened this book—the council heard competing accounts of a mysterious fire, with some freeholders calling for the execution of a convicted and unnamed “Negroe Man.” Other freeholders argued that “the Prosecutor having been deficient in the Prosecution,” the accused arsonist deserved another “Tryal.” Was this anonymous “Negroe Man” to be treated like an equal, a future fellow

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freeholder, presumed innocent until proven guilty, or was he a descendent of Toney and Quashy, a crime-committing slave to be beaten or transported or hanged? We learn that the man was to have been hanged for “willfully setting on fire a Dwelling House,” with said house owned by none other than the Honorable James Logan, the president of the council. So was Logan pursuing the death penalty to satisfy his thirst for revenge? Logan feared the public might think so, and accordingly responded to those freeholders protesting the death sentence by arguing that

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a Complyance with their Request in suffering so heinous a Crime to pass unpunished, cannot but be attended with many ill consequences, more especially as the insolent Behaviour of the Negroes in and about the city, which has of late been so much taken notice of, requires a strict hand to be kept over them, & shows the Necessity of some further Regulations than our laws have yet provided.

Despite Logan’s warning, the council postponed the execution for three months, granting both parties further time to consider a due course of action. As far as I can tell from the available records, this “Negroe Man” was not executed.22 Along with watching someone narrowly escape hanging, the council’s ruling demonstrates three important points about the politics of punishment, the production of racial stereotypes, and the limited power of the law. First, regarding the politics of punishment, the council makes it clear that punishment is not most importantly about making a guilty party pay for his or her actions but about satisfying the collective need for vengeance. “[S]o heinous a Crime” demands some punishment regardless of the guilt or innocence of the victim of the punishment, demonstrating that punishment is frequently based on a form of symbolic substitution in which understanding the causes of an action or understanding one’s own response to tragedy are less important than watching someone else suffer. Rather than self-analysis, legal inquiry, political stock-taking, or cultural criticism, the rush to punish indicates a desire to assuage one’s pain by transferring it to a substitute chosen from among the dangerous classes, in this case an unnamed “Negroe Man” whose guilt was in question. The appointed hanging was therefore meant to be, in the most literal sense of the word, a sacrifice. This need to substitute one form of pain for another served a larger political purpose, for it was feared that

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if no one was punished, then the community risked violent reprisals by those who felt that they had been harmed by crime and who, in the absence of state-sanctioned retributive violence, would take the law and its violence into their own hands to defend their honor and property. By executing a scapegoat, then, a substitute victim meant to appease the anger of the wronged, elites hoped to preempt the possible escalation of violence. René Girard describes such substitutions as part of an attempt “to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its [the community’s] own members.”23 Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation, an American Tale (1798) offers a perfect illustration of this point. The novel culminates in a series of bizarre incidents, including the murder of a wife and her two children. Readers learn that the killer is Wieland, the brother of the narrator, Clara, and that Wieland has performed his butchery because of “the blissful privilege of direct communication” with God, who has allegedly ordered Wieland to “fulfill [the] divine command” of proving his love for God by slaughtering his family. Clara later wonders if Wieland suffers from “a delusion from hell,” yet even after learning that her brother is the murderer, she directs her anger at Carwin, the strange figure discussed in my introduction. In fact, Clara makes it painfully clear that she would rather see Carwin than Wieland die for the crimes, confessing that Carwin was an “object found on which we may pour out our indignation and our vengeance.” Calling Carwin an “object” illustrates that he is perceived not as a subject, a fellow human with agency, but as a found object, the most readily available sacrificial victim suitable for receiving her “indignation” and “vengeance.” Moreover, Clara reveals that even after knowing Carwin is innocent of the murders, and even after the passage of some time—enough time to begin, we might suspect, thinking more clearly about the causes of the violence all around her and her family—“I thirsted for his blood, and was tormented with an insatiable appetite for his destruction.” This fictional portrayal was published sixty-one years after the Provincial Council meeting I am discussing here, yet Brown’s novel locks in my point about the strange politics of punishment, which often amount to theatrical displays of substitute victims, “object[s] found” by those whose “indignation” and desire for “vengeance” amount to a pre-penological “thirst for blood” so consuming that justice is irrelevant. Indeed, like the fictional Carwin in 1798,

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the unnamed “Negroe Man” in 1737 is little more than a scapegoat, a symbolic Other whose punishment tells us more about the insecurities of the punishers than the alleged crimes of the punished.24 The second crucial point to make about the Provincial Council’s handling of the anonymous “Negroe Man” in 1737 regards the production of racial stereotypes, for notice how the council moves from a debate about one man’s contested guilt to the assumed guilt of all those Philadelphians who share his skin color. The council thus slides from rendering a judicial argument about one man’s actions to producing a cultural stereotype about “the insolent Behaviour of the Negroes” (about which no debate arises in the council minutes). This unwarranted leap from one to many, from individual to race, from debated guilt to assumed guilt, demonstrates one of the less seemly aspects of synecdochical representation, by which one example (or part) is apprehended as an all-telling representative of a totality (or a whole). To understand how damaging a rhetorical maneuver this is, recall that the period’s multiple forms of identity ostensibly refused such rhetorical maneuvers, for settlers could be Protestant or Presbyterian or Quaker, an elite banker or middle-class merchant or working-class cobbler, a Brit or German or Italian, and so on, in endless combinations and subsets that problematized—but of course did not eliminate—simplifying racial characterizations. As argued in my introduction, early eighteenthcentury New World society was organized not so much by hard-and-fast notions of race as by diffuse allegiances to varying religions, nations or tribes, dialectics and languages, guilds and proto-classes, forms of government and family affiliation, and so on. Immigrants from across Europe, American Indians from various nations, some Northern African Muslims, and free blacks filtered through such categories, assimilating into some of them, authoring new versions of others, building compound identities as time and place permitted. Winthrop Jordan has demonstrated that for most of the seventeenth century, those who refused to assimilate into acceptable versions of dominant identities were commonly called “heathens or pagans or savages,” with skin color wielded as but a subset of these larger markers.25 However, as post-indentured opportunities for formerly bound laborers became fewer, slowing the flow of indentured European immigrants, and as the slave trade began to accelerate, bringing ever larger numbers of enslaved Africans to the New World, so the culture began the slow process of producing rhetorical norms consistent with the realities of the

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globalizing slave trade, which eventually came to justify its actions by systematically dehumanizing black Africans. Heathen, pagan, and savage thus slowly gave way to notions of white, black, and red, thus shifting the rhetoric of Othering from comments on political forms of organization and culture to supposedly embodied forms of biological difference. In 1737, when the council hears the arson case of the unnamed “Negroe Man,” these norms are still in flux. Thus participating in the formation of a newly racializing consciousness, the council demonstrates that the accepted (and even mandatory) cultural ignorance of all things relating to the “Negroes” means that one unnamed black man can easily stand as a synecdochical representative for all other unnamed black men—after all, this argument tells us, hence laying the foundation for centuries of systematic racism, they are all the same. The slave trade requires cultural ignorance, which in turn enables gross stereotyping, which in turn fuels the reductive and punitive discourse illustrated here, which in turn breeds more ignorance and more stereotyping—we thus witness the production of a deadly tautology in which the council apprehends the individual actions of one man as confirming relatively new cultural truths about race, citizenship, and their relationship to crime and violence. In the machinery of such racializing discourse, the particulars of any one case are reduced to trifling details, mere examples proving a larger claim about race. The proposed use of capital punishment to discipline this unnamed “Negroe Man” in 1737 therefore reflects not a nuanced judicial process but the heavy-handed rhetorical means of producing violence-enhancing and violence-justifying racial stereotypes. We watch, then, as the New World moves from a diffuse and layered notion of ethnicity as one factor among many for determining one’s status in the world to a version of discourse that approaches systematic racism—here we see how the law produces race and racism.26 The third crucial point to make about the Provincial Council’s handling of the anonymous “Negroe Man” regards the limited power of the law, as revealed in the council’s sobering realization that current forms of punishment are incapable of curbing such allegedly “insolent behaviour.” In a blueprint for enacting even harsher punishments against its second class—and now racialized—neighbors, whom the council assumes are guilty, the council recommends that “further Regulations” be devised to render the law sufficiently powerful to coerce “the Negroes” into compliance. But the council already had considerable powers to punish violently,

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as the foundational laws of 1682, in which executions were limited to severe crimes, had been replaced by the Act of 1718, which incorporated England’s harsher sentencing practices into Pennsylvania law. Nonetheless, the council clearly recognizes that such additional punishing power will not solve its problems, and so it offers no details of what “further Regulations” might be employed. An optimistic reading might suggest that this prudent refusal to designate additional forms of punishment demonstrates the council’s realization that any modern sense of criminal justice is compromised to the point of unfeasibility by the brutal repression (and hence brutal violence) required to make slavery work. On the other hand, considering the tortures already discussed, one wonders how the council could imagine, even if it so desired, harsher laws? What could be worse than the public whipping experienced by Anthony Weston in 1683, the even more ferocious beatings suffered by Toney and Quashy in 1707, or the proposed hanging of a “Negroe Man” in 1737?27 The council’s hearing in 1737 thus amounts to a devastating example of failed political power. First, it reveals one of the fundamental paradoxes of the politics of punishment, in which a vengeance-driven process of substitution and scapegoating, justified by the appearance of legality and jurisprudence, amounts to a deadly form of theater that reinforces state power—put simply, we see that the law does not attempt to prevent violence so much as sanctify it. Second, the council’s deliberations demonstrate the early stages of the production of race and racism, thus showing that henceforward the law will be used to supply rhetorical support for the slave trade, expanding New World slavery, and emergent white supremacy—and so the law helps to codify racism. Third, the council’s flabbergasted comments reveal the inability of the law and its attendant violence to shape behaviors according to elite wishes, thus suggesting that the law cannot guide future actions—and so the council admits that the threat of punishment is no deterrent. Seen in this light, the law in general and the death penalty in particular lose any sense of grandeur or benevolence, instead appearing as little more than deadly yet ineffective political weapons. Confronting these realizations must have left Logan and his council feeling powerless, for while their laws were clearly not working, Philadelphia’s elite felt, as Logan wrote in 1736, that they were under assault by “Incendiaries scattering Destruction ’round them.” Moreover, even those citizens not engaged in explicitly criminal behavior were proving the fear that “Man exorbitates and runs into Disorder and wild Confusion.” The

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City of Brotherly Love was going to hell in a handbasket. Nonetheless, despite such glum observations, Logan and his Philadelphia peers avoided destruction; their neighbors in New York City, however, would soon find themselves dealing with a more incendiary situation.28

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Racializing Terror I move now from Philadelphia in 1737 to New York City in 1741, when a series of crimes and fires prompted a storm of transportations, public hangings, and ritualistic burnings at the stake. Again illustrating the early production of racializing discourse in the early to middle eighteenth century, the New York City example shows that what the Philadelphia Provincial Council referred to in 1737 as “insolence” would, by 1741 in New York City, be assumed to be the first step toward open rebellion. As Jordan has argued, this production of a narrative in which the misbehaviors of African slaves were assumed to be foreshadowings of imminent revolution and even “total destruction” “derived from the very nature of slavery.” This racializing fear of the assumedly automatic link between the “insolence” of enslaved Africans and would-be rebellion was driven in large part by dramatic transformations in the composition of the New World’s laboring classes, with the number of indentured white Europeans declining and the number of enslaved black Africans rising. One estimate suggests that of New York City’s population of “12,000 souls,” “one-sixth were, in all probability, Negro slaves.” Given this percentage of slaves (roughly 17–18 percent), the city’s large free black population—making its total African population “at least as twice as large a proportion of Negroes as Philadelphia and Boston”—the city’s long-standing tradition of lacking the stern religious doctrines that supported law and order in Philadelphia or New England, the still relatively unformed nature of the city’s policing apparatus, and the fact that the city was then, as now, one of the great transit points of human immigration, leaving the city full of strangers, it is not difficult to imagine how some New Yorkers believed that criminal activity might escalate into a catastrophe. As Douglas Greenberg summarizes this situation, “New York was an extraordinarily heterogeneous society in an environment which held heterogeneity to be politically disruptive, socially untenable, and potentially revolutionary.” Disruption and revolution were indeed on the minds of New Yorkers in the spring of

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1741, which may explain the ferocity of the Provincial Court’s response to the events described in the New-York Weekly Journal as “the great Terror.”29 The trouble in New York City began with a series of fires: 18 March on the roof of “His Majesty’s House at Fort George” (which in burning to the ground destroyed the governor’s chapel, barracks, offices, and stables); 25 March at Captain Warren’s house; 1 April at the storehouse of Mr. Van Zant; 4 April at the home of “one Quick, or Vergereau (for they both lived under one roof)”; 6 April at the house of Sergeant Burns; and so on in dizzying succession. Some fires were caught before they could cause much damage, such as on 5 April, when coals were found burning in a pile of hay beside the “Coach House and Stables of Joseph Murray.” Although put out before torching anything of value, such near misses, when coupled with the fires noted above, were ominous signs that mischief—if not rebellion—was afoot. Thus, for a three-week stretch from mid-March to early April 1741, it seemed to many New Yorkers that their city was on the verge of being burned to the ground by some mysterious force. Indeed, by 20 April the New-York Weekly Journal was publishing a proclamation by Lieutenant Governor George Clarke referring to a city suffering from “the great Terror” (so great, in fact, that Clarke offered white citizens outrageous sums of money for information; he offered enslaved Africans smaller sums of money but also the promise to be “made free” if they tattled on their neighbors). Calmer minds suggested that the fires were not meant to destroy the city but to provide disruptive cover for “opportunities of pilfering and plundering,” yet the torching of Fort George, described by Linebaugh and Rediker as “the chief military installation of the colony and one of the greatest fortification in all of British America,” was thought to indicate deeper and perhaps more treacherous motives. In either case, whether as cover for thievery or prelude to rebellion, it was clear that the city confronted a serious challenge to law and order. Hence, on 21 April 1741 the Supreme Court of Judicature held for the Province of New-York convened at City Hall to piece together the chain of events that was believed to have been launched by the “premeditated malice and wicked purposes of evil and designing persons.”30 The court’s investigation (see figure 3) unearthed a labyrinthine network of thievery, illegal alcohol sales, houses of ill repute, multiple forms of gambling, various interpersonal intrigues, interracial sex, and every other imaginable form of eyebrow-raising behavior among the city’s slaves, free blacks, and ill-mannered poor whites. In fact, as readers

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encountered the sense of dumbfounded horror pervading the investigation’s 229-page record of debauchery, they likely began to realize that the fires and crimes, whether the work of a massive criminal enterprise or an organized political resistance, reflect some of the results of an ill-managed and profoundly unjust culture simmering on the verge of either explosion or entropy. A fraying thread held New York City together: order survived by sheer luck and the stupid brute power of the status quo to appear both legitimate and better than any handy alternative. The prejudice that lay at the heart of this order is revealed in the fact that not one lawyer in the city assisted the defendants during the trials. Edgar McManus has argued that “this boycott not only crippled the defense but encouraged the prosecutor, Attorney General Bradley, to use tactics which the mere presence of a defense counsel would surely have prevented.” Jill Lepore has cautioned, however, that the adversarial system was not yet institutionalized in 1741; “it remained a rare defendant,” she observes, “who had a lawyer.” While questions thus remain about the ways New York City’s lawyering class handled the trials, their neighbors were shocked by the investigation’s results, for they portrayed a world teetering on a precipice, with slave-inspired chaos on one side and the usual results of managerial incompetence and gross political injustice on the other.31 Although speaking here of an archetypal situation found throughout ancient literature, Girard’s description of the political stakes at play in such moments of crisis is apt: “the whole cultural foundation of society is put in jeopardy . . . institutions lose their vitality; the protective façade of the society gives way; social values are rapidly eroded, and the whole cultural structure seems on the verge of collapse.” As Girard demonstrates in Violence and the Sacred, capital punishment is among the oldest means of reasserting authority in the face of such crises. Indeed, whereas in 1737 the Provincial Council in Philadelphia merely lamented the lack of “further Restrictions” to contain such threats, in 1741 the New York Supreme Court of Judicature launched a reign of terror that stands among the most ferocious in our national history. Of the twenty “White Persons” “taken into custody” for questioning, five were executed and another seven were “discharged” (transported) from the city. Of 154 “Negroes” called before the court, thirteen were burned to death before large crowds, seventeen were publicly hanged, and more than eighty were deported. While McManus argues that these were “judicial murders,” Roi Ottley refers to this incident more pointedly as “the biggest lynching in the history of

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FIGURE 3. The front cover of Daniel Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy (1744). (Courtesy of the Collection of The New York Historical Society, negative #76698d.)

America.” The violence soon spread to Hackensack, New Jersey, where the Boston Evening Post reported in July that eleven slaves had been sentenced to death, that one hundred had been sent to “Goal,” and that “Three Negroes have lately been burnt,” all the result of a presumed parallel conspiracy to the one in New York City. That makes for twenty-two

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FIGURE 4. First page of the record of punishments assigned, from Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy (1744). (Courtesy of the Collection of The New York Historical Society, negative #76616d.)

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hangings and thirteen burnings at the stake in New York City and eleven hangings and three burnings at the stake in New Jersey, for a death total of forty-nine executions in one summer. While Ottley’s calling this “the biggest lynching in the history of America” feels right, these were no ordinary lynchings, for as we may see from the court record of New York City’s punishments (see figure 4), these executions were not carried out in the drunken frenzy typical of lynch mobs; instead, they were swathed in the justifying language of law and bureaucracy and were recorded as neatly as sales in a logbook.32 While the executions were recorded neatly, the killings were apparently sloppy affairs. In one group hanging on 3 July, five alleged “Negroe” conspirators went to the gallows, but “none of them acknowledg’d any Guilt.” Despite their protestations of innocence, four of these victims went quickly to their death at the gallows, but the fifth, “to the great Surprise of the Spectators,” “shew’d Symptoms of Life” after his first hanging and so “was tied up again.” Imagine the spectacle of a professedly innocent man coming back to life after death only to be strung up again. Perhaps to avoid such complications, the killing the following day was accomplished at the stake. Before being “burnt,” however, the victim, hoping for a reprieve, started naming names; and lo and behold “one of the Blacks impeach’d by him at the stake, as soon as he heard himself accused, went and surrendered himself before the Constables could have Time to come for him.” The weekend thus featured a botched execution, a medieval bonfire, a terror-stricken accusation, and a future victim, no doubt shaken by the events unfolding before him, wobbling forward to volunteer his life. As discussed earlier, however, such spectacles often failed to inculcate in either their victims or their spectators the hoped-for awe of the law. During the group killings on 16 June, for example, when “three Negroes were hang’d, and two burnt alive,” all five victims “died hardened, professing innocency to the last.” Likewise, at the hangings of 17 July, one of the six “Negroes executed at the gallows” “behav’d with such unparallel’d impertinence and impudence as to amaze the spectators.” Moreover, Caesar and Prince, two of the ringleaders of the underground world under investigation, both of whom were hanged on 11 May, had previously “been publickly chastised at the Whipping Post.” Horsmanden dreamed in his Journal of the Proceedings that their hangings, “this Earnest Example of Punishment,” might “break the knot” and “unfold this Mystery of Iniquity,” yet even he must have realized that their prior punishments had

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done little to modify their behavior. And so even the third justice of the supreme court provided evidence of the inefficacy of public punishment as a means of deterrence. As if to confirm this thesis, the examples offered here demonstrate that at least some of the executed in the summer of 1741 ended their lives as they lived them: not complying with slavery or marching penitently to their deaths, but voicing opposition to the powers that had enslaved, punished, and would soon kill them.33 While we will never know for certain the details of these cases, three explanations are plausible. First, given my comments regarding the Philadelphia punishments discussed above and the flimsy evidence presented in the New York court records addressed here, one conclusion might be that many of these executed New Yorkers were guilty of no other crime than being less than enthusiastic slaves, poor black workers, or lowerclass whites with untoward night lives. In fact, based on his analysis of the court record Ferenc Szasz argues that “conclusive evidence . . . can be marshaled against, at most, only five whites and three Negroes. And this is just for larceny, not for rebellion.” In these cases the death penalty therefore plays not the judicial role of punishment for a specific crime but the purgative function of cleansing a society of its nauseating sense of its self-incurred decline into slackness. The executed thus fulfilled what Kenneth Burke refers to as the role of the “scapegoat as purificatory victim.” Garry Wills calls such purifying executions “killing as cleansing,” and argues that when a society feels it has become “polluted” it often strives to cleanse and “purify” itself by executing the supposed agents of its contamination. Based on his study of ancient mythology and the foundations of religious thought, Paul Ricoeur argues in The Symbolism of Evil that such acts of expiation are meant both to “take away defilement” and “reaffirm order,” hence offering a clean beginning. For Szasz, Burke, Wills, and Ricoeur, then (in New York for Szasz, in general for Burke, Wills, and Ricoeur), the executed serve symbolic roles that tell us more about the political needs of executioners than about the criminal actions of those chosen to die.34 Moreover, the changing titles of the various reports about the incidents (see notes 29 and 30) tell a clear tale of racialization. In the original 1744 report we encounter a “conspiracy formed by some white people, in conjunction with negro and other slaves.” The events are therefore led by “some white people” in league with a variety of kinds of bound laborers, including “negro and other [i.e., indentured] slaves.” By 1810

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we read of a “history of the negro plot,” hence switching the lead role in the events from whites to negroes and hence assuming that the only kind of slavery is the enslavement of black Africans—conspiring whites are therefore let off the hook while indentured white servitude is erased from the historical record. By 1851, at the heart of antebellum America’s obsession with race, the title has become simply “the negro conspiracy.” Evil has thus been racialized as black, slavery has been racialized as black, poor whites have been exculpated from any role in the events, and the possibility of thinking about whites as slaves has evaporated. We therefore encounter a narrative of racialized Otherness; we watch the production not only of race and racial fears but of a systematized, legally driven form of racism.35 The second plausible explanation for these mass executions argues that while they were indeed rituals for sacrificing scapegoats to the city’s need for a sense of purifying control and order, and while they were indeed founding moments in the city’s production of racialized Otherness and systematic racism, they were also, and perhaps more immediately, desperate attempts to reshape public opinion regarding a decidedly shaky legal system. That is, of the 5,297 cases brought before the courts in New York City between 1691 and 1776, Greenberg has determined that whereas 48 percent resulted in convictions and 15 percent resulted in acquittals, 37 percent of the cases were “never resolved at all”; instead, the cases “simply disappear from the records.” The fact that more than onethird of all cases “disappear” clearly indicates a crisis in efficiency—if not gross corruption—in both law enforcement and the judicial process. As Greenberg argues, “the volume of criminal cases appearing before the courts increased over the century, while the ability of the legal system to deal effectively with those cases declined.” The effectiveness of the courts was indeed a serious question, for the practice of law had yet to be professionalized—as we saw via my comments on Benjamin Austin in the introduction—meaning judges and lawyers brought to trials dramatically different understandings of procedure and precedent. In fact, Greenberg reports that “there is much evidence to indicate that judges in colonial New York were, on the whole, an ignorant lot, ill-suited to hold office and often anxious to abuse the power which such office afforded them. . . . In 1763 there were 328 justices of the peace in the province (excluding New York City), and of these 194 (59 percent) had no legal training or knowledge at all.” Greenberg’s characterization of the competency of the

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state’s legal class may not have been accurate for the city, however, as Lepore has argued that “New York’s bar was one of the best educated in the colonies.” Nonetheless, despite the city’s elite lawyers, “the court that met” in 1741 “rested on shaky foundations.” I suspect, then, that the mass executions of 1741 may have been, at least in part, a desperate attempt by New York City’s elite to prove to themselves, their fellow city-dwellers, and their neighbors in the provinces that the city’s “shaky” judicial system was capable of responding to the ever-growing city’s everexpanding needs for law and order.36 Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings is therefore caught in a double bind, for while it hopes to justify the city’s handling of the events, it also reveals a justice system that is thoroughly unprofessional, sometimes incompetent, and routinely unfair. The preface notes, for example, that “we have no One here, as in the Mother Country, who makes it a Business to take Notes upon such Occasions”—that is, without a formal court recorder, what follows is less an official record of the trials than Horsmanden’s best shot at memory. In fact, while Horsmanden dutifully records the prosecution’s accusations against New York City’s underclass, he observes that “the Prisoners severally spoke in their Justification in their Turns, professed their Innocence, and declared that all the Witnesses said against them was false,” but he does not record one word of these countertestimonies—not one word. Less a record of a fair and balanced trial, then, Horsmanden’s Journal of the Proceedings offers but one side of the trial, hence silencing the accused (whose voices are heard only in “confessions” of dubious merit). The trials were conducted so quickly, in fact, that many of the accused were apparently never even named; instead, they were herded into court in groups, where some were designated simply as “a tall Negro” or as “a tall slender fellow”—who needs names when the innocence or guilt of other humans is written in plain design upon their skin? But even those with names faced what would appear to be stunningly unfair court practices. For example, on 17 June the court met to decide the fate of five accused slaves (these at least were named); but with their lives hanging in the balance, the jury took only “about half and Hour” to find them all guilty—that breaks down to roughly six minutes of deliberation regarding the charges levied against each accused slave. Thus, even while Horsmanden dutifully sought to record the trials, and thus to create a lasting record of the heroic efforts of himself and his judicial colleagues to create order out of chaos, his Journal of the Proceedings

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stands as a testament to a shaky judiciary and to a culture where racism trumped any sense of justice.37 The third plausible explanation argues that the executed were involved in a rebellion. For example, The New-York Weekly Journal warned on 15 June 1741 that the “Plot and Conspiracy” was “calculated not only to ruin & destroy this City, but the whole Province.” This would be accomplished by “burn[ing] the whole Town, and kill[ing] and Murder[ing] all the Male inhabitants.” The local rebels were rumored to have “Encouragement or Assurances . . . from abroad”; some of them were “perswaded that an attempt on this Province would be made by the Spaniards and French.” Despite such fears (or hopes, depending on your side in the controversy), most historians who have written about the incident have discounted this theory—even Richard Slotkin, one of the great historians of the production of race and racism, has called this theory “preposterous.” Yet Linebaugh and Rediker have argued persuasively that “a revolutionary conspiracy, Atlantic in scope, did develop in New York.” Situating New York City’s laboring classes within what they call the “hidden history of the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Linebaugh and Rediker portray early modernity’s seaports and the ships connecting them as both the “engines of capitalism” and “settings of resistance.” For while enslaved Africans, indentured European servants, travelers and adventurers, and all the other ruffians and disturbers of transatlantic capitalism were mercilessly oppressed in this new global economy in the name of law, order, and profit, this repression in turn prodded them to fight for their freedom. In short, Linebaugh and Rediker argue that everywhere the British Empire went in search of profits, the victims of colonialism fought back. As one of the New World’s great ports, complete with a black population of mostly slaves that constituted approximately 30 percent of the city’s labor force, New York City was a central relay and hotspot in this transatlantic dance of profit and protest, repression and rebellion, colonization and contestation. Furthermore, the New World was a theater of constant jockeying between the Old World’s powers, as France, Britain, and Spain warred over and negotiated for possession of prime agricultural lands and shipping ports. Slaves were well aware of these geopolitical tensions and astutely realized that under the right circumstances—such as those afforded by the War of Jenkins’ Ear—their oppressor’s enemies’ transatlantic ambitions could dovetail with their own local struggles for freedom. Colonial masters were also well aware of how global politics

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influenced local politics; they thus worried throughout the eighteenth century about the ability of scheming Old World enemies to trigger New World slave revolts. Given this context, it makes sense that some New Yorkers suspected that the fires of 1741 were but the first locally inflicted blows in an imminent foreign attack.38 On this reading, New York City’s elite, a group Horsmanden’s Journal calls the “People in Ruffles,” launched 1741’s cascade of executions for explicitly military reasons: to eliminate what they thought were the shock troops in a forthcoming invasion. Indeed, throughout Horsmanden’s record of the summer’s events, we learn that the city’s plotting underclass “expected that War would be proclaimed in a little Time against the French; and that the French and Spaniards would come here.” Whether or not such hopes were delusional, Horsmanden nonetheless records them as being shared broadly by the accused. Whether he thought the fires earlier that summer were a prelude to an internationally driven invasion or an internally driven revolution is not clear, but Horsmanden wrote in a letter of 7 August 1741 to Lord Cadwallader Colden that “so bloody & Destructive a Conspiracy was this, that had not the merciful hand of providence interposed & Confounded their Divices, in one & the Same night the Inhabitants would have been butcher’d in their houses, by their own Slaves, & the City laid in ashes.” While Horsmanden’s letter foregrounds the destructive efforts of “Slaves,” his discourse is not racializing, instead arguing that “popery was at the Bottom,” and referring to the conspirators as meeting in “a Conclave of Devils” and “the Cabinet of Hell.” These religious terms are significant, for they demonstrate that even while the mid-eighteenth century’s move towards modern, systematized racism was picking up speed, narratives of both community formation and Othering would continue to rely on older, more religious terminology as well. Hence, to symbolically mark the end of the summer of terror, Lieutenant Governor Clarke called for 24 September 1741 to be observed as a “Day of Publick and General THANKS-GIVING to Almighty GOD . . . for delivering His Majesty’s Subjects of this Province from the Destruction with which they were so generally Threatened by the said Horrid and Execrable Conspiracy.” From this perspective, the mass executions of 1741 amount to nothing less than heavenly sanctioned forms of deliverance from evil.39 Executions as purifying polluted social space and racializing a biologically deficient Other, executions as reasserting the power of a shaky

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judiciary, executions as responses to suspected military threat and the fear of “popery”—in all three cases the public deaths of those New Yorkers either burned at the stake or hanged from the gallows were meant to quell the anxieties of their betters. Indeed, shocked by what the court’s investigation revealed about their city, New York’s “People in Ruffles” responded to the fires of 1741 much like previous witch-burners or later Communist-hunters. That is, although the evidence linking victims to crimes was flimsy at best, New York City’s elites destroyed the supposed agents of the city’s moral and political corruption, proving to themselves that they had the intellectual energy, political power, and stomach for violence required to command cultural authority. And so they murdered thirty-five people and transported over eighty to lives of certain hardship. The fact that this campaign of destruction had little to do with the actual causes of the fires that launched the investigation in the first place demonstrates that inflicting state-sanctioned violence serves as a form of symbolic substitution, as a ritual that obfuscates the need for other, less spectacular forms of self-criticism and cultural understanding. When in doubt, we are told here, produce and then kill the Other, characterize and then burn the Outsider, castigate and then destroy those who are not like you. As a cautionary note, however, we should remember that this destructive logic has no internal braking mechanism: once the process is begun, it is hard to stop. Thus, in a revealing passage in his Journal of the Proceedings, Horsmanden confesses that once the floodgate of accusations was opened, “it seemed very probable that most of the Negroes in Town were corrupted”—he feared that every slave and free black was likely guilty. But if 30 percent of your labor force is “corrupted,” then the economy will grind to a halt—and so the need for punishing Others crashes into the brute fact that Others provide necessary services.40 Zygmunt Bauman argues that creating social order by constructing established norms of belonging requires producing boundaries that, because life is messy, end up being less definitive than elites might hope. Order is therefore contested, norms are debated, the acceptable fades into the negotiable and again into the feared. Hence, “ambivalence is the effect of ordering: the production of order has its toxic waste.” In the period I have addressed here, such toxic waste took the form of banished convicts, indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and poor working whites, outcasts all, yet also much-needed laborers all. Based on his Holocaust research, Bauman offers an observation that stands as a capstone

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to this section of this chapter: “The destruction of such outcasts, whether physical or symbolic, is a creative act; their extinction (short of extinction, expulsion; short of expulsion, confinement; short of confinement, branding) is the construction of order.” Indeed, as I have shown here, the construction of the New World, the making of America, was based in large part on violence, on destroying those who called law and order into question, and who thus brought unwelcome ambivalence into the colonies. But as Horsmanden’s confession reveals, some ambivalence would have to be tolerated, lest the economy lurch toward paralysis. Assigning guilt and even death would be balanced in Horsmanden’s New York City as in Penn’s Philadelphia, then, not so much according to universal notions of justice and evidence as according to local political and economic imperatives.41

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As I demonstrate in the following chapter, the relationships between creation and destruction, between forming inclusion by producing exclusion, and between order and violence were complicated by the colonial rush toward independence. Before turning to the Revolutionary era, however, we should speculate briefly about three additional political lessons learned from the summer of 1741. First, New York City’s “People in Ruffles” learned that importing massive amounts of enslaved Africans inevitably leads to violence. Thus, whereas 4,059 African slaves were imported to the city between 1715 and 1741, a twenty-seven-year period with an average of 150 new slaves per year, in the twenty-two years following these events, from 1742 to 1764, only 339 new slaves were imported, for an average of fifteen per year. New slave imports following the violent summer of 1741 were therefore cut by a factor of ten, clearly indicating that New Yorkers had learned the hard way that urban (or proto-urban) slavery doesn’t make sense: it is too dangerous, too violent, too likely to lead to precisely the kinds of insurrectionary activity that led to the “great Terror” of 1741. Second, however, and in direct contrast to the first lesson, New York City’s merchant elite actually accelerated their post-1741 activity as slave traders, for whereas ten ships registered in New York City departed for slaving voyages to Africa and the Caribbean between 1715 and 1741, 114 did so between 1742 and 1774. Hence, while 1741 taught New Yorkers to fear the inevitable political complications caused by slavery, the city’s wealthy merchants nonetheless went on to embody

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one of the many contradictions of modern capitalism, in which dealers could become astronomically rich by marketing mass violence to others. Third, colonials throughout the New World learned from the summer of 1741 just how quickly house burnings could destabilize local order. In a practical sense, a culture where most of the buildings are made of wood is obviously susceptible to arson. But in a rhetorical sense—the sense by which the house burnings were taken in the summer of 1741—torching a house was a deeply symbolic strike against the corruption of elites. As Robert Blair St. George has argued in his Conversing by Signs, “the house attack defined the individual dwelling as the prime public index of property rights and claims to authority.” Arsonists thus attacked not only a physical dwelling, not only an individual’s home, but the entire social order that made the house and its occupants’ wealth and power possible. In New York City in 1741, the “People in Ruffles” clearly understood this deeper message, responding to the fires with an avalanche of counterrevolutionary and ultimately racializing violence. Within a generation, however, many of the same colonials who quivered in fear from the house burnings of 1741 would cheer the eruption, following the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, of another round of house burnings and attacks, only this time targeting not the machinery of slavery but colonialism itself. This suggests that the revolutionaries had learned well at least one of the lessons of 1741: that nighttime strikes at the houses of imperial figures, what St. George calls “the visible signs of gross social inequalities,” would instill terror in the hearts of the rich and powerful.42

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CHAPTER TWO

The Paradox of a Republican Revolution Using Executions as Pedagogy, 1768–1784

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istorians have long recognized a paradox within the American Revolution: while the leaders of the uprising marshaled the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality to discredit a (supposedly) tyrannical king and to rally the masses to the cause of independence, they maintained a vision of political leadership that was more aristocratic than republican. As Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris note, the Revolution’s leaders were “elitist, prosperous, and essentially conservative”; Gordon Wood echoes this argument, noting that the new nation’s leaders were “habituated . . . to monarchical hierarchy and desirous of stability and continuity.” Nonetheless, the masses could read the documents used to arouse their enthusiasm for war and thus participated heartily in the Revolution’s theatrical acts of resistance; then, once the war was won, the downtrodden employed the Revolution’s stirring rhetoric—All men are created equal, and so on—to nudge their betters toward a more inclusive and equitable version of republicanism. The Revolutionary period was therefore marked not only by a historically unprecedented turn toward liberty but also by a backlash of conservative

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fears about participatory government in general and the masses’ claims to political rights in particular. For example, Philadelphia’s Freeman’s Journal fretted in 1787 that the Revolution had produced “a licentiousness, at present very detrimental, and incompatible with good government.” On 29 May 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was opening, Virginia’s Edmund Randolph warned his fellow elites that without a return to law and order, the “prospects of anarchy” loomed large in the New World. As Gary Nash writes regarding the pre-Revolutionary version of this battle between the grandiloquent rhetoric of elites, the surprisingly successful uses made of that rhetoric by non-elites, and the corresponding backlash against too-damned-much-democracy, “prerogative men shuddered at the outburst of leveling sentiments.”1 In Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America these shudders were expressed in an outpouring of pamphlets, sermons, broadsides, novels, speeches, and other materials detailing the religious sins, political dangers, cultural banality, and criminal tendencies of a people unmoored from traditional forms of order and deference. While many of these documents served the political needs of an elitist and counterrevolutionary movement led by “prerogative men,” others of them responded to what everyone agreed was a spike in Revolutionary-era criminal activity. In fact, Jack Marietta and G. S. Rowe argue that “singlemen,” those mostly young men who “headed no households and mostly lived alone,” and who hence “did not experience the moderating influences” of “wives and children, from parents, siblings, and others,” were indeed cut loose from Old World decorum during the Revolutionary era, thus leaning “toward increased delinquency.” Marietta and Rowe’s conclusion, that “the era of the Revolution seems to have liberated young men from social restraints,” confirms what prerogative men and others were saying at the close of the Revolution: that the political thrill of overthrowing the king had indeed seeped into other aspects of daily life, thus leading—if even indirectly—to increased crime. In fact, Michael Meranze reports that “whereas fortyfour individuals were hanged in Philadelphia before 1776, sixty-two were executed between 1776 and 1790 alone.”2 One of the more delightful examples of this post-Revolutionary backlash against republican principles being taken too far is The Anarchiad, a mock epic poem written by the so-called Connecticut Wits: David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins. Appearing as sections of “American Antiquities,” The Anarchiad was published

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serially in the New-Haven Gazette between 26 October 1786 and 13 September 1787, during the high point of Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts and the writing of the federal Constitution in Philadelphia. During the war the Wits were good rebels; after the war, fearing that the confederacy was sliding into anarchy, they became strong supporters of the Constitution and its bulked-up federal powers. Because the rhetoric of the Revolution had been taken too literally and dispersed too widely, the Wits feared that “then shall ten thousand whirlwinds lead the way, / And he, true Anarch, here exalt his sway.” Thus equating the period’s more egalitarian versions of republicanism with anarchy, the Wits worried that post-Revolutionary America was well on its way to becoming “the last asylum for my knaves and fools,” where “Wild riot reign, and discord greet the skies.” While crime and punishment were not the Wits’ main concerns, their fear of anarchy in general and Shays’s Rebellion in particular produced this lament for supposedly slackening law and order:

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Lo, the Court Falls, th’ affrighted judges run, Clerks, Lawyers, Sheriffs, every mother’s son. The stocks, the gallows lose th’ expected prize, See the jails open, and the thieves arise. Thy constitution, Chaos, is restor’d, Law sinks before thy uncreating word.

The dread monster Chaos is thus chasing clerks, lawyers, and sheriffs from the land, leaving jails open and stocks and gallows empty; as a result, “No legal robber fears the gallows noose.” Although this cheeky reference to “legal robbers” may well point to lawyers, bankers, merchants and other capitalist crooks, such jibes at elites paled in comparison to the fears the Wits and their allies felt regarding “true Anarch’s” relationship to Shays and his back-country rebels.3 In fact, writing about Shays’s Rebellion from Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush fretted that the new nation was coming unhinged because of a post-Revolutionary epidemic of political madness. While former colonists were adept enough in the ways of killing to shake off British rule, “the termination of the war by the peace in 1783 did not terminate the American revolution. The minds of the citizens of the United States were wholly unprepared for their new situation.” For Rush, the situation was less political than psychological: it was not the political capacities but

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the “minds” of newly freed citizens that were unprepared for freedom. Because of this psychological deficiency, “the excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conduct which could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government.” According to Rush, the situation was so dire, the delirious, postwar passion for liberty so contagious, that the nation suffered from “a species of insanity, which I shall take the liberty of distinguishing by the name of Anarchia.” While the Wit’s uttered concerns about “true Anarch” with tongue in cheek, Rush was deadly serious: liberty had declined into anarchy, America was insane. Lest reader think Rush a fool, we should note that Shays’s Rebellion was no isolated incident. In fact, based on her survey of tax-hating uprisings, drunken riots, and protest marches that turned ugly, Jennifer Mercieca has concluded that “in the two years leading up to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia [opening in May 1787], Americans in more than half of the states of the Confederacy had taken some kind of direct action against their local and state governments.” Writing from Philadelphia that summer, Rush’s words may be appraised less as hysterical than as diagnostic: for men of comfort and means, it indeed appeared that anarchy was stalking the land.4 Within this post-Revolutionary context of dueling rhetorics, with the utopian promises of the Declaration of Independence on the one side and desperate calls for law and order on the other, with the egalitarian impulse of Shays’s Rebellion butting heads against the gallows-trumpeting elitism of the Connecticut Wits and the psychological dread of Rush, pursuing the death penalty was meant to demonstrate to the masses that independence did not mean license and that equality did not mean crossing well-established boundaries regarding race, class, and privilege. Indeed, as the Wits illustrate—and as suggested by my comments in the introduction on the Revolutionary sermon of John Hurt—even independence-minded republicans assumed that the gallows were effective weapons for instilling fear in those who might be tempted to take Revolutionary principles too far. The death penalty was understood at the time, then, as a pedagogical tool, as the most stern means of teaching equality-hungry workers and farmers that while the Revolution overthrew the rule of King George III, it did not alter the traditional domination of everyday life by local elites. As Sacvan Bercovitch has observed, “if the condition of progress was continuing revolution, the condition of continuity . . . was control

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of the revolutionary impulse. The social norms encouraged revolution, but the definition of revolution reinforced authority.” Post-Revolutionary America thus featured a dangerous dance between those who pushed for an egalitarian transformation of culture and politics and those who argued for property-protecting law and order. It is difficult to amass a complete picture of how often the death penalty was used to resolve these tensions, yet in 1793 William Bradford calculated that between 1779 and 1792, as many as ninety-three people were executed in Pennsylvania alone. Despite the triumph of republicanism, then, or perhaps as a response to its anarchy-spawning excesses, executions were used with escalating frequency in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America.5 Even before these post-Revolutionary debates about the relationship between republicanism and violence, however, and before the spate of hangings chronicled by Bradford, the colonies were beset with the lawand-order complications that followed from three related problems. First, Sharon Salinger has shown that during the summer the Declaration of Independence was written, 760 Philadelphia families relied for their labor on either indentured servants or slaves, meaning that “30% of the [city’s] households were directly involved in the ownership of bound labor.” This percentage would have been lower in much of New England, equivalent in the mid-Atlantic colonies, and much higher in the southern colonies. As discussed in my introduction and chapter 1, managing this population of bound laborers became even more difficult in light of the Declaration’s thundering promises of equality and the Revolutionary era’s spike in plebian acts of resistance like mobbings, anti-impressment riots, marches, and other open revolts against elite rule.6 Second, during the colonial era the British had realized that managing the New World would be complicated if the colonies formed sophisticated intercolonial bonds; thus, by design, “the colonies had no connection with one another except through the British government.” As noted in my comments in the introduction regarding the malleability of identity, this lack of cultural, political, and especially juridical cohesion meant that the newly free states were ill-equipped for dealing with border-hopping criminals, runaway slaves, and contract-skipping indentured servants. Post-Revolutionary debates regarding whether or not the masses could be trusted with full political rights thus hinged in no small part on memories of pre-Revolutionary colonists who decided to abuse the law and enjoyed great latitude in movement and little chance of detection.

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Indeed, the colonies individually were so undeveloped and collectively so fractured that changing one’s identity was often as simple a matter as leaving town: runaway slaves—like Abraham Johnstone, to whom I turn in chapter 3—and criminals—like Catharine Smith, Joseph Beven, Henry Wilemon, and Isaac Bradford from my introduction—could often move from place to place, building new lives as they went. This fact of colonial life explains Richard Morris’s description of “the helplessness of the administrative and judicial machinery to restore fugitive servants to their masters and to keep them at work.” The combination of this ease of mobility and self-transformation for absconding servants and fleeing criminals, along with the “helplessness of the administrative and judicial machinery” to respond to them, explains in large part the fears many colonists felt for strangers, for without a trustworthy letter of introduction or family connections one never knew what dastardly deeds lay behind the newcomer’s smile. As I detail below, these complications regarding identity and crime, and race and the laboring classes, especially when lived under the pressures of revolutionary ferment, left many Americans grappling with the rhetorical dilemma of how to justify certain acts of violence while punishing others.7 Third, the colonists shared a cultural history regarding spectacles of violence wherein the line between authority-upholding pedagogy and status quo–flouting revolution was razor thin, hence making any public display of violence an inherently unstable event. For example, when news that the Stamp Act had been passed reached Boston in May 1765, disgruntled soon-to-be-rebels calling themselves “The Loyal Nine” (and later the Sons of Liberty) constructed an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the designated tax collector, and strung it up on “a majestic elm tree” in Boylston Square. That night, a crowd of hard-drinking protesters “sawed off [the effigy’s] head and burned it.” Shortly thereafter, Oliver’s house was plundered. Ritualistic hangings of effigies (and some mobbing) followed in rapid succession in Newport, Rhode Island; Dumfries, Virginia; Annapolis, Maryland; Savannah, Georgia; Lebanon, Connecticut; and other towns in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas. In New York City, mobs paraded an effigy of Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden through the streets in “a movable gallows,” which was set ablaze as part of a “tremendous bonfire” held before the gates of Fort George. Hangings and burnings of effigies were so ubiquitous a ritual of protest in the summer of 1765, usually taking place from the best tree in the public square,

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that the trope of the Liberty Tree (and its later incarnation as the Liberty Pole) was intimately linked to the theatrical display of death: fighting for liberty was marked by hanging effigies of despised tax collectors and other loyalist stooges. In fact, in “What a Court,” a song rebels sang in 1776 to taunt the British, “freemen” were encouraged to “boldly agree / To give ’em a dance upon Liberty Tree.” In the 1778 “Old England,” rebels wished for peace, singing “may we live with our brethren in concord”; this goal would be achieved, however, only after “the authors of mischief all hang on a strong cord.” Hanging Tories was thus celebrated in songs as a revolutionary act. For Americans of this period, then, public hangings of criminals would have stirred powerful memories of their recent acts of rebellion, wherein hangings were not meant to stabilize authority but to mock it, threaten it, and sometimes (in post-hanging riots) to lead to direct attacks upon it. Michel Foucault has argued that public hangings are inherently “ambiguous rituals” where crowds oscillate from fear of the law to sympathy for the condemned, from feeling the rush of vengeance to the horror of witnessing death, from awe at the assembled powers to the thrill of overthrowing order. For Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary elites to attempt to use the execution of a criminal as a pedagogical lesson, then, was to play with fire.8

From Arthur’s Hanging in 1768 to “Exterminating Traitors” in 1776 The 1768 story of “Arthur, a Negro Man,” illustrates the interweaving of fears about fleeing criminals, absconding servants, and runaway slaves in an age of political tumult. For by 1768 many colonists were up in arms over a series of heavy-handed royal blunders, including the Revenue Act, Sugar Act, and Currency Act (all passed in 1764), the Stamp Act and Quartering Act (both 1765), and the Townshend Act (1767). There is much debate regarding when diffuse colonial displeasure with the mother country blossomed into organized revolutionary fervor, yet it is clear that by 1768 the colonies were on fire with discontent and that this political energy frequently erupted in acts of illegal behavior. The 16 December 1773 Boston Tea Party is the most famous of these criminal guerrilla actions, but the years preceding this brilliant strike at Britain’s global domination of markets were preceded by a general groundswell of

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both petty illegal actions and political agitation. Richard Maxwell Brown has studied the period’s violent tendencies and concluded that there were at least forty-four riots in the colonies between 1760 and 1775, and that such riotous activity—not all of it political, but certainly all criminal in the Crown’s view—“surged upward as the revolutionary crisis mounted.” The rioters’ intensity was matched by their countrymen’s rhetoric. For example, 1768 saw the publication of John Dickinson’s brilliant “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies,” where in his seventh letter he lashed out against the Crown’s taxes: “This money is to be taken from us. . . . Those who are taxed without their own consent, expressed by themselves or their representatives, are slaves. . . . We are therefore—SLAVES.” “Rusticus” accordingly called that same year for revolution: “Arise, ye Colonists, my Sons, arise / The servile Threats of lawless force despise.” By that summer most eastern merchants had signed on to a nonimportation agreement intended both to cripple trade with Great Britain and to encourage the development of intercolonial trade and economic independence. Given these circumstances, it comes as no surprise to learn that the sanctity of the law—whose law, for what purposes, under what authority?—was a subject of much debate.9 Nonetheless, while not paying what were thought to be unjust taxes or stealing the king’s gunpowder or harassing merchants who broke the nonimportation agreement could all be spun as forms of political resistance, the colonists were still wary of outsiders wreaking acts of criminal violence in their midst. Hence the paradox of revolutionaries fighting for expanded freedoms—labeled criminal by the crown—while still relying on executions to deter the criminals in their midst. For example, Arthur (no last name is available), who was executed in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 20 October 1768, led a life of crime that was a truly mind-boggling, orgiastic tour de force of transgressions. We learn from the broadside printed following his hanging that Arthur was executed for the rape of Deborah Metcalfe, a widow whom he “in a most inhumane manner ravished,” yet before being captured for this crime Arthur roamed the countryside for years, stealing horses when he needed to move around, and engaging in each village he visited in epic amounts of drinking, whoring, gambling, thieving, and other forms of criminal behavior. In his closing remarks he dutifully performs the remorse expected of someone about to meet his maker, but we gather from his tale that Arthur lived a life of profound, almost heroic debauchery.10

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Executing Arthur may have satisfied the anger of locals who knew Metcalfe, yet the frightening implications of his story would not have been lost on pre-Revolutionary Americans: the working classes were dangerous, itinerant day-laborers were dangerous, strangers were dangerous, unknown black travelers were dangerous, and, worst of all, they all committed criminal acts of violence that tended to go undetected and thus unpunished. After all, despite his capture, Arthur’s tale makes it painfully clear that he committed hundreds of crimes before his apprehension by the authorities—this fact could not have made locals feel safe. On the other hand, these fears were beginning to mix with a sense of lurid interest: who are these criminals and what do they do late at night? Arthur may have been hanged for violating some of society’s principles (or, in this case, for violating most of them), yet his story would have been read by many not only with a sense of righteous disgust but also fascination. Hence, even while moving inexorably closer to a break with the mother country and a radical experiment in new forms of political authority, upstanding citizens in the colonies learned both to fear the debauchery of the unruly masses and to consume it in the form of broadsides, pamphlets, and, within the space of a generation, sensational novels.11 While crime and criminals were thus becoming increasingly interwoven with a rising culture industry premised on the marketing of prurient tales (a process I return to below), hangings were still utilized by elites to fulfill what they believed was an important pedagogical function: to teach men like Arthur and his comrades in crime that regardless of who ruled the nation, local laws and cultural norms would be reinforced with the gallows. The paradox of republicanism-loving revolutionaries utilizing executions as pedagogy was heightened as the move toward independence gave way to armed conflict. Indeed, the charged context of what amounted to a ferocious civil war meant that executions were utilized (or at least threatened) not only as a form of judicial response to criminal activity but also as a military response to political activity. Connecticut’s June 1776 Treason Act, for example, proscribed death to Tories convicted of treason. Despite the heavy-handed Treason Act, however, and perhaps because of the widespread use of tar and feathers, property confiscation, and other forms of intimidation, only one man was executed for treason in Connecticut during the Revolutionary War. The fate of Moses Dunbar, hanged for treason in 1777, may therefore offer some insights into the ways revolutionaries used the death penalty as a specifically political and

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military weapon. Connecticut had been plagued by particularly fierce fighting between revolutionaries and Tories, with one infamous raid by the latter group led by the war’s most famous turncoat, Benedict Arnold. Tories were apparently so experienced in hiding from their outraged neighbors that they established places of shelter that their enemies sneeringly called “Tory Dens.” Connecticut Tories had good reasons to hide, for not including the vague listing of one mass arrest that consisted of “large numbers” of traitors, the state’s council of safety arrested forty-four men for treason in 1777 alone. According to Christopher Collier, “about half of Connecticut’s Loyalist element permanently expatriated to Nova Scotia, England, and other sanctuaries.” Among those Tories who stayed to brave the storm of revolution, only Moses Dunbar was executed. He was convicted of having accepted a captain’s warrant for service under England’s Colonel Fanning and of having recruited men for service under General Howe (both Fanning and Howe were stationed on Long Island, just across the Long Island Sound from Connecticut). We would suspect, then, that the execution sermon delivered at Dunbar’s execution would shed important light on how Revolutionary era Americans viewed the explicitly political function of the death penalty.12 Nathan Strong (1717–1795) was among the elite of the state’s elite; along with Joseph Bellamy, Levi Hart, Ammi Robbins, John Smalley, and Cyprian Strong, he was a “New Divinity luminary,” one of the wealthy clergymen who ran the state’s political and religious bodies of power. As explained by James D. German, these New Divinity figures produced “the intellectual expression of the New Light movement” and “promoted and developed the elder Edwards’s [Jonathan’s] version of Calvinism, providing the theological grounds for conversionist preaching.” The New Lights so effectively merged evangelical needs, highbrow theology, local politics, and support for regional economic development that German has observed how within New Light sermons and other speeches, “revivalistic piety, Edwardsian theology, ecclesiastical power, and capitalist enterprise, while distinguishable, are indivisible.” It therefore comes as no surprise to learn that New Light / New Divinity “luminaries” were enthusiastic revolutionaries who soon became equally enthusiastic Federalists struggling to protect what German calls “the Standing Order.”13 A Yale graduate from the class of 1742, Strong’s career was one long commitment to fulfill this Revolutionary era impulse to merge theology and politics while trying to defend the standing order. His oldest son,

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Nathan (1748–1816), followed in his father’s footsteps to become an important Hartford minister, but when he accepted his first appointment in January 1774 his church “numbered only fifteen male members” and “the spiritual interests of the community continued to languish.” Given the political excitement of the Revolution and the apparent religious apathy of Strong’s neighbors—both sapping the church of vitality and bodies—it comes as no surprise to find that the young minister’s first publication was an execution sermon. Thus trying to rouse laconic parishioners by offering an old-style jeremiad in the middle of a war, Nathan Strong’s 19 March 1777 execution sermon repeats two of the traditional reasons embattled elites thought they needed the death penalty: to deter criminals and to appease an Angry God. As for this first argument, Strong claims that the death penalty produces obedience, because “others may be deterred when they see the danger of transgression.” Any sense of uncertainty conveyed by that “may” is negated by Strong’s confident claim that in those uncivilized places where no such deterrence is practiced, “a numerous swarm of unjust persons, murderers, assassins and tyrants have immediately appeared to indulge their lust and satiate their cruelty in the blood of innocence.” Strong’s vague “others” points toward a broad swath of possible criminals drawn from the laboring many and thus hints at the class dimensions of his speech, which on the one hand is meant to reinforce local elite rule over plebeians. On the other hand, however, his reference to “unjust persons, murderers, assassins and tyrants,” delivered at an execution for treason, would surely be heard less as a comment on required class obedience than as a warning to those in the crowd with Tory sensibilities. Strong thus tries to shore up two forms of power: class control over the masses and political control over fence-sitters who, after witnessing this execution, might be more likely to support the Revolution and less likely to support Tories. Seen in this light, Dunbar’s execution amounts to an occasion for staging political authority in a time of crisis, for demonstrating to the masses that Strong and his colleagues would use violence to maintain both class deference and political order. Strong was thus responding to one of the most pressing fears of the period’s elite: that the rhetoric of revolution, to say nothing of the heady experience of killing the king’s men, would lead to a terrible slackening of social norms of order, decency, and hierarchy. Strong therefore used Dunbar’s hanging as an opportune time to introduce himself to the larger community, to try to reinvigorate his fading church attendance, and to try to manage

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a serious dilemma: for on the one hand the masses needed to be stirred from their ignorant slumber by firing their imaginations with talk of liberty and equality and rebellion, but on the other hand they needed to be shown that such terms applied only to attacks on British authority, not on the law, property, or privilege of local elites.14 Despite these political dilemmas regarding class allegiance and political authority, problems clearly amplified by the threats posed by Tories in the state, such earthly fears pale in comparison to the threat of inviting the terrible retribution that would follow if an Angry God were prodded toward action. Thus, much like Mather in The Day of Trouble is Near, Strong’s second point is that “Government is a divine institution” and that in honoring God’s wishes we make our government holy. “The safety of mankind”—to say nothing of the Revolution—therefore hinges on punishing sinners because “every wicked person is an enemy to God and man.” Hence, earthly political “vengeance cannot sleep,” for if it does, then “God Almighty should determine in anger to withdraw his restraint.” And as all colonists knew, whether they were revolutionaries or Tories or the majority of fence sitters, the withdrawal of God’s restraint meant the end of time, the eruption of cataclysmic punishments. In this sense, hanging the treasonous Dunbar serves as a down payment, a ritualistic sacrifice meant to deter God Almighty from losing his restraint. Snapping Dunbar’s neck also serves the pedagogical function of illustrating how much violence Strong and his elite colleagues are willing to use to reinforce their tautological formula of obedience. That is, citizens should learn “to love and revere our country, to obey its laws, [and] to devote ourselves to its service,” for this will please God, who in turn will continue to look favorably upon the young nation’s errand. Break this cycle of obedience, Strong warns, and one will be damned by both earthly and Heavenly trouble; honor this cycle and one will be blessed by both political and metaphysical good fortune. In invoking this chain of obedience—beginning with local elites, then moving up to the state government, and from there up to Heaven itself—Strong was calling upon a narrative form as old as Calvinism itself. Indeed, Richard Bushman has observed that one of the core assumptions of traditional believers during this age was that “obedience to Connecticut’s government was in effect obedience to divine government, and the good will of the rulers was an omen of God’s good will.” Thus deftly merging traditional notions of obedience with support for the Revolution, Strong attempts to turn Dunbar’s execution into a

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pedagogical lesson regarding the dire fate that awaits those who do not obey secular laws, a sacrificial offering to a God who needs constant proof of our attempts to weed out those “wicked persons” who disobey his heavenly laws, and a demonstration of the resolve of local elites to use violence to force compliance to their political authority.15 But from as early as Cesare Beccaria’s canonical On Crimes and Punishments (1764), modernity’s elites understood that public punishments should not be seen by the masses simply as arbitrary punishment from on high; rather, they should be constructive, pedagogical lessons that make what Beccaria called “the most efficacious and lasting impression on the minds of men.” The point was to prove the state’s modernity and benevolence, not its brutality; the goal was to win allegiance, not coerce compliance. Confirming Beccaria’s advice and foreshadowing Michel Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish that “the art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation,” Dunbar’s execution and Strong’s sermon offer examples of the rhetorical functions of violence. Surveying the eighteenth century’s executions, Foucault realized that “punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty,” but that rather than terrifying the assembled masses, locals would ideally “see punishment not only as natural, but in [their] own interest; everyone must be able to read in it his own advantage.” Rather than a “festival” of monarchical power and rowdy misbehavior, then, executions “must be a school” for teaching lessons in civic consent. In the case of Dunbar’s execution, at least as narrated in Strong’s sermon, “everyone” is meant to see his “own advantage” in two ways: killing Dunbar will further the cause of a political revolution and will forestall the wrath of an Angry God. The problem with this two-pronged lesson, however, the hitch within this open-aired school in the norms of modernity and revolutionary republicanism, is that rhetoric is always unstable and polyvalent, meaning witnesses to Dunbar’s execution or readers of Strong’s sermon could make of these signs largely whatever they chose. Stuart Banner has observed that “the scaffold was the minister’s stage,” but as we shall see, it would seem that many locals chose lessons other than those being offered by Strong from the “stage” of Dunbar’s hanging.16 Indeed, while a sense of smug confidence pervades Strong’s jeremiad, its compromised ending tells us much about the contentious relationship between the wishes of elites and the behaviors of the masses. Clearly referring to the widespread practice of turning public hangings into an

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occasion for drunken revelry, bawdy singing, petty crime, and general mayhem, Strong exhorts his audience: “Go not to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts, for death is there! Justice and judgment are there! The power of government, displayed in its most awful form, is there.” But as demonstrated by Negley Teeters, Douglas Greenberg, Louis Masur, and a host of other historians, the crowds attending executions were not likely to notice the “awful form” of government, for they were too busy getting drunk, sizing up potential mates, pick-pocketing, and

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Detail from the masthead of the first issue of The Hangman, 1 January 1845. (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.)

FIGURE 5.

otherwise carousing to notice the high-minded work of secular justice and heavenly judgment. Beccaria’s idealized hope that public punishments would “make the most efficacious and lasting impression on the minds of men” would appear to be a theory not matched by practice.17 This fact was eventually turned into damning visual and poetic evidence by the death penalty abolitionists who launched the weekly

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newspaper The Hangman in Boston in 1845. The masthead of this wonderful magazine featured a portrayal of a public hanging at which the witnesses do everything but absorb lessons in the righteous “power of government” (see figure 5). Indeed, this controversial image—it was soon removed from the cover because of the stir it caused—shows a smiling figure slapping his hat to his side as if cheering on a favorite at a horse race; the forlorn wife of the accused and her weeping children rush the stage begging for mercy, for the hanging of her husband / their father will leave them destitute and destined for lives of poverty; a local merchant sells “refreshments” to a man who looks drunk; a gentleman picks the pocket of a bystander; troops stand by to keep order; and a small boy begs for offerings—it is a pathetic image of a culture gone wrong, where the state-sanctioned theater of violence tries to mask the terrible results of inequality and cruelty. Printed in that same issue of The Hangman, Thomas Dunn English’s scalding poem “The Gallows Goers” supported this visual argument by observing that at such occasions Pickpockets plenty are—mark how they go, Slyly and coolly to work at their trade. Business is business, and people must know Too much attention to that can’t be paid. Swearing and fighting and kicking, the crowd Utter their blasphemous curses aloud— Righteous example is set by the law— Good comes from hanging—from hanging! Hurrah!18

Given this bitter portrayal of the depraved behavior of crowds at public hangings, as prevalent in Strong’s 1777 as in The Hangman’s 1845, we can read Strong’s revealing appeal within its contested public context, thus recognizing a conservative clergyman struggling to tame the unruly impulses of the masses—and apparently failing. Nonetheless, Moses Dunbar was hanged for treason on 19 March 1777, proving if nothing else that while Strong’s God-fearing words might not win the hearts and minds of the drunken masses—who we may surmise went to that place of horror with elevated spirits, and gay hearts—the hangman’s rope could always caress the necks of those who crossed one of the thin lines separating accepted revolutionary violence from criminal behavior.

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While the Revolutionary era’s theater of pedagogical violence was largely a failure in terms of inculcating a proper respect for God and law among would-be criminals and their lowly friends and neighbors, the desired lessons of public violence were apparently lost as well on Tories of all classes. Even before the summer of 1776, self-appointed “committees of safety,” ad hoc gangs of men honoring the streetwise tactics of the Sons of Liberty and other radical local organizations, began using public acts of violence against select Tories as a way of sending threatening signals to Loyalists that it was time to leave town or switch flags. Although the line between legal hangings and extralegal street thuggery was thin, the desired lessons of such acts of violence were apparently not learned. For example, in January 1774 Ann Hulton wrote a letter from Boston reporting how “one Malcolm,” a “poor old man, a tidesman,” was stripped naked and then tarred and feathered as punishment for his allegiance to the Crown. Malcolm was carted around town, beaten, whipped, and then “they brought him to the gallows and put a rope about his neck, saying they would hang him.” In a brave act of resistance, Malcolm “said he wished they would.” A poor worker, Malcolm was punished with extreme violence and threatened with hanging—to which Malcolm apparently said to hell with your Revolution, gimme yer best shot. The next summer, in Philadelphia, Dr. Kearsley, a Tory, received a different kind of punishment. Apparently selected for tarring and feathering, Kearsley was carted around town “to the tune of a rogue’s march,” but before he could suffer his appointed fate the cart miraculously stopped in front of a tavern, whereupon Kearsley “stood up in the cart and called for a bowl of punch. It was quickly handed to him.” A man of some standing in the community, it was enough to humiliate Kearsley by demonstrating that he could have suffered violence—better to have a drink, laugh a mischievous laugh, and let the Tory head home with his tail between legs, agitators apparently thought, than to resort to actual physical violence. Yet by not torturing Kearsley (for there is no other word for the painful process of tarring and feathering), did revolutionaries show their prudence or their cowardice? Would Tories be emboldened or cowed by such acts of performative but not physical violence?19 One answer to such questions is to recognize that the theater of violence was not so much directed at its potential victims as at its potential perpetrators—that is, the key questions of the day were not only who would be targeted with political violence but who had the stomach to

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fight, who could the revolutionaries count on as strong allies? For example, when Thomas Paine published Common Sense in January 1776, he was trying to fire the imaginations of countrymen still largely uncommitted to armed resistance. Like many in the vanguard of the revolution, Paine worried that his neighbors were too soft to wage a sustained guerrilla war. He thus warned that “a line of distinction should be drawn between English soldiers taken in battle, and inhabitants of America taken in arms. The first are prisoners, but the latter traitors. The one forfeits his liberty, the other his head.” It might seem that these lines were directed as a warning to loyalists, but Paine then writes that “there is a visible feebleness in some of our proceedings which gives encouragement to dissentions.” Supporting and even participating in the stringing up of Tories was therefore a key way of eradicating “feebleness”—the theater of death would teach colonists how to stomach the violence necessary to achieve independence.20 In that same vein, one of Massachusetts’s leading revolutionary elites, Joseph Hawley, argued in a July 1776 letter to Elbridge Gerry that the war required enhanced violence against Tories: “did any state ever subsist,” he asked, “without exterminating traitors?” Hawley would go on to serve the cause with distinction, as did Gerry as well. Hawley’s question, then, like Paine’s bravado, is actually a blustery challenge to Gerry and others: do you have what it takes to see this through? Indeed, Hawley is engaging here in some machismo banter, as one revolutionary parades his mettle, his stomach for violence, in a boasting letter to another revolutionary—for is it not a bit strange to hear two elite gentlemen conversing about exterminating fellow human beings? Hawley’s hyperbolic call for violence, then, is both a proposed political tactic and, more importantly, a performative gesture, a manly sign, a chest-puffing way of proving loyalty to the cause. Thus, in the same way that Strong sought to persuade his audience that hanging Dunbar would somehow benefit them directly, and just as Paine’s call for hangings was targeted more at fence-sitting colonials than king-supporting Tories, so the stories of Malcolm, Kearsley, and Hawley demonstrate how Revolutionaries sought to harness violence for political purposes: in Malcolm’s case, to prove that anti-Tory violence would be used, would be public, and could be deadly if needed; in Kearsley’s case, to prove that just the threat of violence could be used to bring the high and mighty back to earth, to show that republicanism would not respect those who clung to the Crown; and in Hawley’s case, to illustrate

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how former colonial subjects would prove their manhood by swearing allegiance to revolutionary violence.21 As Malcolm’s gallows bravado and Kearsley’s long drink demonstrate, such revolutionary extrajudicial violence may not have worked at changing the minds of Tories, but as Hawley’s letter illustrates, it may well have served as a rallying cry for revolutionaries eager to prove their commitment. Indeed, as Kirk Fuoss has argued, by the opening of the twentieth century lynch mobs in the post-Reconstruction South understood that their task was not only to terrorize local black communities but, just as importantly, to train white witnesses in the norms of racial violence. Fuoss calls this “actor training,” meaning that going to lynchings was like going to school: white witnesses were being trained in the ways of racial brutality; they were being socialized into the norms of allegiance and Othering that would sustain white supremacy. Although Paine’s Common Sense and Hawley’s 1776 letter to Gerry were written in a different time and place than the lynchings studied by Fuoss, I would argue that Fuoss’s notion of actor training helps explain the revolutionaries’ excited prose and particularly Hawley’s over-the-top call for “exterminating traitors.” For Hawley was testing Gerry, probing the depth of his commitment, seeing how far Gerry would go down the road of violence. But as we shall see, using the death penalty and the more general threat of violence as a form of actor training was a delicate business that, when the victim of the hanging was a dashing young soldier, could easily backfire upon the authorities.22

Major John André and the Spectacle of a Wartime Hanging, 1780 As the war dragged on, Benedict Arnold, one of the heroes of Ticonderoga and Saratoga, and a twice-wounded warrior for republicanism, inexplicably decided to trade flags. And so, following months of secret correspondence, he managed in mid-September 1780 to arrange to meet with Major John André, the adjutant general to Sir Henry Clinton, the commander of the king’s forces in America. Thus began the train of events that would lead to Arnold committing what General Anthony Wayne described as acts so “dirty” that they “beggar all description” and “would cause the Infernals to blush.” The story ends, of course, with a hanging.23

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Arnold and André agreed to meet onboard the Vulture, an aptly named British warship that sailed up the Hudson, dangerously close to the important fort at West Point. But late on the night of 21 September Arnold got cold feet, refused to row out to the Vulture, and instead asked André to come ashore, near Haverstraw, New York, where the men spent the night poring over military intelligence at the house of Joshua Hett Smith, a “rich, if not wealthy” Tory lawyer. After much negotiation, the soldiers came to an agreement: for a £20,000 payment and the promise of a high commission in the king’s imperial forces, Arnold provided André with plans that would facilitate the capture of West Point and hence, so both men believed, speed the collapse of the rebellion by enabling the British to sever the rebellious colonies’ armies in half. But the intelligencetrading and fate-negotiating session dragged on so long that the dawn of the twenty-second convinced both men that immediate return was too dangerous, and so André agreed to spend the day hiding at Smith’s—soon to be mocked as “Treason House”—from where he hoped to return to the Vulture that night. Later that morning, however, Colonel James Livingston wheeled a six-pounder over to the bluffs towering above the Hudson River and opened fire on the Vulture, supposedly hitting her six times; the British sailors returned the fire with some of their fourteen cannons, commencing a racket that would have aroused rebels for miles around. Thus shorn of any secrecy, already hammered multiple times, and loath to initiate a fullscale engagement with the American ships moored upriver, the Vulture was, in Alexander Hamilton’s words, “obliged to take a more remote station,” hence abandoning André in rebel territory. And so André, instead of sailing safely back to glory surrounded by admiring countrymen, instead spent another night in the hinterland, changed his clothes, tucked his secrets into his silk stockings, and, on the morning of the twenty-third, ventured first northeast (crossing the Hudson at King’s Ferry) and then south by land, hoping to pick his way through rebel territory and so make British-held White Plains by midday. He was captured a few hours later, near Tarrytown, by three sentries, “young men who were playing cards by the roadside,” and was soon in the hands of American forces. Washington ordered his execution; what follows tells us much about the complexities and contradictions of the death penalty, especially in wartime.24 The overwhelming majority of the hanged men and women I have discussed in this book came from the dregs of society: they were slaves and runaways, mulattoes, vagabonds and thieves, indentured servants

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Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

FIGURE 6.

Major John André’s march to the gallows on 2 October 1780, by F. O. C. Darley. (From William Abbatt, The Crisis of the Revolution, Being the Story of Arnold and André, courtesy of Purple Mountain Press, Harbor Hills Books, and the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.)

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and transported felons, poor white whores and highwaymen, every one of them a version of trash, the unlucky members of that vast underclass Lyn Lofland describes as “the old floating population.” In contrast, Major André was not only a British gentleman and military star, but an alluring one. By all accounts he was alarmingly handsome, unfailingly polite, and perpetually cheerful; he occupied his free time composing elegant drawings and articulate letters; he was an experienced actor and a poet with a sharp wit; he charmed his captors so completely that two American soldiers walked him to the gallows with their arms locked in a fraternal embrace. In fact, in F. O. C. Darley’s engraving depicting André’s march to the gallows (see figure 6), the American troops dip their heads in shame, women weep, children look on in anguish, and even the dogs appear stunned. André would have preferred to have been killed by firing squad, a fate then thought to be more dignified than swinging like a common criminal from the gallows; he thus asked Washington to grant him a “mode of death” that would accord with “the feelings of a man of honour,” but Washington denied him this last request. André apparently felt this insult keenly, for as he approached the gallows he is reported to have asked, “must I die in this manner?” Nonetheless, in a letter written to his commander in the final days before his execution, André claimed, “I am perfectly tranquil in mind and prepared for any fate to which an honest zeal for my King’s service may have devoted me.” In other words, André did not fear death and even welcomed it as the price gentlemen pay for serving their king—here then, was a nobleman, a brave soldier, a seductive embodiment of all the airs associated with British aristocracy. Whereas you might expect class-based resentment and nationalist outrage to call for André’s head—after all, he was a spy who plotted to bring the rebellion to its knees—the mysteries of class longing instead turned Americans into envious jelly, a starry-eyed bunch who found themselves angry at Washington for doing something as barbarous as hanging a man of André’s stratospheric stature and disarming good looks.25 As is so often the case in moments of class longing, André’s dapper character obscured his politics. For beneath the veneer of parlor-room grace, André was a British major fighting to squash colonial losers. It is true that André possessed a lively wit, which was popularized in his sixtyone-verse-long mock epic “The Cow Chase,” a goofy narrative poem (later set to music) making fun of a military skirmish near Fort Lee, New York, where the main prize of the attacking Americans appeared to be

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a herd of cattle they hoped to turn into dinner. But in a final stanza not published with the rest of the poem, which appeared in New York City in Rivington’s Royal Gazette while he was awaiting execution, André wrote:

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When the epic strain was sung, The poet by the neck was hung, And to his cost he finds too late, The dung-born tribe decides his fate.

The satiric verse anticipates the poet’s death at the hands of offended readers, serving as an eerie foretelling of his later fate for espionage, yet what is striking here is André’s portrayal of the Americans as a “dungborn tribe.” Swooning rebels may have seen André as the embodiment of the best characteristics of European style and grace, but he saw them as the moronic descendants of shit.26 Indeed, Kenneth Silverman notes that “the man who ciphered plans for the fall of West Point can hardly have been a swooning popinjay”; Linda Colley concurs, reminding us that “cultivated, glamorous, sensitive and brave he undoubtedly was, but he was also an ambitious, experienced imperial warrior.” Nonetheless, André’s many charms clouded the perceptions of many Americans, including the Connecticut Wit Joel Barlow, who, after witnessing André’s hanging, wrote a pathetic letter to his fiancée wherein he described the noble spy: “A politer gentlemen or a greater character of his age perhaps is not alive. . . . With the appearance of Philosophy & heroism he observed that he was buoyed above the fear of death by a consciousness that most of the actions of his life had been honorable.” Echoing sentiments widely felt at the time, Barlow confessed that “my heart is thrown into a flutter My dear at the sight.” Likewise, Dr. James Thacher, another witness to the hanging, described the event as “melancholy and gloomy . . . the scene was affecting awful.” An imperial spy has been hanged, an aristocrat who plotted the ruin of the new Republic has been thwarted, yet Barlow and Thacher, like stunned schoolboys twitching before a pop star, speak of their fluttering and melancholy hearts. In the popular ballad, “The Capture of Major André,” singers lament that the wrong man has been hanged: Now Arnold to New York has gone a-fighting for his King, And left poor Major André on the gallows for to swing,

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It moved each eye with pity, and caused each heart to bleed, And everyone wished him released and Arnold in his stead.

Rebellious colonials were thus caught in a curious contradiction: on the one hand, they fought for equality and liberty and republicanism, all in the cause of overthrowing the rotten monarchy and its arrogant, sneering forces of elitism and inherited privilege; on the other hand, when in the presence of an aristocrat, a handsome and cultured man of taste and elegance, they withered like fools, speaking of “Philosophy & heroism” while their sympathetic hearts bled for a man who plotted the violent destruction of their dearest hopes, if not their lives.27 Not all Americans fell for the spectacle. Hartford’s Connecticut Courant and the Weekly Intelligencer ran a story a week after André’s execution arguing that the spy had “received the reward of his [unreadable] labours, the gallows.” Boston’s Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser of 19 October 1780 emphasized the sordid side of the scandal by publishing “Arnold’s infamous letter” (to which I turn below). Beneath Arnold’s embarrassing communication the Chronicle recounted how Arnold was damned in a “rogue’s march” in Philadelphia, wherein he was ridden through town in a wagon accompanied by the Devil himself, who with one hand shook a purse of money in his face while using his other hand to torment the traitor with a pitchfork (see figure 7). At the close of the march “the effigy of this ingrate was therefore hanged (for want of his body) as a traitor.” Following Arnold’s theatrical hanging, effigies of Andrie (misspelled), and Smith were also “committed to the flames.” Thus performing their disgust with Arnold’s, André’s, and Smith’s treachery, and as so often aided in their experiments in public politics by the great Charles Willson Peale, the artist and activist who built the contraption, Philadelphians sought to shame the plotters by removing them from their regal military context and inserting them, as effigies, into some of the New World’s oldest execution rituals. Thus shorn of their dignity, the spies were ceremoniously hanged and then burned like common criminals.28 Having outlined the contours of the André affair, I will now consider some of its curious twists and implications for this study. First, we should note that André was most likely captured not because of wartime vigilance but because of crime-related hysteria. That is, the locals around West Point, Haverstraw, Tarrytown, and White Plains had been living in fear of criminal bands ever since the initiation of hostilities between the Crown

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

FIGURE 7.

“Benedict Arnold and The Devil,” Charles Willson Peale’s woodcut of the rogue’s march (and eventual burning in effigy) of Arnold and André in Philadelphia on 4 October 1780. (From Andreana, courtesy of the Newberry Library.)

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and the rebels. It is not clear if the supposed spike in thefts was caused by loyalist “Cowboys” or rebel “Skinners”—likely both—using war as a cover for crime, but many New Yorkers in the Hudson River Valley (and indeed colonials everywhere) felt that their fields, barns, and homes were under criminal assault by plundering parties of dubious political alignment. As John Trumbull portrayed the scene in his M’Fingal, a popular mock-epic poem spoofing the Revolution,

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As each party’s strength prevails It turn’d up diff’rent, head or tails; With constant rattl’ing in a trice Show’d various sides as oft as dice

Allegiance was finicky, crime was high, men were armed, and the nights were long—the safety of house and home was about as certain as flipping a coin or shooting dice. In fact, fear was so prevalent that the locals arranged roving squads of police forces, who watched the roads and taverns for suspicious characters and “any cowboys or others who might drive cattle toward New York.” The young men who captured André—despite their slacker-like habit of playing cards while on duty—were therefore not Revolution-supporting military heroes out scouring the countryside for traitors, storm troopers, or spies; rather, they were scared farmers hunting (albeit laconically) for cattle rustlers. The Revolution may have been saved, then, by fear of crime—and so we stumble upon one of those rare cases where a web of surveillance produced by fear of crime actually served a socially useful function, albeit by catching someone not involved in the criminal enterprise the ersatz country police were hoping to stop.29 Second, even while the political stakes were high, while locals were deeply worried about crime, and while such Revolutionary stars as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were involved in the André affair, the execution was unpopular. I have noted that André’s class status, charm, and good looks played strong roles in making his execution a melancholy event, but to appreciate just how unwelcome it was, we should recall that Washington’s troops and crime-fearing locals produced not one volunteer willing to play the role of hangman—not one. And so, as was so often the case (as discussed in my introduction), those who wanted a hanging were forced to look for a hangman amid the ranks of those

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already condemned to die. In this case, Washington ended up turning to “a Tory named Strickland,” who was “promised his liberty for performing the odious task.” André’s aristocratic charms apparently worked so well on republicanism-loving rebels that the only person with the stomach for hanging him was a fellow Tory, who was promptly let loose upon the land—following the hanging—to continue undermining the Revolution, albeit in ways less dramatic than those hatched by Arnold and André. Thus, in the André affair as in many of the death penalty stories told herein, Americans exhibited a familiar version of cognitive dissonance: they were willing to witness a hanging but not to participate in the deed— the death penalty was acceptable as long as someone else found the blood on his hands. To appreciate how peculiar this fact is, consider that during the French Revolution, when the so-called terror was at its height and heads were falling like rain from guillotines, Parisians performed their support for the death penalty by purchasing miniature guillotines as toys. Merchants working the massive crowds at killings even sold sparrows to death penalty enthusiasts who could then execute their own executions by beheading birds in a show of solidarity with those who were killing political opponents. In comparison to the enthusiastic frenzy of the mobs in revolutionary France, the crowd at André’s execution was downright mournful, as “the spot” of André’s hanging was, according to Thacher, “consecrated by the tears of thousands.”30 If freeing one traitorous Tory for killing another seems like a curious equation in military terms, it confirms my argument throughout this book that while hangings were responses to specific juridical or military events, they were also, and always, about manufacturing theatrical moments of symbolic exchange that spoke to broader cultural issues. Indeed, the third important lesson to draw from the André affair is that the execution was less a punishment for a past deed than a rhetorical moment that spoke to the future: André’s life was exchanged for Washington’s political needs. For Arnold and André’s plot was already foiled—killing the gallant young man therefore served no obvious military purpose, instead fulfilling Washington’s personal need to stand as the unchallenged leader of the rebellion. We should recall that in the autumn of 1780 the war was not going well: Congress was broke (or so it often claimed), Washington could barely feed his army let alone wage war (a fact that drove Arnold to distraction), the French navy was apparently in no hurry to engage the British on the high seas, and “the Continental army was on the verge of

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dissolution”—these were indeed the times that try men’s souls. Executing André thus offered Washington an occasion for reasserting executive power in a low moment. Some of Washington’s advisers suggested, and Clinton and Arnold both argued forcefully, that Washington should barter André in a trade for rebel captives. If Washington agreed to such a plan, he could have saved the lives of already captured Americans; had he been inclined to negotiate a harder bargain, he perhaps could have released André in order to grab hold of Arnold, whose “treason of the blackest dye” had turned him into public enemy number one and whose execution would have thus produced nothing short of a national celebration. But Washington chose not to wheel and deal. He chose to hang the spy. He chose death. Washington did so because this gesture of coldhearted resolve was meant to signal to all observers that the commander would not hesitate to kill for power, he would stop at nothing to win the war, he would neither compromise nor negotiate nor waiver. Ordering André’s execution thus performed Washington’s steely strength. Michel Foucault has argued that “the public execution did not re-establish justice, it reactivated power.” For Washington, then, a man besieged by bad news in the autumn of 1780, hanging André was one way to try to reactivate his flagging executive power.31 Indeed, in Ann Seward’s “Monody on the Death of André,” a poem that went through numerous editions, the poet laments: Oh Washington! I thought thee great and good, Nor knew thy Nero thirst for guiltless blood; Severe to use the power that fortune gave, Thou cool determined murderer of the brave. Remorseless Washington! The day shall come Of deep repentance for this barbarous doom.

For the commander of a rebel army fighting in the name of liberty and equality, comparisons to Nero might be imagined as hurtful; being called a murderer of the guiltless, albeit a naive charge leveled by a longtime André confidant, might be thought of as not sitting well; struggling to win a war and being hailed as barbarous might not have been politically desirable—but in fact I suspect that Washington rather enjoyed these charges. How better to reinforce his transcendent power, his cool determination, his sheer ruthlessness and uncompromising commitment to winning

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at all costs? Through the years Thomas Paine came to nurse a healthy hatred of Washington, not least because of what he described as the commander’s “icy and death-like constitution.” Seward may have lamented it, and Paine may have hated it, but it is safe to assume that Washington’s “icy and death-like constitution” served him well as commander in chief—given the tenor of the times, we can imagine him thinking better to be feared than loved. Killing André certainly accomplished that task.32 A fourth overarching point to draw from the André affair, one that again supports one of my arguments throughout this book, is that André’s execution was understood by all the key players—Washington, Clinton, Hamilton, even Arnold in exile in British-held New York City—not as the final and violence-ending act in a legal drama but as an invitation to engage in retaliatory violence. Rather than the closing act of a sordid affair that ended badly, André’s hanging was a prelude, one more cause for continued bloodshed. Consider Benedict Arnold’s remarkable letter of 1 October, written in exile the day before André’s hanging, and addressed to Washington. Aside from Arnold’s stunning display of delusion—treating Washington as a friend and equal (he was not), claiming André was not a spy (he was), speaking as if he influenced British military policy (he did not then and never would)—his letter offers powerful insights into how Revolutionary elites thought about the ethics of violence and punishment. For Arnold boldly declares that if Washington executes André, then Arnold “shall think [himself] bound by every tie of duty and honour to retaliate on such unhappy persons of your army as may fall within my power.” Aside from the jolt caused by hearing America’s most famous traitor speak of “duty and honour,” we should note that for Arnold, André’s imminent execution does not mark the culmination of a reasoned judicial process that should produce assent to the law (even if couched in disagreement with the outcome of this specific finding), but rather a call for retaliation. In fact, Arnold hints that if Washington hangs André, then Clinton, in a fit of retaliatory anger, may abrogate well-established rules regarding the treatment of prisoners to hang forty rebels currently in his capture, thus igniting “a scene of blood at which humanity will revolt.” One hanging leads to another; kill André and Clinton will kill his captives; and then Washington will respond; and on and on it goes, with each threat couched in the language of the law and honor. Arnold’s letter thus predicts a veritable parade of death. And even though the masses may “revolt” at this display of butchery, elites like Clinton and Washington will

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go right ahead with their executions, so the letter suggests, thus trying to prove their executive mettle by executing captives—and so “duty and honour” appear, at least in Arnold’s bizarre letter, to demand nothing less a perpetual cycle of violence.33 Indeed, Arnold’s letter captures in precise terms the strange ways men of his class oscillated when thinking about honor, crime, and punishment. For on the one hand the letter closes with a gentlemanly appeal for Washington to demonstrate his “honour of humanity, and the love you have of justice” by sparing André from his “unjust sentence.” Arnold thus invokes some of the key terms of the Enlightenment, calling upon honor, humanity, love, and justice, all in the name of sparing a supposedly innocent life. This is a startling moment, as this traitor, this spy, this author whose plan would have cost hundreds if not thousands of lost lives, apparently feels no compunction in writing as if he were a gentleman philosopher addressing an impartial interlocutor, not the commander of the army he has just betrayed. Arnold’s ability, then, to act one way (as a possibly murderous traitor) while writing another (as an honor-bound gentleman) illustrates that for many men of his class and age, the high terms of the Enlightenment could be used casually if not hypocritically: honor and justice and love were ubiquitous terms of persuasion, but their content was as fickle as the wind. On the other hand, even while employing such Enlightenment terms in this cavalier manner, Arnold, again like many men of his class, did not hesitate from rotating closer to a less noble, albeit acceptably manly, posture of proud pugilist. For the letter closes with this whopper of a threat: “But if this warning be disregarded, and he [André] suffer, I call heaven and earth to witness, that your Excellency [Washington] will be justly answerable for the torrent of blood that may be spilt in consequence.” Enlightenment be damned, Arnold now speaks like an enraged cutthroat, as an aggrieved warrior who will stop at nothing to avenge the death of his comrade. Arnold’s letter thus shuttles back and forth from talk of justice and love and honor worthy of the parlor room to threats of imminent “torrent[s] of blood” worthy of the backstreet. Making sense of the age requires us to hold onto both perspectives at the same time, to appreciate that for Arnold and Washington and their peers it actually made sense to speak in this way, weaving back and forth from Enlightenment promises to barbaric practices, from high-minded philosophizing to erecting the gallows, from gentlemanly salutations to roguish threats. Arnold’s treason is indeed stunning, but his rhetorical

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shifting from talk of love to threats of murder places him firmly in the middle of his culture.34 In fact, by the antebellum period André’s execution had become the raw material for a veritable cottage industry of memorabilia. In her bestselling Letters from New York, Lydia Maria Child recounts that “tradition says that a very large white-wood tree, under which he [André] was taken, was struck by lightning on the very day that news of Arnold’s death was received at Tarrytown.” So by 1842, when Child wrote this passage, the aristocratic spy who had called Americans a “dung-born tribe” and plotted the downfall of their freedom was being treated as something of an angelic figure: the handsome boy with the quick wit would be avenged by no less a force than Nature herself symbolically striking down the cursed tree under which the major was captured. André’s execution and its mythmaking aftermath thus mark a transitional point in the New World’s understanding of the death penalty, for by the close of the War of Independence, Hawley’s revolutionary bravado, Strong’s elitist moralizing, and Washington’s stern lawgiving would begin to give way to a new culture of mediated forms of punishment as pedagogy and pleasure, hence fueling a new age of mass-produced crime narratives and political ventriloquism.35

From Breaking Bodies to Manufacturing Consent; or, The Dawn of the Culture Industry I have argued on the one hand that the Revolutionary theater of violence—whether carried out under legal or vigilante forms—largely failed to modify the behavior of target audiences, of those marginalized members of the community (slaves, free blacks, Tories, criminals, and others) who were meant to be terrorized into compliance. On the other hand, I have raised the possibility that the theater of violence was less concerned with manufacturing obedience in select Others than with manufacturing consent among white constituencies whose allegiance to the new nation might be suspect. In this sense, hanging some poor wretch had less to do with honoring the law than with producing community—executions destroyed one body to help construct a larger body politic. But as the André affair demonstrates, and as we shall see again below, trying to harness violence to help produce community in the Revolutionary age

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was a complicated affair, for the War of Independence had unleashed a new kind of rhetoric that fueled a new world of heady promises and high expectations. As Gordon Wood has argued, following the Revolution “ordinary people were no longer willing to play their accustomed roles in the hierarchy. . . . They were less dependent, less willing to walk while gentlemen rode, less willing to doff their caps, less deferential, less passive, less respectful of those above them.” Because of this change of habits, post-Revolutionary elites were forced to begin changing the ways they talked about hangings and other forms of state violence. Recognizing that the rhetoric of the Revolution promised a new political culture in which elite leaders could no longer deliver condescending harangues to automatically compliant masses, and thus marking the transition from colonies ruled by a king to a nation ruled by elected representatives, from a world driven by assumed deference to one governed by republican consent, Strong and his colleagues experimented in post-Revolutionary execution sermons with a form of political ventriloquism. Moreover, this ventriloquism would eventually find expression in the nation’s first crime magazine, the American Bloody Register, wherein we can watch as postRevolutionary Americans begin the now familiar process of conflating crime and consumption, sin and selling, executions and entertainment.36 As illustrated by the André affair, the history of the death penalty converges in this period of American history with the dawn of the culture industry. As new forms of mass-produced persuasion and entertainment began to flourish, and as elites continued to address the masses from the gallows, so the voice of these documents began to change. When Mather spoke at executions, he did so in his own voice; when Nathan Strong lectured Dunbar in 1768, he did so in his own voice; but by 1797 when he issued a temperance-driven death penalty sermon, he spoke in the imagined voice of the victim. That is, Strong and his colleagues would read what were ostensibly the dying words of the criminal about to be launched into eternity, yet the rhetorical eloquence of, and conservative political messages contained in, these dying words suggest that they were not the door-of-death statements of poor vagrants, indentured servants, illiterate slaves, and other unfortunates, but thinly disguised excuses for delivering traditional jeremiads. Nonetheless, it is significant that Strong felt the need to engage in this ventriloquism, for it shows us how the voice of authority was shifting. Rhetorical critics refer to such acts of ventriloquism as prosopopoeia; put simply, the term indicates a form of rhetorical counterfeit

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or impersonation in which the relationship between an idea and the speaker of the idea is blurred or even faked. In some older definitions of the word, emphasis is placed on its ability to make the dead speak. As Pierre Fontanier explained in his Les Figures du discours in 1821, prosopopoeia “consists in staging, as it were, absent, dead, supernatural or even inanimate beings. These are made to act, speak, answer as is our want. At the very least these beings can be made into confidants, witnesses, accusers, avengers, judges, etc.” Post-Revolutionary gallows sermons and the many broadsides and magazine articles that followed executions offer classic examples of prosopopoeia, as local religious elites and upstart print capitalists used executions as occasions for counterfeiting the words of an about-to-be-dead criminal, thus sometimes shrouding a conservative diatribe in the softer garb of a deathbed confession, sometimes turning an execution into a surefire marketing opportunity, and often accomplishing both at the same time.37 How post-Revolutionary Americans talked about the death penalty thus marked a larger change in the culture’s notions of authority and allegiance: whereas the brutal violence used against Anthony Weston in 1683 and Toney and Quashy in 1707 was doubly speechless, for neither the punished nor the punishing spoke at these events, and whereas the violence used against Dunbar in 1768 was accompanied by a highminded sermon, the violence of post-Revolutionary executions would be accompanied not only with words but with words ostensibly uttered by the about-to-die criminals. In her magisterial The Body in Pain, where she examines the political functions of torture, Elaine Scarry flags this transformation in the voices of authority and pain as evidence of the “sadistic potential” in language about suffering. For Scarry, “the obsessive display of agency that permits one person’s body to be translated into another person’s voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime’s fiction of power,” illustrates “the conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power.” This “conversion” of the criminal’s imminent execution into an occasion for an authority-supporting sermon or testimony, one that allegedly reports the thoughts of the criminal, is accomplished via the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia. Scarry confirms this argument when she observes that by counterfeiting the voice of the condemned, who is made to speak as if his or her execution were justified (or in Scarry’s case, his or her torture were justified) “the torturers are producing a mime in which the one annihilated shifts to being the agent of

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his own annihilation.” Responsibility for the death of a hanged criminal ideally rests, then, as seen in the examples cited herein, not on the state imposing violence from above, but on the criminal him- or herself, whose counterfeited words lend credence to the charade.38 Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland offers one of the period’s most extended and terrifying examinations of the dangers of this kind of rhetorical counterfeiting. Because the novel’s central character, Carwin, can throw his voice—making it sound like it is coming from some other physical place—and because he can counterfeit the voices of others—hence putting words into other peoples’ mouths—he is able to manipulate those around him by, literally, speaking for the people. A walking metaphor for highbrow Federalists who sought to invoke “We the People” as a justifying credo for pursuing political ends, Carwin’s repeated acts of prosopopoeia illustrate that the crass pursuit of self-interest will henceforward be fought in the name of higher values by miming the voices of others—hence Jay Fliegelman’s observation that Wieland is written (and the age lived) under the “master trope of ventriloquism.” More than just a novelistic trick, such ventriloquism is potentially dangerous: for if representation lies at the heart of the democratic experiment, and if prosopopoeia enables one class of Americans to speak for others, then this rhetorical maneuver means the multivocal dialogues that are supposed to fuel our political system can be turned into elites-serving monologues. In American democracy, we are supposed to speak for ourselves, not for others.39 In fact, such rhetorical subterfuge, such manipulations of prosopopoeia, such acts of miming, were so ubiquitous in this period that in 1791 William Smith published a how-to manual on the practice. Entitled The Convict’s Visitor, Smith’s textbook offers clergy a checklist of ways to minister to those about to die and a step-by-step plan for delivering sermons “at the Time of Execution.” Smith’s manual breaks the pre-death ministering function down into sermonic components—confession, absolution, benediction, and exhortation—and includes an additional special “lesson for the morning of the execution.” Once upon the gallows, The Convict’s Visitor offers a scripted “supplication” that opens with the minister saying, “O ye brethren in iniquity, who for your evil deeds, are appointed to die—come, arise, shake off your enmity to God,” to which the convicts are supposed to respond, “O merciful God! Grant us thy peace and the pardon of our manifold transgressions.” The fact that Smith advises his readers to address “ye brethren in iniquity,” clearly a

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plural, perhaps suggests the prevalence of group executions, or the sense that the about-to-be-hanged have fellow brethren in iniquity watching in the audience, or, thinking more broadly, that the audience shares an implicit bond with those about to die. For as Daniel Cohen has observed, execution sermons regularly “asserted an essential kinship between the condemned criminal and the broader community,” hence “hammer[ing] home their central evangelical message that all people stood in as much need of repentance and reform as the malefactor at the gallows.” Marshalling the full rhetorical power of the slippery phrase “ye brethren in iniquity,” Smith advises that the sermon should end with each convict exclaiming—and the audience hopefully thinking along—“I believe! O Lord strengthen my faith.” Thus using the death of a prisoner as an occasion for a sermon, and pretending that the words of a minister are the words of some brethren in iniquity about to die, The Convict’s Visitor offers revealing insights into the ways hangings were staged occasions for performing social control, literally opportunities for putting godly words into the mouths of condemned sinners.40 Like many post-Revolutionary clerics, Strong was an accomplished practitioner of this deadly art of prosopopoeia. For example, on 10 June 1797, twenty summers after he delivered the Dunbar execution sermon, Strong again mounted a Connecticut scaffold, this time to preside over the hanging of Richard Doane, to read “A Short Account of His Life,” and, under the guise of reading Doane’s letters regarding his “State of Mind During the Time of His Confinement,” to deliver a fevered pitch for temperance. By the summer of 1797 the nation was well past its Revolutionary fervor, the revered Washington had been succeeded as president by the “irascible and stuffy” Adams, and, if one believes the gloomy sermons and pamphlets of the period, the American people were well on their way toward irreparable decadence. Strong’s 1797 execution sermon is accordingly less concerned with inculcating political obedience than in both forestalling and predicting heavenly destruction. Indeed, the second sentence of this curious amalgamation of rhetorical genres—part deathbed confession, part sermon, part political harangue, part temperance propaganda; supposedly Doane’s words but clearly Strong’s—observes that Doane “considers himself held up before mankind, as a warning of the bitter consequences of sin; and the danger of living immorally and thoughtless of God.” While Doane is about to perish at the hands of secular laws—having been convicted of murdering Daniel M’Iver—he/

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Strong nonetheless bravely warns the good people gathered to witness the execution that “unless we repent we shall all likewise perish.” This is not a political threat of impending hangings but a theological threat that those who continue to be thoughtless of God will soon “meet evils more dreadful than the pain or shame of an execution by the hands of men.” Giving up on the conceit of pretending that this sermon has any relationship to Doane’s words, Strong reveals his political colors in the following paragraph, where he wonders, somewhat bemusedly, how it is possible, considering the overwhelming number of the great unwashed who are “destitute of a true love of God,” that they “do not commit more of those crimes that must be punished by the hand of civil justice.” Hence, within the sermon’s opening paragraphs Strong both warns of impending metaphysical punishments and wonders about the reasons why more crimes are not committed.41 Strong then turns in the later pages of his sermon to the supposed cause of Doane and his fellow sinners’ unfortunate behaviors: alcohol. Strong argues here that “tipling houses and dram shops” are but “a nursery for murder and eternal ruin.” The real causes of both murder and eternal ruin, however, are expressed in sad detail in the “Short Account of His Life” section of the pamphlet. Readers learn here that Doane was a successful stonecutter until his wife and child died, leaving him in a spiral of depression fueled by alcohol. Strong notes that “there is no evidence that when free from liquor he was malicious or dangerous.” In fact, Strong even observes that “had this man, in due time, received the correction of the work-house, it might have saved him from the halter.” This is a chilling comment, for it demonstrates that Strong is aware of Doane’s pathetic circumstances—tragically widowed and psychologically hurt, the poor man drinks himself into an alcoholic frenzy before committing a brutal crime—yet the minister still believes Doane’s execution is just. Doane then, like Dunbar before him, is to be executed to make both a pedagogical point for the masses and a sacrificial offering to God. Moreover, Franklin Bowditch Dexter reports that Strong “sometimes betrayed an unusual sensitiveness in regard to his own character and importance”; in short, Strong was an arrogant man whose sermons “neglect[ed] all ornaments of style.” A better minister might have saved Doane’s life through compassionate intervention or inspired preaching; instead, Strong chastises his dead neighbor while using his hanging as an occasion to stage political power. Considering the sad (and avoidable)

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circumstances of Doane’s descent into criminality, and the apparent inability of his community to respond in any way other than unleashing ritualistic violence, I read this document less as a testament to Strong and his allies’ stern faith than as an indictment of their complicity with a cruel culture incapable of attending those most in need of help.42 Perhaps in part because of this culture of cruelty, Revolutionary era executions drew large crowds. Whether or not the masses were actually listening to the sermons directed at them on these occasions, they were at least interested enough in the theater of death to come watch hangings in large numbers. But while elite clergymen saw such occasions as opportunities to offer pedagogical lessons about the ongoing threats of earthly punishment and heavenly retribution, I suspect that people attended these events because they were intrigued by the theater of death, not because it taught them something about law and order or justice and democracy but because it tested the limits of their most basic notions of what humans are capable of doing to one another. As Edward Ingebretsen has observed, monsters have “excited emotions ranging from fear and bewilderment to curiosity and reverence, even a desire for the strange and exotic,” thus making them “occasions of dense exchange.” Although Arthur, Dunbar, and Doane are not described in terms that render them explicitly as monsters, the execution materials surrounding their executions lead readers to see them as monstrous, for they are the objects of both great fear and intense interest, living signs that problematize their culture’s sense of acceptable behavior.43 The complexity of this “dense exchange” between law and license, fear and fascination, death and desire, and the crimes of monstrous others and their consumption by upstanding neighbors may explain not only the large crowds at executions but also the tense energy of the young nation’s first magazine dedicated to crime and punishment, the American Bloody Register (hereafter ABR). Published randomly between 1784 and 1790 in Boston by Ezekiel Russell, and accounting for but five volumes in total, the ABR portrays a culture on the verge of modernity, where international travel, rampant capitalism, and lurid sex jostle up against community values, pastoral ruralism, and an Old World God. Demonstrating that selling modernity’s new mass-produced commodities will depend largely on enticing consumers with images of forbidden fruit, the first edition of the ABR (from November 1784) opens with this titillating promise: “IF Encouragement is given to this REGISTER, the other Numbers

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will contain . . . a select and judicious Collection of all the most remarkable Trials for Murder, Treason, Rape, Sodomy, High-way Robbery, Piracy, Housebreaking, Perjury, Forgery, and other Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Thus amounting to a precursor to today’s supermarket tabloids, the ABR offers readers a laundry list of sin. But even while promising a prurient peak at the underside of life, the second issue of the ABR concludes the gallows confession of Alexander White (an Irishman transported to America and eventually hanged before a crowd of thousands) with this typically sermonic explanation: “This narrative of Facts is now inserted in our REGISTER, with a View to inforce good Government and Piety among Children and Servants . . . GOD grant it may have the desired Effect.” In playing this enticing game of bait and switch, of filling its pages with exciting tales of sin in the not very serious name of preventing them, the ABR was following a pattern established in 1722 in Defoe’s Moll Flanders. In summarizing her remarkable career, Defoe has Moll confess that “my Course of Life for forty Years had been a horrid complication of Wickedness, Whoredom, Adultery, Incest, Lying, Theft” and so on, much of it conveyed with nothing less than sly pleasure. Nonetheless, after 253 pages of such colorful debauchery Defoe/Moll reminds readers, surely with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that “publishing this Account of my Life is for the sake of the just Moral of every part of it, and for Instruction, Caution, Warning and Improvement to every Reader.”44 Like George Combe’s confessional pleasures regarding his witnessing an execution (as discussed in the introduction), and like Moll Flanders’s nearly pornographic pleasures of “Instruction, Caution, Warning and Improvement”—I “let him do just what he pleased; and as often as he pleas’d. . . . we took our fill of our wicked Pleasures,” and so on—so the ABR seduces readers in the name of saving their souls, thus demonstrating how monsters may be both economically and politically productive. Because they are liminal figures freed from the stifling constraints of polite society, monsters may also speak truthfully about the dangers lurking on the edges of society. For example, Richard Barrick’s gallows statement includes this charming threat: “I know a number of my fellow-sinners, who live within six or eight miles of this place, who are as bad or worse than myself . . . but I have made such solemn promises to secret them, that I had rather die than betray them.” While White, Barrick, and their comrade in crime John Sullivan—Irishmen all—were hanged on 18 November 1784, Barrick’s “confession” makes it clear that men of their kind

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fill the woods surrounding Boston. Indeed, Barrick’s brazen threat echoes a fact Michel Foucault observed in Barrick’s European counterparts at the time: “though vanquished by the law, the army of disorder promised to return.” Barrick’s promise in turn ensures rich material for future issues of the ABR, demands further attention from law-abiding citizens, and demonstrates that hanging these three criminals will do nothing to deter their “fellow-sinners.” Less a demonstration of political justice or an exercise in moral pedagogy, the ABR recognizes that violence—both that of criminals and the state—is simply the best form of advertisement: crime sells, violence sells. Thus the first issue of the ABR ends abruptly in the middle of Barrick’s sordid tale, leaving readers with this promise: “For the remainder of Barrick’s Life . . . we must refer our Readers to the Second Number of our Register, which we shall publish immediately.” Barrick’s tale of violence amounts, then, to the raw material for a serialized exercise in consuming culture’s contradictions, only with these contradictions emptied of their political energy and turned instead into the stuff of entertainment masquerading as pedagogy.45 These issues of the ABR therefore enact a dialectical process similar to the one described by Franco Moretti in Signs Taken for Wonders, where he examines the “enticing danger” and “dangerous enticement” of those two canonical modern monsters, Frankenstein and Dracula. As Moretti describes them, these monsters serve metaphorical and filtering functions: by expressing the unsayable in metaphorical form they “make bearable to the conscious mind those desires and fears which the latter has judged to be unacceptable,” thus expressing anxieties while filtering the means of their articulation. The problem, for Moretti, is that such dual acts of sublimation and filtering tend to produce versions of monsters that appear to readers or viewers not as haunting signs marking deeper historical, political, and sexual dilemmas but as alien wonders that stand free of entangling complications. In short, instead of historical signs to be decoded, these monsters appear to be wonders, literally forces of nature. Instead of recognizing Frankenstein as a compound figure of insecurities regarding the relationships among modernizing capitalism, new science, decaying family structures, and the battle between old-world cultural forms and those produced in modern metropoles, readers see the monster as the ultimate oddity, the inexpressibly strange, potentially dangerous, and loathsome Other against whom violence is the logical outcome. Instead of working as signs of discord and dissent, then, monsters—whether

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Frankenstein or the ABR’s troika of hanged thieves—function as wonders that manufacture consent.46 Another melancholy example of the complexity of these issues is William Godwin’s novel of 1794, Caleb Williams. Although taking place entirely in Britain, Godwin’s tale illustrates some of the same dilemmas Americans were facing regarding their simultaneous revulsion at and fascination with criminals, violence, and the state’s attempts to enforce law and order. After waging a losing battle of wits with his master, the brutish Mr. Falkland, and after thus being forced to assume the role of a fugitive from the law—for Williams’s dispute with Falkland involved an unsolved murder, of which Falkland was guilty but for which Williams would be made to suffer—Williams found himself recognizing that justice is little more than the rich man’s truncheon and the poor man’s worst nightmare. “Strange,” Williams thought to himself,

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that men from age to age should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to law! Oh, God! Give me poverty! . . . Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority!47

But Williams is apparently not alone in harboring such resentments against the “gore-dripping robes of authority,” for one evening while in disguise he sits in the corner of a tavern listening to the locals discuss Kit Williams, a criminal whose narrative Caleb Williams soon realizes is laced with examples from his own life. In fact, Kit Williams is a composite fantasy criminal containing parts of Caleb Williams’s adventures and parts of other felons’ actions. Hoping to measure the locals’ feelings about this mysterious character, Caleb asks his hostess, “a buxom, bluff, good-humored widow,” if she knew Kit: “She replied that, as she was informed, he was as handsome, likely a lad, as any in four counties round; and that she loved him for his cleverness, by which he outwitted all the keepers they could set over him, and made his way through some walls as if they were so many cobwebs.” And so Caleb realizes that he has become a local legend; he is the poor man’s hero, a handsome and even supernatural figure who eludes the law by gliding like a ghost through walls—his buxom hostess loves him. A regular Robin Hood who illustrates precisely why such picaresque novels are “radically populist by design,” as Cathy Davidson argues,

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Kit/Caleb wins the hearts of his tavern mates because he is a populist rebel who outwits the law, which many of the tavern crowd seem to agree is little more than a corrupt form of class oppression.48 But one aspect of the early modernity of the late eighteenth century is that the print-capitalism revolution was beginning to blanket parts of society with mass-produced signs that slowly but surely appropriated, recycled, and depoliticized the oral tales fueling such local myths as those contained in the story of Kit/Caleb Williams. Caleb thus soon finds himself in serious danger, for while small groups of local tavern-goers may sit around with a few pints trading yarns about fantastic crimes, newspapers reach vast audiences, entire cities and even regions, thus transforming consciousness in a heartbeat. And so Caleb realizes his time is short when he hears a hawker on a crowded London street shouting out to potential customers “Here you have the most wonderful and surprising history, and miraculous adventures of Caleb Williams: you are informed how . . .” Caleb is thus doomed by the mass production of denigrated culture, for by appropriating his life as the subject of a hot-off-the-press exposé on crime and monstrous criminals, the paper ends all hopes of this new celebrity continuing to elude the law. Sure enough, Caleb is captured soon thereafter.49 Like his monstrous American counterparts, Arthur, Dunbar, and Doane, and like both Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, Caleb Williams walked a dangerously thin line between being the subject of mass fascination and the object of mass revulsion. He both flouted the norms of acceptable behavior and paid a heavy price for doing so; he transgressed the bounds of normalcy to become a folk hero, yet in his capture and punishment the state demonstrated not only its ability to enforce those same bounds but its willingness to do so with fierce brutality, regardless of questions of guilt or innocence. Godwin is of course aware of the delicious thrill caused by inhabiting this liminal space. In fact, when Caleb first figures out that Falkland is the murderer, Godwin has Caleb offer a confession that seems to stand as a thinly veiled reading guide for the rest of the novel: I felt as if my animal system had undergone a total revolution. My blood boiled within me. I was conscious of a kind of rapture for which I could not account. I was solemn, yet full of rapid emotion, burning with indignation and energy. In the very tempest and hurricane of the passions, I

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seemed to enjoy the most soul-ravishing calm. I cannot better express the then state of my mind, than by saying, I was never so perfectly alive as at that moment.

In its thrilled inexpressibility the moment approaches a religious state of bliss. Like his readers reveling in the details of the novel, or like the readers of the gallows sermons and confessions discussed above, Caleb realizes that by stretching his consciousness in opposite directions, by experiencing rapture, revolution, and ravishing calm all at the same moment, he has been more “perfectly alive” than could ever be possible in the mundane monotony of daily life. In this sense, then, the execution sermons discussed above, like Godwin’s remarkable novel, offer listeners and readers not so much a discourse on justice or a lesson in democracy as a titillating inoculation against the boredom of everyday life: others die (or like Caleb are punished) so that we may live more fully.50 In her Scenes of Subjection, a remarkable analysis of how the brutality of antebellum slavery was enmeshed in daily practices, many of them counterintuitively involving pleasure, Saidiya Hartman argues that “the elasticity of blackness enables its deployment as a vehicle for exploring the human condition, although, ironically, these musings are utterly indifferent to the violated condition of the vessel of song.” This notion of elasticity is crucial, for the criminal (or criminalized) characters addressed in this chapter functioned—regardless of any modern notion of race— precisely as “vehicles for exploring the human condition,” as signs loaded with enough cultural knowledge to register with readers or hearers as significant and familiar, yet also elastic enough to be turned toward multiple and even contradictory purposes. But that complex interpretive work was triggered by the initial lure of violence, which in each of the cases addressed herein functioned as a seductive invitation, a pornographic lure, an enticement to engage in the work of making sense of a hanging or a crime story. Indeed, while republicanism may promise a new sense of empowered citizenship, and while the Enlightenment may promise a new reign of reason, these discourses do nothing to satiate the more visceral fascination with the obscene theater of death: whether subjects of a king’s colony or citizens of your own republican nation, it is not every day that you get to see—or read about—a monster slaughtered before your very eyes. Hence, while Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary elites sought to use executions as a form of pedagogy, the examples discussed above

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demonstrate not a pedagogical theater of crime-deterring and moralityinducing pain so much as a rising culture industry based on the marketing of guilty pleasures. As Hartman and others have argued, the racializing logic of slavery would come in the antebellum period to underwrite this process, yet I have shown that its driving force, at least in the early days examined here, was a sense not so much of race as of criminality—the foundational Other of American history is not the slave but the criminal.51 As we shall see in chapter 3, these new means of persuasion—these experiments in the elasticity of violence—would aid not only order-trumpeting elites and commodity-dealing entrepreneurs but activists as well, for abolitionists too could marshal these forces and so turn an execution into a clarion call for the abolition of slavery.

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CHAPTER THREE

The Hanging of Abraham Johnstone and the Turning of Terror into Hope, 1797

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•

I

argued in chapter 2 that post-Revolutionary America experienced a backlash against too-damned-much-democracy: revolutionary impulses needed to be curtailed, so elites thought, to prevent the young nation from succumbing to what founding father Benjamin Rush diagnosed as the disease of “anarchia” and from sliding into what the Connecticut Wits portrayed in The Anarchiad as a coming age of democracy run wild. Part of this backlash against those who took the words of the Declaration of Independence too literally—for of course all men were not created equal and happiness was not a natural right—entailed the use of state-sanctioned violence, as witnessed in the use of military power to quell Shays’s Rebellion in 1786–87, the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and untold numbers of slave insurrections. While crushing dissent with troops, the new nation’s ruling classes also relied upon hangings, whippings, beatings, and myriad other forms of violence to reassert authority in a land where recent memory found young men, including slaves, vying for honor and prestige by engaging in revolutionary bloodletting. Harnessing that wartime fury, turning the raw energy of killing

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the king’s henchmen into something more like quiet assent to the rule of law, was one of the life-and-death challenges facing post-Revolutionary leaders. As Edmund Morgan, James Morone, Jeremy Engels, Jennifer Mercieca, Greg Goodale, and others have argued, this delicate process of transformation—of channeling revolutionary violence into republican assent—required a rhetorical revolution wherein elites stopped calling upon their neighbors to kill in the name of freedom and instead started trying to persuade them of the economic benefits, political advantages, and heavenly rewards of obeying law and order. If, as Sacvan Bercovitch has argued, political life in America depends upon “a way of imagining” the relationship between the individual and the state, what I have called elsewhere enabling “cultural fictions,” then the post-Revolutionary backlash against democracy would require not only marshalling state violence but also developing new ways of imagining the nation, including new cultural fictions justifying state-sanctioned violence.1 I also argued in chapter 2 that the emergence of the American Bloody Register in 1784, the New World’s first magazine dedicated to selling lurid tales of criminal adventures, illustrates a second crucial historical transformation in post-Revolutionary America: the appropriation of violence committed by both rogues and the state as the raw material for a nascent culture industry that would henceforth blanket large markets with consumable terrors, pleasurable violations, and the easy thrill of watching others suffer in the name of law and order. Novels, broadsides, poems, plays, and songs would soon trumpet tales of horrible deeds, monstrous acts, and unspeakable violence, much of it packaged in narrative forms that justified state authority in general and harsh judicial punishments in particular. As we saw in chapter 2, some of these materials also celebrated populist heroes who thumbed their noses at authority, hence providing images of endearing rogues and loveable radicals, yet on the whole it would appear that as elites were learning to harness the emerging forces of mass persuasion, including criminal narratives, so the masses were beginning to see images of crime and criminality not as calls to rebellion or harbingers of political changes on the horizon, but rather as confirmations of the legitimacy and authority of a state that was rapidly solidifying its hold on the monopoly of violence.2 To these immense historical changes in the voices of authority and the appropriation of violence as a tool for manufacturing consent, this chapter adds a third key element in post-Revolutionary American life:

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the entrenchment of slavery and the mass production of racial hysteria, complete with a wave of violence directed against free blacks. To follow these sweeping ideas on a local scale, I offer the first detailed analysis of the long-forgotten case of Abraham Johnstone, a free black farmer who was hanged by his neighbors in south New Jersey in the summer of 1797. Johnstone was punished for the alleged murder of Tom, a local slave who disappeared that summer; however, the supposed victim’s body was never found and no evidence pointed to Johnstone, prompting me to wonder if Johnstone was executed by local whites as retaliation for his aiding Tom’s successful dash to freedom. Despite these fascinating questions, Johnstone’s execution is an event previously lost to history: at the time, there were no newspaper notices of his death; since then, there have been no journal articles, no book chapters, and no monographs studying his fate. In fact, the only direct evidence of this chapter in U.S. history is The Address of Abraham Johnstone, a three-part document printed in Philadelphia in 1797. The pamphlet attributes authorship to Johnstone, whose testimony was published by abolitionists, most likely Philadelphia and south New Jersey Quakers, who sought to use Johnstone’s execution to argue that slavery and its inherent racism, aided by the use of executions, compromised the practices of justice and the promises of republicanism in post-Revolutionary America. In fact, west Jersey Quakers, led by Samuel Allinson, had opposed slavery from as early as 1758; in 1776 they expelled from their local meetings any Friends who held slaves. Johnstone’s execution would therefore have garnered attention from Quakers who understood the deep connections between slavery and hanging, racism and state violence. Thus, whereas the American Bloody Register, William Godwin’s Adventures of Caleb Williams, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland point to the nascent interweaving of print capitalism, the state’s disciplinary powers, and the political functions of violence, The Address of Abraham Johnstone presents a powerful counternarrative, one wherein a doomed black farmer and his abolitionist Quaker allies sought to turn an act of violence into an opportunity for persuading their neighbors of the need to abolish slavery and the death penalty. Johnstone’s Address thus offers us a compelling opportunity to watch our forebears struggle to turn terror into hope.3 Pursuing this thesis raises a historiographical quandary, however, for as is so often the case with this period in U.S. history, we have many more documents written and produced by wealthy gentlemen than by

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poor criminals; just as chapter 2 could only access the stories of “Arthur,” Moses Dunbar, Richard Doane, Richard Barrick, Alexander White, and John Sullivan by studying the materials produced by the men who hanged them, so reconstructing the details of Johnstone’s execution depends in large part on sifting through evidence provided—aside from his Address—by the very group of men who convicted him of murder. I can draw upon the words of white abolitionists and even some of the scant surviving evidence of black abolitionists as well, but for the most part I am left trying to reconstruct this historical moment by relying upon the claims of Johnstone’s accusers. Walter Benjamin once called upon historians to “brush history against the grain”; attempting to honor Benjamin’s challenge means that this chapter hinges in large part on what I will call the strange politics of prosopopoeia. As discussed in some detail in chapter 2, prosopopoeia is often understood as a rhetorical strategy whereby actors mime the voices of others, engaging in ventriloquism. I argue that studying the period’s conflicting uses of prosopopoeia—and my own, for brushing history against the grain means I am left trying to speak with and sometimes for the dead—can teach us important lessons about the construction and negotiation of political authority, especially as practiced in debates about race, class, crime, and violence in the new Republic.4 Before turning to Johnstone’s case, I attempt in the first part of this chapter to explain two contextual issues that would have heavily influenced Johnstone’s white neighbors’ turn to violence: the status of slavery in post-Revolutionary America and the effect of the Haitian revolution, which launched a wave of white-supremacist terror in the United States in the 1790s. Having established its larger historical context, I then turn in the second section to the rhetorical complexities of Johnstone’s Address. This textual analysis is followed in the third section by discussion of the political dilemmas of post-Revolutionary New Jersey, wherein we see how the new nation built its republicanism with a wave of white supremacist violence, including ample use of the death penalty. The chapter closes with a section demonstrating that Johnstone and men like him also illustrate one of white supremacy’s peculiarities: that executions were directed not only against those blacks who broke social codes in a criminal sense but also against those who transcended them via political or economic triumphs. I accordingly title this section “Free Men Inspire Terror.” Echoing my analysis from chapter 1 of the executions in New York City in 1741, I argue throughout this chapter that the death penalty

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was used as a form of deadly theater staged both to terrorize marginalized populations into obedience and to teach white witnesses how to perform and police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. But whereas the victims of 1741 were largely silent—we hear their voices either at the gallows or stake, as they are about to die, as reported by others, or in court proceedings where they enjoyed no legal representation—in 1797 Abraham Johnstone and his supporters fought back, meaning that studying his Address can further our understanding of the complicated ways political activists have struggled to turn brutal acts of violence into occasions for arguing for peace and justice. The chapter therefore strives to explain how and why Abraham Johnstone was hanged in 1797, to contribute to the remapping of the intersections of race, class, crime, and violence in post-Revolutionary America, to demonstrate how the strange politics of prosopopoeia and the violence of white supremacy converged in the death penalty, and ultimately to try to honor the bravery of those who sought to turn terror into hope.

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From “All Men Are Created Equal” to the “Savage Barbarity” of Black Revolution Regarding the status of slavery in post-Revolutionary America, let us turn to Thursday, 11 February 1790, when an address “of the people called Quakers,” “Signed in and on behalf of the Yearly Meeting for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the western Parts of Maryland and Virginia,” was read to the first United States Congress. The address is primarily a religious document, full of references to “Divine blessing,” “true honor,” and “that ever blessed, all-perfect Lawgiver.” The penultimate paragraph, however, broaches the question of whether the Constitution is a passive document intended to delegate some authority while protecting a great many other individual liberties from political incursion by the state, or a work intended to actively pursue the public good. Arguing for the latter interpretation, the address wonders whether a sincere and impartial inquiry may take place, whether it be not an essential part of the duty of your exalted station to exert upright endeavors, to the full extent of your power, to remove every obstruction to public righteousness . . . and whether . . . it be not in reality within your power

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to exercise justice and mercy, which, if adhered to, we cannot doubt, must produce the abolition of the slave trade.

These are bold words, for the authors knew that the first paragraph of section 9 of the first article of the Constitution clearly stated that “the Migration or importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight.” The Constitution’s preamble also stated, however, “We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Privileging the visionary promises of the Constitution’s preamble over its repeated support for slavery, the address wonders how one can argue for “forming a more perfect Union,” “establishing Justice,” “promoting the general Welfare,” and “securing the Blessings of Liberty” without considering the closing of the slave trade.5 As was the case with many abolitionist documents from the period, this question is based on an interpretive strategy that refuses to read the nation’s founding documents as carefully crafted legal compromises full of slippery nuance and subterfuge, instead turning them into clarion calls for justice. The Constitution was not authored for this purpose, yet we cannot help but celebrate the bravery of the abolitionists, righteously demanding that while the Declaration of Independence and Constitution may have been texts justifying narrowly defined and historically specific political actions, they should be read as texts that proclaim universally defined and historically transcendent standards of morality. By playing on this ambiguity between the clearly delegated powers of Article 1 and the Constitution’s sweeping opening promises, the address can be read either as an audacious invitation to rewrite the Constitution, thereby engaging in a radically moralizing politics that emphasizes the “duty” “to exercise justice,” or, alternately, as an equally audacious invitation to quarrel over the Constitution’s position regarding slavery, thereby engaging in a radically disruptive politics that recognizes that even if closing the slave trade is legally impossible, talking about it will nonetheless launch Congress into a productive and deeply revealing debate. In either case, the authors of the address refused to remain silent and be complicit with a document

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and a government that supported slavery. Though they were not privy to the records of the bitter battles fought only three years earlier over slavery at the Constitutional Convention, the address amounted to a pugnacious declaration that the Quakers refused to stand by while man’s compromising laws corrupted God’s absolute morals.6 This uncompromising behavior struck politicians entrenched in the deflecting possibilities of parliamentary procedure as imprudent if not dangerous. We can thus imagine the polite yet piercing venom in the voice of William Smith, representative from South Carolina, when he rose to reply: “I flatter myself gentlemen will not press the point of commitment today, it being contrary to our usual mode of procedure.” Mr. Smith’s world was populated with aristocratic slaveholding gentlemen who followed procedures and respected decorum and who were thus not inclined to make fools of themselves in the United States Congress by discussing acts that the Constitution clearly forbade.7 Responses to the Quakers’ audacious address followed in what is now a familiar pattern: accommodationists tried to appease southern fears about the North’s intentions regarding slavery; southern extremists strained to portray the question as a life-and-death struggle over states’ rights; and others argued that it was a question neither of states’ rights nor procedural protocol but, as Elbridge Gerry put it, of “the cause of humanity.” It is perhaps no surprise to find that in the face of this highstakes to-ing and fro-ing, with tempers slowly but surely rising, conversation turned to threats of violence. Thomas Tucker, representative from South Carolina, jumped to the heart of the matter when he argued that continuing such dangerous talk “may be worse, because an interference with the subject may excite a great degree of restlessness in the minds of those it is intended to serve, and that may be a cause for the masters to use more rigor towards them than they would otherwise exert.” The threat behind Tucker’s statement was clear: As you crazy Quakers increase your talk of abolition, hence exciting slaves, so we southerners will have no choice but to increase the violence necessary to protect the peace. Tucker’s warning that “more rigor towards them” would be the only result of abolitionist activism thus presented antislavery forces with a double bind: on the one hand, abolitionists could avoid Tucker’s promised crackdown by slackening their activism, but this would leave slavery unscathed; on the other hand, they could attack slavery, but this would only lead to increased violence toward slaves, making slavery even more brutal. Tucker’s threat

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thus demonstrated that as far as he and his fellow proslavery supporters were concerned, there could be no debate regarding slavery: it was strictly off limits, beyond the scope of political consideration.8 Understanding Tucker and his supporters’ extremist position enables us to appreciate the courage of abolitionists. For example, the very next day, 12 February 1790, debate on the subject began not with the address read the day before, but with a “memorial” to Congress written by the tireless Benjamin Franklin, who was then serving as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Disregarding Tucker’s threat, Franklin’s memorial boldly asks: How can the American republic and slavery coexist? Following an elegant opening paragraph summarizing the social contract principles that influenced the Constitution, Franklin states:

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Your memorialists . . . have observed, with real satisfaction, that many important and salutary powers are vested in you for “promoting the welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the people of the United States”; and as they conceive that these blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of color, to all descriptions of people, so they indulge themselves in the pleasing expectation, that nothing which can be done for the relief of the unhappy objects of their care will be either omitted or delayed.

Franklin thus challenges Congress to accept his reading of the moralizing activism implied in the Constitution’s preamble, even while he surely knew that such a position contradicted the nuanced restrictions articulated in the document’s later passages regarding slavery. He then switches into an even more challenging tone, telling Congress that he is confident “that you will promote mercy and justice towards the distressed race, and that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow men.” And so Franklin presents Congress with a stark choice: are we to be, following what he argues is the spirit of the Constitution, a righteous people who “promote mercy and justice” or, following a legalistic reading of the Constitution, a hypocritical people who “traffic” in human misery while paying lip service to the words that all men are created equal?9 Over the course of the next month, as Franklin’s memorial was tabled, then brought forward for discussion, then sent to committee,

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then tabled again, Congress was forced to return again and again to his troubling question. We may gather a sense of how unsettling this process was to many members of Congress by turning to the journal of William Maclay, senator from Pennsylvania, who recorded on 15 February 1790 (the Monday following the first reading of Franklin’s memorial on Friday), that “our Vice-President produced the petitions and memorials of the Abolition Society. He did it rather with a sneer.” Escalating the stakes from John Adams’s sneering introduction, William Smith of South Carolina objected to Franklin’s arguments on account of the assumed violence that would follow abolition. For example, at the end of a long statement that can only be described as exasperated, Smith blurted out, “Why, will these people, then, make use of arguments to induce the slave to turn his hand against his master?” Thus Franklin’s petition calling for a nation premised on justice upheld for all, regardless of the “distinction of color,” is escalated by Smith into a treasonous call for insurrection. One month later, on 17 March, Smith asserted that Franklin’s questions were beside the point, for “It was well known that they [slaves] were an indolent people, improvident, averse to labor,” and that “when emancipated they would either starve or plunder.” Slavery as a political and legal category was thus recast as a natural and even benevolent station for racial inferiors incapable of exercising freedom. The following week, on 22 March, Congressman Elias Boudinot of New Jersey reinforced this strategy, claiming that “it would be inhumanity itself to turn these unhappy people loose to murder each other, or to perish for the want of the necessities of life.” A committed defender of slavery, Smith portrayed the peculiar institution as a positive good, as a beneficent alternative to the barbarisms black laborers would commit if they were not enslaved; a moderate abolitionist, Boudinot worried about the means of abolitionism, noting that any action too swift might lead to catastrophe.10 It would be forty-two years before the positive good thesis would be institutionalized through Thomas Roderick Dew’s canonical (and strangely titled) proslavery manifesto of 1832, “Abolition of Negro Slavery.” It would be forty-six years before the gag rule of 1836 officially prohibited abolitionist petitions from causing so much trouble. It was but a short while, however, before the West Indies erupted in slave rebellions that prompted white Americans to flood the press with lurid stories of racial catastrophe. Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence is instructive here, as he was besieged with nightmarish stories from Sylvanus Bourne and

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Nathaniel Cutting, who, writing from St. Domingo, related these horrors committed by black revolutionaries:

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They have burned and laid waste all the Plantations. Their whole plan is marked with bitter resentment for former injuries. The horrid devastation that has lately desolated the richest part of this flourishing colony . . . will not be confin’d by the boundaries of the northern District of St. Domingue. They have afterwards in the most cruel manner murder’d in cold blood great numbers of those whom they had thus render’d defenseless. Their savage barbarity has spared neither age nor sex.

Thus echoing the worst fears of Smith, Tucker, and Boudinot, the terrified tone of Bourne and Cutting’s firsthand observations—reminiscent as well of the sense of dread that blanketed New York City in 1741—is representative of the letters, personal stories, and secondhand tall-tales that filled the minds of white Americans throughout the 1790s with visions of an imminent racial apocalypse.11 Along with these mediated portrayals of the “savage barbarity” of rampaging slaves, many white Americans witnessed the spectacle of boatloads of displaced West Indian plantation masters and their families disembarking in U.S. ports, their former wealth and elegance reduced to a few trunks of possessions and letters of introduction. New Jersey ended up housing its share of such refugees. In fact, in Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz’s narrative of his journeys through the United States during this period, the celebrated Polish traveler noted that by the late 1790s Elizabeth Town (in the northeast corner of New Jersey) had become “a refuge for many French families from the islands . . . fleeing from the cruelty of the Negroes.” Niemcewicz was appalled by the barbarism of slavery, yet he appears here equally appalled by the results of the New World’s first black revolution. Yet opinion was mixed, as Graham Russell Hodges reports that some “black New Yorkers heard with pride the news from Saint Domingue of the creation of the first black state in the western Hemisphere,” whereas “some whites trembled at the news from Haiti [and] others blamed every act of black autonomy in America on the troubling news from the West Indies.” Fear of “black autonomy” in turn led to a cascade of new laws limiting the rights of free blacks and severe restrictions on public debates regarding slavery. As Winthrop Jordan observes, “the reverberating disaster of St.

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Domingo” led many Americans “to feel that slavery was a closed subject, entirely unsuitable for frank discussion.” More than simply being tabooed, however, slavery’s proponents launched a new line of argument, claiming that slavery was a necessary economic, political, and cultural institution, the last line of defense against precisely the kinds of destruction then devouring the West Indies. In short, “what had almost seemed an unnecessary evil” before and during the Revolution, Thomas Drake observes, had by the early 1790s become “a positive good.”12 But as the case of Abraham Johnstone demonstrates, the “positive good” of slavery would need to be enforced with an accelerated regime of violence both in the South against slaves and in the North against free blacks and abolitionists. Thus fueled by the interests of southern gentlemen, driven by terrors regarding Haiti, and supporting the racist tendencies of many in the North, post-Revolutionary America would build its new republicanism in an explicitly racial manner enforced by myriad forms of violence, including the death penalty.

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The Address of Abraham Johnstone The Address of Abraham Johnstone is a confusing document. For the text oscillates between justifying the law and damning its arbitrary application; it both praises local elites and hammers them; it is both theologically dense and homespun folksy; it switches from endlessly long sentences with waves of embedded clauses to short, declarative bursts of anger; nonetheless, through it all, The Address argues for Johnstone’s innocence and the abolition of slavery. My suspicion is that the text is marked by such dramatic shifts in tone and structure because it was written by many people, some of whom had political, others theological, and still others personal reasons for contributing to its production. This multivocality is reflected in the text’s three-part structure. The opening segment, entitled “The Address of Abraham Johnstone,” covering pages 3–31, offers a remarkably sophisticated sermon including erudite discussions of theology, European and colonial history, the philosophy of natural rights, and other Enlightenment topics. The texture of this section of the Address suggests that Johnstone may have been working closely with local Quakers and learned clergymen, a coauthor or coauthors concerned with intellectual matters of the highest order. The second section, entitled “The Dying

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Words of Abraham Johnstone” (see figure 8), covering pages 32–41, offers the details of Johnstone’s conviction and hanging for a murder we are led to believe he did not commit. Much of this section of the text is written in short, declarative sentences teeming with anger about slavery in general and the internecine politicking of a small south New Jersey town in particular, suggesting a different authorial hand—or set of hands—than those that produced the opening “Address.” Indeed, whereas the first section is intellectual and sermonic, this second section is biographical and political, offering a strong sense of Johnstone’s voice, albeit, I suspect, as crafted in tandem with local activists. The Address closes with a short “Letter to His Wife,” covering pages 42–47, wherein readers encounter a string of heartbreaking regrets, dying wishes, and sentimental observations on a life full of “nothing but crosses, vexations, and tribulations” (42). This closing section is the rawest of the Address’s three sections and hence offers the most unmediated glimpse into Abraham Johnstone’s voice; this section is also by far the shortest of the Address, and it too is peppered with sermonic passages. The Address of Abraham Johnstone is therefore a complicated document, for at times it is erudite and mannerly, at times it is raw and accusatory; in places it reads like a well-polished sermon from on high, while in other places it feels like a dashed-off last gasp from the edge of death. Despite these shifts in voice, the Address argues again and again against slavery and the death penalty, making it a seminal document for studying two of our nation’s deepest scars. Indeed, whereas Phillis Wheatley began publishing poems in 1767 and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was published in 1784, the Life of William Grimes, The Runaway Slave was not published until 1825, the first extended African American–authored attack on slavery, David Walker’s Appeal, was not published until 1829, the first book-length critique of slavery, Lydia Maria Child’s Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, was not published until 1833, and the first novel attacking slavery, Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie: or Slavery in the United States, was not published until 1835. There were many speeches, letters, poems, articles, and other African American–authored attacks on slavery by 1797, but it would appear that a strong case can be made for locating The Address of Abraham Johnstone as among the earliest extended documents wherein an African American attacks slavery and perhaps the first such text condemning the death penalty. Moreover, I am intrigued by the likelihood that The

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FIGURE 8. Abraham Johnstone’s “Dying Words,” a section of The Address of Abraham Johnstone, a black man, who was hanged at Woodbury, in the county of Glocester, and state of New Jersey (1797). (Courtesy of the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.)

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Address was a collective and cross-racial effort. It was obviously published by Philadelphia Quakers, this much is beyond dispute, for there were no independent African American presses in New Jersey or Philadelphia at this time. And it was clearly typeset by them or their allies, at which stage we would be foolish not to imagine a fair amount of editing taking place. So the question is, did Johnstone write out his thoughts by hand and then deliver them to his friends? Did he dictate his observations from his prison cell to some white ally or allies? Was he engaged in extensive joint sessions wherein he either spoke or wrote his thoughts as part of a discussion with his allies? It was common practice up through the Civil War for runaway slaves to dictate their life stories to an amanuensis, a political ally, secretary, or ghostwriter who would work the oral history into narrative form: the New York lawyer David Wilson ghostwrote Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, whereas the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child worked closely with Harriet Jacobs on her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—so what roles, if any, did Johnstone’s amanuensis or amanuenses play in this process?13 Some role was played, I argue, because it is beyond the imagination that a runaway slave, trained not in letters but in the ways of plantation misery, would author the scholarly history of the ancient roots of slavery that The Address offers on pages 9–10. Likewise, if we compare Johnstone’s Address with documents produced by his peers (such as Cyrus Bustill, to whom I return), we notice that Johnstone’s Address features dictionaryprecise spelling, more traditionally elegant sentences, and a stunning grasp of European history—the text is so professional in its tone, so glossy and erudite, that it stretches credibility to assume that an unschooled runaway slave wrote it. In short, while Johnstone was obviously a central member of the creative team that produced The Address, he was not alone. I raise these questions not because I want to diminish Johnstone’s role in our national history but because the text’s multivocality suggests that it was a team effort, and hence among the nation’s first sustained crossracial attempts to abolish slavery, oppose the death penalty, and imagine a New World free from racism. Moreover, if we consider the implications of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s comment from the preface to Frank J. Webb’s The Gairies and Their Friends, that “the incidents are mostly true ones, woven together by a slight web of fiction,” then we are obliged to ask how the co-producers, editors, and supporters of such texts sought to shape them according to specific persuasive needs. As Dwight A. McBride

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argues, situating the earliest examples of African American textual production within the life-and-death stakes of abolitionist discourse suggests that “the discursive terrain does not simply function to create a kind of over-determined way of telling an experience; it creates the very codes through which those who would be readers of the slave narrative understand the experience of slavery.” This delicate work of shaping the story to fulfill cultural expectations, to make it more legible and persuasive by manipulating “social codes,” means that the Quaker abolitionists working with Johnstone were writing his Address not in the name of complete verisimilitude but rather, as Stowe suggested, in the name of merging “mostly true” representations with those that might make the text more persuasive for white readers.14 In Cities of the Dead, his stunning exploration of the performative dimensions of cultural production, and especially those dealing with race, Joseph Roach reminds us that “memory operates as both quotation and invention, [as] an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past.” By trying to brush history against the grain by reading Johnstone’s Address in the manner proposed above, I am, echoing Roach and Benjamin, hoping not only to re-create an historically accurate picture of what happened to Johnstone in 1797 but also to use his text as an inventional opportunity for trying to envision a different America, one where black and white Americans gather together across social divisions to fight for the common cause of ending racism, the death penalty, and the culture of violence that underwrites both practices. As an opening move in that endeavor, and to try to make sense of this historically important and rhetorically confusing document, I have divided my comments into a series of subgroups, each one tackling one of the Address’s main argumentative strategies.15

A GENRE-DEFYING CLAIM OF INNOCENCE

The Address of Abraham Johnstone’s repeated claims of innocence flout wellestablished genre expectations, for the vast majority of final testimonies and gallows broadsides from the period close with the convict exclaiming his guilt, appealing to God for mercy, and thanking the state for killing him. In fact, in chapter 2, I discussed William Smith’s The Convict’s Visitor, a manual teaching clergy how to administer to the condemned, wherein Smith advises that prehanging prayer sessions should be crafted

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by clergymen so that they end with the convict accepting his guilt, asking God for mercy, and exclaiming, “I believe! O Lord strengthen my faith.” Such deathbed conversions, confessions, and calls for grace were a core expectation of the dramatic testimonies prisoners were expected to offer from the gallows. Smith’s Convict’s Visitor is thus a primer, a how-to guidebook for producing precisely the kind of rhetorical performances, both before and “at the time of execution,” that would justify both executions and state power. As argued in chapter 2, rhetorical critics refer to such acts of ventriloquism as prosopopoeia, a form of rhetorical counterfeit or impersonation in which the relationship between an idea and the speaker of the idea is blurred or even faked. In the case of The Convict’s Visitor, elite men of the cloth are taught how to speak their own words through the mouths of the damned, who, lingering at death’s doorstep, are coerced into praising the same secular and heavenly laws they have spent their lives breaking. Such coerced conversions were a key aspect of turning gallows testimonies into occasions for counterfeiting the words of about-tobe-dead criminals, turning hangings into occasions to stage plays wherein dominant social values were reproduced. It is a mark of Johnstone’s and his allies’ bravery that they refused these genre expectations, instead using the Address to offer a clarion call for social justice.16 How post-Revolutionary Americans talked about the death penalty in turn marked a larger change in the culture’s notions of authority and allegiance. The brutal public violence used against colonial subjects (including boring tongues, cropping ears, whippings, cartings, beatings, dunkings, brandings, hangings, and burning at the stake) was often rendered without any public speech accompanying the act, and the executions of criminals during the Revolution were usually accompanied by high-minded sermons, fire-and-brimstone affairs wherein elites lectured the lowly; but the violence of post-Revolutionary executions would be accompanied by testimonies ostensibly reflecting the “last wishes” or “dying words” of criminals who were about to die. No longer silenced or spoken for, even the damned were, at the dawn of the age of democracy, given a voice in the new Republic—but such voices were often sites of counterfeiting, contestation, and clashing commitments. For example, consider the Narrative and Confession of Thomas Powers, a Negro from 1796. As far as we can tell, Powers was a rogue of the highest order, a lifetime destroyer of law, a perpetual blaster of class and racial deference, yet Powers’s prosopopoeia-wielding handlers had the gall to portray him marching to

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the gallows in Connecticut while praising “the justness of my punishment.” Or consider the October 1797 broadside conveying the Life, Last Words and Dying Speech of Stephen Smith, a “black man who was executed at Boston,” wherein the man about to be hanged was portrayed by his ventriloquist executioners as a repentant believer who “ask[s] forgiveness of all whom I have injured” and who “hope[s] God will forgive me for the sake of Jesus Christ.” John Bly and Charles Rose, two white farmers hanged in 1787 for their roles in Shays’s Rebellion, suffered a similar fate, as their last words—these coming from men who had just rebelled against the government!—were printed with this whopper of a tall-tale wish: “remember that Government is absolutely necessary to restrain the corrupt passions of men; obey your honest Governors; be not allured by designing men—pay your honest debts and your reasonable taxes—use your utmost endeavors to give peace to your divided, distracted country.” Does anyone actually believe that Bly and Rose went to their deaths spouting such drivel, and hence renouncing every reason that had led them to raise arms against the state? Perhaps Powers, Smith, and Bly and Rose actually believed what they are attributed as having said, illustrating the efficacy of the kind of deathbed preaching taught in The Convict’s Visitor, but I believe that they were spoken for by their executioners. For the sheer repetition of this pattern of conversion, wherein criminals, sinners, and rebels miraculously find God and suddenly seek the respect of, and even forgiveness from, the same authorities they have spent their lives mocking, suggests strongly that these confessions were not authentic but rather political productions, mimes, examples of prosopopoeia.17 The cases of Powers and Smith raise a related question about race. It would be many years before minstrels would perform songs and skits on vaudeville stages (and eventually in films) where white actors would use the conceit of “blackface” to appropriate, make fun of, imagine, and try to control the lives of black Americans, but in these prosopopoeiapacked gallows confessions we sense the early formation of that strategy of representation. Indeed, even while white supremacists would continue to brutalize slaves and abolitionists up through the end of the Civil War, we witness here the early formation of a new regime of discursive power, one where representations rather than bodily violence were becoming a dominant form of exercising authority.18 Albeit practiced for different political ends, The Address of Abraham Johnstone falls within this tradition of prosopopoeia, for it is highly unlikely

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that an unschooled black farmer who had spent most of his life toiling as a slave would have been able to produce such a document. Moreover, The Address offers up some suggestive textual evidence of clashing political visions. For example, “The Address of Abraham Johnstone” that opens the larger Address begins with this genial greeting: “Brethren, it is with a heart overflowing with love and humble hope in my God and Redeemer, and general benevolence, charity and good will to all mankind, that I address you” (3). These lines fulfill generic expectations for the opening of a sermon, yet they are hardly the sentiments of a man about to be hanged for a crime he claims he did not commit. As we shall see, the latter parts of The Address levy harsh charges against a number of white neighbors, whom Johnstone accuses of scheming against him broadly and lying about the particulars of his case. Nonetheless, the second paragraph of the “Address of Abraham Johnstone” section appears to justify the state’s actions, as Johnstone thanks the state for providing “a candid and impartial trial” complete with “a jury of my peers, twelve truly good and worthy men whose integrity and love of truth I so well know” (4). Johnstone later advises his black neighbors to “bless God that you are in a country where the laws are wholesome, and where the majority of the leading characters are liberal minded, humane, generous, and extremely well-disposed to all our colour” (13). These are bizarre passages, for the bulk of the “Dying Words” and “Letter to His Wife” sections argue again and again against precisely these claims. The Address thus opens in one voice, with a fraternal hello to local brethren, glossy prose, elegant sentences, and a gentlemanly nod to the state’s fair handling of the case and its “wholesome” laws, yet it closes in another voice, with Johnstone exclaiming in a short and folksy lament, “it is a shameful death to be suspended in the air between Heaven and earth like a dog” (44).19 Rhetorical and literary critics often refer to texts packed with such perspective-revising shifts in tone and voice as ironic, yet in this case I believe that would be a mistake, for these clashing voices feel to me less like examples of irony than eruptions of clashing political visions and perhaps authorial intentions. For while parts of The Address constitute a shout of anger, an accusatory attack on those merciless souls who support slavery, this opening section appears to be an attempt to mimic cultural expectations regarding both the form (long sentences, philosophical digressions, arguments rooted in theological passages) and content (forgiveness, submission before God, humility) of a traditional sermon. Indeed, Johnstone

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sounds here like a properly trained preacher, a prudent man seeking to turn tragedy into wisdom, when he argues that he “conceives it a duty incumbent upon me at this time to admonish and counsel you with respect both to your present and future welfare” (5). Johnstone may have been a remarkably talented, polyvalent writer capable of penning the vastly different sentences quoted above; or he may have been—as I suspect— working closely with his Quaker allies, who, while telling his story, chose to shape it into a form white religious readers would recognize. The first part of what I am calling the strange politics of prosopopoeia therefore entails turning Johnstone’s story into a sermon that, while attacking slavery, also supports the larger legal and cultural constructs that put the law in place. Thus, while The Address of Abraham Johnstone hinges in large part on a genre-defying declaration of innocence, the pamphlet’s opening sermonic section, and its familiar conservative strand of theological compensation, produces a radical critique of one instance of injustice (Johnstone’s hanging) that nonetheless appears to justify the larger legal apparatus (the state that provided his supposedly “candid and impartial trial”) that makes that injustice possible. This combination of criticizing one aspect of the political order while reinforcing other parts of it is perhaps most obvious in The Address’s marshalling of what I shall call Franklineque tropes of persuasion.

FRANKLINESQUE TROPES OF PERSUASION AND THE POLITICS OF PROTESTANT MANNERS

As Johnstone’s sermon progresses, it interweaves into the generic religious themes and genre-defying political claims addressed above yet another frame of argument that, for lack of a better word, I will call Franklinesque. For even while Benjamin Franklin was among the nation’s leading abolitionists, one of the Revolution’s key international diplomats and spokespersons, and a supporter of the most radical legislative causes at home—he was, in short, the Revolution’s most seminal and progressive figure—he had also cultivated a reputation as the young nation’s spit-spot proprietor of Protestant manners. Writing as Poor Richard in his annual almanacs, where he was a one-man machine of homey quips, pithy how-to tips, and biblical parables turned to managerial needs, Franklin draped his radical politics in the folksy garb of

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commonsense prudence, good manners, and moderation in all things. Johnstone’s Quaker handlers would have spent their lives circulating close to Franklin-the-man and steeped in Franklin-the-myth, so it comes as no surprise that throughout Johnstone’s sermon he portrays himself, like Franklin, as persevering in the face of overwhelming political and economic difficulties, pulling himself up the social ladder by engaging in good hard purifying work, and shuffling along with undaunted good cheer.20 For example, Johnstone preaches, “In the first place then, I most earnestly exhort and pray you, to be upright, and circumspect in your conduct” (6). Like Franklin, Johnstone argues that being upright is only praiseworthy if rendered as public service: “Indeed, I ever conceived public utility to be the touchstone of moral truth” (16). That such claims echo Franklin’s Poor Richard persona, who touts petit bourgeois manners, is obvious; that such claims are being rendered by a poor black farmer who never served in public office, never joined in public service, never participated in any public political actions, and was most likely—at least technically—a runaway slave (we’ll return to this below), should indeed prompt us to wonder who actually wrote these words. The question of authorship is less important, however, than recognizing the rhetorical logic behind their production: that is, whether Johnstone or his Quaker allies or some combination of them actually authored these lines, the concerned parties appear to have recognized that pleading for Johnstone’s life, arguing against this particular misuse of the death penalty, and challenging slavery in general—radical causes for the day—were likely to be more effective if rendered via these Franklineque tropes emphasizing public service and Protestant manners. Thus, even while levying harsh critiques against “ungenerous and illiberal minded persons . . . particularly those who oppose the emancipation of those of our brethren who as yet are in slavery” (6), Johnstone pleads with his audience: “I earnestly exhort ye my dear friends to refrain from cursing, swearing and all manner of prophane language” (23). And so Johnstone’s readers are assumed to be furious at the outrages of slavery yet also decorous in the expression of such anger; for like Franklin, Johnston hammers slavery on one page only to turn to commonsensical manners talk on the next. Thus channeling the Protestant work ethic made famous by Franklin, Johnstone asks his readers to “be diligent and industrious in all your callings, manners

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of business and stations in life” (27), before turning to the ultimate Franklinesque trope of being “frugal” (28). The Address of Abraham Johnstone thus portrays this allegedly wrongfully convicted black farmer as a decent, hardworking man suffused with popular American principles; like Old Lightning Rod himself, Johnstone struggles to achieve freedom and success despite overwhelming odds, all the while maintaining good spirits and a proper sense of humility. It becomes painfully obvious as the Address progresses, however, that Johnstone’s life was lived under a very different rubric. Regardless of the implications of a string of accusations of theft and murder, to which I turn to below, Johnstone admits at the close of his “Dying Words” section to practicing a “too great lust after strange women” (40). This admission is amplified in his closing “Letter to His Wife,” where Johnstone admits that he “lusted after other women” (43) and committed numerous “transgressions . . . against God and our marriage bed” (43)—so many, in fact, that his wife, Sally (whom he also addresses as Sarah), refuses to come visit him in the jail in the final days before his hanging. There could be many reasons why Sally “would not consent to come and see me” (43), but Johnstone’s own confessions suggest that she may have been good and tired of her husband’s philandering. The closer we come to hearing Johnstone’s voice in his “Letter to His Wife,” then, the more glaring the gap between the biographical details of his life and the soaring sermonic appeals and upright Franklinesque tropes of persuasion offered in his opening “Address.” Squaring that cycle of textual contradictions points us back, again, to the strange politics of prosopopoeia, whereby I suspect Johnstone’s Quaker allies sought to use the appearance of Johnstone’s final words to offer a series of behavior-regulating suggestions to their neighbors. The fact that Johnstone was apparently no paragon of Protestant virtue is beside the point; what matters is that his hanging provides an occasion for attacking the brutality of slavery, questioning the indecency of the death penalty, and praising abolitionists as “men whose bosoms glow with philanthropy” and whose “spirit rises indignant” against slavery (7), all the while preaching good middle-class values. As we shall see, Johnstone and his allies sought to wrap these layered political arguments not only within Franklinesque tropes of persuasion but also within one of the seminal images of Western culture—and so The Address returns again and again to the image of Christ on the cross.

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LIKE CHRIST, ANOTHER WRONGFUL BUT JOYOUS DEATH

Christ’s behavior on the cross underwrites all execution sermons and testimonials. For while he risked life and limb to help others only to end up being crucified, he nonetheless went to his death forgiving his murderers and thankful for his imminent arrival in heaven. Execution sermons hinged in no small part on expectations that convicts would emulate this behavior: they were supposed to see the error of their ways, accept the law, ask for mercy, and hence prepare themselves for meeting God. The Address of Abraham Johnstone puts an interesting twist on this genre expectation, for Johnstone argues again and again that because he is innocent, he welcomes the chance to confront his maker—his innocence sends him to death with a light heart. “Yes dear brethren,” Johnstone exclaims, “with joy will I rush into the presence of my God” (5). Leaving behind a life of toil and strife, Johnstone welcomes his hanging for launching him into “the outstretched arms of a merciful God open to receive me into the mansion of bliss and tranquility” (6). Even though wrongfully convicted, Johnstone promises that he, like Christ, “leave[s] this world with joy, and without the least regret” (41). In fact, in his closing “Letter to His Wife,” Johnstone makes this line of argument explicit: like Jesus, Johnstone is about to “die innocent of the crime I am to suffer for,” yet just as Jesus “prayed for and forgave his enemies,” “so do I most freely forgive mine” (45). The Address of Abraham Johnstone thus treads a fine line between scathing critiques of the social system that has strung up another innocent black man and soothing assurances that all will be well in the great hereafter.21 Readers might assume that the compensatory latter half of that argument cancels out the political power of the first, or they might assume that it wraps the text in a more reader-friendly garb—asking which reading is more likely to have driven his contemporaries’ understanding of the text leads us to an undecidable interpretive and historical impasse, for there is no evidence pointing to the ways Johnstone’s neighbors responded to his Address. But regardless of how one chooses to answer that question, the point remains that Johnstone and his allies, at least in the passages considered here, assumed that invoking the tradition of an innocent yet forgiving Christ was more rhetorically productive than levying a series of harsh accusations against those who hanged Johnstone. Given my comments about the Address’s multivocality and internal complications,

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however, readers will not be surprised to learn that this latter strategy is employed as well, to ends that are mixed at best.

BIOGRAPHY AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE

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(AND SOMETIMES AS PARALYSIS)

Thus far I have examined Johnstone’s genre-defying claims of innocence, his Franklinesque tropes of persuasion, and his Christlike narrative of a wrongful yet joyous death; to a large extent, these three argumentative forms entail trying to forward a radical political critique while sounding like a good Quaker. I have wondered if the tensions between these strategies might be explained by the fact that the Address was the product of multiple authors, many of whom, using what I have called the strange politics of prosopopoeia, took Johnstone’s hanging as an opportunity to speak through the about-to-die farmer. No simple act of appropriation, this speaking-through and speaking-for would have been a smart political risk wherein activists used the controversy surrounding a contested execution to raise related questions about slavery and racism. Whether Johnstone’s allies engaged in the strange politics of prosopopoeia, or whether they simply took his words and printed them straight up, there can be no doubt that the authors and producers of The Address of Abraham Johnstone tried to use the hanging of a black neighbor, a familiar exercise in racial terror, as an occasion to produce hope. This is a remarkably complex endeavor, however, for as we learn the details of Johnstone’s life it is hard not to feel overwhelmed by the unshakable force of racial prejudice. Indeed, reading the second part of the larger Address, the “Dying Words of Abraham Johnstone,” demonstrates not only that biographies can be political tools chronicling the everyday injustices of slavery, but also that those narratives, when rendered in crushing detail, can leave a reader feeling helpless. The “Dying Words” section begins with the admission that “my real name is Benjamin Johnstone” (32). Born a slave in Johnnycake Landing Possom Town, Delaware, Johnstone describes bouncing from master to master (from Doctor John Skidmore to Samuel Skidmore to John Grey to Edward Callaghan to James Craig), getting sold as each new master’s ventures failed in the rough-and-tumble economy of the postwar years. Johnstone claims to have saved the life of one of his masters by pushing him aside from the onrushing knife of a would-be murderous slave, whom Johnstone then subdued in heroic fashion. By thwarting a fellow

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slave’s violence, Johnstone earned the everlasting thanks of his master, who promised that upon his deathbed he would grant Johnstone his freedom (32–34). Manumission was no simple matter at this time, however, and so when the master died unexpectedly, apparently too quickly to complete the promised will, one of the dead master’s relatives sought control of the plantation, including all of its slaves. We will never know the details of that oral promise made between Johnstone and his master, but we can surmise that without a formal document of manumission, local courts would not have taken the word of a slave hoping for freedom over that of a wealthy white man hoping to inherit riches—meaning Johnstone was facing almost certain re-enslavement at the hands of his dead master’s relative and the property-defending local court. Worse yet, the area was allegedly crawling with “Georgia men” (34), bounty hunters who would steal free blacks and sell them southwards into slavery, meaning Johnstone was doubly threatened by both the legal system of slavery and its underground black-marketeers. And so Benjamin Johnstone escaped, changed his name to Abraham, and moved in 1792 to Woodbury, New Jersey, where he rented a small plot of farmland and began the slow process of wringing a living from south Jersey’s sandy soil.22 This opening part of his biography therefore portrays Johnstone as a hardworking, life-affirming, upstanding man of his word, but also, at least technically, as a runaway slave. “The Dying Words of Abraham Johnstone” makes it painfully clear that that is precisely how Johnstone’s white neighbors treated him: as a fugitive. Woodbury was founded in 1684 when the Woods family from Berry in Lancashire, England (thus the town’s original naming as Woodberry), arrived on the Shield. By 1797 Woodbury, like most small towns in the new nation, was run by a tightly knit group of families who had first settled the land and earned subsequent distinction in the Seven Years War and the War of Independence. Such elite families may have tolerated a black farmer on the fringes of their town, but they did not accord him any sense of neighborly belonging or hope of advancement. In fact, we learn from the “Dying Words” that life in Woodbury was a constant struggle, frequently in the form of unpleasant rows with neighbors. For example, when Johnstone fell ill in 1793—yellow fever was then ravishing Philadelphia—his wife bartered her labor for a much-needed blanket (it was but an “old carpet hung out of doors on a nail” [35]) owned by her employer, Mrs. Lockwood. In the course of nursing him back to health, and apparently feeling that

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leaving him alone might produce unwelcome consequences, Johnstone’s wife skipped work one day to care for her husband. Instead of offering additional aid or granting her hired help the day off, Mrs. Lockwood allegedly made a public fuss, claiming that Johnstone and his wife “might as well have stolen” the blanket (35).23 Mrs. Lockwood’s treatment of the Johnstones was not exceptional. In fact, fulfilling the explanatory role assigned either to runaway slaves or free blacks whenever things began to go wrong or items turned up missing, Johnstone appears to have been a handy scapegoat for any number of unexplained events. When William Tatem found his supplies unexpectedly low he accused Johnstone of “robbing his smoak house” (35); similar charges were leveled by Samuel Folwell and Mark Brown (36). While duly noting this string of accusations, Johnstone steadfastly swears, “I declare myself innocent” of all charges (36). Given the state of public records for Woodbury from this time, we will never know whether Johnstone was in fact innocent or guilty of these charges. We can surmise with a strong sense of certainty, however, that this barrage of accusations would have created a sense in the town that Johnstone was precisely what was expected of a black stranger scratching a living from the land in the age of the Haitian revolution: trouble waiting to happen, criminal intention lying in wait, latent rebellion verging on explosion. Given this historical context, it does not stretch the imagination to surmise that Johnstone was hanged for reasons having less to do with strict legal questions than with larger cultural fears, and in fact this is the most politically pointed theme within Johnstone’s Address: that he was framed according to the needs of local white elites who sought to use race as an excuse for a landgrab. But as we shall see, the more elaborate the claims of his being framed, and the more completely Johnstone portrays the stacking of the cards against him, the more we are hit with a sense of hopelessness.

THE TROPE OF CONSPIRACY; OR, HOW RACISM RUINS JUSTICE

Among the many rhetorical strategies and political themes jostling side by side in The Address of Abraham Johnstone, one of the most consistent and consistently grating is the charge that Johnstone was framed. In fact, as we progress through his case, it becomes apparent that we could plausibly argue that his hanging in the name of the law was little more than a glorified lynching. Some of Johnstone’s abolitionist handlers certainly felt

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this way, for before readers could begin studying his Address, the back of the title page offered a note “TO THE PUBLIC,” which observes that Johnstone’s execution is “the general subject of much conversation, and is really what may be called a singularly uncommon and peculiar case, as there was not positive evidence of the fact [his supposed guilt]; the proof being founded entirely on presumption, and that even not the most violent.” Johnstone’s abolitionist supporters thus report that the “singularly uncommon and peculiar” nature of the case stems from the fact that he was convicted and subsequently executed “solely on presumption,” on evidence of “so vague a nature” as to cast serious doubt on the justice of the punishment. Johnstone supports this editorial preface by repeatedly stating: “I declare my innocence” (5), “I am innocent” (40), and “I am perfectly innocent” (42). More than just the victim of a wrongful conviction and unjust hanging, however, Johnstone, according to the forceful and even bitter argument in the Address, was sacrificed for the economic advantage of local elites who could rely upon Johnstone’s race to stand as evidence enough to convict him of a crime he did not commit. If that thesis is correct, and if Johnstone was hanged because of a larger conspiracy, one where race played the central justifying role in trumping up false charges, then Johnstone’s execution is not “singularly uncommon and peculiar” but in fact representative of the foundational relationships among race, class, crime, and violence in post-Revolutionary America. There is ample reason to believe that this unsettling charge is true. Indeed, the most glaring problem with the case against Johnstone was its lack of evidence: Tom’s body was never found, there were no witnesses to the supposed crime, and there was no physical evidence (such as a murder weapon, blood, or other criminal detritus). Instead, Johnstone was convicted on the basis of the testimonies of a handful of neighbors; of those testifying against him, Johnstone argued that both Richard Skinner and Henry Ivens lied (36–37). Nevertheless, and returning to the rhetorical strategy of echoing Christlike sentiments, Johnstone prepared for death by forgiving those who lied against him, declaring, “I most freely forgive him [Ivens] and all the world, for the world can do me no injury. It is true man may hurt the body, but he cannot reach sufficiently far to injure the soul: that belongs solely to God—and may God bless, forgive, and protect Henry Ivens and family” (38). While asking God to bless Ivens portrays Johnstone as a forgiving man prepared to meet his maker with a clean conscience, Johnstone did not leave this world without planting seeds of

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suspicion against his neighbors. In fact, along with the supposedly tainted testimony of Skinner and Ivens, Johnstone claimed that Enoch Sharp lied as well, and that “Samuel Huffsey and William Nicholsen have long persecuted me with the utmost rancour and malice” (39). And so, apparently with the dubious evidence provided in court by Skinner, Ivens, Sharp, Huffsey, and Nicholson—no doubt supported by the I-knew-it-allalong nods of Mrs. Lockwood, Tatem, Folwell, and Brown—Johnstone was sentenced to die. Ostensibly writing from his jail cell the day of his hanging, Johnstone prayed, “O Lord bless them, and receive my spirit. Amen—I bid ye all an eternal Farewell. Abraham Johnstone, Woodbury jail, Saturday, July 8, 1797” (41). Before issuing his calm farewell to this world, however, Johnstone ventured a chilling thesis: that Huffsey had arranged the whole affair to claim Johnstone’s bountiful crops, which, five years following his arrival in the area, were flourishing on land tied up in a lease with Huffsey. Furthermore, we know that Tom, the missing slave supposedly murdered by Johnstone, was Huffsey’s chattel; in fact, Huffsey claimed that he sent Tom to Johnstone’s house on a business errand the night of his disappearance (39–40). From the distance of over two hundred years, and acknowledging that there are many possible explanations for this disappearance, I would venture that it is likely that Tom simply ran away, perhaps with Johnstone’s help. Huffsey may very well have charged Johnstone with murder, then, either as a means of punishing him for aiding Tom’s escape, or, more likely, in the hope that the court would punish Johnstone not by hanging him but by making him pay restitution to cover Huffsey’s lost property. This plan (if I may call it such) would have been virtually assured of success, for one of the 1682 laws William Penn adopted for governing Pennsylvania (and which in turn was used in many colonies) stated that “all lands and goods of felons shall be liable to make satisfaction to the party wronged twice the value; and for want of lands or goods, the felons shall be bondsmen . . . till the party injured be satisfied.” The New Jersey version of this law, passed 104 years later, as part of the 1786 act I turn to below, stated that any ex-slave convicted of a crime that did not entail death would be forced to “remove out of the state” within one month of his or her release from jail. Those who did not comply with this forced removal would be sold by the “Sheriff . . . at publick Auction”—Johnstone would thus be sold back into slavery, presumably to Huffsey. Indeed, if prosecuted under the customary sense of restitution established in the 1682

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Pennsylvania law, Johnstone’s conviction for the murder of Tom—less as a statement about protecting the humanity of a slave than about protecting Huffsey’s property—would mean that he was required both to forfeit his crops to Huffsey and to serve as his “bondsmen” until Huffsey was “satisfied” that his loss had been repaid. If prosecuted under the 1786 New Jersey version of the law, Johnstone would be forced either to leave the state, hence forfeiting his crops to Huffsey, or to be sold back into slavery. When Abraham Johnstone was charged with murder in 1797, then, he confronted legal precedents, political norms, and cultural fictions that all pointed to his assumed guilt—his death was virtually a foretold result of rising white supremacy in the age of the Haitian revolution.24 The Address of Abraham Johnstone is therefore so relentless in its marshalling of details, all of them pointing to Johnstone’s almost preordained hanging, that it would not be out of the question for some readers to finish the text and want not so much to overthrow slavery or to abolish the death penalty as to fall down exhausted or to limp toward the liquor cabinet. This is one of the dilemmas of all attempts at political persuasion: in venturing to criticize the powers that be, activists may actually overwhelm their readers or hearers. In this case, Johnstone’s portrayal of race and class relations in post-Revolutionary America is so glum, it unveils a system of power so densely interwoven with daily life, that it leaves you feeling ashamed to be an American, ensnared in machinations beyond your reach, and literally dumbfounded regarding how to go on living amid so much injustice and hardship. I am reminded, then, of Theodore Weld’s American Slavery As It Is, an 1839 text meant to shock the world toward abolition by offering what Stephen Browne has called “a compendium of horrors.” The text sold well and is rightly hailed as one of the seminal antislavery documents in American history, yet Browne has argued that its gruesome piling up of facts and images is so potent, almost pummeling readers, that one likely response was “exhaustion.” Whether Browne’s suspicion is correct is a discussion better left for another day; my point in raising his concern about Weld’s compendium is to foreground the delicate balancing act in showing horrors as a motivation to action, which may instead produce exhaustion. Given my comments on the multivocality of Johnstone’s Address, however, and considering its deft combination of genre-defying claims of innocence, Franklinesque tropes of persuasion, depictions of a wrongful but joyous death, and harrowing portrayals of the everyday details of slavery in the

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South and racism in the North, we can assume that different readers would take away different messages, using the Address as needed for various political purposes. The multilayered and at times perhaps clashing voices of the Address, what I have suggested are the textual marks of prosopopoeia, may have enabled different audiences to latch onto the text in selective ways. But as we shall see, trying to determine what groups made what uses of the text is an almost impossible task, for the archival record shows that Johnstone’s Address sank like a stone.25

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Gentlemen and Monsters in New Jersey Two archival factors make it extremely difficult to prove the thesis that Johnstone was framed, let alone demonstrate how the text was used by contemporaries. First, when the events in question unfolded, there were no regularly printed newspapers either in Woodbury or Gloucester County, and a review of the state’s leading papers at the time, the State Gazette & New-Jersey Advertiser and The Federalist, New-Jersey Gazette (both printed in Trenton), discovered no stories on Johnstone’s plight, meaning that there was no local news coverage either of Johnstone’s execution or the publication of his Address. Likewise, a search of the American Periodical Series database shows that Johnstone and his Address received no notice in the national press at the time. Second, Johnstone was convicted without the benefit of a grand jury, meaning that there is no court record of his trial. On 26 November 1788 the state legislature passed “A Supplement to an Act, intitled An Act to Prevent the Importation of Slaves into the State of New Jersey.” This act stipulated “That all criminal Offences of Negroes and Mulattoes, as well Slaves and Servants as free Persons, shall be enquired of, adjudged, corrected and punished, in like Manner as the criminal Offences of the other Inhabitants of this State.” Despite this attempt to render justice blind to class and color, custom dictated that most slaves and free blacks were denied fair trials—the line between legal executions and extralegal lynchings was thin. Although the lack of newspaper coverage and court records makes it difficult to verify Johnstone’s disturbing thesis that he was framed, I will nonetheless piece together a few suggestive threads from other sources. In doing so I hope to expand my analysis of Johnstone’s wrongful execution into a study of the dilemmas of authority and power in post-Revolutionary New Jersey, and, by extension, America.26

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This larger historical agenda bears its own methodological complexities, however, for because I can find next to nothing about Johnstone, I am forced instead to learn what I can about those who hanged him. For example, Enoch Sharp, one of the men Johnstone accused of lying against him in trial, was a member of a family that was among the colony’s and then the state’s oldest and most prominent landholders. By the close of the War for Independence, Enoch’s uncle, Anthony Sharp, was a reigning elite and a local military hero; his grandfather, Thomas Sharp, was a justice of the peace. This means that Enoch, the man whose testimony is in question, would have been among the privileged young men in the county. As a nephew of a war hero and the grandson of a justice of the peace, and through his inheritance a man on the verge of becoming one the area’s leading landholders, Enoch’s word would have carried considerable authority, maybe even enough to convict an innocent man.27 We know that political and economic relations in the young Republic at this time were held together by hierarchy and status, favors and obligations. This was particularly true in post-Revolutionary New Jersey, where the state was ruled—albeit with much resistance—by what Brendan McConville has described as an “intermarried quasi-aristocracy.” Huffsey would certainly have known Isaac, Enoch, Thomas, and Anthony Sharp, to whom he may have owed any number of favors—say, for a loan to plant a crop, for borrowing a horse, or for carrying his goods to market in Philadelphia, and so on. Huffsey would thus have been both familiar with and probably indebted to the power wielded by those local members of the quasi-aristocracy; indeed, the list of such favors provided by the mighty to the meager was extensive and was one of the chief means of assuring the loyalty of the less than mighty to their better-off neighbors. As McConville describes it, the lowly and the mighty were encouraged to recognize that “mutual commitments bound them together” against perceived threats to the traditional political and racial order. For Enoch to lie on Huffsey’s part, then, could have been one way of extending an allegiance-guaranteeing personal debt, of performing mutual commitment to a racially coded social order that saw Johnstone as a threat, or, more likely, of hoping to put Huffsey in a position where, by claiming Johnstone’s crops, he might be able to begin paying back some of his outstanding loans. Let me emphasize that while this is speculation on my part, triggered by Johnstone’s suggestions, this complicated tissue of rela-

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tions is consistent with the ways power, privilege, and prejudice entwined during this period.28 But rather than speculating about personal motivations that can never be proved, it may be more productive to think about the period’s obsessions with race, class, crime, and violence, particularly as lived in New Jersey—for herein lies the political genealogy of Johnstone’s hanging. Doing so encourages me to speculate that Enoch Sharp’s testimony need not be explained as an intentionally malicious act of lying so much as the culturally supported certainty of a wealthy white man for whom blacks, whether enslaved or free—especially following on the heels of the “shocks of revolution” reverberating northwards from the West Indies—were always already guilty. For New Jersey was wracked throughout its history by outbursts of violence related to slavery. The first African slaves were brought to east Jersey in 1627; thereafter the colony suffered from what Frances Pingeon has characterized as “acute racial tensions.” Indeed, in 1734 a rebellion planned by hundreds of slaves near Somerville was averted at the last minute. On 11 February, the Weekly Rehearsal reported the detection of “a Conspiracy among the Negroes there, to murder the English.” As a result, thirty slaves were “apprehended, one of them hang’d, some had their Ears cut off, and others were whipt.” Copious details of the plot were then published in the New-York Gazette on 25 March, when a terrified Jerseyan warned that “the design of these Negroes” was “to Rise at Midnight, Cut the Throats of their Masters and Sons, but not meddle with the Women, whom they intended to Plunder and Ravish the Day following.” Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have argued that within seven years, by the time of the 1741 New York City “conspiracy,” in which slaves and free blacks were hanged for allegedly plotting to burn down the city, plot-fearing whites had reached a state of paranoia where “‘Negro’ and ‘Convict’ were often one and the same.” While conflating one’s race and criminal profile was becoming common by 1741, the stories cited here from 1734 added a new dimension to the rhetorical arsenal of emerging white supremacy: the portrayal of alleged criminals as nonhumans (not simply lesser humans, like slaves, but not human). Indeed, the supposed architects of the 1734 plot were characterized as “these barbarous Monsters.” A follow-up story from the Weekly Rehearsal on 8 April 1734 called the plotters “those Monsters.” We thus witness our forebears producing a deadly rhetorical formula in which all

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blacks, whether free or enslaved, are assumed to be criminals, some of whom constitute a species of super-Otherness—they are monsters.29 And monsters were everywhere in New Jersey. During the 1741 panic in New York City, terrified whites in Hackensack (in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City) burned three slaves at the stake; in 1772 plans for an uprising were detected in Perth Amboy; in 1779, in a panic that was reproduced throughout the nation, revolutionaries in Elizabeth Town (sometimes spelled Elizabethtown, now Elizabeth) feared a conspiracy had been hatched by Tories who were gathering a force of free blacks and runaway slaves to strike a blow for the king. This list of rebellions is relatively short compared to some southern states, but when added to the flood of stories about Haiti, rumors of random acts of slave violence, hushed threats of retribution, and the memory of how well free blacks fought in the land wars that wracked the state in the late 1740s and 1750s, it contributed to a culturally pervasive fear, almost an obsession, with the threat of black violence. Richard Slotkin argues that these racialized fears about the rebellious and even monstrous violence of blacks began to coalesce at the close of the eighteenth century around “the idea that all black crime is implicitly revolutionary.” As we shall see below, this rhetorical conflation of black/crime/violence/rebellion was also driven by the success of free blacks in becoming community leaders; for in yet another strange example of how white supremacy relies upon reversing cause and effect, I demonstrate in the following section how the rise of black eloquence and leadership produced not respect and fraternity among whites but murderous fear.30

Free Men Inspire Terror: Johnstone’s Hanging and the Rise of Black Leadership It makes sense that the period’s obsessions with the supposedly rebellious violence of increasing numbers of slaves, runaway slaves, and free blacks—monsters all—made life more difficult for Johnstone; it is less intuitively obvious, however, to realize that white fears were also triggered by a rising culture of black eloquence and leadership. For the freedom of Johnstone and other successful blacks, so the argument went, served both as a lure to slaves to run away and, more importantly, as a strong

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counterexample to the cultural fictions required to make slavery look legitimate and even necessary. Indeed, it was difficult to argue that slavery was a “positive good” when men like Johnstone were doing passably well. In fact, in a letter of 1785 Benjamin Rush wrote that “the slaves who have been emancipated among us are in general more industrious and orderly than the lower class of white people.” Because such glaring counterexamples to the cultural fictions sustaining racism in general and slavery in particular could not be tolerated, free black citizens who achieved eloquence and leadership only further infuriated white supremacists. With his successes thus held against him, his failures magnified by hostile neighbors, and his skin color serving as an indictment, we can readily imagine how south Jersey whites, looking for a scapegoat to explain why Tom was missing, would have chosen Johnstone as a sacrificial victim.31 Furthermore, the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery was founded on 26 January 1793 in Burlington (just down the Delaware River from Trenton), apparently with the help of Quakers from Philadelphia. Slaveholding Jerseyans reacted with horror and, as Pingeon recounts their fears, predicted that even gradual emancipation would result in “crime, higher taxes, riots, and even insurrections.” Nonetheless, Arthur Zilversmit reports that in 1794 a bill proposing the gradual abolition of slavery in New Jersey “was defeated in the assembly by a single vote.” Like much of the young nation, then, New Jersey oscillated between abolition and slavery, between a hopeful vision of a future cleansed of racism and a terrifying vision of a future gutted by slave-based violence. Along with the anticipated economic hardships and simple racial hatreds driving opposition to emancipation, some Jerseyans feared that abolishing slavery (or even talking about it) would provide Philadelphia’s already thriving free black community with even more potential converts and comrades, thus enabling its continued expansion and maturation as a political force. In fact, one of the period’s leading voices for racial equality and immediate emancipation was Cyrus Bustill, a Philadelphia activist who hailed originally from New Jersey. Born in Burlington on 2 February 1732, Bustill was freed from slavery in 1769 and earned distinction in the War of Independence; he became a Quaker, moved to Philadelphia, achieved success as a baker, and was among the founders of the Free African Society in April 1787. By 1797, the year Johnstone was hanged on the other side of the Delaware, Bustill had opened a school for African

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American children and risen to a position of high regard among his Philadelphia neighbors—he was thus every slave master’s worst nightmare: an irrefutable counterargument to white supremacists everywhere.32 In 1787 Bustill addressed a gathering of slaves in Philadelphia. In comparison to Lemuel Haynes and other black abolitionists’ devastating prophecies of retribution at the hands of a vengeful God, Bustill’s approach might initially have reassured slave masters. For Bustill suggests that “you being in bondage in Particular, I would that ye take heed that afend [offend] not with your toungue, be ye wise as Serpants and harmless as Doves. . . . Other ways you Cannot Exspect him to side with you nor to Soport your Cause.” Following this advice, however, Bustill notes that “Sappose they [slave masters] Do not See it, the Great Master will See it.” God’s eventual judgment was thus implied, although not expressly characterized in the terrifying eschatological detail offered by Haynes. Above all, Bustill argued that one must not allow slavery to degrade his or her dignity. “Let us keep our hearts, with all the Diligence that in us Lays,” he implores, “Let us endeavour to walk worthy . . . [and] love the Lord our God. . . . Let us endeavour, by a Frugil Steady indostry to Procure an honst Living for Ourselves And Familys.” This long string of encouragements—including another nod to the Franklinesque trope of being frugal—ends in a phrase that would eventually become central to African American abolitionists: “Let us conduct ourselves as Men.” Bustill concludes his speech by assuring his listeners that if they are righteous and law-abiding, then they will “see Him so engaged on our behalf to Deliver from the bond of Slavery.” Knowing that blacks from Jersey now residing in Philadelphia were organizing to conduct themselves and their neighbors as men—which no one could have mistaken as anything less than fighting for political justice—would have been more than enough evidence to slaveholding New Jerseyans that free blacks and their Quaker allies were plotting great evil. In fact, Johnstone and his Quaker allies worried in the Address that “if one negro was befriended, it was feared to be setting a bad example to the others” (34)—even simple human kindness among outcasts would be interpreted in post-Revolutionary New Jersey, the authors are warning us, as either criminal, revolutionary, or both. There is no way to prove that Bustill’s successes in Philadelphia or the founding of New Jersey’s Abolition Society in 1793 caused Johnstone’s execution, yet surely the men who hanged Johnstone had such “bad examples” in mind when they killed their black neighbor.33

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Indeed, the fear of successful free blacks was intense in New Jersey and, as argued above, was accelerating throughout the nation because of fears related to the Haitian revolution. Although hard-and-fast notions of North and South would not coalesce until well into the antebellum period, even in the late Revolutionary era it was well known that southern plantation slavery was more brutal than the versions practiced in northern states such as New Jersey. Even though the state allowed slavery until 1846, most historians agree that because of the efforts of the area’s Quakers and its hard-to-farm soil, west and south Jersey’s relationship with slavery was tenuous at best. This meant that Pennsylvania, which gradually abolished slavery beginning with a complicated 1780 bill, and New Jersey, especially its Quaker-rich western and southern parts, constituted a borderland between slavery and freedom, South and North, even life and death for fleeing runaways. Hence, because of its liminal, borderland circumstances, 673 runaway servants and 189 runaway slaves are known to have passed through west Jersey between 1704 and 1779; we may safely suspect that many more runaways made it through the region without detection. The prevalence of runaways clearly cast a pall over the status of free blacks such as Johnstone, whom many neighbors no doubt suspected of being—and as I have shown here technically was—an absconding slave claiming to have been legally freed. But while Johnstone could be rhetorically conflated downward in class, and hence lumped together with the sins of runaways and petty thieves, I have also wondered here if he might have been conflated upward as well, and hence lumped together with the sins of successful black leaders like Bustill. If this suspicion is correct, then Johnstone’s case illustrates the omnivorous rhetorical capacity of white supremacy, which conflates the innocent and the guilty, the lowly and the mighty, recognizing neither individuals nor particulars but only the elastic signifier of skin color. Johnstone and his abolitionist allies would counter this thinking with the equally omnivorous rhetorical strategy of claiming that freedom knows no bounds, that God loves all his children, and that even slaves should be enveloped in the new Republic’s promises of life and liberty.34

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Conclusion: Abolitionist Discourse and the Trope of Universalism While Johnstone’s 1797 hanging was a place- and time-specific tragedy that unfolded within a fear-filled post-Revolutionary New Jersey, it also exemplifies some of the central narratives driving America’s now longstanding tradition of killing black men who are convicted of crimes on the basis of flimsy evidence, tried before heavily biased judges, and then sacrificed as examples of the fate awaiting those who threaten white supremacy. But as I have demonstrated here, the attempt to produce a spectacle of destruction that would make “the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle” was turned by a brave black farmer and some Quaker activists into an opportunity for trying to persuade their neighbors to end slavery and abolish the death penalty. Even death can be appropriated by creative activists as a tool for advocacy, even terror can be turned toward hope.35 Moreover, I have suggested that The Address of Abraham Johnstone is a multitonal document containing the voices of a community, including some who emphasize the Franklinesque trope of frugality, others who recall Jesus on the cross, some who attack slavery, others still who believe Johnstone was framed, and of course Johnstone himself, who appears here as a hardworking and godly yet doomed man swimming against the currents of racism in post-Revolutionary America. More than a cry of protest against a wrongful conviction and the cruel use of the death penalty, the Address rebukes both Gloucester County’s “quasi-aristocracy” and, more broadly, everyone who supports “the cruel and ignominious stripes of slavery” (11). Indeed, while the tone of the Address appears at times uneven, especially when addressing local judicial elites and their handling of the case—all those “wholesome” laws and such—the document’s overall stand against slavery is clear. For example, in a passage that combines a tribute to the innate humanity of all blacks, including slaves, an appeal to a benevolent Lord, and then a chilling suggestion about how slavery degrades even its supporters, Johnstone and his Quaker allies ask readers to ponder this powerful question: “Are we [blacks] not a living animated part of the creation? Are we not flesh and blood? . . . Lord, what is man? Or rather, what are not brutes?” (18). I have argued elsewhere that such questions point toward one of the period’s dominant abolitionist strategies: the attempt to portray both heavenly love and secular rights

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as universal goods that transcend race. Johnstone and his New Jersey abolitionist allies would have been familiar with this rhetorical maneuver, as one of their peers, the pseudonymous “Impartial,” argued in a 1781 editorial to the New-Jersey Gazette that the state’s white rebels “consider our liberty as a prelude to their release from slavery.” For “Impartial,” liberty was not a whites-only good, but a universal and therefore colorblind right, an expansive condition that should envelope all living (male) beings.36 This universalizing strategy was ubiquitous in Revolutionary and early-Federal abolitionist documents: among others, it was central to Benjamin Rush’s “On Slave Keeping,” to Thomas Paine’s “African Slavery in America,” to Samuel Hopkins’s A Dialogue, Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, to Lemuel Haynes’s Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping, to the (Paine-authored) Pennsylvania “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” and to Cyrus Bustill’s speech, “I Speak to Those in Slavery.” Clearly familiar with much of this early abolitionist literature, Johnstone’s Quaker allies wisely chose to employ their universalizing rhetorical strategy in The Address of Abraham Johnstone. Indeed, in a phrase that echoes the texts just cited, Johnstone employs this universalizing trope to argue that “God is neither a respecter of persons, nor colours, be they white or black, or mulatto, but respects them merely from their deeds and observance of his divine commands” (17). By asking this sweeping question, “What is man?” readers are not only invited to associate Johnstone’s Address with the period’s other seminal abolitionist documents, but also to consider the innumerable ways Johnstone’s rotten fate entwines with their own—for in taking the universalist route Johnstone appears to be prodding us toward a global understanding of the dense relationships linking race, class, crime, violence, and nothing less than the norms of citizenship in the new Republic.37 I find this universalizing trope heartbreaking, for it not only asks us to reappraise our relationships with Others, but to walk a mile in their shoes, to venture the humanizing and humbling risk of recognizing our shared hopes and fates. Reaching across the centuries, Johnstone thus challenges us to see both slavery and the death penalty as a pox upon us all. All the more reason not to lose sight of the fact that the text was produced after yet another black men was strung up—meaning that while the Address offers us evidence of the bravery of Johnstone and some Quakers, and an existential opportunity to practice our own versions of his universalizing

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discourse about rights, it also stands as a monument to barbarism. Indeed, I have shown here that Abraham Johnstone, a free man likely framed for a crime he did not commit, a man who in passing from this earth was able to leave his wife little more than one white hat and some tattered clothes (46), was killed because of the deadly intersections of race, class, crime, and violence in post-Revolutionary America. Johnstone died in vain, yet I hope in this chapter—demonstrating my own use of prosopopoeia—to have added his voice to the thousands of others arguing that Americans are wrongfully executed in the name of law and order; those voices are slowly but surely coalescing into an eloquent and popular movement against the death penalty. By honoring these voices, by asking again and again about how the legacy of slavery and the persistence of the death penalty muddy the fine line between humanity and brutes, we do our small part to redeem the nation, perhaps creating a community more attuned to the rhetorical construction of racism and less likely to accept the slaughter of innocents in spectacular rituals of destruction. While The Address of Abraham Johnstone remains an enigma, it nonetheless offers us a rare and heartbreaking glimpse into the social dynamics surrounding a late-eighteenth-century execution. The pamphlet’s publishers remained anonymous, and its authorship, which I have argued was a team affair hidden behind the use of prosopopoeia, is attributed solely to Johnstone, a man who had already suffered a harsh fate by the time his Address was made public. In retrospect, the less than forthcoming status of the Address’s authors, publishers, distributors, and supporters is even more curious, for by 1797 the leading men of the new Republic were publicly tackling these same issues. In fact, feeding off of the inspiration of Cesare Beccaria, and led by Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush, postRevolutionary Americans were riveted, beginning in 1787, by an intense debate about the death penalty. Whereas Johnstone hoped to spur his neighbors to new political consciousness by asking them to ponder the question, “What is man?,” Rush and his contemporaries relied upon a combination of theological, political, and practical reasoning, all wrapped up in the rhetoric of Enlightenment. But as we shall see in chapter 4, the Enlightenment too was riven with contradictions, meaning that any claim about the death penalty or slavery or democracy writ large, when justified by reference to Enlightenment principles, was bound to be confusing at best, cannon fodder for critics at worst.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Enlightenment, Republicanism, and Executions, 1785–1800

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elivering a July Fourth oration in Boston in 1785, John Gardiner, an Episcopal minister and “perhaps Boston’s most distinguished man of letters,” offered this observation on the relationships among the different forms of government and their corresponding stages of Enlightenment: The introduction and progress of freedom have generally attended the introduction and progress of letters and science. In despotick governments the people are mostly illiterate, rude, and uncivilized; but in states where CIVIL LIBERTY hath been cherished, the human mind hath generally proceeded in improvement, learning and knowledge have prevailed, and the arts and sciences have flourished.

Thus expressing a belief held widely at the time by post-Revolutionary Americans, Gardiner argues that Old World monarchies lead to stupid and unmannerly followers, whereas New World freedom and civil liberty lead to brave seekers of higher truths. Even before the war was won,

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Philip Freneau gushed in his 1775 poem, “The Rising Glory of America,” that the imminent revolution would usher in a world “more new, more noble, and more flush of fame / than all that went before.” The Enlightenment may have been initiated in Europe, the argument went, but it would reach its fruition in America, where Gardiner boasted that “learning and knowledge” were free to develop outside the stultifying grasp of “despotick governments.” Indeed, “in no part of the habitable globe is learning and true useful knowledge so universally disseminated as in our native country,” Gardiner claims, before asking, “where are the people who so universally interest themselves in all publick political matters as our fellow citizens at large?” Linking their education, oratorical skills, and political passions, Gardiner thus wonders of his fellow Americans: “Who debate more freely? Who, in general, conclude more justly?” As Freneau imagined it before the war, and as Gardiner saw if following the war, America was a land of Enlightenment and free debate, and thus of unprecedented justice and boundless promise.1 As we shall see throughout this chapter, debates about crime and punishment in general and the death penalty in particular in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America hinged in large part on the ability of interlocutors to marshal the rhetorics of Enlightenment and republicanism as support for their cause. But one of the difficulties in addressing how opponents and proponents of executions drew upon the rhetorics of Enlightenment and republicanism is trying to figure out what exactly Americans meant when they used those terms. For example, in his July Fourth oration of 1787, delivered in Hartford, Connecticut, Joel Barlow argues that American independence is historically exceptional because it was won in a war triggered not by “Ambition, Superstition, and Avarice, those universal torches of war,” but by “sober reason and reflection.” As enlightened reason and reflection led the colonies to rebellion in 1776, so Barlow argues that reason and reflection must now lead the new nation “in effecting the establishment of a permanent federal system.” This was a reference to the fate of the Constitution, which was then getting hammered out in Philadelphia; it would not be sent to the states for ratification until September, but by July 4 Barlow and his allies knew the fight for ratification was going to be intense. Hence, as if to add God’s weight to the Federalist side, Barlow reminds his listeners that while the nation owes its freedom to the heroism of fallen comrades and surviving allies, thanks are due “above all” to “our heavenly Benefactor, who hath

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hitherto smiled upon our endeavours.” Talk of God soon gives way to Imperial Dreaming; in fact, Barlow’s vision of the nation’s imminent greatness—much like Gardiner’s and Freneau’s—is so grand that he implores every citizen considering whether or not to ratify the new Constitution to “consider himself as the legislator of half mankind.” Barlow encourages listeners “to enlighten and harmonize the minds of our fellow citizens” regarding ratification by seducing them with visions of an empire ruled by a government described as “the child of reason.” Indeed, in his closing remarks Barlow announces that “the present is an age of philosophy; and America, the empire of reason.” For Barlow, then, Enlightenment is a catchall phrase synonymous with American independence, support for the Federalists and their Constitution, and heavenly blessing, which taken together amount to a recipe for a benevolent “empire of reason.”2 By 1787 Barlow was trying his best to become something akin to a modern poet laureate: his speeches and poems strived to serve sermonic functions by offering nothing less than benedictions upon Federalist leadership in an age of too-damned-much-democracy. For example, the July Fourth oration quoted above was commissioned by the Order of the Cincinnati, a club of Revolutionary elites who believed leadership in the new nation should be assumed by an order of former soldiers and “their eldest male posterity”—that is, by a hereditary military elite who were battle-tested in the norms of honor and valor. Founded in 1783 at West Point, with George Washington as its president, the Cincinnati smacked of Old World aristocratic privilege; hence Ben Franklin’s letter lambasting Washington’s “Order of Hereditary Knights [formed] in direct Opposition to the solemnly declared Sense of their Country!” Barlow was a favorite among this elite and ultranationalist crowd, as seen in the sales patterns of his immense philosophical poem, The Vision of Columbus. Leon Howard reports that when the book went to press in 1786, “the original list of subscribers included, in addition to Washington and Lafayette, the names of twelve generals, three major generals, thirty-three colonels, seventeen majors, and fifty-two captains . . . over one-fourth of the subscribed copies went into the upper ranks of the army and to their friends.” This tight relationship between Barlow’s heroic poem and the nation’s fighting elite amounted, Howard concludes in a bemused tone, to “the greatest exhibition of patriotism since the siege at Yorktown.” As discussed in chapter 2, this patriotism was driven in no small part by a fear of too-damnedmuch-democracy, what Barlow’s colleagues in the Connecticut Wits

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called anarchy. Indeed, Howard reminds us that Barlow was a lawyer “at a time when the people were closing courts, disrupting legal procedures, and promising violence to lawyers.” Like his fellow Federalist lawyers, established clergy, and members of the Order of Cincinnati, Barlow believed in rule by the best, in what Donald Scott characterizes as “public discipline built upon the habits of subordination, self-control, and religious nurture.” Barlow’s Enlightenment patriotism was thus rational and elitist; in contrast to the rowdy enthusiasms of too-damned-much-democracy, Barlow believed, as he said in his July Fourth oration, in a world of “sober reason and reflection.”3 At roughly the same time as Barlow was giving his nationalist encomium to the glorious aligning of American republicanism, Enlightenment rationality, and Christian benevolence, hence pointing toward a rising Federalist empire of reason driven by “a gentlemanly dislike of extremism,” Philadelphia’s Columbian Magazine, or Monthly Miscellany offered a glimpse into a strikingly different America. As was typical for magazines of the day, the Columbian concluded each issue with lists of recent deaths, organized by state. Under the listings for Pennsylvania at the close of the July 1787 issue, readers encounter this curious notice: “The poor old woman vulgarly called a witch died in consequence of the ill treatment she lately suffered from a barbarous and ignorant mob.” Despite Gardiner’s, Freneau’s, Barlow’s, and the Federalists’ best intentions of dragging their neighbors into the Enlightenment, and hence into their empire of reason, some New World inhabitants were still living in an old world populated by superstition. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine an action more contrary to what Federalist elites hoped was the enlightened and republican spirit of the age than this “barbarous and ignorant mob” murdering an elderly woman, allegedly a witch, in a brazen act of street violence. On the other hand, we could also think of a belief in witchcraft as an inarticulate yet powerfully felt partner of skepticism. As Michel de Certeau suggests in The Writing of History, modernity’s assault on an Old World ruled by an all-explanatory God unleashed multiple forms of trauma and uncertainty. “What used to be totalizing is no more than a feature within a landscape of disorder,” he argues, meaning that “witches’ hallucinations” and “rampant skepticism attest to the same absence”; that is, “sorcery and skepticism outline the void” of an Old World shattered by modernity. In short, the death of God leads not only to secular modernity but also to new forms of superstition. From this perspective, the mob

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rampaging against a witch in the streets of Philadelphia and Barlow’s and Gardiner’s Federalist high hopes for enlightened reason amount to different sides of a shared historical dilemma: how to make meaning in a New World rumbling its way toward modernity.4 But that modernity was desperately uneven in its pace of development. For example, in New Travels in the United States of America, a 1788 travelogue, J. P. Brissot de Warville celebrated the hustle-and-bustle lifestyle enabled by America’s emerging transportation system. Marveling at his ability to travel the ninety-six miles between New York City and Philadelphia in just one day of pleasant coach riding, Brissot gushed, “after no more than a century and a half of existence, and though thwarted by a thousand obstacles, Americans are already superior to nations which have been in existence for fifteen centuries.” At the same time, however, the streets of the New World also sported markers of a different kind of life, as Brissot commented wryly on “pigs wandering in the streets and rooting in the garbage. There is a law prohibiting them but it is not observed. I have read an American review that it is both sanitary and economical to let pigs roam in the streets.” While pigs wandered in search of victuals, Federalists chose to look into the future, seeing not grubby garbage removal but grandeur and greatness. In October 1787, just a few weeks after the proposed Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, the Massachusetts Centinel printed the lyrics to “The Grand Constitution.” There may have been pigs on the loose, but the song imagined a rising commercial power: Our trade and our commerce shall reach far and wide, And riches and honour flow in with each tide, Kamschatka and China with wonder shall stare That the Federal stripes should wave gracefully there.

The song envisions a capitalist empire so grand that U.S. flags will soon wave over the ports of foreign lands; the first verse accordingly closes with the rousing promise that “our Empire in glory shall ever remain.” Lest readers imagine that such Federalist visions were delusional, I should note that pigs clearing garbage from the streets were ubiquitous in early modernity, for this was an age not yet blessed with the publicly funded removal of refuse. As Lyn Lofland notes, “pigs must have been as common a sight in the cities of times past as the automobile is today.” I am highlighting Brissot’s observations, his celebration of the New World’s

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simultaneous modernity and squalor, not to mark a particular kind of cultural or historical blindness, but rather to observe the ability of a generation of settlers and travelers to balance contradictions with aplomb.5 Indeed, despite—and perhaps because of—these tensions between Enlightenment paeans to Reason and the practice of killing witches, or between Federalist visions of a rising commercial empire and the brute fact of pigs roaming the streets, Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America produced a remarkable generation of intellectuals who merged the pursuit of Enlightenment and New World republicanism, often via arguments about crime, violence, and punishment. Among many others, some of the leading figures in this movement were Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, William Bradford, and that most famous experimenter in all things political and scientific, Thomas Jefferson. In their own idiosyncratic ways, these men illustrate the fine line Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Americans walked by asserting the progressive, science-driven hopes of the Enlightenment while still holding onto, some more firmly than others, traditional notions of political privilege and heavenly prerogative. Indeed, to many observers the Enlightenment’s transformation of nothing less than the sense of how the human mind worked and how it affected the New World around it led to a dilemma regarding the ancient powers of revelation. For how could observers reconcile the bolt of thunder from heaven with the microscope’s boggling view of the interior spaces of life? How could students comprehend the telescope’s equally boggling view of the celestial bodies rotating around the Sun without doubting the Bible’s apparently inaccurate cosmological claims? Such questions led, as Andrew Delbanco observes, to a “contest in colonial America between belief and knowledge,” to a culture “dividing into skeptics and seekers”; likewise, Frank Luther Mott and Chester Jorgensen assert that “Calvinism was inveterately and completely antithetical to the dogma of the Enlightenment.” To a large extent these characterizations are apt, particularly so regarding debates about the death penalty, as pro-modernity and pro-Enlightenment activists relied heavily on the rhetorics of science and progress to portray executions as barbaric holdovers from ancient times, literally as tributes to a dead world of superstition and kings. To death penalty abolitionists, Calvinists who supported capital punishment were nothing less than Old World blockades preventing both the Enlightenment in general and American republicanism in particular from achieving their full glory.6

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On the other hand, debates about the relationships among the death penalty, Enlightenment, republicanism, and religion were also marked by interlocutors claiming to speak as champions of all of these positions at once, even while contesting the meaning of each of them. For example, writing in December 1783 to the Reverend Charles Nisbet in Montrose, Scotland, in the hopes of persuading him to accept the presidency of Dickinson College (an offer he accepted), Benjamin Rush paints a rousing picture of rising New World glory:

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Our governments are daily acquiring strength and consistency, and our people become every day more subject to law and order. Europe in its present state of political torpor affords no scope for the activity of a benevolent mind. . . . Here the benefactor of mankind may realize all his schemes for promoting human happiness. Human nature here (unsubdued by the tyranny of European habits and customs) yields to reason, justice, and common sense. . . . America seems destined by heaven to exhibit to the world the perfection which the mind of man is capable of receiving from the combined operation of liberty, learning, and the gospel upon it.

Rush was among his generation’s most outspoken advocates for abolishing the death penalty; he saw executions as contrary to the utopian promise of a New World driven by “reason, justice, and common sense.” A world suffused with the spirit of “liberty, learning, and the gospel” could surely devise more humane responses to crime, Rush argued, than snapping the necks of its convicts. For Rush, then, the Enlightenment, New World republicanism, and Christian benevolence coalesced around a swaggering national sense of greatness—America seems destined by heaven—that in turn demanded the abolition of executions.7 Rush’s thesis was challenged by an array of Calvinists for whom the troika of “liberty, learning, and the gospel” meant something entirely different. For these death penalty proponents, the Bible not only sanctioned but expressly called for executions. Furthermore, as the Bible was the basis of all reason, so the argument went, anyone calling for abolition in the name of Enlightenment was misinformed about both God’s will and his determinative power on human thought. Moreover, as all human government was but the earthly manifestation of heavenly beneficence, so republicanism was understood not as a means of transforming the world but as a means of achieving God’s larger plan, which included the

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death penalty as a central means of punishing sinners. Thus, while Rush and his allies called upon the Enlightenment, republicanism, and God to end the death penalty, these same concepts were called upon by death penalty supporters—including Robert Annan, to whom I turn below—as evidence of the need to continue executing those who broke the law. The boundaries of popular belief in post-Revolutionary America stretched far enough to include yet a third group, this one neither champions of the Enlightenment nor proponents of strict Calvinism; rather, this third school of thought came close to what we call today postmodernism—that is, instead of approaching life as structured by competing master narratives (faith vs. reason, good vs. evil, monarchy vs. democracy, free vs. enslaved), some perceived the world instead as a comic jumble of contingency. No less an elite figure than President John Adams, for example, wrote that one might characterize the period as an “Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Bonaparte, Tom Paine, of the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit; or anything but the Age of Reason.” As discussed in previous chapters, large parts of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, the Connecticut Wits’ Anarchiad, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and some of the articles in the American Bloody Register capture this vein of thought nicely, as they reveal a world governed not by reason or God but by whimsy and wit, foible and fault, arbitrary powers and absurd passions. “And which, one might ask, is worse, a cosmology of malignant spirits or a community populated by ruthless people who will stop at nothing to satisfy deviant desires?” As asked by Cathy Davidson, the question points to this sobering conclusion: that “rationality resolves none of these questions; explanation merely translates the locus of evil from the supernatural, the abstract, and the remote to the human, the personal, and the present.” This proto-postmodern thinking comes close to what Lewis Simpson calls “apocalyptic pessimism,” for it believes neither in progress nor perdition, instead seeing life as a pathetic carnival of errors. Because this line of thinking eschews anything resembling ethical consistency or political commitment, it serves executionists and abolitionists equally well. That is, one could argue from this position that hangings are further evidence of the depraved folly of man, useless shows of brutality that should be done away with, or one could argue that hangings are one of the only truly shattering events in the human spectrum of experience, a clarifying moment of life-and-death reality in an otherwise hopelessly clouded world of ambiguity.8

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To track the complexities of these arguments, I demonstrate below how Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Americans argued over the roles the Enlightenment, New World republicanism, and God played visà-vis crime, violence, and punishment in general and the death penalty in particular. Studying these questions enables me to track the course of modernity in the United States, for whereas proponents of the death penalty portrayed themselves as guardians of a theological order threatened by the anarchy launched by too-damned-much-democracy, opponents of the death penalty portrayed themselves as heralds of a new and modern age of enlightened justice. The period’s arguments about crime, violence, and punishment were therefore frequently less about the specific judicial questions of a given case than about clashing worldviews. Indeed, the period’s debates about crime, violence, and punishment enabled disputants to clarify their positions on larger issues regarding the pace of modernity, the promises of the Enlightenment, the status of God, the role of slavery, and, ultimately, the fate of the Republic.

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Jefferson’s Bill and the Contested Social Contract of Modernity Before turning to Thomas Jefferson’s 1778 bill addressing crime, violence, and the death penalty, I should note that even while willing to die in battle against the king’s mercenaries and henchmen, Jefferson and his contemporaries found intellectual challenges and political inspiration in the trunks of leather-bound books that arrived seasonally from Europe. When the continent’s philosophical fashions landed in America they were devoured by those who longed for the imprimatur of the Old World’s high style and aristocratic elegance. For example, the famous Italian philosopher, Cesare Beccaria, was received during the Revolutionary era as more than just another reformer; he was a star, a celebrity, a cause to be debated and honored; he was, as James Madison lamented many years later, “in the zenith of his fame as a Philosophical Legislator.” As one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, a cosmopolitan man of science, and among the New World’s most accomplished and forward-thinking reformers, Jefferson read Beccaria with enthusiasm. In fact, he was so impressed by Beccaria’s essay On Crimes and Punishments that he copied long passages from it—in Italian no less—into his running journal of

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ideas, quotations, and rough sketches known as a Commonplace Book. In his Autobiography, Jefferson lauded Beccaria as a voice of progress and good governance, saying he had “satisfied the reasonable world of the unrightfulness and inefficacy of the punishment of crimes by death.” One of the architects of the Revolution, our nation’s third president, and an early leader of the American Philosophical Society, and hence one of the figures most responsible for the texture of modernity and democracy in America, Jefferson would thus appear to have thought about law and order along lines heavily influenced by Beccaria.9 We should note, then, that Beccaria argued in his essay On Crimes and Punishments (1764) that leaders needed to move beyond spectacular rituals of bodily punishment, instead using forms of discipline that would highlight the state’s rationality and benevolence. The fact that his proposed alternatives to capital punishment, including banishment, forced labor, and impressment into the military, were likely to lead to severe physical pain and even death suggests that Enlightenment thinking was less about ameliorating pain than about making it more functional for the modernizing state. Indeed, in his note “To the Reader,” Beccaria declares that “far from diminishing legitimate authority,” his hope is “to reinforce it.” Pursuing this strategy of reformation in the name of authority may explain why Beccaria’s writings struck a chord with Thomas Jefferson, who, even while pursuing reforms, was always committed to reinforcing the power of those elites who managed “the empire of reason.”10 In fact, when Jefferson was asked to reform Virginia’s penal code in 1776, he was not as bold in his legislative actions as in his philosophical musings. Numerous historians, including myself, have written about the glaring schism between his public actions and private ruminations regarding slavery—that story will not be repeated here. But in thinking about the history of the death penalty in the United States we need to note that Jefferson’s understanding of the function of punishment appears to have been rather hidebound, for in his “Bill Proportioning Crimes and Punishments” Jefferson argued not so much for trying to produce a Beccaria-like system of mass-produced assent as for an Old World system of corporeal brutality. Indeed, his bill reads like a catalogue of the corporeal tortures Beccaria argued against. For example, for committing high treason, Jefferson proposed “death by hanging” or by “burying alive”; for petty treason he suggested “death by hanging” and “dissection”; for committing murder in a duel, he prescribed “death by hanging” and “gibbeting, if

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the challenger”; for committing rape, sodomy, or polygamy, he proposed “castration” for men and, for women, “cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole one half inch diameter at the least”; for maiming or disfiguring, he proposed “dismemberment”; and for “pretensions to witchcraft, &c.,” he called for both “dunking” and “stripes.” Jefferson’s proposed legal code was therefore stuffed with calls for Old World corporeal punishments, meaning that Jefferson read Beccaria without profiting from the Italian’s arguments. This is triply strange, for Jefferson copied Beccaria’s thoughts into his Commonplace Book; he later wrote that he believed his charge in drafting the bill was to produce laws formulated “with a single eye to reason”; and he prefaced his bill with the Beccaria-like argument that “the experience of all ages and countries hath shewn that cruel and sanguinary laws defeat their own purpose.” And so Jefferson read Beccaria and pointed to “reason” as his guiding light, yet his bill reads less like a tribute to Beccaria’s modernism than to the ancient law of lex talionis, the biblical rule from the book of Exodus: “If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”11 Jefferson apparently felt keenly this contradiction between his sense of his own modernity and the bill’s obvious barbarism, for in looking back upon his bill in his Autobiography, he wrote: “How this last revolting principle [of lex talionis] came to obtain our approbation, I do not remember.” This would appear to qualify as a modulated mea culpa, yet when he recalls why the bill was not passed by the Virginia legislature (having lost by one vote), Jefferson argues that “the Revisors had adopted these opinions,” meaning those modern ideas postulated by Beccaria, whom he cites by name, “but the general idea of our country had not yet advanced to that point.” In the first sentence, Jefferson admits his confusion regarding how his bill incorporated punishments deemed brutal and counterproductive by modern reformers; in the second sentence, he blames the bill’s failure not on his own retrograde thinking or failed political maneuvering but on his blockhead countrymen, who had not yet progressed to the point of recognizing Jefferson’s wisdom. There may be some truth in this lament, for as Kathryn Preyer observes, “The bill and its defeat remain something of a mystery.” Henry Ward and Harold Greer Jr. have shown that post-Revolutionary Virginia, like so much of the new nation, experienced an unsettling rise in crime, including especially horse stealing (the eighteenth century equivalent to stealing a car), counterfeiting, and

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theft, with much of the action allegedly fostered by what Attorney General Edmund Randolph called “a formidable gang of blacks and whites,” led by an unnamed “notorious robber.” It may be the case that Jefferson’s bill, even with what I am calling its barbarous provisions for corporeal torture, struck his fellow Virginians as too lax. If this is the case, then thinking about Jefferson’s bill demonstrates that criminal reformers were swimming upstream against the mighty currents of public opinion. But as we shall see, many of Jefferson’s contemporaries were making even stronger arguments against the death penalty, thus suggesting that Jefferson was not so much in the forefront of his age’s thinking as squarely in its confused and confusing center.12 Indeed, it is striking to note that much as he did regarding slavery, Jefferson wrote in his private journals about progress and reform while publicly pursuing or supporting legislation that bolstered the status quo. Why was that so regarding both slavery and the death penalty? For a possible answer, let us consider Douglas Hay’s assessment of Jefferson’s contemporaries in England, where, as in America, philosophizing about modernity’s reason and practicing a very different kind of political power went hand in hand: “however much they believed in justice (and they did); however sacred they held property (and they worshipped it); however merciful they were to the poor (and many were); the gentlemen of England knew that their duty was, above all, to rule. On that depended everything. They acted accordingly.” As did Jefferson, which means that the reformist energies of Beccaria’s essay On Crimes and Punishments would require other champions in America. As we shall see, the task was taken up by Philadelphia’s Benjamin Rush and William Bradford.13 Before turning to Rush and Bradford, however, I want again to emphasize that much like reformers today, Jefferson’s generation faced a public that was simultaneously obsessed with crime and violence and committed to denying its existence. For while Jefferson and his colleagues in Virginia were trying to revise their state’s laws, the New Hampshire Gazette was circulating a piece of poetic fluff called “The Present Age,” wherein the anonymous author, painting a utopian picture of the new Republic, celebrated the fact that America is “void of wants and crime.” However, in the poem’s final stanzas the author is confronted by the “wondering stare” of Tom, who charges the author with lying about the present age; the author protests but soon yields, confessing “just turn the picture upside down, / I fear you’ll see the right on’t.” That is, the

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naive claim to live in a blessed land free of crime is but a lark, a dream meant to seduce readers before disabusing them of such nonsense in the closing line. The poem therefore oscillates from fueling the fantasy of a crime-free republican empire to a cheeky wink acknowledging that in fact crime is rampant—so much so that it is the subject of poetry. Attempting to pass legislation regarding crime in a society pulled by opposite impulses—the Enlightenment dream of no crime, a wink and nod to its titillating presence—understandably left Jefferson and his colleagues in a daunting position. And so, as I demonstrate below, the attempts by postRevolutionary reformers to change the public’s mind about punishment in general and the death penalty in particular triggered what can only be called one of the nation’s first culture wars.14

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Executions, Enlightenment and “This Abode of Misery” Before turning to Revolutionary Philadelphia’s best activists, I want to expand upon the contradiction illustrated by the poem in the New Hampshire Gazette, and thus backtrack to 1758 to reestablish some of the dominant pre-Revolutionary cultural understandings that Jefferson, Rush, Bradford, and other reformers labored against. To do so, I will turn to the Connecticut Calvinist Joseph Bellamy, who in 1758 delivered a blistering election sermon entitled “The Millennium.” In typically bleak Calvinist fashion he sees all around him a community sliding rapidly toward chaos, where those who choose to look carefully will ascertain “wickedness prevailing, God dishonoured, Satan triumphing, the world perishing, [and] the true church of God more generally in sackcloth.” Nonetheless, in a reversal of fortunes found in many jeremiads from the period, Bellamy then opines, “methinks now, viewing all things in the light of holy scripture, it must be perfectly rational to conclude, that all these things are only preparatory, as an introduction to the glorious day.” So while the world is streaking toward hell, with sin and sinners abounding, Bellamy projects the “perfectly rational” hope that all may yet be saved. This miraculous “glorious day” will be all the more spectacular precisely because of the sublime effort necessary for overcoming the shenanigans of nonbelievers. As later argued by F. W. J. Schelling in his Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, Bellamy tells us that in pulling off this miraculous

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turnaround from Satan’s doorstep, God’s greatness will be proven all the more forcefully. Indeed, because the “solicitation to evil” is understood as a necessary spur to redouble one’s efforts on behalf of goodness, even evil appears as but a small part of God’s larger plan. Having invoked the notion of rationality to support this prophecy, Bellamy is beholden to provide something along the lines of evidence, one of the key aspects of any argument claiming to be “perfectly rational.” And sure enough, Bellamy supplies such evidence a few pages later, in a stunning mathematical formula (see figure 9) that enables him to conclude that “the greatest part of mankind may yet be saved, if God so pleases.” This breezy intermingling of metaphysics and mathematics, theology and reason, is typical of the jeremiads of the period and demonstrates that many Calvinist ministers understood their craft to be at the forefront of the Enlightenment.15 The key component to Bellamy’s sermon, however, the locking mechanism that sutures together his damning vision of sinfulness and his “perfectly rational” vision of salvation, is the notion of discipline. “It therefore becomes all the followers of Christ,” Bellamy warns, “to be of good courage, and exert themselves to the utmost, in the use of all proper means, to suppress error and vice of every kind, and promote the cause of truth and righteousness in the world.” In short, letting one’s neighbor commit “error and vice” without proper punishment is akin to sinning itself. This means that punishing criminals is a community responsibility sanctioned from on high; moreover, supporting and engaging in punishment stands as one of the important actions believers may take to prove to their neighbors and their God that they are fighting the good fight against the “wickedness prevailing” all around them. “Suppress[ing] error and vice” thus offers a public means of pursuing the evangelical imperative of “promot[ing] the cause of truth and righteousness in the world.” Fighting crime, Bellamy tell us, is God’s work.16 Bellamy’s “Millennium” sermon therefore offers a rhetorical template that we will encounter again and again as we progress into the pro-death penalty writings of Robert Annan in the late 1780s and early 1790s, and again in the sermons, orations, and writings of George Barrell Cheever and his Calvinist allies in the antebellum period. For Bellamy walks listeners through a four-stage cycle: first, he offers chilling images of egregious sinning, thus hammering the slack morals of his doomed listeners; second, he performs a miraculous reversal and offers his now terrified listeners an opportunity for salvation; third, he “proves” the possibility of

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A mathematical formula offering “perfectly rational” proof of the likelihood of salvation, from Joseph Bellamy’s The Millennium (1758). (Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.)

FIGURE 9.

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this salvation by calling upon “rationality” as a trope of persuasion—in this case the rationality of mathematics—thus making heavenly intervention seem more earthly, more comprehensible, more scientific; and fourth, he concludes this cycle of persuasion by arguing that in order for his listeners to achieve this rational salvation they must participate in an evangelical and disciplinary program that calls for both repressing sin wherever one finds it and aggressively spreading God’s word to those who have not seen the light. If this four-stage cycle of persuasion is successful, then listeners will find that they have been drafted into God’s army, not only as his appointed spokespeople but also as his policemen and policewomen. Although I have not found any execution sermons preached by Bellamy, we know that his Calvinist colleagues offered them in the hundreds, suggesting that hanging the sinners of the day was indeed among the important means of fulfilling this cycle of salvation via disciplinary evangelism. While Calvinists such as Bellamy drew upon theological motifs to make political arguments about the need for discipline and surveillance, including using the death penalty, champions of the Enlightenment used discourse about science to make political arguments about the need for revolutionary change, including abolishing the death penalty. In fact, two of the leading figures of the American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Rush and William Bradford, merged discourse about science, morals, and government while arguing passionately for the abolition of the death penalty. Rush was a famed signer of the Declaration of Independence and a republicanism-loving elitist, a philanthropist who trusted no one, an abolitionist who owned a slave, a scientist whose treatises were sometimes ridiculed, and a doctor whose cures were often disputed—an enigmatic and even baffling character, he was one of Revolutionary America’s most essential figures. In The Cattle Killing, John Edgar Wideman’s terrifying novel about cholera, slavery, and hypocrisy in postwar Philadelphia, Rush is described (under the veil of the character “Dr. Thrush”) as a brilliant, brash, handsome man who they say is impatient with fools, full of himself, perhaps to the point of arrogance, yet a fair and decent sort at bottom . . . polite to the lower orders—merchants, tradesmen, mechanics, respectful even toward the African people . . . [He has] impeccable manners and deportment, [is] an elegant dresser, [and possesses] a biting, rakish wit. [He is] an enlightened, principled man, a Dissenter

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who seated reason perhaps a bit too near God’s throne for some clergy’s taste. Overall [he is] a man perfectly suited for this new age.17

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Along with two other dissenters perfectly suited to the age, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, Rush was one of the first leading men of his era to take a stand against slavery; he was a cofounder (in 1774), secretary (1787–1789), and president (1803–1813) of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, one of the first abolitionist societies in the New World. In his essay “On Slave-Keeping” Rush portrayed the use of hangings by slave masters in terms that foreshadow by some sixty years the argument that would later become central to antebellum slavery and death penalty abolitionists alike: that hanging was part of the cruel spectacle of racist brutality, that slavery required such terrors to persist, and that together slavery and hanging threatened democracy itself. Here is how Rush puts its: Let us attend the place appointed for inflicting the penalties of the law. See here one without a limb, whose only crime was an attempt to regain his liberty—another led to a gallows for eating a morsel of bread, to which his labor gave him a better title than his master—a third famishing on a gibbet—a fourth, in a flame of fire!—his shrieks pierce the heavens.—O! God! Where is thy vengeance!—O! humanity—justice—liberty—religion!—Where,—where are ye fled?

Considering his staggering prose, his repeated use of dashes and exclamation points, and his logjam of fragmentary thoughts, it appears that Rush is struggling to express himself. The logically ordered openings of each phrase—“one,” “another,” “third,” and “fourth”—contrast with the emotional horrors that follow, three of which, the gallows, the gibbet, and burnings at the stake, are forms of capital punishment. Rush thus links slavery and the death penalty as the grisly twins of Old World barbarism. Indeed, despite the rhetorical tension between his sentimental prose and his rationalizing structure, Rush argues that slavery’s abuse of the law, particularly its use of the death penalty, not only offends the Enlightenment quartet of “humanity—justice—liberty—religion!” but also threatens the New World by tempting an Angry God to bring vengeance down upon those who support slavery and practice its public forms of torture.18

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Like his fellow Revolutionary era reformers, Rush’s energies were soon focused on the struggle for independence and nation-building; it would thus take him fourteen years to return to the subject of capital punishment. When he did so, in 1787, he argued against the death penalty and public punishments in a series of speeches, letters, essays, and pamphlets that illustrate some of the curious complications of Enlightenment thinking. Rush was prodded into these persuasive efforts for many reasons, but I will foreground two. First, both during and after the war Rush questioned George Washington’s military and political capacities; he sent scathing letters to Patrick Henry and John Adams, talked up a storm at dinner parties, and let it be known that he believed Washington was “deficient.” After reviewing Washington’s troops huddled at their meager winter quarters in 1778, Rush wrote that the army appeared more like a “mob” in which “discipline [is] unknown, or wholly neglected.” If the army could only be led by “a Gates, a Lee, or a Conway,” it “would in a few weeks” be transformed into “an irresistible body of men.” Rush served for eight months as the Continental Army’s surgeon and physician general (resigning in a huff that did not help his reputation), but he was not a military veteran, so his observations may well have been dismissed as the product of jealousy or ignorance. Moreover, despite Rush’s and Franklin’s and Paine’s and a few others’ complaints, Washington was almost universally revered as a giant among men—for his birthday in 1788 the general was hailed in a popular reworking of “God Save the King” as “Godlike Washington! / Fair Freedom’s chosen son, / Born to command.” As Garry Wills has observed, “some animal vitality, conveyed how we don’t know, baked off [of] him with few words.” Criticizing the Great Cincinnatus was thus tantamount to committing public suicide. Rush’s taking a bold stand on a humanitarian issue in 1787 may therefore have been part of a postwar plan to refurbish a Revolutionary reputation tainted by attacking the “animal vitality” of the godlike Washington.19 Rush’s second crucial spur to action was the failure of a 15 September 1786 law that curtailed the use of the death penalty by instituting an elaborate system of public punishments, including the parading of chained prisoners, known as “wheelbarrow men,” through the streets of Philadelphia. Michael Meranze offers this summary of the law’s intentions: Instead of the brief, yet dramatic, spectacle of traditional punishments, public labor offered a regular, extended demonstration of the penalties of

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crime. Instead of a momentary, yet severe, infliction of pain and death, public labor operated through constraint and indirection, using the body as a medium to reform the character.

Clearly readers of Beccaria, the supporters of the law hoped to curtail the use of hangings while producing obedient laborers and law-respecting citizens, but as James Mease observes, “this alteration of the penal system was far from having the effect which the friends of humanity wished.” As Susanna Dillwyn wrote in a letter that May, in a tone of high disgust, the wheelbarrow men shuffled through the streets “with great iron chains around them, at the end of which a monstrous ball of iron is fast’ned to prevent their running away—it is a painful sight.” Painful indeed, the scene sounds more like a tribute to Old World barbarism than New World enlightenment. The law’s failure and Rush’s subsequent arguments triggered a lively debate in the Philadelphia papers; addressing these early exchanges over capital punishment enables us to watch as post-Revolutionary social activists struggle to find the vocabulary and argumentative structures needed to articulate a vision of how the world’s first republican government should respond to crime and violence. Rush is particularly instructive in this endeavor, for along with standing among the new Republic’s leading proponents of Enlightenment, and hence as one of America’s most vocal champions of Beccaria, he was also a deeply religious man; like his fellow “Christian revolutionaries,” he sought to merge New World republicanism, Enlightenment reason, and God’s revelation.20 Rush’s opening salvo in this debate was a speech entitled “An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and upon Society,” which he read before the Society for Promoting Political Enquiries, which gathered in Benjamin Franklin’s parlor on 9 March 1787, roughly eleven weeks before the opening of the Constitutional Convention that May. The society was formed that February, so Rush’s lecture was among the first hosted by this august body, which included a preamble written by Thomas Paine and participation by such luminaries as Richard Bache, Charles Biddle, William Bradford, Tench Coxe, Ben Franklin, Francis Hopkinson, the Reverend Samuel Magaw, John Mifflin, Robert Morris, Timothy Pickering, David Rittenhouse, Edward Shippen, Charles and Samuel Vaughan, and James Wilson. Rush thus spoke before the best and the brightest (not to mention the wealthiest), addressing an all-star cast of revolutionaries presided over by Old Lightning Rod himself. Spurred by

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the warm reception given to the speech, Rush published it in a pamphlet in April (see figure 10); a condensed version of his argument then appeared in the American Museum that July. Rush thus broached the subject of capital punishment with a speech to his fellow elites, a newspaper article for the masses, and a pamphlet for those able to participate in the New World’s flourishing print capitalist market.21 Rush begins his argument (cited hereafter from the pamphlet version) by noting the three reasons commonly cited for supporting public punishments: “1st, to reform the person who suffers it—2dly, to prevent the perpetration of crimes, by exciting terror in the minds of spectators; and, 3dly, to remove those persons from society, who have manifested . . . that they are unfit to live in it” (3). Although hangings accomplish the third goal, Rush argues that they fail regarding the first two. While Rush admits that “Reason” may be “deposed and oppressed”—recall Charles Brockden Brown’s cynicism about democracy, or Fisher Ames’s venom toward the masses—he nonetheless announces that it “is the only just sovereign of the human mind” (3). Hence marshalling reason against “opinions that have been sanctified by such long and general prejudice,” speaking in the town that would soon host the convention that would ultimately save the new Republic, and addressing as learned and elite a crowd as could be assembled in the New World, Rush proposes to correct the wayward habits of his countrymen regarding their support for the death penalty (3). Rush’s central point, which has come through the ages to be repeated by almost every death penalty abolitionist I have read, is that “all public punishments tend to make bad men worse, and to encrease crimes” (4). Speaking of the public whippings described in chapters 1 and 2, Rush argues that “a man who has lost his character at a whipping-post, has nothing valuable left to lose in society.” Likewise, “he probably feels a spirit of revenge against the whole community” (4). While Rush was arguing on principle, his contemporary, Stephen Burroughs, one of the most notorious rogues of post-Revolutionary America, provided walking proof of this claim. His Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs was not published until 1798, but by the 1780s his story was the stuff of common fireside chatter. Every time Burroughs was caught, he was whipped, or branded, or jailed, or beaten, and in some cases tortured mercilessly, and in each instance the rough treatment failed to teach him a lesson, instead filling Burroughs with loathing for the men who handled him like a dog. In 1785 he was stripped naked and chained, spread-eagled, to the floor of

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FIGURE 10. The cover of Benjamin Rush’s Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and upon Society (1787). (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)

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a jail for thirty-two days, left to starve, freeze, and wallow in his own feces. “And this,” Burroughs exclaims in the tone of high indignation that permeates his narrative, “I have experienced in a land of Christianity!” Burroughs warned his readers that such treatment “destroys the feelings of humanity, and makes a man savage. It begets in his nature a ferocious feeling.” And sure enough, each time he escaped from his hapless but brutal jailers, Burroughs commenced to making war on those who tortured him, confirming Rush’s thesis that such punishments “tend to make bad men worse.” In the case of Burroughs—a preacher’s son—such treatment turned a relatively harmless man with little judgment and little respect for the law into a lifetime criminal who bragged about being “savage” and “ferocious.”22 While stories from men like Burroughs confirmed Rush’s thesis that public punishments left their victims scarred for life, Rush also argued that such punishments fail to produce terror in their witnesses, even those who attend hangings. Thus Rush asks incredulously, “How often do we find pockets picked under a gallows, and highway-robberies committed within sight of a gibbet?” (9) Criminals proceed with their craft, undaunted even in the shadow of the gallows, yet Rush fears that lawabiding citizens may find themselves swayed by the sight of violence, for “by an immutable law of our nature, distress of all kinds, when seen, produces sympathy” (6). Based on this sympathy with the victim of cruelty, “we secretly condemn the law which inflicts the punishment— hence arises a want of respect for laws in general” (7). In this sense, Rush is following a standard argument of the age, for he is subscribing to what Karen Halttunen describes as “spectatorial sympathy.” Schooled by Hutcheson and Hume and other leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, and favored by humanitarian reformers who believed in a “visual imperative,” advocates of spectatorial sympathy assumed a direct line between visual stimulation and ethical response. For example, in Adam Smith’s widely read Theory of Moral Sentiments, he notes that “the mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on a slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.” Clearly drawing from firsthand observations gained through years of living in a country where hangings were as regular as the seasons, Smith concludes that “the emotions of the by-stander always correspond to what . . . he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.” Smith’s impressive tome (and

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the school of thought it spawned) has thus been characterized by Halttunen as “treat[ing] ethics as a matter of sentiment, sentiment as a matter of sympathy, and sympathy as a matter of spectatorship.” Rush was trained in Edinburgh and was intellectually indebted to its humanitarian philosophers; his Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments thus echoed Smith’s Enlightenment notion of “spectatorial sympathy” in arguing that the masses would turn away from executions and public punishments in disgust, seeing in them not the thundering and righteous power of law but its cruel abuse. On the other hand, Rush fears that those witnesses with harder dispositions will observe the state’s work at the gallows and conclude that violence is an acceptable mode of social exchange: “hence will arise a disposition to exercise the same arbitrary cruelty over the feelings and lives of their fellow creatures” (8). Rush thus envisions citizens responding to executions in two dramatically different ways: either they feel a sense of spectatorial sympathy and are horrified by the state’s use of violence, thus feeling sorry for the criminal and dubious about the law itself, or they feel seduced, pulled toward violence, and so reproduce it in their daily lives. In either case, Rush argues that state-sanctioned public violence decreases the likelihood of the successful administration of justice.23 Rush’s worries were shared by Jefferson, who, in looking back upon the Revolutionary era’s experiments, admitted that public punishments “instead of reforming [criminals], plunged them into the most desperate & hardened depravity.” Michel Foucault argues that this oscillation between reform and depravity illustrates a larger cultural pattern amounting to a dance of power and rebellion, what he calls “the play of truth and infamy.” Foucault’s use of the word play is significant, for it suggests that truth and infamy were staged, literally performed. Michael Meranze has studied such performances during the Revolutionary era and noted, as have I throughout this book, that these public punishments as performances were meant to fulfill pedagogical functions: they were intended to provide grisly lessons instilling proper behavior in the awestruck masses. This model of punishment/performance/pedagogy hinged, then, on a belief in mimicry, on the hope that witnesses to public punishments and forced labors would know not to mimic the offenders and instead to mimic the majesty of the law. The calculation driving this “visual imperative” was terribly flawed, however, as Rush noted at the time and as Jefferson later realized. Surveying their responses, Meranze observes that

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“public labor appeared as a moving and open wound on the social body.” Instead of teaching noble lessons, public punishments and public labor as punishment “spawned a cycle of dangerous mimicry and contagion”; rather than “a sign of the growing sensibility of Revolutionary society, public labor revealed the malice and degradation that accompanied republican character.” Meranze argues that this failed pedagogical project illustrates “mimetic corruption,” meaning that the play of truth and infamy was desperately unbalanced: the mimicry of the masses tended, just as Jefferson and Rush feared, toward corruption rather than uplift, degradation rather than reform. The consequences of mimetic corruption were observed by George Keith Taylor, who, while arguing in the Virginia legislature in 1796 in favor of a bill to amend that state’s old penal code, observed that

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Man is in a considerable degree the creature of habit. He soon becomes familiarized to the most tragic scenes, as well as to the most odious vices. What he first beheld with disgust and abhorrence, he may be soon accustomed to view with indifference or delight. Repetitions of carnage, instead of operating beneficially on him by way of example, render his mind callous and inhuman, destroy his morality, corrupt his manners, and make him in every respect depraved and vicious.24

Thus reflecting insights shared at the time by Jefferson and Taylor (and later theorized by Halttunen, Meranze, and Foucault), and so realizing that the play of truth and infamy often leads to mimetic corruption, Rush proposed to forego public punishments and labor as punishment. In their place, he envisioned a system of mass persuasion based on marshalling myths. In offering this curious alternative to public punishment Rush demonstrates some of the complicated nuances of Enlightenment thinking, for the second half of his Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments provides a recipe for increasing the pain felt by criminals by confining them to a dungeon-like prison. “To encrease the horror of this abode of discipline and misery,” Rush argues, “let it be called by some name that shall import its design” (11). If the prison is made terrible enough, Rush believes, then “children will press upon the evening fire in listening to the tales that will be spread from this abode of misery. Superstition will add to its horrors, and romance will find in it ample materials for fiction, which cannot fail of increasing the terror of its punishments” (11,

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emphasis added). Rush is following here a thread of thought initiated by Beccaria, who argued in his essay On Crimes and Punishments that “all harms are magnified in the imagination” (69). Many observers agreed at the time that because of mimetic corruption, the play of truth and infamy as enacted in public punishments was a failed project. Rush’s answer to this dilemma, like Beccaria’s before him, is to manipulate public thinking via the mass production of cultural fictions so terrible that they will be capable of doing what hangings cannot: terrify the masses into obedience. This may strike some readers as an ironic moment, as Rush, one of the leading advocates of New World Enlightenment, calls upon his “abode of misery” to produce not reason but behavior-altering superstition, not logic but romance, not sound policy but terrifying fiction. Moreover, whereas the Enlightenment is often thought of as a push for transparency in government and jurisprudence, and thus as a call for the regulation and formalization of public means of social order and control, Rush proposes to make the laws applicable to this prison and the criminals who reside there not public but secret: “Let no notice be taken, in the law,” Rush argues, “of the punishment that awaits any particular crime” (11). Likewise, Rush suggests that “the duration of punishments” should be “unknown” (11). By keeping both the form and duration of punishments that await any given crime secret, and by using the power of the imagination to multiply a sense of dread regarding the “abode of misery,” Rush imagines criminals will be terrified into obedience, thus putting an end to the “indifference and levity with which some men suffer the punishment of hanging” (11). Going to prison will be so horrible, so mind-numbingly rotten and body-crampingly painful, that even those criminals who laugh at the prospect of hanging will tremble before the thought of being sent away to the “abode of discipline and misery.” (Rush interchanges the terms discipline and misery, sometimes using both, sometimes only one; by the end of the pamphlet, only misery remains, perhaps suggesting a punishing disposition at the core of his thinking.) And so the age of Enlightenment veers, when thought turns to crime and punishment, toward the production of paralyzing myths and institutionalized misery. In fact, Rush spends the next six pages detailing his plan before concluding in his penultimate paragraph: “These are the latent struggles of reason, or rather the secret voice of God himself, speaking the human heart, against the folly and cruelty of public punishments” (18). And so Rush—philosopher, doctor, revolutionary activist, social

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reformer, man of science, champion of Enlightenment—closes by invoking “reason” and the “secret voice of God” as the joint authors of this plan for using reason to produce “discipline and misery” for criminals and chilling superstitions for the public.25 Much as his thinking about spectatorial sympathy and mimetic corruption mirrored some of the dominant intellectual strands of his era, so Rush’s swerve toward the production of myth, romance, and misery was less a betrayal of Enlightenment principles than a telling representation of some of the central cultural habits of the day. For Halttunen has argued that while Enlightenment reformers sought to drive pain out of the public, a rising culture industry sought to recapture pain as the raw material for a new genre of pornography. Hence the period’s remarkable rise of publications concerning lurid floggings, sexualized whippings, and intensely detailed tortures. In the name of reason and God, public punishments were castigated as relics of a brutal past, yet in the cause of sales and titillation, those same punishments were reimagined by a new wave of cultural producers as sexy transgressions—and so mimetic corruption and early print capitalism led from spectatorial sympathy to prurient pleasure. Indeed, by 1806 the first of many editions of the lurid History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin was published; by 1807 the heroine was visually depicted with bare breasts draped in chains, and thus as a veritable S&M hottie whose sexual debasement provided readers with illicit thrills with a nationalist twist (for the villains were Algerian Muslims). As Halttunen describes the transition away from public punishment and toward texts such as those detailing Martin’s captivity, “the social theater of public punishment gave way to a solitary fantasy theater, which staged private, interior scenarios of cruelty; legitimate spectatorship was replaced by furtive voyeurism.” Thus echoing my analysis of the American Bloody Register in chapter 2, Rush’s Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments demonstrates not only that these apparently contradictory impulses could be present in the same text, but that the goals of the former strand of thought (punishment as public pedagogy, humanitarianism as opposed to violence) could be advanced by marshalling the latter (punishment as private titillation, pornography based on violence).26 Despite these observations on the complicated cross-currents present in his Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments, Rush was rightly proud of his achievement, for his was among America’s first sustained critiques

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of the effects of the public uses of violence in the name of the law. Indeed, his Enquiry made such a splash that by May 1787 Rush and his peers founded the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (now known as the Pennsylvania Prison Society), a group that went on to make significant legislative contributions. These were heady times for reformers, and so, over the next two years, Rush sent copies of his 1787 pamphlet along with letters to fellow intellectuals and reformers, including John Dickinson, John Coakley Lettsom, Jeremy Belknap, England’s famous prison reformer John Howard, and James Thornton. In these letters Rush glides seamlessly from discussing his opposition to the death penalty to his support for abolishing slavery, ending war, and curtailing alcohol consumption; indeed, Rush weaves together God, science, and republicanism in a utopian burst of reformist and at times evangelical zeal, boldly proclaiming that tackling his shopping list of dilemmas will lead to “the approaching regeneration of our world.” Thus doing his part to regenerate the world, Rush published another anti-death penalty essay in the American Museum in July 1788. In a letter to Jeremy Belknap he described the essay, “An Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of Punishing Murder by Death,” as “the boldest attack I have ever made upon a public opinion or a general practice.” This bold attack triggered a heated fivepart response from “PHILOCHORAS” in the Pennsylvania Mercury and then a two-part response (anonymous but also assumed to be from “Philochoras”) in the American Museum, to which Rush responded with his own long essay in the Pennsylvania Mercury and then a two-part rejoinder in the January and February 1789 issues of the American Museum. In 1792 Rush would collect his contributions to this debate and republish them as Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death; in 1793 William Bradford would join the debate with An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania; along the way, the pseudonymous “Citizen of Maryland” would join the fray with a powerful four-part essay; all told, the speeches, letters, and pamphlets involved in this debate numbered at least twenty-three and covered almost five years (see figure 11). In the following pages I examine the arguments as they arrived in public, moving from Rush to Philochoras to “A Citizen of Maryland,” back to Rush and Annan again, and then on to Bradford, thus taking readers inside one of the first protracted debates about the death penalty in the New World.27

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Rush and Annan Debate the Death Penalty and “The Reign of Chaos” Drawing on the social contract theories then popular among America’s leading intellectuals, Rush argues in his “Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of Punishing Murder by Death” that “to take away life, for any crime, is a violation of the first political compact” (3). Rush relies here on the notion that by joining “political society” citizens pledge part of their “liberty and property” to the social order, even while retaining final authority over their own life. This is a curious claim, however, for both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the two giants of social contract theory, offer what would appear to be support for the death penalty. In his Leviathan of 1651 Hobbes argued in a chapter entitled “Of Crimes and Punishments” that “Public Authority” rests on the fair administration of prudent laws capable of producing obedience without resort to terror. Nonetheless, Hobbes warned that those who commit acts of criminal violence forfeit their status as “subjects” and become “Enemies” against whom the state is forced to “make warre.” Hobbes argues that when you break the law you enter into a condition of “declared Hostility,” in which “all infliction of evil is lawful”—presumably this would include executions. Likewise, in his Second Treatise on Civil Government, Locke argues that in the “state of Nature” that precedes “civil government,” “every man has a power to kill a murderer,” for the initiator of the violence “hath, by the unjust violence and slaughter he hath committed upon one, declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security.” It is not clear if this law of retribution applies to the civil government instituted to calm the passions of the state of nature, yet it is instructive to find Locke referring to murderers not as badly mistaken fellow humans but as expendable beasts of prey. Rush’s invoking the humanitarian impulses behind the “social compact” to support his abolitionism is therefore a curious maneuver, for it was not clear that the leading social contract theorists had opposed the death penalty. At least one of Rush’s opponents anticipated this line of argument, for on 1 April 1788, roughly ten weeks before Rush’s June contribution to the American Museum, “CATO” argued in The Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser that “an unjust man breaks the chain, which unites him with his neighbors; he becomes the enemy of all, and therefore subjects himself to be injured.” CATO does

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FIGURE 11. The title page of Philadelphia’s American Museum. (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)

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A TIMELINE OF THE GREAT DEATH PENALTY DEBATE

9 March 1787

Benjamin Rush, speech, “An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and upon Society.”

April 1787

Benjamin Rush, pamphlet, An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and Upon Society.

July 1787

Benjamin Rush, “An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishment upon Criminals, and upon Society,” American Museum, 142–153.

1 April 1788

CATO,

“Addressed to Mr. [Daniel] Humphreys” (the editor),

Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser, 2. July 1788

Benjamin Rush, “An Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of

6 September 1788

CATO,

25 September 1788

PHILOCHORAS/Annan,

no title, Pennsylvania Mercury, 2–3.

2 October 1788

PHILOCHORAS/Annan,

no title, Pennsylvania Mercury, 2–3.

4 October 1788

PHILOCHORAS/Annan,

no title, Pennyslvania Mercury, 2–3.

7 October 1788

PHILOCHORAS/Annan,

no title, Pennyslvania Mercury, 1–2.

21 October 1788

Benjamin Rush, no title, Pennsylvania Mercury, 2–4.

Punishing Murder by Death,” American Museum, 78–81. “Addressed to Mr. Humphreys,” Pennsylvania Mercury,

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2–3.

23 October 1788

PHILOCHORAS/Annan,

November 1788

Anonymous/Annan, “Observations on Capital Punishment:

no title, Pennsylvania Mercury, 3–4.

Being a Reply to an Essay on the Same Subject, Published in the American Museum for July 1788,” American Museum, 444–454. December 1788

Anonymous/Annan, “Observations on Capital Punishment:

not attack Rush directly, but the essay’s arguments undercut Rush’s later attempt to use social contract theory to abolish the death penalty.28 Nonetheless continuing in this vein of marshalling grand but by no means self-evident Enlightenment concepts, Rush’s second main point is that “the punishment of murder by death is contrary to reason” (3). Five subarguments about the relationship between punishment and reason follow this claim. First, repeating his prior argument regarding mimetic corruption, Rush contends that by making the taking of life a normal affair, by showing that the state approves of the murder of another being, public executions “tend to multiply murders” (3). Second, because executions

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Being a Reply to an Essay on the Same Subject, Published in the American Museum for July 1788,” American Museum, 547–553. January 1789

Benjamin Rush, “Rejoinder to a Reply to the Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of Punishing Murder by Death,” American Museum, 63–65.

February 1789

Benjamin Rush, “Rejoinder to a Reply to the Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of Punishing Murder by Death,” American Museum, 121–123.

January 1790

A Citizen of Maryland, “An Oration Intended to Have Been Spoken at a Late Commencement, on the Unlawfulness and Impolicy of Capital Punishments, and the Proper Means of Reforming Criminals,” American Museum, 7–8.

February 1790

A Citizen of Maryland, same title as above, American Museum, 69–71.

March 1790

A Citizen of Maryland, same title as above, American Museum, 135–137.

April 1790

A Citizen of Maryland, same title as above, American Museum, 135–137.

November 1791

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson(?), “Letter from a Lady in

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Montgomery County,” American Museum, 215. 1792

Benjamin Rush, pamphlet, Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death.

1793

William Bradford, pamphlet, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania.

are the punishment for committing murder, those citizens who are afraid of committing suicide (but want to die) may commit murder, knowing that this will provide a means for “escap[ing] from their misery by means of a halter” (3). While Rush’s first claim seems logical enough, I suspect that many readers at the time found his second claim flimsy at best, for there is little evidence that murderers were secretly suicidal depressives who hoped to provoke the state into ending their own lives. The following three subarguments are equally unpersuasive (so much so that I will skip them here) leaving readers grasping for evidence of why capital punishment is “contrary to reason.” Indeed, these opening passages

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demonstrate that for Rush, “reason” was not the bedrock commitment driving a logically ordered and evidence-based form of argumentation so much as a politically loaded trope to be marshaled against his enemies. That is, Rush calls upon reason to support the opening claims of his “Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of Punishing Murder by Death,” yet the evidence used to support those claims appears decidedly assertive rather than conclusive. Rush’s third main point reflects his realization that you cannot talk about capital punishment without considering the powerful influence of religion. Whereas his Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals ended with the brief religious passages observed above, his “Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of Punishing Murder by Death” spends four full pages on the topic. In fact, his third main point is that “the punishment of murder by death is contrary to divine revelation,” for “whether it be inflicted by a single person, or by a whole community,” taking a life is “an usurpation of the prerogative of heaven” (4). Six subarguments support this claim, including the tautological first subargument that while “there are many things in the scripture above” reason, there is “nothing contrary to reason.” God is the ultimate author of reason, the argument goes, so anything contrary to reason, such as the death penalty, is by definition contrary to “the will of God” (5). Given the facile nature of Rush’s examples of reason in his second main point, and given the unknowability of “God’s will,” and considering the hermeneutic hairsplitting required to parse the difference between standing “above” or “contrary” to reason, this would appear to be a less than persuasive claim. This same cycle of calling upon a combination of indefensibly grand terms and God’s will to oppose the death penalty is repeated in Rush’s second religious subargument, where he claims that the death penalty violates God’s will because it compromises “the order and happiness of society,” which God of course has a vested interest in protecting (5). Opponents of these two opening claims had any number of biblical passages at the ready, including the most often cited pro-death penalty clause, Genesis 9:6, which warns “whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” Anticipating this familiar argumentative move, Rush’s third subargument claims that Genesis 9:6 is not a command to kill those who shed another’s blood but a “denunciation” of the cycle of violence triggered by murder in the first place (6). As we shall see in volume 2, antebellum death penalty disputants engaged in endless

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hermeneutic sleuthing to try to divine the meaning of this phrase, with death penalty proponents claiming that it functions as a nonnegotiable command, as a legal rule demanding the execution of the guilty, while opponents argued—often via readings of the phrase as written in Hebrew, German, Latin, and other languages—that it was a poetic warning about the ways each act of violence leads to more violence. How one interpreted the word “shall” thus carried immense political consequences, pointing on one reading to a mandatory death sentence, and on another reading to a wary acknowledgment of the fragility of the human condition, perched forever on a precipice from which each act of violence nudges us closer to barbarism. But Rush is, as it were, in a rush, and so he moves quickly on, glossing over the immense philosophical and political importance of this interpretive question to arrive at his final three subarguments about religion, none of which is particularly persuasive. He concludes this section of his argument by exclaiming, “how delightful to discover such an exact harmony between the dictates of reason, the order and happiness of society, and the precepts of the gospel! There is a perfect unity in truth” (7). Although readers may be hard pressed to follow his notion of how reason functions, and equally challenged to see on what interpretive evidence he bases his arguments about “divine revelation,” this closing claim about the “perfect unity of truth” would have rang true—or at least familiar—with that generation of Americans who had grown up believing that nature’s God and self-evident truths walked hand in hand.29 Indeed, Rush offers not so much an argument against the death penalty as an invocation of accepted post-revolutionary clichés about the natural order of things, which was assumed to be unified, organic, sanctioned in all aspects by a partnership among reason, God, and those enlightened few who hear nature’s “exact harmony.” Curiously, though, Rush appears resigned to the fact that no one hears these celestial harmonies. He is reduced, then, to relaying his hopes for abolition to “you, therefore, the unborn generations of the next century.” Because the unborn will have the time to benefit from the ripening of the Enlightenment and the Gospel, they will “often review with equal contempt and horror, the indolence, ignorance and cruelty of your ancestors,” and thus “fully comprehend the extent of the discoveries and precepts of the gospel” (9). Like a great but misunderstood artist writing in a melancholy mood, and thus finding solace in the dream that later generations will somehow transcend the current generation’s stupidity, Rush imagines a future full of enlightened

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Christian abolitionists: “You will love the whole human race, for you will perceive that you have a common Father” (9). On the one hand, making this pathetic gesture to the wisdom of future generations could be read as a sign of Rush’s resignation to a botched present and his own persuasive failures; on the other hand, it might be read as an astute appropriation of one of the core stylistic patterns of Calvinist jeremiads. As Ronald Bosco observes, Calvinists traditionally used execution sermons “to direct their sermonic cares, concerns, and advices not only to their contemporaries but to their children,” thus addressing “the future spiritual estate of the young.” In this sense, we may read Rush’s future-oriented appeal to “the unborn generations of the next century” as an attempt to clothe his abolitionist arguments in the familiar form of a Calvinist sermon. Moreover, such appeals to the wisdom of a soon-to-be-great future were consistent with the period’s political hopes as well, for from the onset of hostilities between rebels and loyalists, New World optimists argued that time itself favored the cause of freedom. As Brooke Hindle has argued, Rush and his Revolutionary era contemporaries shared “a deep faith that time was on the side of the colonies.” Rush’s July 1788 essay in the American Museum, which in turn became the first installment of his 1792 Considerations, therefore amounts to a traditional jeremiad with Enlightenment and revolutionary twists: he portrays a fallen world, holds out hope for its redemption, offers proper study of both reason and the Gospel as the means of salvation, and concludes that by abolishing the death penalty future generations will finally achieve the enlightened benevolence necessary to fulfill democracy’s promise and hence achieve salvation.30 The response to Rush’s jeremiad appeared in two parts, both under the heading “Observations on Capital Punishment: Being a Reply to an Essay on the Same Subject, Published in the American Museum for July 1788.” The first part appeared in the November issue and the second part followed in the December issue of the American Museum. There is no authorial attribution accompanying either piece, but a letter from Rush to Belknap that autumn indicates that Rush believed the rejoinders were written by Robert Annan, the minister of Philadelphia’s Old Scots Church. Moreover, while Rush and his anonymous interlocutor were debating in the pages of the American Museum, a parallel series of arguments was being staged in the Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser, wherein Rush’s opponent was listed as PHILOCHORAS. Four years later, in 1792, after Rush’s anti-death penalty essays were republished as Considerations on the

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Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death, the Pennsylvania Mercury ran a critique of the pamphlet that was signed by “Philochoras” (see the chronology of the debates, figure 11). Historians have thus retrospectively attributed the anonymous 1788 American Museum pieces to the pen of Philochoras. Annan indicates in his 1788 essays in the American Museum that he had spoken to Rush before publishing them, and Rush reveals in a letter (to which I turn below) that he knew the author was Annan, so although published anonymously in the American Museum and under the pen name of Philochoras in the Pennsylvania Mercury in 1788, Rush and his abolitionist allies knew that Annan was the author of the rebuttals.31 In Greek, philo means “friend of” or even “lover of”; choras means space, or landed property; the classicist Debbie Hawhee argues, however, that Philochoras suggests more than just being a friend or lover of space. Rather, it also implies a sense of proprietary control, a defense of the political hierarchy and physical boundaries that make a given space manageable. This would certainly comport with the arguments Annan/ Philochoras makes in his rebuttals to Rush. Other than his suggestive pen name and his responses to Rush, there is little historical evidence of Annan’s politics save his taking the lead in authoring Address and Petition of a Number of the Clergy of Various Denominations . . . Relative to the Passing of a Law Against Vice and Immorality. . . . [and] the Prohibition of Theatrical Exhibitions. This sixteen-page pamphlet announces the clergy’s “duty of reforming everything which may be offensive to the Supreme Governor of the universe,” including the theater, which Annan and his fellow clergy pronounce “unfavorable to virtue.” No doubt loath to be accused of either boorishness or cultural ineptitude, Annan and his coauthors borrow the rhetoric of Enlightenment science to argue that their conclusion should not “be considered as speculation. For it is fact and experiment.” This is a curious turn of phrase, for facts are what are learned from conducting experiments, meaning an entity that is both fact and experiment is confused indeed. Nonetheless, as we shall see in his arguments regarding executions, and as illustrated here in his assault on the theater, Philochoras sought to appropriate Enlightenment notions of “fact and experiment” while offering what amounts to a blistering jeremiad, an old-school defense of the boundaries of behavior threatened by modernity in general and abolitionists in particular.32 As noted above, one of the central components of early death penalty debates was the attempt to prove the meaning of Genesis 9:6. Rush and

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other death penalty abolitionists argued that the line was cautionary, an allegory meant to teach us not to rely on violence lest we begin a cycle of retaliatory bloodshed. Annan’s response, which would echo in Calvinist sermons for the next hundred years, was that Genesis 9:6 “carries with it all the authority and majesty of a statute” (446). Its demand that those who commit violent crimes be punished violently was, Annan argued, “authoritative and mandatory” (447). Rush’s counterinterpretation was based in part on the biblical hermeneutics of Reverend William Turner, a British abolitionist whom Annan castigates in the American Mercury as “a socinian sceptic” (446). Such name calling illustrates what rhetorical critics call ad hominen attacks: arguments that tackle not the ideas of one’s interlocutors but their ethos, their credibility, their standing in the world. But Annan’s ad hominem abuse of Turner’s and Rush’s character is only an opening gesture in which they stand as synecdochical representatives of all that ails late-eighteenth-century America. Indeed, Annan moves from lambasting individual “socinian sceptics”—in this case Turner and Rush—to the larger theological and political implications of skepticism, which Annan claims “is nearly allied to atheism” (449). Sidetracking from the death penalty issues at hand, and turning the deeply religious Rush into a spokesman for anarchy, Annan argues that such socinian-almostatheists “exclude the Supreme Being from the government of his own world. . . . They detach the idea of God’s majesty and authority from civil majistracy” (449). In Philochoras’s 25 September 1788 essay in the Pennsylvania Mercury, this line of attack is levied in even more forceful terms, as readers are warned that “human nature is fearfully deranged and disordered,” largely because of the recent successes of “skepticism,” which amounts to “a horrid void, a waste, a wilderness. . . . It is an attempt to introduce the reign of Chaos.”33 Annan’s charges might generously be called humbug, for Socinianism did not deny God’s existence or attempt to “exclude the Supreme Being from the government of his own world”; rather, it posited “the humanity of Christ,” emphasizing that he was a physical being, a man, both divine and earthly. More broadly, Louis Masur has noted that Arminians, Socinians, Universalists, and Unitarians all “advanced a faith in a benevolent and forgiving deity” and “emphasized human choice in the struggle for righteousness and the battle against sin,” thus offering strong but by no means blasphemous alternatives to some core Calvinist doctrines. Annan’s scathing rebuke and his charge that Rush hopes to introduce “the reign

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of Chaos” thus demonstrates a high-handed refusal to parse theological niceties; for Annan, any divergence from Calvinist dogma amounts to heresy. But to swerve into this line of argument—calling Benjamin Rush of all people a heretic and essentially arguing that religious questions are off limits to anyone who questions Calvinism—indicates a biting anxiety, an almost desperate attempt to reclaim unassailable authority in an age when Calvinism was losing ground to its more liberal competitors. For Annan and his allies, then, the argument over the death penalty was but one small part of a much larger culture war regarding the fate of Calvinism in the world’s first secular republic.34 Following the charge that Rush knows not of what he speaks when reading the Bible, Annan’s second main point—again offering an argument that would circulate in Calvinist circles for generations to come—is that abolishing the death penalty will open the doors to both earthly and heavenly catastrophe. Employing an intoxicating combination of slippery slope logic, hyperbole, and prolepsis, Annan warns, “Take away this fundamental law [the death penalty], and immediately society rushes to ruin: no man’s life is safe” (548). Rhetorical critics refer to slippery slope arguments as establishing a “precedent slope,” that is, they create an imagined downhill slide whereupon one action (abolishing the death penalty) inevitably leads to some unwanted conclusion (society rushing to ruin). Predicting this slide from cause to effect can produce a frightening and hence very persuasive strategy, regardless of the fact—as is readily apparent in Annan’s case—that there may be little evidence linking the triggering event to the feared response. What matters here is establishing the sense of inevitable causality, the “precedent slope.” As if to thwart any critical reading of his slippery slope argument, Annan closes his precedent slope with the hyperbolic threat that “no man’s life is safe,” hence turning each and every reader of his article, most of whom will never have a brush with crime or criminal violence, into a now threatened and soon to be victim. This universalizing threat is strengthened by Annan’s use of prolepsis; that is, by writing the entire sentence in the present tense, with no if/then form and no acknowledgement of temporal lapse or conditional causality, Annan writes about a situation that may happen in the future as if it is a present reality—no man’s life is safe.35 Following this collapsing of present and future, what is and what will be (prolepsis), and again employing both slippery slope logic and hyperbolic prose, Annan then announces that Rush’s “scheme would involve

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society in total confusion. . . . It would introduce universal anarchy and ruin” (548). This charge would appear to grant Rush’s text immense power, at least enough to plunge the universe into chaos; but Annan does not want to elevate Rush’s argument to a level of such stature, and so he calls Rush’s anarchy- and ruin-producing manifesto a “scheme.” This descriptive choice illustrates another of Annan’s rhetorical tools, in this case employing tapinosis, the trope of belittlement and reduction by abuse (for example, calling a poet a rhymester, or calling Rush’s manifesto a scheme). This is a curious maneuver, however, for even after Annan has used tapinosis to belittle Rush’s ideas, he then grants them immense power, going so far in the final sentence of his second essay as to claim that abolishing the death penalty “would introduce absolute anarchy, and soon exterminate the whole human race” (553). Annan’s rhetorical strategies are thus at loggerheads: on the one hand, his use of tapinosis belittles Rush’s work, turning it into a mere scheme, the triflings of a half-wit; on the other hand, his uses of slippery slope, hyperbole, and prolepsis have the (perhaps unintended) consequence of making Rush’s work appear nearly godlike, as if they were weapons capable of triggering nothing less than the end of time. Sandwiched between these internal rhetorical contradictions, Annan makes the curious choice of turning to the more mundane concerns of deterrence, announcing that the death penalty “certainly does tend to save the lives of thousands” (549). The rhetorical tension between the absoluteness conveyed in certainly does and the conditional nature of tend to is interesting here, perhaps indicating Annan’s ambivalence in claiming a statistical fact that no one has ever been able to prove. Annan’s argument is therefore impressive as a display of his mastery of classical rhetorical tropes, yet his argument as a whole, like his uncertain line about deterrence, appears to be conflicted—readers trained in classical rhetoric and formal logic, as were Rush and most of his peers, would have picked this text apart. Nonetheless, despite its internal rhetorical contradictions, Annan’s opening points illustrate some of the most long-standing arguments in favor of the death penalty: it is sanctioned by God, it prevents anarchy and ruin, and it saves the lives of the innocent.36 More importantly, though, Annan’s apocalyptic warning about imminent “absolute anarchy” and even the “exterminat[ion of] the whole human race” demonstrates that he is concerned with issues much heavier than those raised by the local politics of the death penalty. Indeed, as will

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be the case with George Barrell Cheever’s sermons on the subject in the 1830s and 1840s, Annan appears willing to engage Rush on the death penalty because it offers him a public occasion to lecture his readers on the declining state of morals and godliness. In this regard Annan is practicing one of the older forms of religious persuasion; Donald Scott has argued that ever since the first Great Awakening before the Revolutionary War, evangelicals and revivalists of all denominations had come to view such outpourings of religious fervor—as Annan hoped would be triggered by a debate about the death penalty—as “a deliberately deployed instrument of social order.” The specific topic at hand was but an occasion for pursuing “the restoration of family government and the exertion of church and civil discipline,” all understood as “the only reliably effective remedy for disorder.” Thus pursuing this long-standing formula, and assuming the scolding tone so important to the jeremiadic form, Annan warns his readers that “liberty in the United States is verging fast towards licentiousness. I see government in a relaxed and feeble state. I see the magistracy, as well as the gospel, even in the hands of good men, treated with neglect and contempt” (553). Issued amid the frenzied national debates regarding the fate of the proposed Constitution, these claims would have been understood not only as voicing traditional Calvinist concerns but also as endorsements for a law-and-order version of high Federalism. Indeed, in a phrase that illustrates the deep tension between traditional Calvinist and new Federalist notions of hierarchy and radical republican notions of equality, Annan complains that “Humanity is become the popular cry! Weak men join in the cry, to gain the applause of the unthinking; but, as understood, it degenerates into nonsense” (553). Opposing the death penalty thus amounts to nothing less than one plank in the revolutionary agenda of overthrowing established order. The unthinking masses applaud those demagogues—men like Jefferson, Franklin, and Rush— who claim to speak for humanity, yet Annan knows—as do John Adams, Fisher Ames, and Alexander Hamilton—that as their opponents’ understanding of the Bible is shallow, little more than Socinian skepticism, so their understanding of their own cause is but nonsense.37 In fact, in another of his essays in the Pennsylvania Mercury, Annan pokes fun at one of the core assumptions of Rush’s Enlightenment crowd, arguing that “all nations, in all ages, have agreed in this truth, that the murderer should not be permitted to live . . . it is like one of these selfevident truths, to which reason assents as soon as it is proposed.” Jay

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Fliegelman has written elegantly about the irony of Jefferson’s immortal phrase, wherein a political activist, a student of philosophy, a persuader second perhaps only to Paine in potency, claims to write with “a nonrhetorical rhetoric,” a language so obvious and true that “epistemological transparency would be achieved.” The claim to convey ideas that were self-evident thus reached for “the nakedness of truth” conveyed in “the ultimate Protestant plain style.” Recognizing the sleight of hand driving such claims, Annan mocks them, flips Jefferson’s phrase on its head, and thus turns it into either a call for hangings or a critique of the sloppy logic that arbitrarily calls some truths self-evident. But in so doing Annan has opened a dangerous line of thought, for if Jefferson’s self-evident truths can be seen as self-serving political maneuvers draped in the ever-pliable logic of Enlightenment reason, then so can Annan’s theological claims be read as self-serving political maneuvers draped in the ever-pliable logic of biblical hermeneutics. That is, in launching this critique of self-evident truths, Annan demonstrates how to be a good deconstructionist who disassembles accepted truths, for he is arguing that all claims are rhetorical, that nothing is ever self-evident. But by acknowledging that all language is always political, that no truth claim is privileged, that there is no escape from rhetoric, Annan undercuts one of the major planks of his religious authority: his claim to a have a special relationship to other, albeit religious, self-evident truths.38 Nonetheless, we can gather a sense of the depth of this critique of the flimsy rhetorical logic driving republicanism by listening to the Tory protagonist in John Trumbull’s long satiric poem about the Revolution, M’Fingal, where the Old World–trumpeting loyalist excoriates Ye dupes to ev’ry factious rogue, Or tavernprating demagogue, Whose tongue but rings, with sounds more full; On th’ empty drumhead of his skull. . . . For liberty in your own by-sense Is but for crimes a patent license

For M’Fingal, New World republicanism is a one-way street to hell; Jefferson’s self-evident truths are dangerous political claims skulking around as pure philosophy and the drunken bumpkins are too stupid to tell the difference. Following this same line of reasoning, Annan warns that such

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dallying with dupes and demagogues may prompt God’s wrath. Sounding a hyperbolic doom-and-destruction tone steeped in the rhetorical traditions made famous by Edwards and the Mathers, Annan observes that if the nation does not make dramatic amends for its backsliding, then “we will soon feel the consequences, and they must be tremendous!” (553). Perhaps recognizing that these claims would fuel the already rising anger towards conservative Calvinism, Annan tries in the final column of his article to incorporate the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, claiming, “I wish ever to be a friend to humanity—but let it be a rational and judicious humanity” (553). By invoking the rational and the judicious, Annan no doubt hoped to moderate his Calvinist and Federalist jeremiad with the enlightened language of modernity and republicanism, yet as we shall see, Rush took Annan’s responses as nothing less than high-handed moral rebukes from a religious dinosaur.39 Indeed, in a letter to Jeremy Belknap that autumn Rush boasted that “my essay upon the punishment of murder by death has been attacked in our newspapers by the Reverend Mr. Annan. . . . He rants in a most furious manner. . . . His arguments are flimsy and such as would apply better to the 15th than the 18th century. They all appear to flow from his severe Calvinistical principles.” In contrast to such outdated and severe Calvinistical principles, Rush quotes the King James Version of Luke 9:56: “The Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.” This combination of assuming that Annan’s arguments are too old-fashioned to speak to the spirit of the Enlightenment and based on misreadings of the Bible would soon become fully formed in Rush’s public response to Annan. By the time Rush’s responses were published in the opening issues of the American Museum in 1789, the journal was equipped with this remarkable title: The American Museum, or Universal Magazine, Containing Essays on Agriculture—Commerce—Manufactures—Politics—Morals—and Manners. Sketches of National Characters—Natural and Civil History—and Biography. Law Information—Public Papers—Intelligence. Moral Tales—Ancient and Modern Poetry, &c. &c. A veritable encyclopedia of knowledge, a compendium of the new, the American Museum hoped to become one of the nation’s premier arbiters of Enlightenment rationality. The conspicuous absence of the words religion and theology from the otherwise broadly inclusive list of subjects on the masthead indicates that the editors were attempting to move their readers toward a more secular approach to modernity. Given this apparent editorial leaning, and considering the

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condescending Old World tone of Annan’s rejoinders, it comes as no surprise that Rush began his responses to Annan with a full-throated tribute to the Enlightenment (and republicanism) as the best hope for freeing the world from mysticism and cruelty (and perhaps Federalism as well).40 Opening with an explicit nod to Beccaria, Rush argues that “Reason . . . has lately taught us in the writings of the marquis of Beccaria, that in a perfect human government there should be no pardoning power; and experience has taught us that where certainty has taken the place of severity of punishments, crimes have evidently and rapidly diminished” (10). As first argued in Beccaria’s essay On Crimes and Punishments, the idea of abolishing the power of pardons was meant to take the authority of the law out of the hands of distracted and easily bribed princes, instead creating a formalized, bureaucratized system of justice. Likewise, ever since Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws was published in 1748, reformers had argued that replacing severity with certainty would show criminals that the likelihood of escaping capture was nil, that no matter what illegal acts they might engage in, they would be punished. Thus summarizing two of the towering Enlightenment figures on the subject, Rush begins his essay by appealing to arguments about the use of reason in responding to violent crimes. But God is not far behind. In fact, Rush follows the sentence quoted above—reason has lately taught us—with a long passage about the role of “divine law.” Echoing the claim from the first half of his Considerations that executions are “an usurpation of the prerogative of heaven” to give and take life, Rush writes that “to punish murder . . . by death . . . is to exalt the angry and vindictive passions of men to an equality with the perfect law of God. It is to place imperfect individuals and corrupted human governments upon the throne of the righteous judge of the universe” (11). Lest readers make the error of thinking that the assumption underlying this religious claim conflicts with Rush’s commitments to Enlightenment reason, he argues that “reason and religion have the same objects. They are in no one instance opposed to each other. On the contrary, reason is nothing but imperfect religion, and religion is nothing but perfect reason” (12). This cultural jimmying, this trying to tape together vast systems of understanding the world, was fraught with all the interpretive dilemmas that follow from trying to make the Bible and the Enlightenment—two profoundly complicated subjects—sing as if in obvious and incontrovertible harmony. But as noted in my reading of Rush’s An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, so his

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FIGURE 12. The

cover of Benjamin Rush’s Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death (1792). (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.)

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later American Museum essays, when combined into his Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death (see figure 12) appear to be least persuasive when Rush veers off into such vast generalizations, for he is a decidedly sloppy philosopher. A better tactic, then, one that obviously resonated with a generation of Americans who had recently risked life and limb to expel King George’s troops from the New World, was to link capital punishment with the whimsy and cruelty of monarchies. Less a humanitarian reform than a nationalist call to order, associating capital punishment with monarchy meant that American patriots should be abolitionists. Rush thus closes his rejoinder to Annan with the charge that

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capital punishments are the natural offspring of monarchical governments. Kings believe that they possess their crowns by divine right; no wonder, therefore, they assume the divine power of taking away human life. Kings consider their subjects their property: no wonder, therefore, they shed their blood with as little emotion as men shed the blood of their sheep or cattle. But the principles of republican governments speak a very different language. (18)

This powerful passage not only links capital punishment with the brutality of monarchs, but subtly shows that slavery, that other system of bondage in which one may treat another human as property, like sheep or cattle, is equally complicit in sullying “the principles of republican government.” As we have already seen in chapter 3’s reading of The Address of Abraham Johnstone, and as we shall see in volume 2, those who wished to abolish slavery and those who wished to abolish the death penalty often made common cause, with both movements arguing that the production of dehumanizing violence—whether in slavery or executions—compromised both the promises and the practices of republicanism in America. In this sense, then, Rush argues that executions, slavery, and monarchies are birds of a feather, for they are all equally anathema to the republican spirit of ’76. I will close my analysis of this opening phase of the first extended debate about the death penalty in American history by noting that Rush appears least persuasive when working on theological or philosophical levels, and most persuasive when, as in the passage above, he links the death penalty to the abuses of monarchy and slavery. A lot more Painelike pugilism and a lot less righteousness would have served him well. In

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contrast, Annan speaks authoritatively about the Bible, but appears to come unhinged when he stoops to ad hominem attacks, slippery slope fallacies, prolepsis, and other rhetorical strategies that make him seem less like a calm man of the cloth and more like an anxious debater arguing the losing side of a case. Indeed, if Rush’s arguments make him seem smug, Annan’s hyperbolic and overheated prose makes him seem desperate. While Rush and Annan thus floundered in their own ways, the American Museum followed their exchange in 1789 with a remarkable four-part essay, “The Unlawfulness and Impolicy of Capital Punishment.” Published anonymously “by a citizen of Maryland” in the January, February, March, and April issues of 1790, the essay merges Rush’s Enlightenment thinking with Annan’s theological concerns, but also adds the rhetorical leavening of sentimental prose, producing a heart-wrenching argument. The author argues in the opening of the January installment that the death penalty is the product of “the fallibility of the human intellect,” which has “crimsoned the earth with streams of blood, and filled the air with thousands of dying groans.” The anonymous abolitionist thus draws a harrowing picture of a culture gone terribly wrong. The February installment links this scene of pain back to theology, but whereas Rush sought to do so by engaging in rhetorical analysis of specific biblical passages, the anonymous author takes a smarter course. “Let us beware,” the author argues, “lest, forsaking the spirit, and viewing with microscopic eyes a few minute points of the letter, we prop a fabric of sanguinary jurisprudence, which must soon melt away before the strong beams of religious truth.” Let nitpicking clerics debate the microscopic meanings of arcane phrases, readers are told, true godliness comes from understanding the broad spirit of the Bible. And that book preaches not misery and torture but love and forgiveness; hence, “the plan of building morality upon the gallows implies this capital mistake” of implementing bad social policy by misunderstanding the Good Book. Indeed, the worst aspect of the death penalty, our anonymous author argues in the final installment, is that it instills in Americans a bloodthirsty refusal to forgive those who most need forgiveness. For whereas the “spirit of christian government” abhors “revenge and cruelty,” executions manufacture terror, as seen in this dreadful gallows scene: He holds up his trembling hands for mercy—he deplores his error; for his heart is yet uncorrupted. See his helpless wife and tender babes; their

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shrieks pierce the skies—they tear their hair—the powers of nature are exhausted—they faint. And must he suffer? Rise, Humanity! Rise, Justice! Rise, Policy! Rescue the unhappy man from destruction.

Complete with dashes, exclamation points, crying babes, bereaved wives, shrieks of terror, a man begging for mercy, appeals to Humanity! Justice! and Policy! and the presumed ending of it all in a twitching body dangling from a rope, this dynamic passage amounts to a primer in sentimental prose. Foregoing high philosophical and theological reasoning, the passage drags readers into the subject position I characterized earlier as “spectatorial sympathy,” asking them not so much to think about hangings as to imagine themselves being hanged, or as watching a loved one being turned off. It would be many years before this sentimental strategy became culturally dominant, yet it is not difficult to imagine readers reeling from this emotional imagery.41 But the debate was not yet exhausted, for even while Rush, Annan, and the Maryland citizen may have had their fill, 1793 found Pennsylvania’s attorney general, William Bradford, leaping into the fray with An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania. Bradford came from one of Philadelphia’s elite families; his father was a well-known printer and public figure in the city’s lively pre-Revolutionary intellectual community. As a side venture to his printing duties, in 1754 he opened the London Coffee House at Front and Market Streets, described by the Bridenbaughs as “a general clearinghouse for business, news and gossip.” Bradford’s coffeehouse “had for sale tickets for concerts, plays, lectures and public events of all kinds”; when the Stamp Act crisis unfolded in 1765, Philadelphia’s newly formed Sons of Liberty met to discuss action in Bradford’s venue. William Bradford’s father was thus at the heart of the production of the public spaces and political movements required for Enlightenment culture to flourish (and which his son’s interlocutor, Annan, would later oppose). The younger Bradford sought his education at Princeton, where he befriended such future Revolutionary luminaries as James Madison, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Philip Freneau, and Aaron Burr; within a few semesters of Bradford’s graduation in 1772, Princeton was “popping with revolutionary ardor.” Bradford enlisted and saw action in the war, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before resigning in 1779 for reasons of health. By 1780 he had been named Pennsylvania’s attorney general (a position he would assume for

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President Washington in 1794, thus becoming the nation’s second attorney general, after Edmund Randolph). When the Rush and Annan debate hit the papers, Governor Thomas Mifflin asked Bradford to weigh in on the subject; as a longtime Philadelphian from the right class, the holder of impeccable revolutionary credentials, a powerful lawyer, and a leading member of the city’s Enlightenment literati, Bradford was the perfect choice for the job.42 Whereas Rush favored the Enlightenment line taken by Beccaria and Montesquieu, and hammered the idea that executions supported monarchy, he also spent considerable space addressing religious arguments; and whereas the Maryland citizen writes in often frantic sentences laden with emotions, Bradford makes it clear from as early as his title page and preface that he will not engage in such gestures. Indeed, while the title page includes an epigraph from Montesquieu, the second leaf of the preface (i.e., the “Advertisement”) announces that the pamphlet is an attempt “to collect the scattered rays which the juridical history of our own and other countries affords—and to examine how far the maxims of philosophy abide the test of experiment.” Bradford thus announces his high-minded political intentions by introducing his work with words coded with Enlightenment overtones, including rays (of understanding, knowledge, the light of reason, etc.), juridical history, examine, philosophy, and experiment, all of which suggest the progressive revelation of truth at the hands of science and law. The absence of religion is conspicuous; the avoidance of sentimental prose suggests what Philadelphia’s men of ruffles must have thought of the Maryland citizen’s emotional lines.43 Readers who skip the preface’s pointed declaration of principles are treated in the first paragraph to an even more explicit statement of Bradford’s uncompromising allegiance to the Enlightenment. Blithely ignoring hundreds of years of controversy and debate, Bradford declares in the first sentence that “the general principles upon which penal laws ought to be founded appear to be fully settled” (3). He follows this sweeping of the table with a summary of the field: “Montesquieu and Beccaria led the way in the discussion, and the philosophy of all Europe, roused by the boldness of their march, has since been deeply engaged. . . . a remarkable coincidence of opinion among the enlightened writers on this subject, seems to announce the justness of their conclusions” (3). For Bradford, the arguments of Montesquieu, Beccaria, and their fellow “enlightened writers” are so powerful and so consistently aligned that they embody

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“the voice of Reason and Humanity” (4). But post-Revolutionary Americans are apparently not listening to the voice of Reason and Humanity, for “sanguinary punishments, contrived in despotic and barbarous ages, have been continued when the progress of freedom, science, and morals renders them unnecessary and mischievous” (5). Bradford thus presents readers with an argument by dichotomy that will eventually become a cornerstone of later abolitionist tracts: on the one side he presents despotism, barbarism, and vengeance, all serving the evil ends of monarchies, which of course utilize the death penalty; on the other side he offers the progress of freedom, science, and morals, the Enlightenment tropes serving the cause of American republicanism, which of course should abolish the death penalty. In an elegant passage summarizing such Enlightenment-equals-republicanism-equals-abolition thinking, Bradford prophesies that “a spirit of reform has gone forth—the empire of prejudice and inhumanity is silently crumbling to pieces—and the progress of liberty, by unfettering the human mind, will hasten its destruction” (5). Like the capricious brutality practiced by monarchies, then, the death penalty is an unfortunate relic of “the empire of prejudice and inhumanity.” Thus echoing the philosophical hopes and political agendas of Beccaria, Gardiner, Barlow, Jefferson, Rush, and other Revolutionary era reformers, Bradford positions opposition to the death penalty as a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking and America’s rising empire of reason.44 Bradford uses the word empire to indicate undesirable political arrangements—such as the British “empire of prejudice and inhumanity”— yet his and his peers’ constant use of the word reminds us that the rise of the Enlightenment both fueled and was fueled by the rise of modern nationalism. Indeed, it is clear from the distance of hundreds of years that while the Enlightenment’s militancy against God and king hoped to free the individual in the name of reason, the modern nation-states that rose from the ashes of Old World monarchies harnessed consent via the equally destructive and equally delusive seductions of mass-produced nationalism—hence the fantasy empire called forth in Barlow’s July Fourth oration of 1787, the dreamy imperialism envisioned in “The Grand Constitution” in the Massachusetts Centinel in October 1787, and the heady scheming of Federalists everywhere. Even Beccaria, who so forcefully opposed public punishments and the death penalty in general—arguing that “the ultimate penalty has never dissuaded men from offending against society”—bowed before the awesome power of national security. For the only condition

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under which he supported the death penalty was when someone “retains such connections and such power as to endanger the security of the nation,” perhaps even rising to the point of being able to “threaten a dangerous revolution.” There is no logical reason why the critiques Beccaria has raised against public punishments and the death penalty in general should somehow fail in the face of national security: whether the offended party is a person or the state, criminals or plotters will still not be deterred by the threat of death, conspirators will still not be awed by imminent hanging, the confidants of the hanged will still feel terrible resentment against the powers that killed their loved one, and imprisonment or banishment will still be just as effective at preventing repeat offenses. In short, even while states have every right to protect themselves, killing those who “endanger the security of the nation” does nothing to enhance national security. For Beccaria to miss this obvious point demonstrates that for early-modern reformers, emergent nation-states were awesome, law-transcending, Enlightenment-abrogating powers. Zdzislaw Mach has argued that for nationalism to succeed, “the symbols” appropriated by the nation-state to create a sense of unity and purpose among the people—including flags, songs, icons, narratives, and so on—must literally be “sacred for citizens”; they must lift off from the realm of political creations and appear instead as inviolable, transcendent, sacred. Thus, as we see in the cases of Bradford, Beccaria, and their late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment reformer peers, the almost sacred power of the state trumped any reformist zeal regarding the death penalty. Hangings were barbarous, unless of course the national security of the state was threatened.45 Like Beccaria in Italy and many of his fellow post-Revolutionary Americans, Bradford was therefore so steeped in nationalism that it compromised his abolitionist principles—he was seduced by what Benedict Anderson has diagnosed as “the magic of nationalism.” For while the first eleven pages of Bradford’s pamphlet offer a strong defense of the revolutionary possibilities of the Enlightenment, with capital punishment portrayed as a barbaric legacy of Old World monarchies, on page 12 he backtracks to moderate his case against the death penalty. Bradford argues there that the Pennsylvania Legislature “would be warranted to abolish this dreadful punishment in all cases . . . and to make, in this country, a fair experiment in favor of the rights of human nature” (12). But the bold abolition of the death penalty in “all cases” as proposed in that quotation is qualified by this parenthetical qualification, which falls

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in the quotation above where I have used ellipses: “(except in the higher degrees of treason and murder)” (12). The following paragraph then begins with this nationalism-trumpeting claim: “In no country can the experiment be made with so much safety, and such probability of success, as in the United States” (12). When Old World monarchs execute traitors or murderers it is a violation of “the rights of human nature,” but when the United States executes traitors or murderers—presumably including many of the victims discussed in chapters 1 through 3—it is an acceptable defense of an exceptional nation-state, an act of violence sanctioned by a “higher” standard. For Bradford as for Beccaria, then, republican nationalism trumps Enlightenment humanism.46 Moreover, as was the case with most post-Revolutionary reformers, Bradford’s vision of U.S. nationalism was evangelical, even millennial. If U.S. nationalism provided certain exceptions to Enlightenment hopes, it also carried its own heavy burden of Christian benevolence, which, if realized, was expected to launch the nation to levels of greatness beyond even the wildest imaginations of Gardiner or Freneau or Barlow. Indeed, in Bradford’s closing remarks he offers a vision of U.S. nationalism as a crime-free and therefore execution-free utopia of Enlightenment reason and Christian benevolence. “It is from the ignorance, wretchedness or corrupted manners of a people that crimes proceed,” Bradford concludes. “A mitigation of punishment ought, therefore, to be accompanied, as far as possible, by a diffusion of knowledge and a strict execution of the laws” (43). Thus, like Benjamin Rush before him, Bradford ends his treatise in a manner that feels curiously like a sermon, like a call for his slack neighbors to live up to their revolutionary promise as God’s chosen children, good republicans, and thus the founders of a benevolent empire of reason. Bradford’s bold call was not unanswered, for Mease reports that “at the following session of the legislature, the punishment of death was abolished for all crimes except murder of the first degree.” Bradford and Rush won a legislative battle, then, but as we shall see, their clarion calls for enlightened justice and benevolent sympathy would continue to crash into the glum realities of a post-Revolutionary nation struggling to live up to is professed principles.47

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CONCLUSION

The Hanging of John M’Kean and the Perils of Sinning in an Age of Reason

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•

A

hard-drinking Irishman who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1783, John M’Kean was a notorious wife beater. He apparently hit his wife daily, sometimes for no reason, sometimes for trifling reasons, sometimes just because he was drunk and was in the habit. One wonders what his neighbors were doing during these constant batterings; nonetheless, when he finally killed his wife and was hanged for it, one observer ventured that “the safety of society requires it.” But it would seem that society was not threatened, just his wife—which means that some intervention was needed before, not after, she was beaten to death. But no interventions were offered, the predictable worst unfolded, and thus, in 1807—ten years following Abraham Johnstone’s hanging in New Jersey, fourteen years following the publication of William Bradford’s Enquiry, and fifteen years following Rush’s Considerations—as many as 5,000 West Jerseyans and Philadelphians gathered in a field to witness the hanging of M’Kean.1 Following the period of intense xenophobia triggered by the XYZ Affair and various revolutions in Europe, falling amid a period of massive

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immigration, and feeding from the trough of trashy sources like the American Bloody Register, which as we saw in chapter 2 peddled lurid portrayals of Irish criminals such as Richard Barrick, John Sullivan, and Alexander White, many post-Revolutionary Americans loathed the Irish. Indeed, as I discussed in the introduction, when reviewing the fate of Catharine Smith, the Irish were generally thought of not only as religious outsiders (they were Catholic in a Protestant land) and as class outsiders (they were almost universally poor), but also as biological outsiders who were lumped together with black slaves as members of an inferior and crime-prone race. The combination of rising numbers of such triply damned immigrants, supposedly declining norms of deference, and rumors of escalating crime left many Americans worrying, as John Alexander reports, that the poor had “gone sour and become dangerous.” At least one observer addressed the underlying conditions of this souring, as a 1797 editorial in Gale’s Independent Gazetteer wondered if the depravity so widely associated with the Irish “may not, in some degree, be traced to the extreme poverty of this distressed class of people.” A Philadelphia-based clergyman who visited the desperate living quarters of the poor warned that brave adventurers would find there “nuisances as offensive to the senses as dangerous to the health. Among other things the reservoirs of putrid excrements are truly pestilential.” The immigrant poor lived not only in “extreme poverty” but amid open streams of shit. While this witness conveys a sense of empathy with those whose lives are desperate—a class described by Freneau in 1815 as “wrong’d man, borne down, deceived and vex’d . . . bewilder’d and perplex’d”—other Philadelphians offered different responses, such as those who gathered on 12 August 1800 to fulfill the righteous task of burning down houses of prostitution. Their work supposedly consumed three days of demolition. Thus rotating from questioning the economic causes of crime to engaging in vigilante violence, thinking as ever about race and class, and walking amid neighbors who subscribed with equal fervency to the Enlightenment and Old World mysticism, those postRevolutionary Philadelphians who watched M’Kean swing from the gallows would have found their heads full of confusing and even contradictory impulses. M’Kean’s hanging then, was not only a juridical, political, and theological affair, but an unsettling cultural occasion, for it offered an open text waiting for observers to inscribe their meanings upon his dangling body and wasted life.2

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I have demonstrated throughout this book that such occasions led to wildly different outcomes. In the mass-hangings in New York City in 1741, we saw some prisoners march to the gallows with dignity, some of them even damning their executioners, while others confessed to crimes they had not committed and yet others fingered accomplices in the crowd; in the 1780 case of Major André we saw revolutionaries weep for their British foe, an imperial warrior who won their hearts with his good looks and quick wit; and with Abraham Johnstone in 1797 we saw Quaker activists trying to turn his execution into an opportunity to engage in political persuasion. No set-and-sure occasion, these public hangings provided open-air stages for performing a variety of political meanings. Thinking both historically and rhetorically, then, it is intriguing to wonder if Beccaria, Rush, Bradford, and their abolitionist peers, having spent many years filling the public with essays, pamphlets, editorials, and speeches, managed to forge a new discursive sensibility for their fellow Americans. M’Kean’s hanging did not elicit a firestorm of public response, perhaps either because it was not considered noteworthy or because abolitionists were simply exhausted—another day, another killing—yet we do have an anonymous pamphlet describing his exit from this world. It would be imprudent to draw overly strong conclusions on the evidence provided in just one document, yet it is nonetheless instructive to study how, following a decade of anti-death penalty activism, M’Kean’s hanging was framed. If the 1807 Execution of John M’Kean for the Murder of His Wife (see figure 13) is indicative of deeper cultural patterns, then it may appear that the flowering of enlightenment imagined by Beccaria, Rush, Bradford, and others was, at least as concerned the death penalty, stalled at best, dead at worst. Indeed, the cover of M’Kean’s execution pamphlet makes it clear who M’Kean’s friends are, as the devil himself claws at a rock while shadowing his now dead minion hanging from a crude scaffold. At first glance, the message here seems clear enough: M’Kean did the devil’s work, for which he was hanged. Yet the image is not so much representational as allegorical: the absurdly oversized rock used to counterbalance the dangling M’Kean, for example, would appear not to be a realistic portrayal of the mechanical workings of a gallows so much as an impossible-tomiss millstone—it is the visual portrayal of a lifetime’s worth of guilt. Likewise, the tree in the bottom left of the image is strangely deformed: it has eerie hornlike branches jutting from its leafy canopy, it has one

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FIGURE 13. The

front cover of The Execution of John M’Kean, for the Murder of His Wife (1807). (Courtesy of the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.)

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sad branch drooping awkwardly from the middle of its trunk, and it appears to be lashed to the boulder upon which the devil plays—the image portrays how the devil and his cronies violate the natural order of things, disfiguring even nature. The top half of the image thus offers a didactic political lesson—literally a visual corollary to Annan’s worry about the coming “reign of chaos”—about the ghoulish warping of nature depicted in the bottom half of the image. Finally, by portraying the hanged in outline only, with no facial or other personalizing details, the image gestures not toward M’Kean himself but to any and all sinners in danger of sharing his fate. The image thus demonstrates the collapsing of the political and the theological into a damning indictment of sin.3 It comes as no surprise then, when the “To the Reader” note on the back of the title page situates M’Kean’s execution as yet another pedagogical moment from which the masses will hopefully learn a godly lesson:

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Ye votaries of Vice! You who are spending your time, your substance, and your health, take warning by the untimely fate of John M’Kean!! The sin of Drunkenness and Debauchery may, ere you are aware, lead you as afar as it has done him—Pause for a moment, and reflect the consequences of sinning against God and your own consciences.

This passage relies on what I have called slippery slope logic, for it creates a “precedent slope” upon which sinning gathers steam, falling inevitably from drunkenness and debauchery to the gallows. This threatening argument is then followed by the confession that “this unhappy man denied having murdered his wife—but acknowledged having frequently beat her unmercifully. He died as he had lived, a hardened sinner.” And there’s the rub: just as M’Kean lived a wretched life of drunken violence, undeterred by the threat that the fate of men like Abraham Johnstone might someday befall him, so we can safely assume that the “hardened sinners” at M’Kean’s execution were not deterred by his hanging. In fact, considering the many cases I have recounted in this book, it appears that reflecting on “the consequences of sinning” is among the least likely responses to executions.4 Rather than prompting temporal thoughts about the logic of deterrence, both the cover image and text of the pamphlet suggest that M’Kean’s execution was meant to be understood not so much as an exercise in judicial logic or political pedagogy as part of a transhistorical struggle between

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good and evil, between the righteous work of God’s children and the hellish schemes of the devil’s henchmen. However, by 1807 the separation of church and state had been formalized, which means that sanctioning the state’s law as doing the work of God’s law was increasingly problematic. Perhaps this explains the rhetorical confusions of M’Kean’s pamphlet, where punishments for sinning are justified as fulfilling the secular function of deterrence. Moreover, if preventing pain and degradation was a genuine concern, then M’Kean’s neighbors would have intervened before he murdered his wife. Yet they waited until she was dead before acting and then justified their too-late-to-make-a-difference response in traditional theological terms, thus proving that their concern was not so much with stopping current crime or deterring future crimes as with making a sacrificial gesture toward a potentially Angry God. Having backslid for years, having been compromised by their proximity to M’Kean’s violence, having proven themselves slack over and over again, snapping M’Kean’s neck thus served the propitiatory function of reasserting the community’s commitment to God and authority. Regina Schwartz defines the biblical act of propitiation as “an offering to ward off divine wrath, to encourage the deity’s favor, to invoke his blessings”; likewise, Garry Wills describes one function of the death penalty as seeking “purification by destruction,” literally as cleaning one’s dirty hands by obliterating another’s. In both cases, propitiation amounts to a form of substitution wherein “an offering” is made, where one victim is traded for the sins of others. Thomas Paine argued in his Age of Reason that this logic of death as substitution may be traced all the way back to “the paroxysm of the crucifixion,” which saddled Western culture with “the theory . . . that one person could stand in the place of another, and could perform meritorious services for him.” Thinking of M’Kean’s hanging in this way does not diminish his record of brutality toward his wife, but it does enable us to see that his hanging served functions above and beyond those that we might call judicial. For in addition to the obvious angles of embodying anti-Irish racism in an age of massive immigration, enacting a crude form of social control in an age of post-Revolutionary confusion, and serving as yet another failed attempt at deterrence and political pedagogy, M’Kean’s life was taken as part of a symbolic redrawing of frayed communal and religious bonds. Thus, whereas William Bradford assumed in 1793 that crime and punishment would henceforward embody “the voice of Reason and Humanity,” M’Kean’s hanging in 1807

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demonstrates a different, much older, and in many ways more alluring symbolic logic of substitution and exchange—not unlike Christ, M’Kean must die so that others may live.5 It is difficult for any society to admit that its judicial powers and theological myths are political weapons used to sacrifice the downtrodden—whether enslaved, indentured, or otherwise marginalized—for the purposes of building symbolic community in the face of deep political divisions. Yet in Philadelphia in 1800, “the top 0.5% of the city’s taxpayers owned more taxable property than the bottom 75%. . . . 58.4% of the taxables were listed as owning no real property.” Such stunning gaps in wealth make it hard for the promises of republicanism—let alone the soaring visions of Gardiner and Barlow and Freneau—to feel like anything other than a cruel joke. Even though they were men of elite standing, and even though they may not have advocated aggressively for the redistribution of wealth, Beccaria, Rush, Bradford, and the other Revolutionary and early Federal era activists addressed here argued that one consequence of such stark inequality, the death penalty, flew in the face of the bold premises of both the Enlightenment in general and American republicanism in particular. Just as important, these reformers seemed to be approaching an understanding of crime wherein the individual was situated less as a moral aberration or singular anomaly than as a representation of collective failure: whether apprehended as an example of socialization gone wrong, community breaking down, benevolence never offered, or economic opportunity thwarted, the spectacular violence of the few—of men like M’Kean—was beginning to be seen as a harsh metonym of the less visible violence of a society where justice and equality for all was increasingly fading into the stuff of myth. For example, in his speech before the Virginia legislature in 1796, George Keith Taylor suggested that those who attend executions should “remember that he [the prisoner] is their fellow man . . . [and] a character which might have been virtuous if they had done their duty.”6 Seen from this perspective, executions are demonstrations of political failure, of society’s best and brightest not fulfilling their duty to pursue the common welfare; for Taylor is arguing that while it is the lowly who swing from the gallows, it is the high and mighty who construct a society where violence—both criminal and state-sanctioned—is a daily occurrence. As Freneau later pleaded in a melancholy poem about the decline of democracy into despotism, perhaps it was time to “own that man’s

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neglected culture here / breeds all the mischiefs that we feel or fear.” But as the M’Kean execution pamphlet demonstrates, Freneau may ask too much; for it is easier to assume that the villain is a devilish wreck and personal failure than to inquire about the ways compromised democracy and grossly unfair versions of capitalism produce desperate lives of alienation and violence. Nonetheless, two years following McKean’s execution, the pseudonymous ME (some catalogues list the author as M. Eleneva) argued in Essays on the Injustice and Impolicy of Inflicting Capital Punishment that the time had come to “be less rash and cruel, for thy heart has been formed for mild and benevolent purposes.” Echoing Rush’s prior pamphlet, and embodying the hope of this period’s anti-death penalty reformers, ME pleaded with readers to “desert then the blood flag of the Penal Code, and thy mind will be blessed with peace.” As we shall see in volume 2, that promise was difficult to fulfill.7

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Notes •

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PREFACE 1. The Federalist flak is quoted in Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, updated version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 258; Thomas Paine, “To the Citizens of the United States” (1802), in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 503–517, quotation from 506.

INTRODUCTION. THE RHETORICAL HISTORY OF “A VERY HARD CHOICE” 1. American Weekly Mercury (30 June to 7 July 1737): 3 and 1; first published by Andrew Bradford in December 1719, fifty-eight years before the First Amendment was established, the paper faced intense pressure from the Provincial Council (see Leonard Levy, Emergence of a Free Press [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], 49–50) and hence may have tried to curry favor with colonial censors by publishing such stories; Boston’s News-Letter, founded in 1704, was the first regularly (as compared to occasionally) published newspaper; for a charming

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Notes biography of Bradford see Horatio Gates Jones, Andrew Bradford: Founder of the Newspaper Press in the Middle States of America (1869; New York: Arno, 1970); and see Anna Janey DeArmond, Andrew Bradford: Colonial Journalist (New York: Greenwood, 1969).

2. Various spellings cited from Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, From the Organization to the Termination of the Proprietary Government (hereafter MPCP; Harrisburg, Theo. Fenn & Co., 1851), 4:47 (21 April 1736), 209 (6 June 1737), and 224 (23 June 1737); American Weekly Mercury (29 April to 6 May 1736): 3 and (30 June to 7 July 1737): 3; Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States, trans. Francis Lieber (1833; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 101—while he generously listed it as coauthored, Beaumont wrote the book (see Thorsten Sellin’s comments in his introduction to this edition, p. xviii). 3. Benjamin Franklin, “Information To Those Who Would Remove to America” (1784), in Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 975–983, quotations from 977, 979; J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; New York: Penguin, 1981), 82; Russell Menard, “From Servant Mobility to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” William and Mary Quarterly 30:1 (January 1973): 37–64, quotations from 42; David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

University Press, 1981), 154–155; John Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 17. 4. Paine’s wish from Common Sense (1776), as reprinted in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 65–115, quotations from 93, 109; for further analysis of the dilemmas of identity see Michael Zuckerman, “The Fabrication of Identity in Early America,” in “Almost Chosen People”: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 21–54; in one infamous twist on this argument, the runaway convict servant, Sarah Wilson, managed in the early 1770s to foist herself off on pomp-and-circumstance-loving colonials by pretending to be a sister of the queen, complete with stolen jewels and the stage name of Sophia Carolina Mathilda, Marchioness de Waldegrave (see Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 [New York: Knopf, 1955], 345–346). 5. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation, an American Tale (1798), as reprinted in Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. Jay Fliegleman (New York: Penguin, 1991), 57, 81, 273; markings reported in Lyn Lofland, A

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World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Spaces (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 47–48, and in Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896; Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1995), 146; America’s most famous literary portrayal of such markings is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850; New York: Norton, 1961), yet as was so often the case, Hawthorne shied away from the politically touchy aspects of his subject by having Hester Prynne wear her scarlet letter rather than having it branded upon her body; for historical notes on the practice Hawthorne made famous, see Earle, Curious Punishments, 86–95, and Edwin Powers, Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620–1692, A Documentary History (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 198–201; for a critique of The Scarlet Letter’s evasions, see David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 259–278. 6. Francis Lieber, from the “Translator’s Preface” to Beaumont and Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States, 9; Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 176; regarding the daunting economic situation faced by women, Billy G. Smith reports in The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) that as late as the Revolution, “twice as many females as males applied to the Overseer of the poor for aid” (170); for a contemporary analysis of these questions, see Jennifer K. Wood, “In Whose Name: Crime Victim Policy and the Punishing Power of Protection,” Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17:3 (2005): 1–17. 7. Kathleen M. Brown, “Brave New Worlds: Women’s and Gender History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 50:2 (1993): 311–328, quotations from 315, 317–318, 328; for a literary precursor to Brown’s argument, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 110–150; for an overview of the scholarship revising our understanding of some women’s lives in the colonial and revolutionary periods, see Mary Beth Norton, “The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Early America,” American Historical Review 89:3 (1984): 593–619; for an early history of the relationships among crime, violence, and sex, see David Brion Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860: A Study in Social Values (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), 147–178. 8. MPCP (21 April 1736), 47; Boston News-Letter (29 April to 6 May 1736): 2; American Weekly Mercury (29 April to 6 May 1736): 3; the New York City woman appears in the American Weekly Mercury (22 April to 29 April 1736), 3 and (29 April to 6 May 1736), 2–3; the relationship between imprisoning or executing mothers and orphaning their children continues: as of 2000, 1.5 million children

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Notes nationwide had a mother behind bars; at the time of imprisonment, nearly half of these women ran single-family households, meaning their children were sucked into child services upon their imprisonment (see Bureau of Justice Statistics, Special Report: Incarcerated Parents and Their Children [Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2000], 1–9).

9. Christ Church records available in Record of Pennsylvania Marriages, Prior to 1810, Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd series (Harrisburg: Busch, 1895), 1:75; the classic literary portrayal of these questions is Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her childhood, was Twelve Years a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her brother), Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest and died a Penitent (1722; London: Wordsworth, 2001). 10. John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment, with a Comment on Capital Punishment by Clarence Darrow (New York: Citadel, 1960), 6, 28—Laurence’s study was originally published in 1932; this rerelease included part of Darrow’s fight against executions; Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Richard Davis (1764; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19; on Beccaria, see Stephen John Hartnett, “Prisons, Profit, Crime, and Social Control: A Hermeneutic of the Production of Violence,” in Race, Class, and Community Identity, ed. Andrew Light and Meck Nagel (New York: Humanities Press, 2000), Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

199–221; for a brilliant study of the empire-crime nexus, see Peter Linebuagh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 11. Mr. Van’s 23 March 1774 statement as reproduced in The Spirit of ’Seventy-six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, ed. Henry Steel Commager and Richard B. Morris (1958: New York: Da Capo, 1995), 12; for examinations of the relationship between capital formation and capital punishment in the eighteenth century, see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 17–64. 12. “Free America” as it appears in Commager and Morris, The Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 19; for contemporary studies of the relationships among crime, capitalism, and their respective forms of violence, see Crime and Capitalism: Readings in Marxist Criminology, ed. David Greenberg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry: Toward Gulags, Western Style, 2nd

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ed. (London: Routledge, 1994); and David Shichor, Punishment for Profit: Private Prisons / Public Concerns (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995). 13. Philadelphia abolitionists quoted from The Impropriety of Capital Punishments: or, The Report of A Committee on Dr. Cuyler’s Sermon entitled “The Law of God with Respect to Murder” (Philadelphia: John Pennington, 1842), 5; on the political milieu of this committee, see Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Pennsylvania, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); for discussions of how economics influenced politics during the Revolution, see Stephen Lucas, Portents of Rebellion: Rhetoric and Revolution in Philadelphia, 1756–1776 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 32–59, and T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 14. Joel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed. (1991; London, Verso, 2003), 21; 1796 conviction rate from Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 79, and see table 2, p. 181, for a slightly lower conviction figure averaged over the period from 1794 to 1800. 15. For a contemporary version of such questions, see the debate between H. Wayne House (“The New Testament and Moral Arguments for Capital Punishment”) and John Yoder (“Noah’s Covenant, the New Testament, and Christian Social Order”) in The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, ed. Hugo Adam Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Bedau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 415–428 and 429–444 respectively; and see Stephen John Hartnett and Daniel Mark Larson, “‘Tonight Another Man Will Die’: Crime, Violence, and the Master Tropes of Contemporary Arguments about the Death Penalty,” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 3:4 (2006): 263–287. 16. Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 17; Daniel Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 87; 1682 laws reprinted in Samuel Hazard, Annals of Pennsylvania, From the Discovery of the Delaware (Philadelphia: Hazard and Mitchell, 1850), 568–574, quotation from 573–574; on the disciplinary entanglements fostered by the theological issues raised here, see Kai Erikson, “Puritanism and Deviancy,” in Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1966), 185–205. 17. Mather’s The Day of Trouble is Near (1674) as quoted in Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 60; Perry Miller, “The End of the World,” in Errand into the Wilderness (1956; Cambridge:

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Notes Cambridge University Press, 1993), 217–239, quotation from 218; on the structure of what he calls “Storms of God’s Wrath: The Message of Doom and Decay,” see Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 88–135; David Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 47.

18. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” (1841), in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1985), 188; William Henry Burleigh, Poems, with a Sketch of His Life, by Celia Burleigh (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1871), xiii, 199; and see the analysis of these challenges in Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 19. “[B]ehav’d” from the American Weekly Mercury (30 June to 7 July 1737): 3; I recount additional stories of gallows misbehavior in the chapters that follow, but for examples not discussed here, see Daniel Cohen’s descriptions of pirates marching to death with bravado in Pillars of Salt, 66–67; entry of 11 March 1686, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 100; Cotton Mather, Call of the Gospel Applied Unto All Men in General, and Unto a Condemned Malefactor in Particular (Boston: R. P., 1686), 93, 20; Morgan was sent into the great beyond before a crowd estimated at over 5,000; along with Cotton Mather’s sermon, Morgan’s hanging was also addressed by Joshua Moody and Cotton’s father, Increase Mather (see Powers, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 295–298). 20. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (1604; New York: Pocket Books, 1965), Act IV, Scene II, lines 5–20, p. 71; Patrick Gordon’s testimony of 4 October 1726, in MPCP, 3:260; and see Wilbur Dunkel, “Law and Equity in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13:3 (1962): 275–285; there were brief periods in British history when hangmen were celebrated at local taverns following executions, but this tradition seems to have passed quickly toward the ambivalence I am describing here (for an overview of the hangman’s roles in history, see Laurence, History of Capital Punishment, 55, 86–139); for an executioner botching his assignment, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Vintage, 1995), 4–5. 21. Matthew 7:1–2 quoted from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Gerald D. Robin, “The Executioner: His Place in English Society,” British Journal of Sociology 15:1 (1964): 234–253, quotation from 234; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 169–175; for a satirical account of this process, where the executioner is referred to as “the

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great State Strangler,” compared to an artist, and called “a person of wide culture and sympathies,” see Charles Duff, A Handbook on Hanging (1928; New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 14, 8, 19. 22. Veritas, Brief Statement of the Argument For the Abolition of The Death Punishment. In Twelve Essays (Philadelphia: Gihon, Fairchild & Co., 1844), 16; anonymous letter and Nanfan quotations both from Douglas Greenberg, “The Effectiveness of Law Enforcement in Eighteenth-Century New York,” in Crime and Justice in American History: Historical Articles on the Origins and Evolution of American Criminal Justice, vol. 1, The Colonies and Early Republic, ed. Eric Monkkonen (London: Meckler, 1991), 271, 278; for a contemporary example of an executioner claiming to be a tool—“I go there and do a job”—even while abolitionists see him as a weapon, see Ron Wikberg and Wilbert Rideau’s conversations with Sam Jones, Louisiana’s executioner, in their Life Sentences: Rage and Survival behind Bars (New York: New York Times Books, 1992), 3–5 and 304–318, quotation from 4. 23. Smith and Beven lines from “Philadelphia, July 7,” Pennsylvania Gazette (1 July to 7 July 1737): 3; Bradford lines from William Stephens, A Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia, beginning October 20, 1737, vol. 2 (London: W. Meadows, 1742), 9, 10, 32. 24. See Jesse Jackson and Bruce Shapiro, Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future (New York: Norton, 2001); for historical studies of the relationship between race and the production of criminality, see Michael Stephen Hindus, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980), and Stephen John Hartnett, “Prison Labor, Slavery, and Capitalism in Historical Perspective,” Dark Night Field Notes 11 (Winter 1998): 25–29; for contemporary studies see Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 1999), especially 118– 161; Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds., Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York: New Press, 2002); and Stephen John Hartnett, Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2003). 25. Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael Braddick (London: Palgrave, 2002), 154–172, quotation from 158; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 2; on the construction of race and racism, see Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1968); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); Alden T. Vaughan,

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Notes Roots of American Racism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Nicholas Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29:3 (1996): 247–264; for a cautionary modification of the thesis that discourse about crime shaped notions of race and racism, albeit focusing largely on a later time frame than discussed here, see Daniel Cohen, “Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Constructions of Interracial Rape in Early American Crime Literature, 1767–1817,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56:3 (1999): 481–526.

26. On the impact of the many branches of Enlightenment thinking on America, see Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 22–54; and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2, The Science of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1969), 555–568; on the anti-French hysteria that swept the United States following the XYZ Affair of 1798, see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 303–374 and 529–690, and Stephen John Hartnett and Jennifer Rose Mercieca, “‘Has Your Courage Rusted?’: National Security and the Dilemmas of Republicanism in America, 1798–1800,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9:1 (2006): 79–112. 27. Combe’s The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects was published in 1828 and subsequently reissued in editions in London, New York, and Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Paris; lecture information from Combe, Notes on the United States of North America, During a Phrenological Visit in 1838–9-40, in Three Volumes (Edinburgh: MacLachlan, Stewart, & Co., 1841), 1:363; see George Combe, Thoughts on Capital Punishment (Edinburgh: MacLachlan, Stewart, 1847); quotation from Charles Gibbon, The Life of George Combe, Author of “The Constitution of Man,” vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1878), 33; on Gibbon’s significance to the skeptical wing of the Enlightenment see May, The Enlightenment in America, 114, 118–119; on the relationships among Combe, phrenology, and early modernity, see Stephen John Hartnett, “‘It is Terrible to Possess Such Power!’: The Critique of Phrenology, Class and Gender in Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-mark,’” Prospero 5 (1998): 5–26, and Madeleine Stern, Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1971). 28. Gibbon, Life of Combe, 1:34–35; on the struggles between Enlightenment and sorcery, and between a rising civil society and a declining church, see Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 147–205; on the rhetorical complexities of jeremiads—which like Combe’s confession denounce sin while invoking it in novelistic

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detail—see Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad. 29. John Bartram quoted in Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Galaxy Books, 1965), 20; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 7; Benjamin Rush, “An Eulogium on David Rittenhouse, Late President of the American Philosophical Society,” in Essays Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, ed. Michael Meranze (Schenectady: Union College Press, 1988), 226; on the question of rhetoric and epistemology, see Robert L. Scott, “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” Central States Speech Journal 18 (1967): 9–17. 30. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words are Deduced from their Originals, Explained in their Different Meanings, etc. (London: Knapton, Hitch, Lawes, Millar, Dodsely, and Longman, 1756); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), quotation from section 3.2.8, p. 347, first italics added; Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 182–183; and see Thomas Paine’s “Agrarian Justice” (1795), where he speaks of “the execution of the laws that govern society” (The Thomas Paine Reader, 471–489, quotation from 472). 31. Johnson, Dictionary, “execution”; my summary in this paragraph is indebted to Hannah Arendt’s “On Violence,” where she posits state violence as the last resort Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

of actors who have squandered political power and cultural authority (from her Crises of the Republic [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972], 103–198, especially 142–155); in this same vein, see Hartnett, “Prisons, Profit.” 32. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act I, Scene I, lines 63–64, p. 3; some commentators use both versions of the word interchangeably—for examples, see Irving S. Kull, “Slavery in New Jersey,” in New Jersey History, ed. Kull, vol. 2 (New York: American Historical Society, 1930), 726, and Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 86; for one of the few articles to address the political implications of these semantic issues, see Philip Smith, “Executing Executions: Aesthetics, Ideology, and the Problematic Narratives of Capital Punishment Ritual,” Theory and Society 25:2 (1996): 235–261. 33. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” (1841), in The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Stuart and Susan Levine (1976; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 175–197, quotations from 186; on the notion of looking “side-long” as a methodological imperative, see Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry:

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Notes An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 48–66; and see Robert Rushing, Resisting Arrest: Detective Fiction and Popular Culture (New York: Other Press, 2007).

34. Randall McGowen, “Punishing Violence, Sentencing Crime,” in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennehouse (New York: Routledge, 1989), 140; the methodology suggested here thus aspires to achieve what Fredric Jameson calls “transcoding”— see his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 17–102 in general, quotation from 40. 35. Chaplain John Hurt, The Love of Our Country. A Sermon Preached Before the Virginia Troops in New Jersey (Philadelphia: Styner and Cist, 1777), 9, 15, 16, 17, emphasis added; Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 185; May, The Enlightenment in America, 161; on the rhetorical complexities and political dilemmas of wartime Calvinism, see Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 413–509. 36. Washington’s boast as it appears quoted in Gay, The Enlightenment, 560; Federalist no. 1 in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1787; New York: Penguin, 1987), 87; Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 123; for an overview of how the colonists’ dream of empire Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

spurred their construction of the United States, see my Democratic Dissent & The Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 93–99; more broadly, see Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 37. Hurt, Love of Our Country, 22, 23; like Hurt, Samuel West argued in a May 1776 sermon that the revolutionaries could have it both ways: “while we are contending for liberty, we may avoid running into licentiousness . . . we may preserve the due medium between submitting to tyranny and running into anarchy” (quoted in Heimert, Religion, 443); on the dilemma of overdue war pay and its postwar consequences, see Jeremy David Engels, “Reading the Riot Act: Rhetoric, Psychology, and Counter-revolutionary Discourse in Shays’s Rebellion, 1786–1787,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91:1 (2005): 63–88. 38. “A Farmer” (David Cooper), An Enquiry into Public Abuses, Arising for a Want of a Due Execution of Laws, Provided for the Suppression of Vice, in the State of New Jersey (Philadelphia: Hall and Sellers, 1784), 20, 18; for an example of Cooper’s work as a slavery abolitionist see his blistering A Serious Address to the Rulers of America, on the Inconsistency of their Conduct Respecting Slavery (Trenton: Isaac Collins, 1783);

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this treatise is sometimes wrongfully attributed to Anthony Benezet (as is written in a librarian’s hand on the cover of the pamphlet held by the New York Public Library), but the version held by the NYPL is signed “A Farmer,” the same nom de guerre Cooper used for his temperance tract the following year. 39. “Honestus” (Benjamin Austin), Observations on The Pernicious Practice of the Law, As Published Occasionally in the Independent Chronicle, in the Year 1786, and Republished at the Request of a Number of Respectable Citizens (Boston: Joshua Belcher, 1814), 3, 10, 12; “Old South” (Benjamin Austin), Constitutional Republicanism, in Opposition to Fallacious Federalism (Boston: Adams and Rhoades, 1803); Austin appears sparingly in our historical scholarship, but is seen in passing in John E. Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 520 n. 48, and in Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 222; on the status of lawyering as a profession at the time, see Daniel Boorstin, The Americans, vol. 1, The Colonial Experience (1958: London: Phoenix, 1988), 195–202, and the essays collected as “Law and Society in Early America,” a special issue of William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 50:1 (1993). 40. Austin’s rotten fate as reported in Thomas O. Selfridge, A Correct Statement of the Whole Preliminary Controversy between Tho. O. Selfridge and Benj. Austin; Also a Brief Account of the Catastrophe in State Street, Boston, on the 4th August, 1806 (Charlestown: Samuel Ethridge, 1807), quotation from 48, justifications for murder Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

from 33 and 45; for a stunning mapping of the relationship between lynchings in the late nineteenth century and uses of the death penalty in the twentieth century, see Franklin Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 89–118; for images of vigilante justice in action, see James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). 41. Dwight Conquergood, “Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty,” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 339–367, quotation from 346; for additional scholarship emphasizing the performative aspects of executions, see Kirk W. Fuoss, “Lynching Performances, Theatres of Violence,” Text and Performance Quarterly 19:1 (1999): 1–37; Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8:2 (2005); 263–286; and Peter Ehrenhaus and A. Susan Owen, “Race Lynching and Christian Evangelicalism: Performances of Faith,” Text and Performance Quarterly 24:3–4 (2004): 276–301. 42. Federalist Papers, 157; and consider the fact that The Federalist Papers include fifty-five references to violence and twenty-three references to crime (see the

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Notes entries for violence, violences, violent, crime, crimes, and criminal in The Federalist Concordance, ed. Thomas Engerman, Edward Erler, and Thomas Hofeller [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 594 and 120); on the centrality of concerns over order, safety, and control to early Republican thought, see Jennifer Rose Mercieca, “‘We the People’: The Rhetorics of Republicanism in America, 1776–1845,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2003.

43. 2 Kings 21:11–12, quoted from New Oxford Annotated Bible; the 1694 sentence is quoted in Henry Scofield Cooley, A Study of Slavery in New Jersey (Baltimore: n.p., 1896), 39; for notices of other New Jersey burnings at the stake, see American Weekly Mercury (14–20 January 1729), reprinted in Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, 1st series, vol. 11 of Archives of the State of New Jersey, ed. William Nelson (Patterson: Press Printing, 1894), 201–202; Frances Pingeon, Blacks in the Revolutionary Era (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1975), 12–13; and Negley Teeters, “Tentative List of Persons Executed in Early New Jersey,” a typed ms. from 1962 held in the Special Collections of the Alexander Library, Rutgers University. 44. James Revel, “The Unhappy Transported Felon,” appended to John Mellville Jennings, “The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen Years Transportation At Virginia in America,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 56:2 (1948): 180–194, quotation from 192; Defoe, Moll Flanders, 213; for evidence of how England’s poor created their own gallows humor, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

both mocking and fearing death, see Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons,” in Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree, 65–117, 66–67 on their defiant street patter. 45. William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1793), 5; no author credited, On the Punishment of Death and the Means of Preventing Crime (London: William Benning, 1828), 7, 8—although published in England, John O’Sullivan and other antebellum American abolitionists read this document and cited it in their own work; Arthur Caverno, A Sermon Delivered at Great-Falls, N.H., Aug. 9, 1835, on the Subject of Abolishing Capital Punishment (Portsmouth: Miller and Brewster, 1836); Thomas Upham, The Manual of Peace (New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1836), 233. 46. John O’Sullivan, “Report on the Subject of Capital Punishment, No. 249 in Assembly, April 14, 1841,” p. 51 of the pamphlet version held in the NYPL; the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century no-deterrence-effect arguments discussed here are now conclusively supported by the best available evidence—for an overview, see William C. Bailey and Ruth D. Peterson, “Murder, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence: A Review of the Literature,” in Bedau, Death Penalty in

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America, 135–161. 47. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 277, 279, 280; Erikson, Wayward Puritans, 19; regarding this Foucauldian and Eriksonian argument that the law produces crime, see Stephen John Hartnett, “A Rhetorical Critique of the Drug War and ‘The Nauseous Pendulum’ of Reason and Violence,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 16:3 (2000): 247–271, and Linebaugh, The London Hanged; and see Michael Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

CHAPTER 1. SETTLER DEBAUCHERY, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, AND THE THEATER OF COLONIAL (DIS)ORDER, 1683–1741 1. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 262; Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (1944; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 12; Marcus Wilson Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America, 1607–1783 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 51; and see Sharon Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 90–96. 2. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 99–140, quotations from 130 and 131; Abbot Emerson Smith, ColoCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

nists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 3; in contrast to these claims, T. H. Breen and Stephen Foster have demonstrated that most of the emigrants coming to Massachusetts in 1637 were “grouped into relatively small nuclear families” led by men of middling stations who “could have contributed to social stability and helped Massachusetts to avoid the type of recurring internal conflict that plagued colonies like Virginia” (“Moving to the New World: The Character of Early Massachusetts Immigration,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 30:2 [1973]: 189–222, quotations from 194); for analysis of servants embarking for the New World, see David Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 34–64. 3. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 20; A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 27; Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 117, and see 307–337; undated quotation from the British Quarterly Review, as it appears in Cheesman A. Herrick, White Servitude in

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Notes Pennsylvania: Indentured and Redemption Labor in Colony and Commonwealth (Philadelphia: McVey, 1926), 140; Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722; London: Wordsworth Classics, 2001), 69.

4. “Americanus” (Benjamin Franklin), “To the Printers of the [Pennsylvania] Gazette,” 9 May 1751, in Benjamin Franklin: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes, ed. Frank Luther Mott and Chester Jorgenson (New York: American Book Company, 1936), 214–216, quotations from 215, 214–215; Franklin returned to the subject nineteen years later, arguing in an article in the Philadelphia Public Advertiser, “We look upon it as an unexampled Barbarity in your Government to empty your Gaols into our Settlements” (“N. N.” [Franklin], “To the Printer of the Public Advertiser,” 30 January 1770, in Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758–1775, ed. Verner Crane [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950], 186–192, quotation from 189–190). 5. Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn: and A Proposal for Some Regulations Concerning Felons in Prison, and the Good Effects to be Expected from them; To which is Added a Discourse on Transportation, and a Method to Render that Punishment more Effectual (London: J. Roberts, 1725), 47, 48, 52; on the political and intellectual context of Mandeville’s Fables, see Phillip Harth, “The Satiric Purpose of the Fable of the Bees,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 2:4 (1969): 321–340, and M. M. Goldsmith, “Public Virtue and Private Vices: Bernard Mandeville and English Political Ideologies in the Early Eighteenth CenCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

tury,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 9:4 (1976): 477–510. Mandeville’s proposal may have had yet another muted racializing aspect, as Roxann Wheeler reminds us that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the people Mandeville calls the “Mahometans,” the Muslims of the so-called Barbary Coast, were not yet coded as racially other. Their governments and religions were frowned upon, but they were not considered racially, biologically inferior to Europeans. Shipping convicts to the Barbary Coast rather than to the New World would therefore have at least prevented the amalgamation of poor white Europeans with enslaved black Africans (see “The Complexion of Desire: Racial Ideology and Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Novels,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:3 [1999]: 309–332, 318–319 on North Africa). 6. Samuel Johnson supposedly said this to Dr. John Campbell, who retold the story to James Boswell, who recounted it in a letter of 21 March 1775 (as reprinted in The Spirit of ’Seventy-six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris [1958; New York: Da Capo, 1995], 248–249). 7. Williams, Capitalism & Slavery, 10; Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern

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Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 67; for corroborating evidence see Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent Classes, 45–58, and Henry Gemery, “Markets for Migrants: English Indentured Servitude and Emigration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Colonialism and Migration; Indentured Labor before and after Slavery, ed. P. C. Emmer (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 33–54; Farley Grubb shows that one of the major forces propelling these indentured servants was the loss of a father; in fact, of servants under the age of twenty-one who emigrated to the New World between 1682 and 1686, 29 percent of the women and 37 percent of the men had recently deceased fathers, hence leaving them both emotionally and economically unmoored (“Fatherless and Friendless: Factors Influencing the Flow of English Emigrant Servants,” Journal of Economic History 52:1 [1992]: 85–108, figures from table 1, p. 92). 8. Prices from Ekirch, Bound for America, 124–126; on crime, punishment, and the law in the early colonies, see Bradley Chapin, Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606–1660 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), especially table 4.1, “Homicides Brought to Trial Before 1660,” 112–113; comparative homicide rates from Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, “Violent Crime, Victims, and Society in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800,” Pennsylvania History 66 (1999; special issue on “Explorations in Early American Culture”), 24–54, quotation from 26. 9. Penn convened his first meeting of the council in December 1682; Michael ZuckCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

erman, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 120; John Winter, letter to Robert Trelawny, no date (circa late seventeenth century), quoted in Richard Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Octagon, 1965), 462, 463. 10. Immigration figures from Salinger, Serve Well and Faithfully, 20–21; Penn’s brochures and marketing skills are discussed in Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 30; Michael Zuckerman, “Almost Chosen People”: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 38. 11. Provincial Council meeting of 16 November 1683, in Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, From the Organization to the Termination of the Proprietary Government, vol. 1, Containing the Proceedings of Council from March 10, 1683, to November 27, 1700 (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co., 1852), 92—note that most libraries catalogue these Minutes as Colonial Records of Pennsylvania (hereafter cited as MPCP); on the subtle dance of obligations, restrictions, and expectations regarding the violence of masters against servants and the recourse of both

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Notes parties to the law, see Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 233–252; on the paying of recognizance see Morris, Government and Labor, 468–482; while servants could press charges against abusive masters, Herrick reminds us that they were deterred from doing so by the knowledge that “in all cases of causeless complaint a servant was subject to three month’s extra service” (White Servitude, 29); as for the practice of punishing masters by taking their recognizance, a similar fee was charged to tavern keepers, who were allowed to serve alcohol only after paying a recognizance guaranteeing that they would not allow gaming in their establishments (see “Honestus” [David Cooper], An Enquiry into Public Abuses, Arising from a Want of a Due Execution of Laws, Provided for the Suppression of Vice [Philadelphia: Hall and Sellers, 1784], 6).

12. On Penn’s life see “The Author’s Life,” in The Select Works of William Penn, in Three Volumes, 4th ed. (London: William Phillips, 1825), 1:1–115; on his trial see “The People’s Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted,” in 1:179–223, quotation from 186, and Hampton L. Carson, “William Penn as Law-Giver,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 30:1 (1906): 1–29; William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1793), 14; on the gap between Quaker principles and the Quakers’ use of violence, see Daniel Boorstin, The Americans, vol. 1, The Colonial Experience (1958: London: Phoenix, 1988), 43–48, and Herbert W. K. Fitzroy, “The Punishment of Crime in Provincial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

60:3 (1936): 242–269, especially 248–250; on the production of myths regarding Penn’s allegedly utopian colony, none of which acknowledged his use of the death penalty and other forms of violent punishment, see Edith Philips, The Good Quaker in French Legend (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932), 91–132. 13. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 51; for details on the eighteenth century’s versions of this brutality see Linebaugh, The London Hanged; Mandeville, Enquiry into Frequent Executions, 1; John Trumbull, M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem in Four Cantos (1776), as reprinted in The Satiric Poems of John Trumbull, ed. Edwin T. Bowden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 141; regarding the penalty of contract extension see Galenson, White Servitude, 101; to compare the numbers of executions in England with those in Amsterdam from 1651 to 1810, see Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression from a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 82, table 1. 14. Letter from William Penn to his Provincial Council, meeting in Philadelphia, 9 February 1698, in MPCP, 1:527; Paul Williams (likely author), The Vain and

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Prodigal Life, and Tragical Penitent Death of Thomas Hellier (London, 1680), quoted here as printed in abridged fashion in T. H. Breen, James H. Lewis, and Keith Schlesinger, “Motive for Murder: A Servant’s Life in Virginia, 1678,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 40:1 (1983): 106–120, quotation from 119. 15. Provincial Council meeting of 25 February 1707, in MPCP, 2:405, Brickell as cited in Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 78; Frances Pingeon reports that it was customary in New Jersey in the first decades of the eighteenth century for the masters of executed slaves to receive from a county-tithe “£30 for a male and £20 for a female” (Blacks in the Revolutionary Era [Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1975], 12); Thomas Jefferson authored a 1786 law to this effect, entitled “A Bill Directing the Methods of Trying Slaves Charged with Treason or Felony,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 2:616–617; during the Revolutionary War, a version of this practice enabled white masters to enlist their black slaves as soldiers in their stead—this was known as the “substitution system”—if the slave was killed in battle, the master would be paid his market value, ranging from as little as £50 to as much as £170; in New York, white masters were paid with land, sometimes as much as 500 acres (see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution [1961; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996], 58–64, 70–71); for an overview of this practice see George Moore, HisCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

torical Notes on the Employment of Negroes in the American Revolution (New York: Charles T. Evans, 1862). 16. Provincial Council meeting of 25 February 1707, in MPCP, 2:405, 406 (emphasis added in both), 406 (block quotation). 17. The punishments are described in Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896; Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1995), 1–9 on bilboes, 70–85 on variations of the whipping cart; drawn by Frank Hazenplug, the images are nice examples of the late-eighteenth-century neocolonial revival; the prophecy of death in Carolina is quoted from Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People, 34; on the complicated politics of selling and buying slaves within the colonies, where many slaves were on the market because they, like Toney and Quashy, had committed crimes elsewhere, see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 198–203. 18. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4, 5, 17, 117; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975 in French, 1977 in English; New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 46; and see Dwight Conquergood, “Lethal

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Notes Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty,” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 339–367.

19. Benjamin Rush to Julia Stockton-Rush, 22 August 1787, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 436– 37; Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), quotation from 87, 19–54 on public punishments, 55–86 on public labor; regarding Rush’s complicated positions on these questions, see Greg Goodale, “America’s Rhetorical Revolution: Defining Citizens in Benjamin Rush’s Philadelphia, 1783–1813,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2007. 20. The story of the town council providing dung for such occasions is from Halle, Germany, and is cited in Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering, 86; for specifically American means of humiliation, see Earle, Curious Punishments, and my comments on “Malcolm” and Doctor Kearsley in chapter 2. 21. All figures from Salinger, Serve Well and Faithfully, 57–61; for a list of servants arriving from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany from 1580 to 1775, totaling 350,000, see Richard Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 159; Philadelphia quotation from Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Galaxy Books, 1965), Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

4; the War of Jenkins’ Ear between Britain and Spain began in 1739 and soon engulfed much of Europe in the War of Austrian Succession—it was known in England and many of the colonies as King George’s War (see Boorstin, The Colonial Experience, 51). 22. Provincial Council meeting of 3 September 1737, in MPCP, 4:243, 244; the most exhaustive study of the period’s executions is Negley K. Teeters, “Public Executions in Pennsylvania: 1682–1834,” originally published by the Lancaster Historical Society in 1960 and reprinted in Crime and Justice in American History: Historical Articles on the Origins and Evolution of American Criminal Justice, vol. 2, The Colonies and Early Republic, ed. Eric Monkkonen (London: Meckler, 1991), 756–835; in his table on page 819 Teeters lists no executions in 1737 for the charge of arson; in his table on p. 831 he lists five death penalty verdicts in 1737 that were reversed, including a 3 September case involving “Samson,” whom I assume is our unnamed “Negroe Man”; note that the essay cited here later became the long first half of Teeters’s Scaffold and Chair: A Compilation of Their Use in Pennsylvania, 1682–1962 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1963). 23. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (1972; Baltimore:

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Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 4, and 39–88 in passing; on substitution and scapegoating see Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (1961; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), 176, 248, and Theodor Reik, Myth and Guilt: The Crime and Punishment of Mankind (New York: George Braziller, 1957), where he argues that the mythology surrounding Christ’s crucifixion functions as a substitution: “the ‘last Adam’ was subjected to the punishment that the first Adam deserved, [and] was vicariously punished as if He were the criminal Himself” (263). 24. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation, an American Tale (1798), as reprinted in Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. Jay Fliegleman (New York: Penguin, 1991), 189, 195, 213, 217, 253. 25. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1968), 95; along these same lines, see Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael Braddick (London: Palgrave, 2002), 154–172; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971: Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Joel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 26. On the complicated rhetorical mechanics and political uses of synecdoche, see my Democratic Dissent & The Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 155–157, 162–172, 178; regarding its use in the production of proslavery rhetoric, see 40–92; linking the reductive rhetoric addressed here to the globalizing push of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, Nicholas Hudson has shown how imperial ambitions required the production of racism, thus turning the political, cultural, religious, and other differences of the people of the world into immutable biological deficits (see “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29:3 [1996]: 247–264). 27. On both the political machinations prompting the Act of 1718 and the act’s dramatic transformation of punishment practices in colonial Pennsylvania, see Fitzroy, “Punishment of Crime,” 250–269; on the subsequent Act of 1786, see Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 83–84. 28. In April 1736, Logan issued his “Charge to the Grand Inquest,” a set of

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Notes instructions meant to guide the work of the grand jury impaneled to hear all of Philadelphia’s cases with death penalty implications; quotations from The Charge Delivered from the Bench to the Grand Inquest, at a Court of Oyer and Terminer and General Goal-Delivery, held for the City and County of Philadelphia, April 13, 1736 (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1736), 14, 7.

29. Jordan, White over Black, 115, 119; population estimate from The New-York Conspiracy, or A History of the Negro Plot with the Journal of the Proceedings against the Conspirators at New-York in the Years 1741–2, etc. (New York: Southwick & Pelsue, 1810), unnumbered third page; Daniel Horsmanden is credited here as the “Recorder of the City” who compiled The New York Conspiracy; a later edition appeared as: Originally prepared and published by Daniel Horsmanden, edited by William Wedgwood, The Negro Conspiracy in the City of New York, in 1741 (New York: George W. Schott, 1851), wherein Horsmanden is listed as the “third justice” on the Province of New York Supreme Court of Judicature; Douglas Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement in the Colony of New York, 1691–1776 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 32; “great Terror” from the New-York Weekly Journal (20 April 1741): 3; while indentured European servants were declining in relation to enslaved Africans, they were not disappearing altogether—in fact, during the summer of 1741 the New-York Weekly Journal is full of advertisements for bound laborers: a typical notice reads: “TO BE SOLD: On Board the Brig. Maryann . . . Servants, Husbandmen, Flax-Dressers, Coopers, Hatters, Taylors, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Fanners, Butchers, Weavers, &, enquire of Peter Van Brugh Livingston” (25 May 1741, p. 3). 30. List of fires, “evil and designing persons,” and “pilfering . . .” from The Recorder of the City of New York (Horsmanden), A Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America, And Murdering the Inhabitants (New York: James Parker, 1744), 5–7, 11, and 9; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 51; “A Proclamation,” New-York Weekly Journal (20 April 1741): 3–4. 31. Edgar McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1966), 128; for earlier accounts, see T. Wood Clarke, “The Negro Plot of 1741,” New York History 25:1 (1944): 167–181, and Thomas Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985); Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in EighteenthCentury Manhattan (New York: Vintage, 2006), 84. 32. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 49; Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, see charts on pp. 11–12 of appendix; McManus, Negro Slavery, 138; Roi Ottley, Black Odyssey: The Story of the Negro in America (New York: Scribners, 1950), 29; and see

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Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; New York: International Publishers), 192–195; Boston Evening Post (6 July 1741), as reprinted in Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, 1st series, vol. 12 of Archives of the State of New Jersey, ed. William Nelson (Patterson: Press Printing, 1894), 98; for a report of New Jersey fires, see New-York Weekly Journal (4 May 1741): 3. 33. New-York Weekly Journal (22 June 1741): 3; (6 July 1741): 3; and (20 July 1741): 4; in contrast to these victims, who went to their deaths protesting innocence and acting impudently, others who had claimed innocence began confessing to various crimes once the tenders were lit (see New-York Weekly Journal [31 May 1741]: 3); Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 25. 34. Ferenc Szasz, “The New York Slave Revolt of 1741: A Re-examination,” New York History 48:3 (1967): 215–230, quotation from 217; Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 248; Garry Wills, “The Dramaturgy of Death,” New York Review of Books (21 June 2001): 6–10, quotation from 6; Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 44; and see Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800–1865 (1938; New York: Negro University Press, 1968), 26–36. 35. I was led to this line of thought by Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 389 n. 72; for further analysis of the production of race and racism in early U.S. history, see Stephen John Hartnett and Michael Pfau, “The Confounded Rhetorics of Race in Revolutionary America,” in Rhetoric, Independence, and Nationhood, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

vol. 1 of The Rhetorical History of The United States, ed. Stephen Lucas (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming). 36. Greenberg, Crime and Law Enforcement, 71, 218; Greenberg, “The Effectiveness of Law Enforcement in Eighteenth-Century New York,” in Crime and Justice in American History: Historical Articles on the Origins and Evolution of American Criminal Justice, vol. 1, The Colonies and Early Republic, ed. Eric Monkkonen (London: Meckler, 1991), 275; Lepore, New York Burning, 79, 70; for a strong argument that the “revolt” was not so much politically as criminally motivated, although he does take the possibility of planned rebellion seriously, see Leopold S. Launitz-Schurer, Jr., “Slave Resistance in Colonial New York: An Interpretation of Daniel Horsmanden’s New York Conspiracy,” Phylon 41:2 (1980): 137–152. 37. Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, i, 58, 59, 83; Lepore’s New York Burning offers insight into Horsmanden’s motivations in this regard, and shows that when Chief Justice DeLancey, who missed the bulk of the trial while away on business, returned to New York in July, he quickly put an end to Horsmanden’s witch hunt (see 173–176). 38. New-York Weekly Journal (15 June 1741): 2–3; such fears of foreign invasion were

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Notes so pronounced that when an unmarked privateer was spotted “lying off” Long Island, locals assumed it was a forerunner of “Spanish forces” (New-York Weekly Journal [29 June 1741]: 3); Richard Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800,” American Quarterly 25:1 (1973): 3–31, quotation from 13; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 178, 144, 179; for fuller treatment of Linebaugh and Rediker’s magnificent book, see Stephen John Hartnett, “Subjects, Slaves, and Patriots: Rhetorics of Belonging and the Democratic Imagination,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6:1 (2003): 161–178; perhaps the most famous instance of foreign meddling in New World slave rebellions was Lord Dunmore’s 7 November 1775 proclamation, by which he freed Virginia slaves willing to fight for Britain against the rebellious colonies (see Dunmore’s Proclamation of Emancipation [Charlottesville: University of Virginia McGregor Library, 1941]).

39. Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 204, 69, and see similar talk of invasion expressed on 87, 119, and 160; Daniel Horsmanden to Lord Cadwallader Colden, 7 August 1741, in Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, vol. 2, 1730– 1742 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1918), 224–227, quotations from 225; “A Proclamation,” New-York Weekly Journal (14 September 1741): 1–3, quotation from 2. 40. Horsmanden, Journal of the Proceedings, 107; regarding my comparison of New York City in 1741 to the more famous Salem witch trials, in the only known protest against these mass lynchings, an anonymous letter sent to Colden that Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

August (and subsequently identified as the work of Josiah Cotton) compared Horsmanden’s reign of terror to “our New England Witchcraft in the year 1692” (the letter is reproduced in Lepore, New York Burning, 203–205). 41. Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and “The Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 143–156, quotations from 148, 149; the notion of creative destruction was enshrined in Western thought via Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto, where he described modernity as a process of “constant revolutionizing” based on “enforced destruction” (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 58, 61; for a postmodern version of this thesis, see Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 42. Data from James G. Lydon, “New York and the Slave Trade, 1700 to 1774,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 35:2 (1978): 375–394, see table 1, p. 378 and table 4, p. 382; Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 294, 268; for a similar attempt to trace some of the tactics of

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the revolutionaries to lessons learned from their slaves, rambunctious sailors, drunken mobs, and other threats to social order, see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 211–247.

CHAPTER 2. THE PARADOX OF A REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION USING EXECUTIONS AS PEDAGOGY, 1768–1784 1. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, “Preface,” The Spirit of ’Seventy-six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, ed. Commager and Morris (1958; New York: Da Capo, 1995), xli; Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991), 125; Freeman’s Journal of 22 August 1787 as quoted in John Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 5; Edmund Randolph, 29 May 1787, as recorded in James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (New York: Norton, 1969), 30; Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 200; regarding the aristocratic tendencies of the period’s elite, see Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns; The Suppressed History of Our Nation’s Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 237– 520, and Bernard Fay, George Washington: Republican Aristocrat (Boston: Houghton Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Mifflin, 1931), 147–150, 222–223, 266; on the contested norms of republicanism see Stephen John Hartnett and Jennifer Rose Mercieca, “‘Has Your Courage Rusted?’: National Security and the Contested Rhetorical Norms of Republicanism in America, 1798–1800,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9:1 (2006): 79–112. 2. Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, “Violent Crime, Victims, and Society in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800,” Pennsylvania History 66 (1999): 24–54, quotations from 37, 39; Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Pennsylvania, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 22. 3. David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem, 1786–1787, ed. William Bottorff (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1967), 34, 18, 6, 16—note that the poems were originally published anonymously; excellent background material is available in Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943); on the Wits’ dilemma of being satirists who live off of skepticism and debunking in a post-Revolutionary age committed to building myths of national unity (precisely the opposite of satire), see Peter M. Briggs, “English Satire and Connecticut Wit,”

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Notes American Quarterly 37:1 (1985): 13–29; on the perceived cataclysm of Shays’s Rebellion see Leonard Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and Jeremy Engels, “Reading the Riot Act: Rhetoric, Psychology, and Counter-revolutionary Discourse in Shays’s Rebellion, 1786–1787,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91:1 (2005): 63–88; and note that Shays’s Rebellion led to the execution of John Bly and Charles Rose (see Louis Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 29–33).

4. Benjamin Rush, “An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution,” in Medical Inquiries and Observations, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1789), 186–196 in full, quotation from 196; Jennifer Mercieca, Founding Fictions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming), from an unnumbered page in the manuscript version of chapter 3; on Rush’s crusade against post-Revolutionary “anarchia,” see Greg Goodale, “America’s Rhetorical Revolution: Defining Citizens in Benjamin Rush’s Philadelphia, 1783–1813,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2007; and see Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 451–488 on “The Populist Impulse”; for another blistering example of the arguments leveled against the rights-hungry but all too stupid masses, see Fisher Ames, “The Mire of DeCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

mocracy” (1805), reprinted in The Federalist Literary Mind, ed. Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962), 51–54. 5. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 134; William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1793), unnumbered table at the end of the pamphlet; for classic studies of the dialectical tension between democratic hopes and law-and-order fears, see Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988); James Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990); and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 471–518; for an attempt to map a rhetorical typology of these debates, see Stephen John Hartnett and Ramsey Eric Ramsey, “‘A Plain Public Road’: Evaluating Arguments for Democracy in a Post-metaphysical World,” Argumentation and Advocacy 35:3 (1999): 95–114. 6. Sharon Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 70; on

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the plebeian actions noted here, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 211–247. 7. First quotation from Edmund and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 91; for more on Britain’s planned lack of cohesion among the colonies and their subsequent attachment to the motherland, see Robert James Branham and Stephen Hartnett, Sweet Freedom’s Song: “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and Democracy in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22–27; Richard Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Octagon, 1965), 519. 8. “Majestic” from Frank Moore, Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1855), editor’s note on 20–21, following Thomas Paine’s 1765 “Liberty Tree” ballad; next two quoted passages from Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), scene described on 9–12, “sawed off” from 11, list of burnings from 177–189, and Liberty Tree information from 182–184; New York City quotations from Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 45, 47; the scenes described here are also detailed in Edmund Morgan and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, 160–163 on Boston and 188–191 on Newport; “What a Court,” 1776 song reprinted in Oscar Brand, Songs of ’76: A Folksinger’s HisCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

tory of the Revolution (New York: Evans, 1972), 51; “Old England” from Moore, Songs and Ballads, 200–202; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Vintage, 1995), 65. 9. Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 46, 303–304; John Dickinson, “Letter Seven,” Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768), in The Writings of John Dickinson, vol. 1, Political Writings, 1764–1774, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1895), 357; Rusticus, “The Cause of Liberty and Right,” 1768 poem reprinted in Colonies to Nation: 1763–1789, vol. 2 of A Documentary History of American Life, ed. Jack Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 148–154, quotation from 148; for additional early Revolutionary materials see Pamphlets of the American Revolution, vol. 1, 1750–1765, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); for an overview of changing notions of law in the period see George Dargo, Law in the New Republic: Private Law and the Public Estate (New York: Knopf, 1983); for an excellent overview of the years leading up to the Revolution, see Nash, Urban Crucible, 200–247.

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10. The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man, Who was Executed at Worcester, October 20th 1768. For a Rape committed on the Body of Deborah Metcalfe, broadside from 1768 held by the American Antiquarian Society; for a similar broadside see The Last Words and Dying Speech of Ezra Ross, James Buchanan and William Brooks, Who were Executed at Worcester on Thursday the 2nd Day of July 1778, in Massachusetts Broadsides of the American Revolution, ed. Mason Lowance, Jr. and Georgia Bumgardner (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 95; for a tale of “practices disgraceful to human nature” that rivals even Arthur’s record of epic criminality, see Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, a Negro (New Haven: T. & S. Green, 1790), reprinted in Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives, ed. Daniel E. Williams (Madison: Madison House, 1993), 289–307, quotation from 289. 11. On the literary lure of crime, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 123–137; Daniel Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Williams, Pillars of Salt, 1–63; confirming the trends spotted by Davis, Cohen, and Williams, Sasha Abramsky argues that by the opening of the twenty-first century, crime had become the central staple of popular culture: “we have come to regard arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment as fundamental props of our mass culture, thus elevating one of the more unpleasant duties and Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

obligations of the civil society . . . into a cultural commodity” (“Crime as America’s Pop Culture,” Chronicle Review, Chronicle of Higher Education [15 November 2002]: B11–B12). 12. Context from Epaphroditus Peck, The Loyalists of Connecticut (New Haven: Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut, 1934), 13–14, 18, 20–21, 24–25, and Christopher Collier, Roger Sherman’s Connecticut (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 85–109, quotation from 106; for a typically scathing portrayal of Tory villainy, see Philip Freneau, “America Independent” (1778), in Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: Hafner, 1929), 24–33; while Dunbar was the lone figure executed for treason in Connecticut, eleven men were hanged or shot for treason in Pennsylvania between March 1777 and November 1781, accounting for roughly 11 percent of the 102 executions carried out in the state during this same period (see Negley K. Teeters, “Public Executions in Pennsylvania: 1682–1834,” originally published by the Lancaster Historical Society in 1960 and reprinted in Crime and Justice in American History, vol. 2, ed. Eric Monkkonen [London: Meckler, 1991], 756–835, figures from 775, 821–822).

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13. James D. German, “The Social Utility of Wicked Self-Love: Calvinism, Capitalism, and Public Policy in Revolutionary New England,” Journal of American History 82:3 (1995): 965–998, quotations from 976, 966, 971, 994; and see Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 93, and Richard Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 235–266 and passim on the politics of, and schisms within, the New Light movement. 14. A brief biography of the younger Strong may be found in Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, vol. 3, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), 357–363, quotations from 358; execution sermons were such auspicious occasions for trying to exercise the power-amid-crisis described above that in 1773, when Levi Ames was hanged in Boston, competing pamphlets were published by Samuel Mather, Andrew Eliot, and Samuel Stillman (see the advertisements, as printed in Cohen, Pillars of Salt, 11); there is no comprehensive history of the kinds of revolutionary violence described herein, but we know that as many as forty Jerseymen were committed to jail for treason by New Jersey’s Council of Safety (see Bradley Chapin, The American Law of Treason [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964], 49, 133 n. 12); in the South, those slaves who ran away from plantations to join the British army but were later recaptured were sometimes punished with death (see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution [1961; Chapel Hill: University of North CaroCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

lina Press, 1996], 25–27, 128–129). 15. Nathan Strong, The Reasons and Design of Public Punishments; A Sermon Delivered Before the People Who Were Collected to the Execution of Moses Dunbar, Who was Condemned for HIGH TREASON against the State of Connecticut, and Executed March 19th, A.D. 1777 (Hartford: Eben. Watson, 1777), 6, 9, 7, 8, 12, 13; Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee, 190; for an overview of Calvinism in the Connecticut valley see Cedric Cowing, The Great Awakening and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the 18th Century (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), 41–45; more broadly, see German, “Wicked Self-Love” and Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee; in a touching moment merging family love and political jockeying, the ordination sermon marking the younger Strong’s ascension to the pulpit was delivered by the elder Strong (see Nathan Strong, A Sermon, Preached at the Ordination of the Reverend Nathan Strong, Pastor of a Church in Hartford; by his Father, the Reverend Nathan Strong, Pastor of a Church in Coventry [Hartford: Eben. Watson, 1774]). 16. Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Richard Davies (1764; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 31; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 104, 108, 109; on the intellectual affinities between Beccaria

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Notes and Foucault, see Stephen John Hartnett, “Prisons, Profit, Crime, and Social Control: A Hermeneutic of the Production of Violence,” in Race, Class, and Community Identity, ed. Andrew Light and Meck Nagel (New York: Humanities Press, 2000), 199–221; Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 33.

17. Strong, Reasons and Design, 17; on the behavior of execution crowds see Teeters, “Public Executions in Pennsylvania”; Douglas Greenberg, “The Effectiveness of Law Enforcement in Eighteenth-Century New York,” in Crime and Justice in American History: Historical Articles on the Origins and Evolution of American Criminal Justice, vol. 1, The Colonies and Early Republic, ed. Eric Monkkonen (London: Meckler, 1991), 264–298; and Masur, Rites of Execution, 1–92. 18. Masthead from The Hangman 1:1 (1 January 1845); Thomas Dunn English, “The Gallows Goers,” The Hangman 1:1 (1 January 1845): 4—I return to this magazine in volume 2. 19. Ann Hulton to Mrs. Lightbody, 31 January 1774, as printed in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 335–336; Kearsley information from the memoirs of Alexander Graydon, as excerpted in Commager and Morris, 339–340; Jill Lepore reports in New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in EighteenthCentury Manhattan (New York: Vintage, 2006), that Daniel Horsmanden, the author of the trial proceedings studies in chapter 1, was carted off to the countryside for punishment in the summer of 1776, but he too, like Kearsley, escaped Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

unscathed (see 223–225). 20. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), as reprinted in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 65–115, quotation from 107; despite these fiery lines, Paine would eventually become a death penalty abolitionist, as seen in his 15 January 1793 speech arguing against the execution of Louis XVI (see his “Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet,” in Thomas Paine Reader, 394–398), where he argued—in terms foreshadowing my analysis in chapter 4—that abolishing the death penalty “must find its advocates in every corner where enlightened politicians and lovers of humanity exist” (398). 21. Joseph Hawley to Elbridge Gerry, 17 July 1776, as printed in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 345–346; Hawley rose to the rank of major in the Revolutionary forces, served Massachusetts eloquently in the legislature, and was “regarded as one of the ablest advocates of American liberty” (so says William Allen, The American Biographical Dictionary [Boston: John P. Jewett, 1857], 421); Hawley was also a manic depressive who rotated through emotional extremes, including fiery phases of “characteristic extremism,” wherein he apparently

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spoke and wrote (as in the letter cited here) in the most extravagant terms (so argues Shaw, American Patriots, 131–152 on Hawley, quotation from 136). 22. Kirk W. Fuoss, “Lynching Performances, Theatres of Violence,” Text and Performance Quarterly 19:1 (1999): 1–37, quotation from 26; for an analysis of how this racializing “actor training” took place not only in the spectacular moments of violence described herein but also in the mundane exchanges of daily life, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 23. General Anthony Wayne to H. A. Sheel (2 October 1780), as reprinted in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 753; and see Carl Van Doren, Secret History of the American Revolution: An Account of the Conspiracies of Benedict Arnold and Numerous Others, etc. (New York: Viking, 1941). 24. “[R]ich, if not wealthy” and “Treason House” from William Abbatt, The Crisis of the Revolution: Being the Story of Arnold and André (1899; New York: Harbor Hills, 1976), 4 and 10; Hamilton quoted in his October 1780 letter to John Laurens, as printed in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 759; “young men playing cards” from Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, Father Knickerbocker Rebels: New York City During the Revolution (New York: Scribner’s, 1948), 191; while details of the shelling of the Vulture differ from source to source, I am relying here on James Thomas Flexner, The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John André (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 350. Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

25. Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Spaces (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 71; André’s request to Washington from his 1 October 1780 letter, as printed in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 762–763; André’s final question (which appears in various forms in different studies) as reported in Abbatt, Crisis of the Revolution, 73; his letter to Clinton cited as it appears in Wertenbaker, Father Knickerbocker Rebels, 193; André’s repulsion at the thought of dying on the gallows was supported by hundreds of years of British culture, wherein death by sword or axe (and eventually bullet) was considered more noble than death by hanging (see John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment [1932; New York: Citadel, 1960], 6, 28). 26. André’s unpublished verse cited as it appears in Brand, Songs of ’76, 133; some of the poem’s other verses, as put to song, appear on pp. 134–135; for a brief history of the poem’s publication record, see Abbatt, Crisis of the Revolution, 108, bibliographic entry no. 206; and see “Death of Major André,” a slightly different version of “The Capture of Major André,” which appears in Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 87. 27. Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York:

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Notes Thomas Crowell, 1976), 380; Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 205; Joel Barlow’s letter of 2 October 1780, to Ruth Barlow, as it appears in Silverman, Cultural History, 380; Thacher quoted in Abbatt, Crisis of the Revolution, 72; “The Capture of Major André,” in Brand, Songs of ’76, 138–139.

28. The first quotation appears under the heading of “Fish-Kill, October 5,” in the [Hartford] Connecticut Courant and The Weekly Intelligencer (10 October 1780): 2; rogue’s march information under the heading of “Philadelphia, October 4,” in the [Boston] Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser (19 October 1780): 3; Peale’s constructing the shaming cart described here is noted in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 5:89–90; on the performative complexities of effigies, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performances (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 36–47 and passim. 29. John Trumbull, M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem in Four Cantos, as reprinted in The Satiric Poems of John Trumbull, ed. Edwin T. Bowden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 106; first published in 1776, the poem was completed in 1782; the fear-of-crime aspect of the story is culled from Flexner, Traitor and Spy, 356, and Abbatt, Crisis of the Revolution, 27; we may glean a sense of life in the Hudson River Valley at this time by noting that of the three young men who captured André, only one of them could read the “pass” (a letter of transit) that Arnold Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

had given his accomplice to help him pick his way through rebel territory (as reported in Flexner, Traitor and Spy, 358). 30. “[O]dious task” from Abbatt, Crisis of the Revolution, 75; guillotine information from Laurence, History of Capital Punishment, 73; Thacher from the excerpt of his journal printed in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 765–767, quotation on 766. 31. “[D]issolution” from Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Knopf, 2004), 130; “These are the times that try men’s souls” is the immortal opening line from Thomas Paine’s first “American Crisis” offering (December 1776), as printed in The Thomas Paine Reader, 116–123; “blackest dye” from Nathanael Greene’s 26 September 1780 journal entry, as reprinted in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, 755; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49; for an overview of this period of the war, see John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 409–467. 32. Ann Seward, “A Monody of the Death of André,” as reprinted in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 763; Thomas Paine, “To the Citizens of the United

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States” (1802), in The Thomas Paine Reader, 503–517, quotation from 516; for more on Washington’s regal, even “semi-royal” arrogance, see Ellis, His Excellency, 78 and passim, and Fay, George Washington: Republican Aristocrat; after first learning of Seward via Commager and Morris’s Spirit of ’Seventy-six, I encountered the New York Public Library’s rare 1792 version of her Monody on the Unfortunate Major Andre (New York: T. Allen, 1792)—aside from its pages upon pages of wretched poetry and sentimental prose, authored by both Seward and André, the complete title suggests the wrong month for his execution; the book also lists the author as Anna, not, as Commager and Morris list it, as Ann. 33. Arnold’s letter is reprinted in Van Doren, Secret History, 369–370, and Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 762; the letter is made even more pathetic by learning that “Clinton asked Arnold to make threats that would be unsuitable for a British commander” (Flexner, Traitor and Spy, 388)—that is, so as not to sully his reputation, Clinton used the already compromised Arnold to levy these thuggish warnings. 34. Arnold’s letter as reprinted in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-six, 762. 35. Lydia Maria Child, “Letter XXV” (4 August 1842), in Letters from New York (New York: C. S. Francis, 1846), 169; for an example of the affair’s rendering as a gorgeous, coffee-table souvenir, see Andreana. Containing the Trial, Execution and Various Matter Connected with the History of Major John Andre (Philadelphia: Horace W. Smith, 1865). Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

36. Wood, Radicalism of American Revolution, 145–146; for more on these post-Revolutionary transformations, see Mercieca, Founding Fictions; Hartnett and Mercieca, “Has Your Courage Rusted?”; and Goodale, “America’s Rhetorical Revolution”; on ventriloquism and the Constitution, see Michael Warner, “Textuality and Legitimacy in the Printed Constitution,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 97 (1987): 59–84. 37. Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (1821), as quoted in Michael Riffaterre, “Prosopopoeia,” in The Lesson of Paul de Man, ed. Peter Brooks, Shoshana Felman, and J. Hillis Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 107; and see Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 123–124; and Richard Lanigan, “The Algebra of History: Merleau-Ponty and Foucault on the Rhetoric of the Person,” in The Critical Turn: Rhetoric & Philosophy in Postmodern Discourse, ed. Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 169 n. 2, and 141. 38. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 18, 27, 47, emphasis added; a similar argument

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Notes is made in Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 37–43 and passim; for analysis of the political uses of gallows confessions, see Daniel Williams, “‘Behold a Tragic Scene Strangely Changed into a Theater of Mercy’: The Structure and Significance of Criminal Conversion Narratives in Early New England,” American Quarterly 38:5 (1986): 827–847.

39. Jay Fliegelman quoted from his introduction to Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation, an American Tale (1798), as reprinted in Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. Jay Fliegleman (New York: Penguin, 1991), xxxix; on Brown’s novel, see Peter Okun, Crime and the Nation: Prison Reform and Popular Fiction in Philadelphia, 1786–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 18–27. 40. William Smith, The Convict’s Visitor, or, Penitential Offices . . . Consisting of Prayers, Lessons, and Meditations: with Suitable Devotions Before, and At the Time of Execution (Newport, RI: Peter Edes, 1791), 4–18, 35–37, 38, 64; Daniel A. Cohen, “Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Constructions of Interracial Rape in Early American Crime Literature, 1767–1817,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56:3 (1999): 481–526, quotations from 492, 497; on the British tradition of gallows speeches, from which Smith borrows, see J. A. Sharpe, “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 107 (1985): 144–167; for an example of this rhetorical ventriloquism in action, consider “The Last Words and Dying Speech of Robert Young,” a 1779 broadside where the final words of the about-to-beCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

hanged Young—a godless rogue of epic proportions—are, miraculously, “I freely forgive the world as I hope for forgiveness through Christ Jesus” (see The Last Words and Dying Speech of Robert Young, in Massachusetts Broadsides of the American Revolution, 97). 41. Nathan Strong, A Sermon, Preached in Hartford, June 10th, 1797, at The Execution of Richard Doane (Hartford: Elisha Babcock, 1797), 3, 3–4; “stuffy” from May, Enlightenment in America, 256; Strong became a prolific author: two of his widely circulated texts are The Hartford Selection of Hymns (Hartford: Peter Gleason, various dates), co-compiled with Abel Flint and Joseph Seward, and his Sermons, on Various Subjects, Doctrinal, Experimental and Practical, 2 vols. (Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin, 1798 and 1800). 42. Strong, Execution of Richard Doane, 7, 12, 19, 20; on the context of Strong’s sermon, see Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 461–481; on the temperance movement see Mark E. Lender and James K. Martin, Drinking in America: A History, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1987); Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, 359.

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43. Regarding large crowds at executions, Masur reports that John Lechler was hanged in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in October 1822 before anywhere from fifteen to forty thousand spectators (Rites of Execution, 96–97); Teeters notes that Lino Amelio Mina was hanged in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in June 1832 before a crowd of ten thousand (“Public Executions,” 781, and see similar stories at 763–764, 766, 773, 776); Edward Ingebretsen, At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1; more broadly, see Arnold Davidson, “The Horror of Monsters,” in The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 93–124. 44. The first two editions of The American Bloody Register are reprinted in Williams, Pillars of Salt, 233–251, quotation from 233; for background on Ezekiel Russell, see Williams’s notes, 252–257; ABR, 247; Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722; London: Wordsworth, 2001), 216, 253. 45. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 23; ABR, 246, 237; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 262. 46. See Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: New Left Books, 1983), 83–108, quotations from 101, 103. 47. William Godwin, The Adventures of Caleb Williams; Or, Things as They Are (1794; New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), 244–245; as we shall see in volume 2, the trope of the bloody “robes of authority” carried through to the antebelCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

lum period, when Charles Spear, in his seminal Essays on The Punishment of Death, 12th ed. ed. (Boston: C. Spear, 1845; first published in 1844), gasped in disgust: “There the law stands all ghastly and bloody!” (73). 48. Godwin, Adventures of Caleb Williams, 275; Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 174; for a charming history of this genre, see Frank Wadleigh Chandler, The Literature of Roguery, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1907); Shaw notes in American Patriots that in many versions of the tale, “the Robin Hood saga leads inexorably to Robin Hood’s defeat” (211), hence making any comparison between Caleb Williams and Robin Hood even more poignant; in Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of New Hampshire (1811; New York: Dial Press, 1924), Stephen Burroughs recounts with pride that during the 1780s he too, like Caleb Williams, regularly encountered locals who, not recognizing him, would regale him with tall tales of his own life—one constant theme of those tales was that Burroughs (not the real man, but the imagined one, the populist legend) “would steal from the rich and give to the poor” (224). 49. Godwin, Adventures of Caleb Williams, 311; the technological and economic

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Notes transformations required for launching a national culture industry did not coalesce in the United States until the Jacksonian period, but the logic of mass representation as containment is evident here, both in Caleb Williams and the ABR; on the rise of print capitalism in the United States, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in NineteenthCentury America (London: Verso, 1990), 77–108; on its political functions see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 85–92, 124–131.

50. Godwin, Adventures of Caleb Williams, 150; on Godwin’s radicalism, see May, Enlightenment in America, 172–173; this argument is echoed in Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), where he observes that the “space of death is preeminently a space of transformation: through the experience of coming close to death there may well be a more vivid sense of life” (7). 51. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 34; for further evidence of Hartman’s thesis, see The Negro Forget-Me-Not Songster (New York: Turner and Fisher, 1844), a compendium of songs illustrating the pleasures of dehumanizing others; on this sense of an elastic sign capable of doing profound cultural work according to different interpretive habits and political needs, of which Satan is perhaps one of the more curious examples, see Mario Paz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson

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(1933; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 55–83.

CHAPTER 3. THE HANGING OF ABRAHAM JOHNSTONE AND THE TURNING OF TERROR INTO HOPE, 1797 1. “Anarchia” from Benjamin Rush, “An Account of the Influence of the Military and Political Events of the American Revolution,” in his Medical Inquiries and Observations, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1789), 186–196, quotation from 196; David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem, 1786–1787, ed. William Bottorff (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1967); on Rush and his role in the post-Revolutionary backlash, see Greg Goodale, “America’s Rhetorical Revolution: Defining Citizens in Benjamin Rush’s Philadelphia, 1783–1813,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2007; classic studies of these questions include Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988), and James Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990); recent contributions include Jeremy Engels, “Reading the Riot Act: Rhetoric, Psychology, and Counterrevolutionary Discourse in Shays’s Rebellion, 1786–1787,” Quarterly Journal of

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Speech 91:1 (2005): 63–88; Jennifer Rose Mercieca and James Arnt Aune, “A Vernacular Republican Rhetoric: William Manning’s Key of Libberty,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 119–143; and Stephen John Hartnett and Jennifer Rose Mercieca, “‘Has Your Courage Rusted?’: National Security and the Contested Rhetorical Norms of Republicanism in Post-Revolutionary America, 1798– 1801,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9:1 (2006): 79–112; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (London: Routledge, 1993), 12; on “cultural fictions” see my Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 1–39. 2. The first two editions of the American Bloody Register are reprinted in Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives, ed. Daniel E. Williams (Madison: Madison House, 1993), 233–251; for examples of the kinds of stateviolence-justifying materials described here, see The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man, Who was Executed at Worcester, October 20th 1768, a broadside held by the American Antiquarian Society; The Last Words and Dying Speech of Ezra Ross, James Buchanan and William Brooks, Who were Executed at Worcester on Thursday the 2nd Day of July 1778, in Massachusetts Broadsides of the American Revolution, ed. Mason Lowance, Jr. and Georgia Bumgardner (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 95; for a tale of “practices disgraceful to human nature” that ends with a call for law and order, see Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, a Negro (New Haven: T. & S. Green, 1790), reprinted in Williams, Pillars of Salt, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

289–307; on the literary lure of crime, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 123–137; Daniel Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 3. Abraham Johnstone, The Address of Abraham Johnstone, a Black Man, Who Was Hanged at Woodbury, in the County of Glocester, and State of New Jersey, on Saturday the 8th day of July Last; to the People of Colour. To Which is Added his Dying Confession or Declaration, also, a Copy of a Letter to His Wife, Written the Day Previous to His Execution (Philadelphia, 1797), hereafter cited in the text (note that in the original pamphlet the title is printed in all small caps); the pamphlet is noted but not analyzed in Daniel Cohen, “Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Constructions of Interracial Rape in Early American Crime Literature, 1767–1817,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 56:3 (1999): 481–526, 514–516 on Johnstone; on west Jersey Quakers see Frances Pingeon, Blacks in the Revolutionary Era (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1975), 24, 16.

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Notes

4. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–264, quotation from 257; for a postcolonial version of reading documents against the grain, see Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); on the politics of this method of historiography, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10–14, and Michael Meranze, “Even the Dead Will Not Be Safe: An Ethics of Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 50:2 (1993): 367–378. 5. “The Address of the People called Quakers, to the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States,” 11 February 1790, in The Debates and Proceedings in the United States Congress (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 2:1182–1183, hereafter cited as DPUSC; this and all further quotations from the Constitution are from the version printed in Stephen Schechter, The Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted (Madison: Madison House, 1990), 277–290; for analysis of these early arguments over slavery, see Stephen John Hartnett and Michael William Pfau, “The Confounded Rhetorics of Race in Revolutionary America,” in Rhetoric, Independence, and Nationhood, vol. 1 of The Rhetorical History of the United States, ed. Stephen Lucas (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming), and Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

6. Among the literature addressing the Declaration, see Stephen Lucas, “Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document,” in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas Benson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 67–130; Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); and Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997); on the struggle to shift the nation’s sacred texts from justifying politics to proclaiming morals, see Martha Solomon Watson, “The Dynamics of Intertexuality: Re-reading the Declaration of Independence,” in Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Thomas Benson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 91–111; as I have been taught by Jennifer Mercieca, the convention debates were made public beginning in 1808, when some of Robert Yates’s notes were published by Edmond Genet in A Letter to the Electors of President and Vice-President of the United States; the first complete set of convention debates, entitled Secret Proceedings and Debates, was based on Robert Yates’s notes and published in 1821; nineteen years later, in 1840, Madison’s notes on the debates were published posthumously as part of The Papers of James Madison; for a complete

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publication record of these materials see The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 1:xii–xvi. 7. William Smith, 11 February 1790, DPUSC, 1184; it has been noted that American Quakers distanced themselves from the outrageous guerrilla tactics of their English brethren; nonetheless, in this instance we see the clear lineage of antinomian thought in American Quakers, which Leonard Levy describes as a calling that “made obedience to law seem unnecessary, because being in tune with God meant everything” (Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie [Chapel Hill: University of north Carolina Press, 1993], 168–204, 238–259); for a review of this impulse throughout American history, see James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 8. See the responses of James Madison, Michael Stone, and Elbridge Gerry, all from 11 February 1790, in DPUSC, 1185, 1185–1186, and 1189 respectively; Thomas Tucker, 11 February 1790, DPUSC, 1190. 9. Benjamin Franklin, “Memorial,” written 3 February and read in Congress on 12 February 1790, DPUSC, 1198; on Quaker efforts during this period see Thomas Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965), 100– 113; on Franklin’s earlier (and very complicated) antislavery efforts, see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 40–42. 10. William Maclay, The Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from PennsylvaCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

nia, 1789–1791 (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927), 191; William Smith, 12 February 1790, DPUSC, 1202; Smith, 17 March 1790, DPUSC, 1455; Elias Boudinot, 22 March 1790, DPUSC, 1470; Boudinot’s tempered abolitionism is noted in Paul Finkelman, “Chief Justice Hornblower of New Jersey and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793,” in Slavery and The Law, ed. Finkelman (Madison: Madison House, 1997), 113–141, 114–115 on Boudinot. 11. Thomas Roderick Dew’s “Abolition of Negro Slavery” appeared originally in American Quarterly Review 12 (1832), and subsequently evolved into his Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond, 1832); on the thesis of slavery as a positive good, see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 59–67; Sylvanus Bourne to Thomas Jefferson, 8 September 1791; Nathaniel Cutting to Thomas Jefferson, 29 November 1791; and Cutting to Thomas Jefferson, 28 December 1791, all from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 22:133, 350, 460; on the fears of white islanders throughout the period see Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 49–51, 152–153, 172–174.

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12. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree: Travels through America in 1797–1799, trans. and ed., Metchie Budka, Collections of the New Jersey Historical Society at Newark, vol. 14 (Elizabeth, NJ: Grassman, 1965), 267; Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613– 1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 177; Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: Norton, 1968), 384; Drake, Quakers and Slavery, 101; for an analysis placing these arguments in a transatlantic perspective, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). 13. See Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London, 1793); The Life of William Grimes, The Runaway Slave (New York, 1825); David Walker, An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Boston, 1829); Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833); Gustave de Beaumont, Marie; or, Slavery in the United States, trans. Barbara Chapman (1835; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958); an exhaustive listing and electronic versions of slave narratives is available from the Documenting the American South’s “North American Slave Narratives” webpage, accessible at www.docsouth.unc.edu; for a collection of early speeches by African Americans, see Philip Foner and Robert Branham, Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 (Tuscaloosa: UniCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

versity of Alabama Press, 1998); Wilson’s work with Northup is discussed in the editor’s introduction to Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (1835; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), xii–xv; Child’s work with Jacobs is noted in the editor’s introduction to The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1987), xvi. 14. Stowe from the preface to Frank J. Webb, The Gairies and Their Friends (1857; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xix, emphasis added; Dwight A. McBride, Impossible Witness: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 3, and see 151–172 for further discussion of this shaping of slave narratives to help readers move closer to abolitionism. 15. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performances (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 33; on the shackling but also inventional possibilities of approaching race as a performance, see Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Webb’s The Gairies and Their Friends offers an account of the simultaneously elastic and unbendable ways race was performed in antebellum Philadelphia. 16. William Smith, The Convict’s Visitor (Newport, RI: Peter Edes, 1791), 64; for a

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list of gallows sermons, confessions, and testimonies from this period, see Richard Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime in New England, 1675–1800,” American Quarterly 25:1 (1973): 3–31; for a catalogue from a wider range of U.S. history, see Thomas McDade, The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American Murders from Colonial Times to 1900 (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1961); for analysis of the kinds of conversions addressed here, see Cohen, Pillars of Salt; Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Daniel E. Williams, “‘Behold a Tragic Scene Strangely Changed into a Theater of Mercy’: The Structure and Significance of Criminal Conversion Narratives in Early New England,” American Quarterly 38:5 (1986): 827–847. 17. The Narrative and Confession of Thomas Powers, a Negro (Norwich, CT, 1796); Life, Last Words and Dying Speech of Stephen Smith (Boston, 1797); Bly and Rose are quoted in Masur, Rites of Execution, 32; on the ways such confessions were produced, see Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 49–78; more broadly, see Carol Stabile, White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in U.S. History (London: Routledge, 2006). 18. On minstrels and “blackface,” see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (BerkeCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed. (1991; London, Verso, 2003), 115–132. 19. Like Johnstone, John Young went to his hanging protesting his innocence, saying in his Last Dying Speech & Confession of John Young (New York: n.p., 1797), “I pity from my Soul those three unfortunate perjured people who swore against me” (7). 20. For a collection of his writings, including both his Autobiography and his Poor Richard’s Almanack, see Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library Classics, 1987); context is offered in Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Galaxy Books, 1965); for scenes of Franklin practicing this strategy of merging radical politics with petit bourgeois manners, see Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). 21. Jesus’ plea for forgiveness from the cross is portrayed in Luke 23:34. 22. As two examples of the complexity of proving any of Johnstone’s claims, consider first his alleged birth site, Johnnycake Landing Possum Town. As of 2006,

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Notes no such town exists in Delaware. However, Frederica sits on land that was once called Johnny Cake Landing; other maps indicate that it sits next to land that was once called Johnny Cake Neck; yet another record indicates that in 1771 Zachariah Goforth sold land to John Dill, who was the innkeeper of JohnnyCake Landing (see L. Thomas Scharf, History of Delaware, 1609–1888 [1888; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1972], 2:1037, 1158; United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission, Delaware [1787; Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1937]; John Long, ed., Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia: Atlas of Historical County Boundaries [New York: Scribner’s, 1996]; and New River Notes, “Delaware Place Names,” available at www.ls.net~newriver/de/deplace.htm.) Second, while the details of Johnstone’s life in Delaware are vague, he notes that he received help from William Thomas (36) and Warner and Daniel Mifflin (34), Delaware Methodists who were opposed to slavery (see Patience Essah, A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865 [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996], 46–58, and William H. Williams, Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639–1865 [Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1996], 123, 201).

23. On the history of Woodburry/berry, see Anna Luts Brown, “A History of Gloucester County, New Jersey,” master’s thesis, Bucknell University, 1935; on the 1793 epidemic see A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic, ed. J. Worth Estes and Billy G. Smith (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 1997). Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

24. Section XIV of the 1682 Laws, in Samuel Hazard, Annals of Pennsylvania, From the Discovery of the Delaware (Philadelphia: Hazard and Mitchell, 1850), 572, emphasis added; “An Act to Prevent the Importation of Slaves into the State of New Jersey, and to Authorize Manumission of Them Under Certain Restrictions, and to Prevent the Abuse of Slaves” (2 March 1786), in Acts of the Tenth General Assembly of the State of New Jersey (Trenton: Isaac Collins, 1786), 239–242, quotation from 242. 25. Stephen Browne, “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80:3 (1994): 277–292, quotations from 277, 278; for my response to Browne, see “Fanny Fern’s 1855 Ruth Hall, The Cheerful Brutality of Capitalism, & the Irony of Sentimental Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88:1 (2002): 1–18; on these dilemmas of representation and persuasion in antislavery activism, see my Democratic Dissent, 11–39. 26. C. Wright and Paul A. Stellhorn report in Directory of New Jersey Newspapers, 1765– 1970 (Trenton: N.J. Historical Commission, 1977) that the first regularly printed paper in the town was the Gloucester Farmer, which began publication in 1817 (269–270); quotation from “A Supplement to an Act, Intitled An Act to Prevent

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the Importation of Slaves into the State of New Jersey,” in Acts of the Thirteenth General Assembly of the State of New Jersey (Trenton: Isaac Collins, 1786), 488; on the customary lack of grand juries in cases involving slaves and free blacks, see McDade, The Annals of Murder, xxii. 27. The Sharps can be tracked in Thomas Cushing and Charles Sheppard, History of the Counties of Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland, New Jersey (Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, 1883), 630, 320, 435, 377, 139; on Anthony Sharp’s service in the war see Transcriptions of Early County Records of New Jersey (Newark: Historical Records Survey, 1940), 56, and William Stryker, Official Register of the Officers and Men of New Jersey in the Revolutionary War (1872; Baltimore: Clearfield, 1997), 87; for evidence of the chain of land inheritance within the Sharp family, see American Weekly Mercury (9–16 November 1738), in New Jersey Archives, 1st series, 11:552– 553. 28. Brendan McConville, These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 41, 48; for narratives depicting this web of debts and favors, see J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; New York: Penguin, 1981), and Benjamin Franklin, “The Autobiography,” in Writings, 1307–1469; these same debts and favors could also take the form of long-simmering grudges based on perceived slights or slanders—for example, in Under Their Vine and Fig Tree the Polish traveler turned émigre Niemcewicz describes how his neighbor, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

whenever asked for help or paid for labor, produced but “extortion, carelessness, and cheating” (281). 29. “Shocks” from Jordan, White over Black, 375; Pingeon, Blacks in the Revolutionary Era, 5; following quotations from the Weekly Rehearsal (11 February and 8 April 1734), and the New-York Gazette (25 March 1734), as reprinted in Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, 11:333, 336–337, 337, and 342; and see the related documents in Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey, comp. and ed. Clement Alexander Price (Newark: New Jersey Historical Society, 1980); Linebaugh and Rediker, ManyHeaded Hydra, 200, see my chapter 1 on the New York City plot; on the political uses of monsters, see Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: New Left Books, 1983), 83–108. 30. New Jersey panics described in Pingeon, Blacks in Revolutionary Era, 6, and Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; New York: International Publishers, 1983), 80, 200, 89, 206; Slotkin, “Narratives of Negro Crime,” 26; on fears of treason, Tories, and other war-era acts of counterrevolutionary violence

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Notes in general, see Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763–1783 (1960; New York: International Publishers, 1977), 123–140; regarding such fears in New Jersey, see Leonard Lundin, Cockpit of the Revolution: The War for Independence in New Jersey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 115–118, 162–164, and 374–376; regarding slaves and free blacks, see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 19–32 and 111–181, and McConville, These Daring Disturbers, 146–147.

31. Benjamin Rush to Richard Price, 15 October 1785, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, vol. 1, 1761–1792, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 371, emphasis added; regarding the fear of the positive example set by free blacks, see the letters of Thomas Basye and Martha Turberville in A Documentary History of Slavery in North America, ed. William Lee Rose (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 88–90; on the correlation between rising slave numbers and the harassment of free blacks, eventually leading to their being declared illegal in most states, see Jordan, White over Black, 403–426. 32. Pingeon, Blacks in the Revolutionary Era, 25; on the founding of the Free African Society see Pingeon, 22–23, and Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967),173; on the bill see Zilversmit, 175; for an example of the abolitionist sentiments fueling the society, see John Cooper’s September 1780 “To the Publick,” in Documents Relating to the Revolutionary History of the State of New Jersey; Archives of the Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

State of New Jersey, 2nd series, vol. 4, ed. William Nelson (Trenton: State Gazette Publishing, 1914), 650–653; biographical information on Bustill from Anna Bustill Smith, “The Bustill Family,” Journal of Negro History 10:4 (1925): 638–644. 33. Cyrus Bustill, “I Speak to Those in Slavery,” 18 September 1787, reprinted in Foner and Branham, Lift Every Voice, 22–25; the reference here is to Lemuel Haynes’s blistering Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping, reprinted in Ruth Bogin, “Liberty Further Extended: A 1776 Antislavery Manuscript by Lemuel Haynes,” William and Mary Quarterly 40 (1983): 93–105; on Bustill, Haynes, and their fellow black abolitionists of the Revolutionary era see Hartnett and Pfau, “Confounded Rhetorics of Race,” and Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1989). 34. Runaway figures from Henry B. Weiss and Grace M. Weiss, An Introduction to Crime and Punishment in Colonial New Jersey (Trenton: Past Times Press, 1960), 72, unnumbered table; by including New York City in this question the number of runaway slaves recorded between 1716–1783 rises to 732 (see Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown, eds. and comps., “Pretends to Be Free”: Runaway

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Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey [New York: Garland, 1994], Appendix 1, table 4, unnumbered leaf); on the laws treating all unknown black men as if they were runaway slaves, see Henry Scofield Cooley, A Study of Slavery in New Jersey (Baltimore: n.p., 1896), 34. 35. As discussed in my introduction, the tradition of creating spectacular rituals of destruction meant to tingle the ears of those who hear of the event goes back to 2 Kings 21:11–12, quotation from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 36. See letter by “Impartial” to the New Jersey Gazette (10 January 1781), as reprinted in Frank Moore, Diary of the American Revolution (1860; New York: Washington Square, 1967), 467–471; for further treatment of this universalizing strategy, see Franklin’s 1790 petition to Congress (from note 9 above), and Hartnett and Pfau, “Confounded Rhetorics of Race.” 37. In chronological order, these texts are Benjamin Rush, “On Slave Keeping” (1773), in Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert Dunes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 3–18; Thomas Paine, “African Slavery in America” (1775), in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 52–56; Samuel Hopkins, A Dialogue, Concerning the Slavery of the Africans (Norwich, CT: Judah Spooner, 1776); Haynes, Liberty Further Extended (1776); Paine’s “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” (1 March 1780), in The Law of Freedom and Bondage: A Casebook, ed. Paul Finkelman (New Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

York: Oceana Publications, 1986), 42–45; and Bustill, “I Speak to Those in Slavery” (1787).

CHAPTER 4. ENLIGHTENMENT, REPUBLICANISM, AND EXECUTIONS, 1785–1800 1. John Gardiner, An Oration Delivered July 4, 1785, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston (Boston: Peter Edes, 1785), 10, 21; “man of letters” from Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992), 345; biographical information and some writings by Gardiner are available in The Federalist Literary Mind, ed. Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962); Philip Freneau, “The Rising Glory of America” (1775), in Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: Hafner, 1929), 3–17, quotation from 3. 2. Joel Barlow, An Oration Delivered at the North Church in Hartford, at the Meeting House of the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati, July 4th, 1787 (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787), 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, emphasis added; for a bibliography

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Notes of Barlow’s works, see Leon Howard, The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 421–424; on the trope of empire in early U.S. thought, see my Democratic Dissent & the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 93–99; for more expansive views, see Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), and Daniel Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); in his 1778 poem “America Independent,” Freneau sang the praises of “a glorious empire [that] rises, bright and new!” (in Poems of Freneau, 24–33, quotation from 33).

3. “Eldest male posterity” is from the Order of Cincinnati’s founding document, as quoted in Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 441; Franklin’s letter quoted in Rosenfeld, American Aurora, 448; the subscriber’s list is included in Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus, A Poem in Nine Books (Mexico City: Frente de Affirmación Hispanista, 1992), unnumbered pages following page 258; quotations from Howard, Connecticut Wits, 159, 197; the anarchy reference is to David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem, 1786–1787, ed. William Bottorff (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1967); Donald M. Scott, From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 24. Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

4. Barlow and his colleagues’ “gentlemanly dislike” as characterized in Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 187; I should note, however, that Barlow soon changed his colors, for in 1788 he ventured to France where, as May observes, he became “an honorary citizen and passionate advocate of the French Republic, an atheist, and a bad word in Connecticut” (192); Thomas Paine records in his 1802 letter “To the Citizens of the United States” that Barlow was with him the night the Jacobins arrested them both in Paris (in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick [New York: Penguin, 1987], 503–517, arrest story from 514); no author, see under “Pennsylvania,” The Columbian Magazine, or Monthly Miscellany (July 1787): 558; I was led to this juxtaposition of Barlow and witches by Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956); on the consequences of this strange event, see Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Pennsylvania, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 103–108; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 151; although addressing a later

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period, a similar argument about the relationships among modernity, rhetoric, and secrecy is offered in Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 5. J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 1788, trans. Mara Soceanu Vamos and Durand Echeverria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 153, 201; “The Grand Constitution: or, The Palladium of Columbia: A New Federal Song,” Massachusetts Centinel (6 October 1787), as reprinted in Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 101; on the political uses of music during this period, see Robert James Branham and Stephen John Hartnett, Sweet Freedom’s Song: “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and Democracy in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 14–44; Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 37; pigs continued to plague New York City well into the antebellum period, as illustrated in the comical drawing from 13 August 1859 in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (as printed in Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 786). 6. Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 75, 76; Mott and Jorgenson, “Introduction,” in Benjamin Franklin: Representative Selections, ed. Frank Luther Mott and Chester Jorgenson (New York: American Book Company, 1936), xxi; for Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

context, see Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 45; on the historical interlacing of modernity and pain, see John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 100–141. 7. Benjamin Rush to Reverend Charles Nisbet, 5 December 1783, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:315–316, emphasis added; while avoiding his tricky politics, Wade Williams notes that Rush’s version of the Enlightenment amounted to “a universal mode of communication that encompassed all forms and all subject matter” (“Religion, Science, and Rhetoric in Revolutionary America: The Case of Dr. Benjamin Rush,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30:3 [2000]: 55–72, quotation from 69, emphasis added). 8. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 224; Adams quotation from 1805 as cited in Davidson, 39; Lewis Simpson, “The Satiric Mode: The Early National Wits,” in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis Rubin Jr. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 49–61, quotation from 52.

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9. See The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson, A Repertory of His Ideas on Government, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926), 298–316; Jefferson’s Autobiography, a sketchy affair at best, has been republished as a single text by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2005), but most historians know the text as in, and I am quoting from the version included in, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1892–1899), 1:62–63; James Madison to Thomas S. Grimke (15 January 1828), The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1910), 9:298–301, quotation from 300. 10. Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, trans. Richard Davies (1763; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4—all further references to Beccaria are cited in the text, with page numbers referring to this edition; on Beccaria’s popularity, see Paul M. Spurlin, “Beccaria’s essay On Crimes and Punishments in Eighteenth-Century America,” Studies on Voltaire and The Eighteenth Century 27:4 (1963): 1489–1504; Jefferson, Adams, and Madison (among others) all read Beccaria closely; in fact, Philadelphians even took to writing letters to the editor of the New World using Beccaria as a nom de guerre (see John Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980], 70–71); for further analysis of Beccaria, see my “Prisons, Profit, Crime, and Social Control: A Hermeneutic of the Production of Violence,” in Race, Class, and Community Identity, ed. Andrew Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Light and Meck Nagel (New York: Humanities Press, 2000), 199–221. 11. Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments in Cases Heretofore Capital” (1778), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Body (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 2:492–507 (note that I am interlacing punishments listed from this draft of the bill and the outline version that appears in Papers, 2:663–664); “reason” from his Autobiography, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1:58; the bill’s preface quoted from Papers, 1:493; Exodus 21:22 quoted from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); on Jefferson’s compromised thinking regarding slavery, see Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996) and Stephen John Hartnett and Michael Pfau, “The Confounded Rhetorics of Race in Revolutionary America,” in Rhetoric, Independence, and Nationhood, vol. 1 of The Rhetorical History of the United States, ed. Stephen Lucas (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, forthcoming). 12. Jefferson’s qualified mea culpa and his blame-shifting are from his Autobiography, in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1:60 and 63 (no dates provided); on the

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complicated fate of the bill, see Charles Cullen, “Completing the Revisal of the Laws in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 82:1 (1974): 84–99; Kathryn Preyer, “Crime, the Criminal Law, and Reform in Post-Revolutionary Virginia,” Law and History Review 1:1 (1983): 53–85, quotation from 70; Harry M. Ward and Harold E. Greer Jr., Richmond during the Revolution, 1775–1783 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977), 109–125, Randolph quoted on 111; for context, see Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 95–96. 13. Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 17–64, quotation from 53; my reading of Jefferson’s bill flies in the face of accepted historical hagiography, which sees Jefferson’s bill as “liberal and humane . . . a model of enlightened political activism” (so says Darren Staloff, summarizing the common line, in Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding [New York: Hill and Wang, 2005], 256). 14. Anonymous, “The Present Age,” New Hampshire Gazette (1779), as printed in Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution, ed. Frank Moore (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1855), 255–258; for studies foregrounding this tension in the period’s leading thinkers, who oscillate from a liberating impulse to a shackling impulse, see Gregory S. Goodale, “The Rhetorical Revolution: Contesting Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Citizenship in Benjamin Rush’s Philadelphia,” Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2007; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Robert J. McCarthy, “Panopticism and Publicity: Bentham’s Quest for Transparency,” Public Culture 6 (1994): 547–575; and Peter Okun, Crime and the Nation: Prison Reform and Popular Fiction in Philadelphia, 1786–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 15. Joseph Bellamy, “The Millennium” (1758), reprinted in The Great Awakening: Documents Illustrating the Crisis and Its Consequences, ed. Alan Heimert and Perry Miller (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 614, 623, 630; Bellamy, The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin, Vindicated (1760; Morris-Town: Henry Russell, 1804); on Bellamy’s career, see Mark Valeri, Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); “solicitation” from F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutman (1809: La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1936), 50. 16. Bellamy, “Millennium,” 632; on the function of the jeremiadic form, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), and Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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17. John Edgar Wideman, The Cattle Killing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 167; for analysis of Rush’s complicated racial politics, see Goodale, “America’s Rhetorical Revolution.” 18. Benjamin Rush, “On Slave-Keeping” (1773), in Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, ed. Dagobert Dunes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 3–18, quotation from 16; Rush thus confronts a dilemma faced by all abolitionists: how to represent the horrors of slavery? Along these lines, see Stephen Browne, “‘Like Gory Spectres’: Representing Evil in Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80:3 (1994): 277–292; on the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the period’s complicated abolitionist work, see Hartnett, Democratic Dissent, 40–49, and Hartnett and Pfau, “Confounded Rhetorics of Race.” 19. “[D]eficient” is from an 1812 letter sent to John Adams recounting Rush’s feelings during the war, as cited in Rosenfeld, American Aurora, 485; “mob” and the following lines are from a 12 January 1778 letter to Patrick Henry (available in Letters of Benjamin Rush,1:182–185, quotations on 183); on Rush’s roles and views during the war, see Donald D’Elia, Benjamin Rush: Philosopher of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974), 52–57; on Washington’s ascension to godlike status, see Branham and Hartnett, Sweet Freedom’s Song, 39–44; “Godlike Washington!” and other lyrics extolling his stature (“Huzza! Huzza!”) are available in Lawrence, Music for Patriots, 96, and in The Spirit of ’SevCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

enty-six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, ed. Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris (1958; New York: Da Capo, 1995), 900–902; like Rush, Paine thought Washington was a do-nothing oaf—“you slept away your time in the field”—who took credit for the heroic efforts of Gates, Greene, and others (see his 1795 “Letter to George Washington,” in The Thomas Paine Reader, 490–502, quotation from 494); Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 12. 20. Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 80, and see 80–96 on the circumstances leading up to Rush’s joining this topic; James Mease, The Picture of Philadelphia, Giving an Account of Its Origin, Increase, and Improvements, etc. (1811; New York: Arno Press, 1970), 160; Susanna Dillwyn to William Dillwyn (May 1787), as cited by Butterfield in Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:416 n. 1; “Christian revolutionaries” from D’Elia, Benjamin Rush, 82; for more on the 1786 law, see Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 76–81. 21. Benjamin Rush, An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and Upon Society (Philadelphia: Joseph James, 1787), 3, hereafter cited in the

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text; the newspaper version appeared as “An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishment upon Criminals, and Upon Society” in The American Museum (July 1787): 142–153; on the society’s founding and members, see Michael Vinson, “The Society for Political Inquiries: The Limits of Republican Discourse in Philadelphia on the Eve of the Constitutional Convention,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113:2 (1989): 185–205; the society was disbanded in May 1789. 22. Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of New Hampshire (1798; New York: Dial Press, 1924), 112–113; for his analysis of Burroughs as an “ideological insurgent,” see Daniel Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 155–162; for another reading of Rush’s text, see Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 120–126. 23. Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in AngloAmerican Culture,” American Historical Review 100:2 (1995): 303–334, quotations from 307, 327 n. 62, 307; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (the final, 1790 version) (1759; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12, 13; despite his observations on spectatorial sympathy, Smith nonetheless endorsed what he called “the sacred and necessary law of retaliation” (83), and argued that through hangings “others are terrified by his fate from imitating his example” (103). Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

24. Jefferson, Writings, 1:63; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 259; Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 107, 112, 88; George Keith Taylor, Substance of A Speech Delivered in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on The Bill to Amend the Penal Laws of this Commonwealth (Richmond: Samuel Pleasants, 1796), 12; Burroughs likewise argued in his Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs that “severe laws have a fatal tendency. . . . [For] everything which tends to destroy the principles of humanity, serves to eradicate from the human breast that benevolence and compassion towards mankind, which is the bond of perfection in society” (130). 25. For a similar critique of Beccaria’s position regarding penal servitude, see Graeme Newman and Pietro Marongiu, “Penological Reform and the Myth of Beccaria,” Criminology 28:2 (1990): 325–346; on the interlacing of modernity and pain, see Peters, Courting the Abyss, 100–141. 26. Halttunen, “Humanitarianism,” 334; the Martin narrative, and a sampling of its racy illustrations, is reprinted in Daniel Williams, ed., Liberty’s Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic (Athens: University of Georgia, 2006), 105–130. 27. On the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, see Negley Teeters,

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Notes The Cradle of the Penitentiary (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1955), 29–35, and his longer treatment of the subject in They Were in Prison (Philadelphia: Winston, 1937); see Benjamin Rush to John Dickinson, 5 April 1787; to John Coakley Lettsom, 18 May 1787 and 16 August 1788; to Jeremy Belknap, 7 October 1787 and 13 October 1789; to John Howard, 14 October 1789; and to James Thornton, 3 September 1792; all in Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:416–417, 417–418, 479–481, 489–491, 526–527, 527–528, and 621–622; quotation from letter to Belknap, 19 August 1788, Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:481; Benjamin Rush, “An Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of Punishing Murder by Death,” The American Museum (July 1788): 78–81; this essay became the expanded first half of Rush’s Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1792); throughout the rest of this chapter, all page citations are from this pamphlet version and are offered parenthetically in the text.

28. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (1651; New York: Prometheus, 1988), 169; John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690; New York: Prometheus, 1986), 12, 13; CATO, “Addressed to Mr. [Daniel] Humphreys” (the editor), Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (1 April 1788): 2; and see Cato’s more explicit defense of hanging, also “Addressed to Mr. Humphreys,” in the Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (6 September 1788): 2–3; for Hobbes, Locke, and Cato, the question was not how to abolish pain and violence, but, as for Beccaria and Bentham as well, how to make them more productive for Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

the emergent modern nation-state; on the social contract and punishment, see Adam Hirsch’s observations in The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 80–82; for Beccaria’s use of the social contract, see his essay On Crimes and Punishments, 10–13, 66–67. 29. Regardless of religious creed or political affiliation, this belief in the “unity of truth” was one of the foundational tropes of early American thinking; even as late as 1836, when Ralph Waldo Emerson was delivering his “Nature” talk before crowds of admirers, the lapsed Unitarian would claim that “a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world” (“Nature,” as reprinted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff [New York: Penguin, 1984], 35–82, quotation from 60); for analysis of how such synecdochical, well-nigh cosmological claims underwrite U.S. democracy, see my Democratic Dissent, 132–172. 30. Ronald Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,” American Quarterly 30:2 (1978): 156–176, quotations from 168, 170; Hindle, Pursuit of Science, 248; and see Emory Elliott, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New

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England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 120–125. 31. The two anonymous—yet attributed to Annan—essays responding to Rush both appeared under “Observations on Capital Punishment: Being a Reply to an Essay on the Same Subject,” in the American Museum (November and December 1788): 444–454 and 547–553 respectively, hereafter cited in the text; Butterfield’s notes corroborate Rush’s attributing the work of “Philochoras” to Annan, see Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:491 n. 8. 32. Many thanks to Debbie Hawhee, the classicist, rhetorical critic, and three-point ringer, for her help in making sense of the meanings of Philochoras; see The Address and Petition of a Number of the Clergy of Various Denominations in the City of Philadelphia . . . Relative to the Passing of a Law Against Vice and Immorality (Philadelphia: William Young, 1793), for which Robert Annan is the first signer on the list of clergy printed on page 4, quotations from 4, 5, and 6; for additional evidence of Annan’s thinking, see his Brief Animadversions on the Doctrine of Universal Salvation (Philadelphia: Aitken & Son, 1787). 33. PHILOCHORAS, no title, The Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (25 September 1788), 2–3, quotations from 2; Socinianism is touched upon in May, Enlightenment in America, 14–16; and see Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 204, 335; on the rhetorical structure of ad hominem attacks, see Douglas Walton, A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Press, 1995), 36–40. 34. “Humanity” and the two following quotations are from Masur, Rites of Execution, 69, 68; on the fracturing of the Calvinist world into modernity’s hodge-podge of religious affiliations, see Nathan Hatch, “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Hatch and Mark Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 59–78; Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and The Religious Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); and William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 35. “[P]recedent slope” from Walton, Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy, 159; on the other terms used here, see Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, second edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 36. On tapinosis, see Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 149; for an overview of the contemporary literature addressing deterrence, which overwhelmingly agrees that the death penalty is not a deterrent, see William Bailey and Ruth Peterson, “Murder, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence: A Review of the Literature,” in

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Notes The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 135–161.

37. Scott, From Office to Profession, 38; Scott observes that by 1800 “the overwhelming majority of the established clergy, especially in Connecticut and Massachusetts, was a Federalist clergy” (p. 24)—before serving in Philadelphia, Annan had been stationed in Boston, where, given the evidence considered here, he likely supported this linkage between Calvinism and Federalism. 38. PHILOCHORAS, no title, Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (2 October 1788): 2–3, quotation from 2; Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 49, 48, 32; on the philosophical background to Jefferson’s use of the phrase, see Wills, Inventing America, 181–192. 39. John Trumbull, M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem in Four Cantos (1776), as reprinted in The Satiric Poems of John Trumbull, ed. Edwin T. Bowden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 155. 40. Rush to Belknap, 7 October 1788, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:490; along with the King James version that Rush quotes, similar passages occur in the New Standard Revised Edition in John 3:17, Mathew 20:28, and Mark 10:45, which may be found in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, pages 132, 38, and 78 of the New Testament (thanks to Martin Medhurst, Bob Ivie, and Jennifer Mercieca for helping me locate these passages); see pages 190–191 for a timeline Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

of the give-and-take between Rush and Annan; all citations herein indicate page numbers from the pamphlet version of Rush’s 1792 Considerations. 41. A citizen of Maryland, “An Oration Intended to Have Been Spoken at a Late Commencement, on the Unlawfulness and Impolicy of Capital Punishments, and the Proper Means of Reforming Criminals,” American Museum (January 1790): 7–8; (February 1790), 69–71; (March 1790), 135–137; and (April 1790), 135– 137; quotations from Jan., p. 7. Feb., pp. 70, 71, and April, p. 195—I wonder if this was Rush, for the title is similar to his later works, and the prose is consistent with his earlier essay on slavery. The paper followed this series of essays by reprinting an October 1791 letter from a “faithful friend” to Rush, wherein the author (my colleague Greg Goodale believes it is Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson) says that she has “often read, with congenial feelings of humanity, many of your tracts, and others, on the abolishing of sanguinary punishments” (“Letter from a Lady in Montgomery County,” American Museum [November 1791]: 215). 42. On the senior Bradford’s coffeehouse see Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Galaxy Books, 1965), 22, and Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and

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the Origins of the American Revolution (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 194; the list of the younger Bradford’s classmates and the “popping” quotation are from Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 81 and 673. 43. William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1793); and see Davidson, Revolution and the Word, regarding these tensions between different modes of argument. 44. Bradford repeats his celebrations of Beccaria and Montesquieu on pages 20, 44, 51, 53, 54, and 69. 45. Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, 67; see my comments on Barlow’s speech and “The Grand Constitution” above; Zdzislaw Mach, “National Anthems: The Case of Chopin as a National Composer,” in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (New York: Berg, 1997), 61–62; on this relationship between nationalism and nations, see Branham and Hartnett, Sweet Freedom’s Song, 16–27, and (for a later period) Eric Hobsbawm’s chapter “Building Nations” in The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975; New York: Vintage, 1996), 82–97. 46. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on The Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7; as numerous observers have argued, this “magic” is often toxic, as seen in my Democratic Dissent, 93–131, where antebellum nationalism underwrites war and the expansion of slavery; for an overview, see Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); for an exception to this argument, see Thomas Paine’s “Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet” (1793), where he argues that “enlightened politicians and lovers of humanity” must oppose the death penalty, even when considering the fate of a character as seedy as Louis XVI (in The Thomas Paine Reader, 394–398, quotation from 398). 47. Mease, Picture of Philadelphia, 162; Bradford’s Enquiry was soon published in London, where it met with high praise—on the transatlantic flow of humanitarian ideas, see Michael Kraus, “Eighteenth Century Humanitarianism: Collaborations between Europe and America,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 60:3 (1936): 270–286, 277–278 on Bradford.

CONCLUSION. THE HANGING OF JOHN M’KEAN AND THE PERILS OF SINNING IN AN AGE OF REASON 1. No author, Execution of John M’Kean for the Murder of His Wife (Philadelphia: Printed for the Traveling Stationer, 1807 or 1808), 4. 2. On the XYZ Affair and its impact on American politics, see Stephen John

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Notes Hartnett and Jennifer Rose Mercieca, “‘Has Your Courage Rusted?’: National Security and the Dilemmas of Republicanism in America, 1798–1800,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9:1 (2006): 79–112; regarding the waves of Irish immigration, see Sharon Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 53–56; on Barrick, Sullivan, and White see the American Bloody Register, 234, 238, and 242 (the first two editions are reprinted in Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives, ed. Daniel E. Williams [Madison: Madison House, 1993], 233–251); see Joel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995) and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed. (1991; London, Verso, 2003); John Alexander, Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 49; Gale’s Independent Gazetteer and the anonymous clergyman quoted from, and the August 1800 fires as described in Alexander, 22, 79, 83; Freneau, “Reflections on the Gradual Progress of Nations from Democratical States to Despotic Empires,” in Poems of Freneau, ed. Harry Hayden Clark (New York: Hafner, 1929), 155–157, quotation from 155.

3. Many thanks to Rachel DeLue, Cara Finnegan, and our fellow members of the University of Illinois American Studies Working Group, who helped parse the meanings of this image. 4. Execution of John M’Kean, 6, 5, back of title page, and unnumbered fourth leaf; for Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

an account of the difficulties faced by men like M’Kean, see Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 5. Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2; Garry Wills, “The Dramaturgy of Death,” New York Review of Books (21 June 2001): 6–10, quotation from 6; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794), in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 399–451, quotation from 417; William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1793), 4. 6. Tax figures from Alexander, Render Them Submissive, 12; George Keith Taylor, Substance of A Speech Delivered in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on The Bill to Amend the Penal Laws of this Commonwealth (Richmond: Samuel Pleasants, 1796), 6; for a contrary view, one arguing that as modern capitalism progressed in the United States it taught Americans to see the poor and criminal not as representatives of society at large but as individual failures, see Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System, trans. Glynis

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Cousin (1977; Totawa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981), 99–142. 7. Freneau, “Reflections,” 156; Essays on the Injustice and Impolicy of Inflicting Capital Punishment; Originally Published in the Democratic Press, by ME (Philadelphia:

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Democratic Press, 1809), quotations from 40.

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Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

Bibliography •

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES The materials listed in this bibliography were found in the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum (New York City), and the New York Historical Society; the Special Collections and University Archives of the Alexander Library, Rutgers University, and the New Jersey State Archives (Trenton); the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia); the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester), the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston), the Boston Athenaeum, and the Special Collections Library of the Harvard Law School; the Newberry Library (Chicago), and the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS American Bloody Register (Boston), 1784. American Museum (Philadelphia), 1787–1791. American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia), 1736–1738. Boston Evening Post (Boston), 1741. Boston News-Letter (Boston), 1736.

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The Columbian Magazine, or Monthly Miscellany (Philadelphia), 1787. Connecticut Courant and Weekly Intelligencer (Hartford), 1780. Gales’s Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), 1797. The Hangman (Boston), 1845. Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser (Boston), 1780. Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), 1787. New Hampshire Gazette (Portsmouth), 1779. New York Gazette (New York City), 1734. New-York Weekly Journal (New York City), 1741. Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), 1737. Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (Philadelphia), 1788. Royal Gazette (New York City), 1780. Weekly Rehearsal (Boston), 1734.

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Oxford University Press, 1994. “An Act to Prevent the Importation of Slaves into the State of New Jersey, and to Authorize Manumission of Them Under Certain Restrictions, and to Prevent the Abuse of Slaves.” 2 March 1786. In Acts of the Tenth General Assembly of the State of New Jersey, 239–242. Trenton: Isaac Collins, 1786. The Address and Petition of a Number of the Clergy of Various Denominations in the City of Philadelphia . . . Relative to the Passing of a Law Against Vice and Immorality. Philadelphia: William Young, 1793. “The Address of the People called Quakers, to the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States.” 11 February 1790. In The Debates and Proceedings in the United States Congress, 2:1182–1183. Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834. Alexander, John. Render Them Submissive: Responses to Poverty in Philadelphia, 1760–1800. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Allen, James. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000. Allen, William. The American Biographical Dictionary. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1857. Ames, Fisher. “The Mire of Democracy.” 1805. Reprinted in The Federalist Literary Mind,

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edited by Lewis P. Simpson, 51–54. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Andreana. Containing the Trial, Execution and Various Matter Connected with the History of Major John André. Philadelphia: Horace W. Smith, 1865. Annals of Pennsylvania, From the Discovery of the Delaware. Edited by Samuel Hazard. Philadelphia: Hazard and Mitchell, 1850. Annan, Robert. Brief Animadversions on the Doctrine of Universal Salvation. Philadelphia: Aitken & Son, 1787. ——— (writing as Anonymous). “Observations on Capital Punishment: Being a Reply to an Essay on the Same Subject.” Pts. 1 and 2. American Museum (November 1788): 444–454; (December 1788): 547–553. ——— (writing as Philochoras). No title. Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (25 September 1788): 2–3. ——— (writing as Philochoras). No title. Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (2 October 1788): 2–3. ——— (writing as Philochoras). No title. Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (4 October 1788): 2–3. ——— (writing as Philochoras). No title. Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (7 October 1788): 1–2. Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

——— (writing as Philochoras). No title. Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (23 October 1788): 3–4. Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1943. ———. The American Revolution: 1763–1783. 1960; New York: International Publishers, 1977. Arendt, Hannah. “On Violence.” 1969. In Crises of the Republic, 103–198. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Austin, Benjamin (writing as Old South). Constitutional Republicanism, in Opposition to Fallacious Federalism. Boston: Adams and Rhoades, 1803. ——— (writing as Honestus). Observations on The Pernicious Practice of the Law, As Published Occasionally in the Independent Chronicle, in the Year 1786, and Republished at the Request of a Number of Respectable Citizens. Boston: Joshua Belcher, 1814. Bailey, William C., and Ruth D. Peterson. “Murder, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence: A Review of the Literature.” In The Death Penalty in America, edited by Hugo Adam Bedau, 135–161. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard

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Satiric Poems of John Trumbull, edited by Edwin T. Bowden, 101–212. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962. United States Constitution Sesquicentennial Commission. Delaware. 1787; Washington D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1937. Upham, Thomas. The Manual of Peace. New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1836. Valeri, Mark. Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Van Doren, Carl. Secret History of the American Revolution: An Account of the Conspiracies of Benedict Arnold and Numerous Others, etc. New York: Viking, 1941. Vaughan, Alden T. Roots of American Racism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Veritas. Brief Statement of the Argument For the Abolition of The Death Punishment. In Twelve Essays. Philadelphia: Gihon, Fairchild & Co., 1844. Vinson, Michael. “The Society for Political Inquiries: The Limits of Republican Discourse in Philadelphia on the Eve of the Constitutional Convention.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113:2 (1989): 185–205. Walker, David. An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Boston, 1829. Walton, Douglas. A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,

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1995. Ward, Harry M., and Harold E. Greer Jr. Richmond during the Revolution, 1775–1783. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977. Warville, J. P. Brissot de. New Travels in the United States of America, 1788. Translated by Mara Soceanu Vamos and Durand Echeverria. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. Watson, Martha Solomon. “The Dynamics of Intertexuality: Re-reading the Declaration of Independence.” In Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Thomas Benson, 91–111. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997. Webb, Frank J. The Gairies and Their Friends. 1857; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Weiss, Henry B., and Grace M. Weiss. An Introduction to Crime and Punishment in Colonial New Jersey. Trenton: Past Times Press, 1960. Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Father Knickerbocker Rebels: New York City during the Revolution. New York: Scribner’s, 1948. Wheeler, Roxann. “The Complexion of Desire: Racial Ideology and Mid-EighteenthCentury British Novels.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:3 (1999): 309–332. Wideman, John Edgar. The Cattle Killing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Wikberg, Ron, and Wilbert Rideau. Life Sentences: Rage and Survival behind Bars. New York: New York Times Books, 1992. Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Williams, Daniel. “‘Behold a Tragic Scene Strangely Changed into a Theater of Mercy’: The Structure and Significance of Criminal Conversion Narratives in Early New England.” American Quarterly 38:5 (1986): 827–847. ———, editor. Liberty’s Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. ———. Pillars of Salt: An Anthology of Early American Criminal Narratives. Madison: Madison House, 1993. Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. 1944; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Williams, Wade. “Religion, Science, and Rhetoric in Revolutionary America: The Case of Dr. Benjamin Rush.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30:3 (2000): 55–72. Williams, William H. Slavery and Freedom in Delaware, 1639–1865. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1996. Wills, Garry. “The Dramaturgy of Death.” New York Review of Books (21 June 2001): 6–10.

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———. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. ———. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1991. Wright, Esmond. Franklin of Philadelphia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Wright, William C., and Paul A. Stellhorn, editors. Directory of New Jersey Newspapers, 1765–1970. Trenton: N.J. Historical Commission, 1977. Yoder, John. “Noah’s Covenant, the New Testament, and Christian Social Order.” In The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, 429–444, edited by Hugo Adam Bedau. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Zimring, Franklin. The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Zuckerman, Michael. “Almost Chosen People”: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. ———. “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden.” In Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, 115–158. Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

Index •

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

A “Abolition of Negro Slavery,” (Dew), 131 abolitionist(s): British, 196; Citizen of

Abramsky, Sasha, 244n. 11 “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” (Paine), 159

Maryland on, 187, 191, 205, 206, 207,

Act of 1718, 63, 237n. 27

270n. 41; Constitution and, 30, 81,

“actor training,” 97, 127, 247n. 22

127–30, 165, 199; death penalty and,

ad hominem, 196, 205

10, 13, 16, 19, 31, 37, 125, 204, 208;

Adams, John, 20, 113, 131, 168, 178,

Franklin as an, 141; on hanging, 19;

199, 266n. 19

Paine as an, 159; Quaker, 155; slavery

Adams, Samuel, 31

and, 19, 30–31, 125, 128, 130, 155,

Address of Abraham Johnstone, The (John-

177, 204; societies of, 131, 156, 177;

stone): Abraham was born as Benja-

violence as seen by, 10. See also Brad-

min in, 135, 145–46; accuser Brown

ford, William (son); Bustill, Cyrus;

in, 147, 149; accuser Folwell in, 147,

death penalty; Hangman; Johnstone,

149; accuser Huffsey in, 149–50, 152;

Abraham; pamphlets; Quakers; Rush,

accuser Ivens in, 148–49; accuser

Benjamin; Veritas

Lockwood in, 146, 147, 149; accuser

ABR. See American Bloody Register

Nicholson in, 149; accuser Sharp in,

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303

304

Index

149, 152, 259n. 27; accuser Skinner in, 148–49; accuser Tatem in, 147, 149; authorship of, 160; complex structure of, 133–34, 158; conspiracy

of Various Denominations (Annan), 195 Adventures of Caleb Williams, The (Godwin),

in, 147–51; death penalty condemned

118–20, 125, 168, 251n. 48, 252n. 49

in, 134, 136; death welcomed in, 144,

African Americans, 77; attacks on slavery

148–49; evidence missing in, 148;

by, 134. See also free black(s); slaves;

Franklinesque tropes of persuasion

transportation

in, 141–43, 145, 150, 156, 158; free

“African Slavery in America” (Paine), 159

black in, 125, 143, 146, 147; frugality

Africans, 43, 51; imported as slaves, 77;

in, 143, 158; genre expectations in,

transportation of, 44, 77. See also free

137–41, 144; hanging in, 39, 125, 127,

black(s); slaves

144; innocence in, 144, 145, 147–49,

Age of Reason (Paine), 216

150; irony in, 140; Jesus imagery in,

Alexander, John, 3, 212

144, 158, 257n. 21; law in, 149–50;

aliases, 1–2, 4, 220n. 4. See also identity

manumission in, 146; multivocality

allegiance, 97, 109

in, 134, 136, 140, 144–45, 151, 158;

allegory, 213, 214

murder of Tom in, 125, 148, 149–50,

Allinson, Samuel, 125

155; Part I of (“The Address of Abra-

“America Independent” (Freneau), 262n.

ham Johnstone”), 133, 140, 141; Part II of (“The Dying Words of Abraham Johnstone”), 133–54, 135, 140, 143, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

127–28 Address and Petition of a Number of the Clergy

145, 146–47; Part III of (“Letter to His

2 American Bloody Register (ABR) (newspaper), 110, 124, 125, 168, 186, 212; cultural modernity in the, 115–18

Wife”), 134, 140, 143; prosopopoeia

American Museum (magazine), 189; Consid-

of, 127, 139–41, 143, 145, 151, 160;

erations on the Injustice (Rush), 194; was

Quakers and, 133, 136, 137, 141, 142,

encyclopedic, 201–202; as an Enlight-

143; reconstruction of the execution

enment arbiter, 201–202; Enquiry into

in, 126, 127, 136, 138; rhetoric of,

the Effects of Public Punishments upon

137, 138, 140–43, 158, 159; scape-

Criminals (Rush), 179–80, 181, 182–87,

goat for a crime in, 127, 140, 143,

202, 204; “Enquiry into the Justice

144, 147, 151, 155, 158–60; slavery

and Policy of Punishing Murder by

attacked in, 39, 133, 136, 140, 142;

Death” (Rush), 187, 188, 190, 191,

universalizing in, 158, 159; wife Sally/

192; “Philochoras” in, 187, 190, 194,

Sarah in, 143, 160; writing styles in,

195. See also Rush, Benjamin

133, 134, 136, 140–41, 158 “Address of the People called Quakers,

American Philosophical Society, 170, 176 American Revolution: crime during the,

to the Senate and House of Repre-

7–8, 80; dangers, 87; elites, 80, 81,

sentatives of the United States, The,”

82, 96, 107, 110, 138, 163–64; George

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

305

Index III and the, 82; liberty and the, 28,

107–8; British spy, 26; “Cow Chase”

30, 33, 82, 84, 96, 128, 159; Liberty

by, 100–101; effigy burning of, 103;

Tree, 84–85, 243n. 8; obedience and,

gallows march by, 99, 100; prisoner

30; paradox in the, 79, 86; as part of

trade involving, 99; retaliation invited

God’s plan, 28; rebels, 8–9, 84, 85,

by execution of, 107–8; Washington

96–97; rhetoric of the, 79, 89, 96–97;

ordered death of, 39, 98, 100, 104–6;

riots, 86; slave substitution system in

verse by, 247n. 26; on the Vulture, 98,

the, 235n. 15; Sons of Liberty, 84, 95,

247n. 24

206; treason and, 8, 87, 96, 170, 244n. 12, 245n. 14; violence and the, 8, 87,

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

96–97, 124. See also Arnold, Benedict;

Angry God, 11, 12, 22, 89–91, 177, 201, 216 Annan, Robert: ad hominem attacks

Dunbar, Moses; Franklin, Benjamin;

of, 196, 205; Address and Petition of a

Paine, Thomas; post-Revolutionary

Number of the Clergy of Various Denomi-

America; Washington, George

nations by, 195; alias “Philochoras”

American Slavery As It Is (Weld), 150

was, 187, 190, 194, 195, 199; anarchy

American Weekly Mercury (periodical), 24,

warnings by, 198–99, 201; Angry God

26; accuracy of the, 17; ambivalence

of, 201; Bradford and, 206; Calvinism

on punishment in the, 13, 17; execu-

and, 197, 201, 270n. 37; death penalty

tion reports in, 1, 2, 5, 7, 14, 17, 18;

Great Debate by, 190–91, 198, 199,

gallows misbehavior in the, 224n. 19;

206; death penalty supporter, 168,

history of the, 219n 1; on London

174, 196, 197, 198; Enlightenment

trade problems, 8; Provincial Council

and, 201; on Franklin, 199; on Genesis

pressured the, 219n. 1; religious preju-

9:6, 196; jeremiad of, 201; laws and,

dice in, 10; on the Sharp family, 259n.

269n. 32; as a minister, 194, 270n. 37;

27; on Smith (Catherine), 1, 2, 5, 7,

on morals, 199; religious persuasion

10, 14, 17. See also identity

of, 199; on religious truth, 200–201;

“Americanus.” See Franklin, Benjamin

rhetoric of, 195, 196, 197–99, 201,

Ames, Fisher, 180, 199

205; Rush on alias of, 195; Rush

Ames, Levi, 245n. 14

attacked by, 195, 196, 197–98, 201,

Anarchiad, The (Connecticut Wits), 80–81,

209n. 31; Rush’s rejoinder to, 202,

123, 168, 241n. 3 anarchy, 26; in America, 80, 81, 82, 164, 169; Annan on, 198–99, 201; crimespawned, 25; death penalty prevents, 198; republicanism and, 40, 82, 83; Rush and, 196, 198 Anderson, Benedict, 209 André, John: Arnold and, 26, 97–98,

204; on “socinian sceptics,” 196; tapinosis of, 198; Turner castigated by, 196 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, An (Walker), 134 Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, An (Child), 134 Arnold, Benedict: André and, 26, 97–98, 107–8; effigy burning of, 103; gallows

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306

Index

march by, 102, 103; hanging of, 97;

Bradford, 207, 208, 210; influenced

as a heroic soldier, 97; honor of, 108;

Jefferson, 169–70, 171, 172, 264n. 10;

rhetoric of, 107–9; as a traitor, 88,

national security and, 208–9; national-

97–98; treason of, 108; on the Vulture,

ism of, 268n. 28; as a nom de guerre,

98, 247n. 24; Washington’s letter

264n. 10; opposed punishment,

from, 107–8

208–9, 210, 217; religious motives of,

arson, 78; death penalty for, 8; Journal

179

of the Proceedings reports of, 67, 68–69,

Beggars Act of 1597, 42

70, 73, 75, 76–77, 238n. 29, 239n. 37,

Belknap, Jeremy, 187, 194, 201

240n. 40, 246n. 19; by unnamed “Ne-

Bellamy, Joseph, 88, 174, 176; The Millen-

groe Man,” 58–59, 61, 62, 63; in New

nium, 173, 174, 175; rhetoric of, 174,

Jersey, 67; in New York City, 64–66,

176

70–75, 76, 78, 84; statistics, 236n. 22;

Benezet, Anthony, 230n. 38

symbology of, 78

Benjamin, Walter, 126, 137

“Arthur, a Negro Man” (broadside), 85, 86–87, 115, 119, 244n. 10

Bercovitch, Sacvan, 29, 82–83, 124 Beven, Joseph: ambivalence of death and,

assimilation, 61

37; execution of, 1, 14, 17; mobility

Austin, Benjamin (pseud. Honestus),

of, 83

31–33, 72 Autobiography (Jefferson), 170

Beven, Thomas, 17 Bible: as Calvinist basis of reason, 167; death penalty supporters, and the,

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

B

168, 192; divine government and the,

Bache, Richard, 179

90, 192, 202, 204; as execution sup-

banishment, 41, 42, 46

port, 11; Genesis 9:6, 192, 195, 196;

Banner, Stuart, 91

Luke 9:56, 201; Luke 23:34, 257n. 21;

Barlow, Joel, 80, 101, 165, 208, 210,

2 Kings 21:11–12, 261n. 35; Matthew

217; arrested with Paine, 262n. 4; on democracy, 163–64

7:1–2, 15; social policy and the, 205 Biddle, Charles, 179

Barrick, Richard, 116–17, 126, 212

“bilboes,” 52, 53, 235n 17

Bartram, John, 22–23

“Bill Proportioning Crimes and Punish-

Bauman, Zygmunt, 76–77

ments” (Jefferson), 170–72

Beaumont, Gustave de, 2, 134, 220n. 2

black eloquence, 154, 155

Beccaria, Cesare, 20, 213; On Crimes and

black leadership, 154. See also free black(s)

Punishments and Other Writings, 8, 91,

black racializing, 62, 64, 71–72, 75

93, 169–70, 171, 172, 185, 202, 207;

Bly, John, 139

death penalty debates and, 160, 209;

Body in Pain, The (Scarry), 15, 111

on hanging, 179; influenced Adams

Bosco, Ronald, 194

and Madison, 264n. 10; influenced

Boston: effigies, 84; elites, 33; executions,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

307

Index 14; mob riots, 33, 84; newspapers, 7,

Enquiries and, 179; son of printer

67, 92–93, 93–94, 102, 153, 219n. 1

William Bradford, 206. See also Annan,

Boston Evening Post (newspaper), 67

Bradley (Attorney General), 66

Boston Tea Party, 8–9, 85

branding, 5–6, 221n. 5

Boudinot, Elias, 131

Breen, T. H., 231n. 2

Bourne, Sylvanus, 131–32

Brickell, John, 51

Bradford, Andrew (1686–1742), pub-

Bridenbaugh, Carl and Jessica, 58, 206

lished American Weekly Mercury, 1, 219n. 1 Bradford, Isaac: escape of, 18; Georgia’s,

Brief Statement of the Argument for the Abolition of the Death Punishment (Veritas), 16–17

18; was hanged for robbery, 8; identi-

Brissot. See Warville, J. P. Brissot de

ties of, 18, 83, 84; was reprieved to be

broadsides, 5, 7, 26, 80; hanging, 86, 111,

an executioner, 1, 14–15, 16, 18; was

124, 137; “The Last Words and Dying

unafraid of the death penalty, 37. See

Speech of Robert Young,” 250n. 40;

also Smith, Catherine; Wilemon, Henry

Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro

Bradford, William (father) (1722–1791), 206 Bradford, William (son) (1755–1795), 166; abolitionist, 49, 176, 213,

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Robert; Rush, Benjamin

Boston News-Letter (newspaper), 7, 219n. 1

Man, 85, 86–87, 115, 119, 244n. 10; Life, Last Words and Dying Speech of Stephen Smith, 139 Brown, Charles Brockden, 4–5, 60, 112,

217; American Philosophical Soci-

125, 168, 180

ety member, 176; army service of,

Brown, Kathleen, 6

206, 207; Attorney General, 206–7;

Brown, Mark, 147, 149

Beccaria influenced, 207, 208, 210;

Brown, Richard Maxwell, 86

British praised Enquiry of, 271n. 47;

Browne, Stephen, 150

chronicled Pennsylvania executions,

burglary, 5, 7; hanging for, 1, 8, 51

83; was an elite, 206; “empire” used

Burke, Kenneth, 71

by, 208; Enlightenment allegiance of,

Burleigh, William, 13

207–10; Enquiry How Far the Punish-

burning, 25, 69, 70, 239n. 33

ment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylva-

Burroughs, Stephen, 180, 182, 251n. 48,

nia, 36, 187, 191, 206, 207–10, 211,

267n. 24

271n. 47; nationalism of, 208–10; as a

Bushman, Richard, 90

New World intellectual, 166, 172, 173,

Bustill, Cyrus, 136, 155–56, 157, 159

207, 213; opposed the death penalty, 36, 176, 208–10; praised Penn, 49; Princeton educated, 206–7; reason

C Calvinists, 11, 22, 28, 30, 88, 166; Annan

and, 216; rhetoric of, 208; science and,

and, 197, 201, 270n. 37; Bible is

176; Society for Promoting Political

basis of all reason for, 167; execution

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308

Index

sermons of the, 175, 194; losing

Clinton, Henry, 97, 106, 107, 249n. 33

94; troika of “liberty, learning, and the

Cohen, Daniel, 11, 113

gospel,” 167. See also Angry God; Hurt,

Colden, Cadwallader, 75, 84, 240n. 40

John; Mather, Cotton; sermons

Collier, Christopher, 88

capital punishment: abolitionists on, 21; authority and, 66; Calvinists on, 30, 166; democracy entwined with, 19;

Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, 50 Columbian Magazine, or Monthly Miscellany, 164

divine government and, 90, 192, 202,

Combe, George, 21–22, 116, 226n. 27

204; history of, 8; produces racism, 19;

Commager, Henry Steele, 79, 249nn.

property and, 8, 10, 204; proponent’s

32–33

reasoning about, 24; Rush on, 180.

Common Sense (Paine), 4, 96, 97

See also death penalty; debate(s); Hurt,

confessions. See gallows statements

John

Connecticut, 84, 87–88, 89, 90; newspa-

capitalism, 8, 9, 10, 24, 27, 64 carnifex, 15 carting, 35, 52, 95, 138 Cato (pseud.), 188–89, 190, 268n. 28 Cattle Killing, The (Wideman), 176

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

65, 66, 71, 100. See also elite(s)

ground, 197; Rush and the, 167, 193–

pers, 81, 102 Connecticut Courant and the Weekly Intelligencer (newspaper), 102 Connecticut Wits, 80–81, 82, 123, 163–64, 168, 241n. 3

Caverno, Arthur, 37

Connor, Catherine. See Smith, Catherine

Certeau, Michel de, 164

Conquergood, Dwight, 33

“chain of misconduct,” 11, 12. See also

Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of

crime; jeremiad(s); sin Chaplin, Joyce, 19 character, 4, 5, 24 Cheever, George Barrell, 174, 199 Child, Lydia Maria, 20, 109, 134, 136 Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performances (Roach), 137 Citizen of Maryland (pseud.), 187, 191, 205, 206, 207, 270n. 41 citizenship, 27, 46

Punishing Murder by Death (Rush), 187, 191, 202, 203, 204 Constitution of Man, The (Combe), 21, 226n. 27 Constitution of the United States of America, The, 30, 81, 127–30, 162, 163, 165, 199 Constitutional Convention, 80, 82, 129, 179 Constitutional Republicanism, in Opposition to

Clarke, George, 65, 75

Fallacious Federalism (Austin), 31–33,

Clarke, Samuel, 20

72

class, 27, 73; the desperate, 212; the labor, 57, 74, 87; obedience, 89, 90, 123; power, 28, 33; pre-Revolutionary, 87; riots and, 33; white criminals as a,

Conversing by Signs (St. George), 78 Convict’s Visitor, The (Smith), 112–13, 137–38, 139 Cooper, David (pseud. A Farmer), 30–31,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

309

Index 32–33, 229–30n. 38 corporeal punishment, 20, 49, 52, 170, 172. See also capital punishment; violence

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Cotton, Josiah, 240n. 40

Day of Trouble is Near, The (Increase Mather), 12, 90 death: cultural fear of, 14–15, 37; tools and weapons of, 15–17. See also execution(s)

counterfeiting: gallows statements, 111;

death penalty: abolitionists and the, 10,

ventriloquism, 109, 112, 138, 139,

13, 16, 19, 31, 37, 125, 204, 208;

250n. 40. See also prosopopoeia

advocates, 14, 25; ambivalence about

“Cow Chase” (André), 100–101

the, 13–14, 15, 17, 18, 37; prevents

Coxe, Tench, 179

anarchy, 198; for arson, 8; was con-

Crévecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 3, 4

demned, 134; debates, 32, 51, 160,

crime: African slaves increased, 51–56;

162, 166–67, 168, 187; Enlightenment

burglary, 8; careers for women, 5;

and the, 208; Genesis 9:6 and the,

debates about, 11, 13, 20, 24, 27, 32,

192, 195, 196; Great Death Pen-

38, 40, 126, 162; deterrence, 21, 36,

alty debates and the, 188, 190–202,

37, 57, 58, 63, 215–16; from English,

204–10; for murder, 8; New World

criminals, 1, 42–43, 44–45, 47, 56;

and the, 109, 187; nonchalance about

gender and, 5–6; identity linked to, 84;

the, 13–14, 37; opposed by Rush,

by “monsters,” 6, 115, 116, 117, 119,

56–57, 167–68, 178, 187; opposition

153–54; organic spread of, 11; politi-

to the, 17, 36–37, 39; is a penological

cal, 8, 9; as popular culture, 244n. 11;

failure, 38; pregnancy affects the, 7;

property, 8, 10; rape, 86, 116, 171; re-

for property crime, 10; propitiation,

ligion and, 11, 13; Revolutionary era,

216; public norms and using the,

80–84; sin and, 11–13, 33, 39, 110,

5; race created by, 20; is a ruthless

113, 215; theft, 17; volumes, 72–73.

machine, 38; supporters, 168, 192; as

See also arson; newspapers; poetry;

theatre, 97, 127, 247n. 22; for treason,

property; punishment; slaves

8; for trifling crimes, 8. See also Annan,

Cummings, Archibald, 2, 11 Currency Act, 85 Cutting, Nathaniel, 132

Robert; Bradford, William (son); executioner; Johnstone, Abraham debate(s): capital punishment, 11, 26; chronicles, 26; class, 126; complicated

D Danger of Breaking Christian Unity, The (Cummings), 2, 11

nature of, 32; convention, 254n. 6; crime, 11, 13, 20, 24, 27, 32, 38, 40, 126, 162; death, 13, 160, 162, 166–67,

Darley, F. O. C., 99, 100

187; democracy, 32; Enlightenment,

Davidson, Cathy, 118–19, 168

20, 167; execution, 32, 51, 160, 162,

Davis, Catherine (Whatnell), 7. See also

166–67, 168, 187; free, 162; Great

Smith, Catherine

Death Penalty, 188, 190–202, 204–10;

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Index

identity and character, 4, 5, 24; key

57, 58, 63, 215–16

themes of colonial, 24; law, 32, 86;

Dew, Thomas Roderick, 131

life shaped by, 27; modernity and,

Dexter, Franklin Bowditch, 114

169; norms, 76; obedience, 28, 271;

Dialogue, Concerning the Slavery of the Afri-

political, 39, 83, 254n. 6; punishment,

cans, A (Hopkins), 159

11, 20, 27, 38, 40, 179; race, 126; race

Diary of Samuel Sewall, The, 14

and, 61; religious, 23, 167; republican-

Dickinson, John, 86, 187

ism, 83, 167; sexuality, 6; slavery, 130,

Dillwyn, Susanna, 179

132; themes, 24; violence, 11, 13, 20,

Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 37–38, 91

27, 38, 40, 83, 126; women, 6. See also

discourse: racializing, 62, 64, 75

Annan, Robert; Rush, Benjamin

divine government, 90, 192, 202, 209

Declaration of Independence, 23; politics

divine law, 202, 204

of the, 128; rhetoric in the, 45, 82,

Doane, Richard, 113–15, 119

83, 123; signers, 176. See also Rush,

Drake, Thomas, 133

Benjamin

Dunbar, Moses, 91, 96, 110, 111, 113,

Defoe, Daniel, 36, 43, 116 DeLancey (Justice), 239n. 37

114, 126; hanged for treason, 87, 88, 90, 244n. 12; as a “monster,” 115, 119

Delbanco, Andrew, 166

dung throwing, 57, 101, 109, 236n. 20

democracy: backlash against, 80, 123–24;

Dying Words of Abraham Johnstone, 135

Barlow on, 163–64; cynicism about, 180, debates about, 32; dialogue in, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

112; Enlightenment and U.S., 38, 160; everyday, 115, 120; executing,

E effigies, 85, 103; as ritual punishment, 84, 102

25, 27, 28, 38; executions threatened,

Ekirch, A. Roger, 42, 45

177; Freneau on the decline of, 217;

Eleneva, M. (pseud. ME), 218

modernity and, 27, 32, 170; monarchy

Eliot, Andrew, 245n. 14

versus, 168; promise of, 194; racism

elite(s) (class): Adams as an, 168; anarchy

and, 19; run wild, 123; Rush on, 123,

and, 123; Angry God and, 90; Austin

177, 180, 194; through violence, 19,

against, 31; Barlow as an, 162–63;

25, 33; too-damned-much, 80, 123,

Boston, 33; Bradford as an, 206; chal-

163–64, 169; violence produced by,

lenges for, 39; cheap labor used by

218

the, 44, 46, 50; Clinton as an, 107;

demonstration: “actor training” as, 97,

criticized, 133; democracy killed by,

127, 247n. 22; dung throwing, 57,

25, 31; domination by, 82, 83, 89,

101, 109, 236n. 20; New York rebel-

146, 147; economics of, 148; ethics of,

lions as, 64–66, 67–69, 70–75, 84; of

107; hangings used by, 87; hereditary,

power, 33; as riots, 33, 86

163; Jefferson and, 170; lawyers, 73;

deterrence, punishment as, 21, 36, 37,

London, 8, 44; mass persuasion of,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

311

Index 124; merchant, 77; modernity’s, 91;

World; Shakespeare, William; trans-

New World, 39, 47, 50–51, 57, 80;

portation

New York, 73, 75–77, 78, 87; obedi-

English, Thomas Dunn, 94

ence and, 89, 90, 123; pedagogy of,

Enlightenment: American democracy

120; Philadelphia, 63, 206; “People in

and, 38, 160; American Museum and

Ruffles,” 75, 76, 77, 78; politics of, 30,

the, 201–2; Annan and the, 201;

63, 85, 91, 110–11; post-Revolution-

Clarke, and the, 20; Combe and the,

ary, 110; power of, 16, 25, 28, 33–34,

21, 116; death penalty abolition and,

47, 50, 63, 73, 82; property disputes

208; debates, 20, 167; divine gov-

and, 8; punishments used by, 38, 51,

ernment in the, 90, 192, 202, 204;

107; race and, 147; religious, 111,

English, 20; governmental, 161–62;

115, 138; Revolution and, 80, 81, 82,

honor, humanity, love, and justice in

96, 107, 110, 138, 163–64; rhetoric

the, 108; hope of the, 22, 23; Hume

of, 80, 110, 115; Sharp as an, 152; as

and the, 20, 24–25, 182; Hutcheson

slave traders, 77; transportation and,

and the, 20, 182; intellectual legacy

44, 45–46; violence as a tool of, 34–35,

of the, 27; law and the, 34; Locke and

49–51, 57, 60, 75–76, 91, 96; Wash-

the, 20, 49, 188, 268n. 28; nationalism

ington as an, 107. See also free black(s);

and the, 208; New World debates and

Hurt, John; Rush, Benjamin; Strong,

the, 20, 162; not just one, 21; rational-

Nathan (father); Strong, Nathan (son)

ity, 164, 168, 170, 174, 175, 176, 201;

Elizabeth Town (Elizabethtown, ElizaCopyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

beth), New Jersey, 132, 154

Reid and the, 20; rhetoric, 160, 207; Rush and the, 23, 160; science, 22–23,

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 268n. 29

161, 166, 175, 176; Scottish, 20; truth

Engels, Jeremy, 124

and the, 23; Wollaston and the, 20. See

England: army of, 65, 88, 204; colonization by, 9, 11, 28, 30, 42–46, 83–85;

also Rush, Benjamin Enlightenment words and codes: exam-

cheap labor from, 44; criminals from,

ine, 207; experiment, 207; juridical

1, 42–43, 44–45, 47, 56; elites of, 8,

history, 207; philosophy, 207; rays,

44; Enlightenment, 20; execution rate in, 49; expatriates went to, 88; George III of, 82; harsh sentencing in, 49, 63; homicide rates in, 46; laws for Penn

207 Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (Mandeville), 43 Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments

in, 11; London, 49, 50; modernity

upon Criminals, An (Rush), 179–80,

in, 172; prisons in, 42–43, 44, 187;

181, 182–87, 202, 204

property seizure in, 41; publishing in,

Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is

36, 43; rebellion against, 85; slaves

Necessary in Pennsylvania, An (Brad-

in, 44; violence in, 49; Wales, 47. See

ford), 36, 187, 191, 206, 207–10, 211;

also André, John; immigration; New

London praise for, 271n. 47

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

312

Index

“Enquiry into the Justice and Policy of

norms, 97, 127, 247n. 22; for treason,

Punishing Murder by Death” (Rush),

244n. 12, 245n. 14. See also André,

187, 188, 190, 191, 192

John; Bradford, William (son); gallows

Equiano, Olaudah, 134

statements; hangman; Johnstone,

Erikson, Kai, 38

Abraham; M’Kean, John; poetry; pun-

Essays on the Injustice and Impolicy of

ishment; sermons; Smith, Catherine;

Inflicting Capital Punishment (Eleneva M.), 218

Wilemon, Henry Execution of John M’Kean for the Murder

Evans, Jonathan, 51

of His Wife, The (Anon.), 213, 214,

execute: civically, 28; defined, 24–25; the

215–16, 218

law, 30, 32; as a metaphor, 33. See also Hurt, John executing democracy, 25, 27, 28, 38 execution(s): abolitionists, 10, 21;

execution sermons, 26, 37, 89, 100, 113, 176; Calvinist, 175, 194 executioner: Bradford escaped death as an, 14–15, 16, 18; carnifex as, 15;

ABR chronicled, 115–18; advertise-

damned, 213; outcast, 15, 16, 224n.

ments, 1–2, 117; ambivalence about,

21, 225n. 22; Shakespeare on the, 15,

13–14, 15, 17; of “Arthur,” 85, 86;

17; shaming and, 25; as a symbol, 17,

of Beven, 1, 14, 17, 37; botched, 70;

71; transference to the, 16; as ventrilo-

crowds, 251n. 43; debates, 32, 51, 160, 162, 166–67, 168, 187; defined,

quist, 112, 139 expatriates, 88

25; democracy threatened by, 177;

F

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

diarists on, 14, 21, 22; enjoyment of, 21–22, 93; as evil, 188; of innocents,

Fable of the Bees, The (Mandeville), 43

70, 71, 239n. 33; Irish, 10; justice

Fanning (Colonel), 88

and, 25; mass, 66–67, 70; for military

Farmer, A. See Cooper, David

reasons, 75; of a “Negroe Man,” 58,

Federalist Papers, The (Madison, et al.), 29;

59; New World rituals of, 102; New

crime and violence references in the,

York, 16–17, 66, 75–76, 126–27; news

229n. 42; excerpt from no. 17., 34

items, 1–2, 219n. 1; orphans and, 221–22n. 8; as pedagogy, 87, 91, 117, 215; politics and, 87, 217; as propitiation, 216; racism and, 19; religion and, 11; reprieves, 18; restitution for,

Federalists: Austin opposed the, 31; empire rise of, 164–69, 208; Selfridge, 32; songs, 165, 208 Fergusson, Elizabeth Graeme, 191, 270n. 41

51–52, 54; as ritual punishment, 115;

fire. See arson; punishment types

of scapegoats, 59, 60; spectacle of, 38,

Fliegelman, Jay, 28, 112, 200

94; state supported, 24, 25, 26, 66,

Folwell, Samuel, 147, 149

70; symbolism of, 17, 71, 213, 214,

Fontanier, Pierre, 111

215; as theatre, 127; as training for

Fort George, 65, 84

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

313

Index

G

Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, The (Defoe), 36, 43, 116 Foster, Stephen, 231n. 2 Foucault, Michel, 54, 57, 85, 106, 117; Discipline and Punish, 37–38, 91; “play of truth and infamy” of, 183–85 Franklin, Benjamin (pseud. Americanus,

256n. 15 Galenson, David, 3 Gale’s Independent Gazetteer (newspaper), 212 gallows, 17, 81, 92–93, 205–206, 214;

Poor Richard), 232n. 4; abolitionist,

misbehavior, 224n. 19; moveable,

141; Annan on, 199; criticized Wash-

84. See also American Bloody Register;

ington, 163, 178; Enlightenment goals

execution(s); gallows statements;

of, 34, 166; on immigration, 3, 4, 43;

hanging

Information To Those Who Would Remove

“Gallows Goers, The” (English), 94

to America, 3; “memorial” to Congress

gallows statements: Barrick’s, 116–17; as

by, 130–31; persona of, 141–42; rhe-

confessions, 26, 116; counterfeiting of,

torical tropes of persuasion, 141–43,

111; ventriloquist, 112, 138, 139. See

145, 150, 156, 158; slavery critic,

also prosopopoeia

130–31, 141, 177; satirized transportation, 4, 43, 45; Society for Promoting Political Enquiries and, 179

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Gairies and Their Friends, The (Webb), 136,

Gardiner, John, 161–62, 163, 164, 165, 208, 210, 217 gender: Brown on, 6; colonial norms and,

Fredrickson, George, 19

7, 18, 24; crime and, 5–6, 7; identity

Free African Society, 155

and, 24, 26, 27, 38; power and, 6;

“Free America,” 9, 29

roles, 6, 7

free black(s), 61, 109, 132–33, 260n. 31; bounty hunters and, 146, 177; Johnstone was a, 125, 160; leadership

“gender frontiers” (Brown), 6 Genesis 9:6: and the death penalty, 192–93, 195, 196

rise of, 154, 155; New Jersey and, 151,

Georgia, 84

153, 156–57; New York City, 64, 65,

German, James D., 88

76, 153; Philadelphia’s, 155–56; Tory

German immigrants, 45, 46, 47, 61, 236n.

force of, 154

21

Freeman’s Journal (newspaper), 80

Gerry, Elbridge, 96, 97, 129

Freneau, Philip: on democracy, 212,

Gibbon, Charles, 21, 22

217–18, 262n. 2; nationalism and,

Girard, René, 60, 66

210; on New World enlightenment,

God: Angry, 11, 12, 22, 89–91, 177,

162, 163, 164; Princeton friends of,

201, 216; Nation and plan of, 28, 30.

207. Works: “America Independent,”

See also religion; religious rhetoric;

262n. 2; “Rising Glory of America,”

sermons

162, 217–18 Fuoss, Kirk, 97

Godwin, William, 118–20, 125, 168, 251n. 48, 252n. 49

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

314

Index

Goodale, Greg, 124, 270n. 41

supporters, 22; Tory, 85; as training

Gordon, Patrick, 15

for violent norms, 97, 127, 247n. 22;

“Grand Constitution, The” (song), 206,

of Ward, 41; of Whatnell, 7. See also

208

American Bloody Register; broadsides;

“Great Terror,” 65, 77, 238n. 29

Dunbar, Moses; gallows statements;

Greenberg, Douglas, 64, 72, 92

Johnstone, Abraham; M’Kean, John;

Greer, Harold Jr., 171

poetry; prosopopoeia

Grimes, William, 134

hangman: celebrated, 224n. 20; cancelled

Grubb, Farley, 233n. 7

hangings and the, 16; involuntary

Grubber, William (slave Billy), 56, 57

role of, 104, 105; as a pariah, 16, 17; transference to being a, 16. See also

H Hackensack, New Jersey, 67, 154

Hangman, The (newspaper), 92–93, 93–94

Haitian revolution, 39, 126, 131–33, 147,

Hart, Levi, 88

150, 154, 157

Hartford, Connecticut, 89, 102

Halttunen, Karen, 6, 182–83, 184, 186

Hartman, Saidiya, 120–21

Hamilton, Alexander (pseud. Publius), 98;

Hawhee, Debbie, 195

in Federalist no. 17., 34 hanging, 25, 66, 69, 170; abolitionists on,

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

executioner

Hawley, Joseph, 96–97, 109, 246n. 21 Hay, Douglas, 172

19, 21, 177; of André, 98, 100, 104–6,

Haynes, Lemuel, 156, 159

203; of “Arthur,” 85, 86–87, 115,

Hazenplug, Frank, 53, 55, 235n. 17

119; Beccaria on, 179; of Bradford,

Henry, Patrick, 178

1, 8, 14–15, 16, 37, 83; broadsides,

Hindle, Brooke, 194

86, 111, 124, 137; for burglary, 1, 8,

History of Capital Punishment, A (Laurence),

51; cancelled lacking a hangman, 16; criminal’s ambivalence about, 13–14; of Dunbar, 87; elites used, 87; gallows

8 History of the Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin, 186

statements, 26, 111–12, 116–17, 138,

Hobbes, Thomas, 188, 268n. 28

139; lynching laws for, 32; of “Mal-

Hodges, Graham Russell, 132

colm,” 95, 96, 97; Mather’s sermon

Honestus. See Austin, Benjamin

at a, 14; of McDeirmatt, 7; of Mor-

Hopkins, Lemuel, 80, 241n. 3

gan, 14, 224n. 19; as pedagogy, 87,

Hopkins, Samuel, 159

91; political gain from, 213; as public

Hopkinson, Francis, 179

entertainment and drama, 33–34, 35,

Horsmanden, Daniel, 240n. 40, 246n. 19;

85, 92–94, 93, 205–6; reprieves, 18; as

justice, 238n. 29, 239n. 37; Journal

ritual punishment, 84, 85; sloppy, 70;

of the Proceedings, 67, 68–69, 70, 75,

of Smith (Catherine), 1, 5–8, 13, 16,

76–77, 238n. 29, 239n. 37, 240n.

17; as “spectatorial sympathy,” 296;

40, 246n. 19; revealed a bad justice

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

315

Index system, 73–74

indentured servant(s): ads for runaway, 2;

How the Irish Became White (Ignatiev), 10

brokering, 47; contracts, 50; costs, 45;

Howard, John, 187

immigrant, 3, 42, 45, 233n. 7; Penn’s,

Howard, Leon, 163–64

47–48, 50, 51; Provincial Council of

Howe (General), 88

Pennsylvania and, 46, 47–48, 50–51;

Huffsey, Samuel, 149–50, 152

Smith as an, 17; whipping of, 48;

Hulton, Ann, 95

whites, 3, 10, 12, 44, 45, 46. See also

Hume, David, 20, 182; defines execution,

“scum”; Weston, Anthony

24–25 Humphreys, David, 80

Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser (newspaper), 102

Hurt, John, 28–30, 82, 228n. 37

Independent Journal (newspaper), 29

Hutcheson, Francis, 20, 182

“Information To Those Who Would Re-

hyperbole, 197, 198, 205

move to America” (Franklin), 3 Ingebretsen, Edward, 115

I identity: aliases and, 2, 3–4, 18, 83, 84, 220n. 4; American Weekly Mercury and, 24, 26; assimilation and, 61; branding

insolence, 64 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, The, 134 Irish immigrants, 10, 17, 45, 116, 211–12,

and, 5–6, 221n. 5; character and, 4, 5,

216

24; class and, 27; crime and, 84; crimi-

irony, 140

nal, 2, 3–4; gender and, 24, 26, 27, 38;

Ivens, Henry, 148–49

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

industries, 2; literacy and, 2, 7; in literature, 4–5; New World, 4; property

J

and, 4; race and, 27. See also gender;

Jackson, Jesse, 19

immigration; law; Smith, Catherine

Jameson, Fredric, 228n. 34

Ignatiev, Joel, 10 immigration: criminal percentage in,

Jefferson, Thomas: American Philosophical Society member, 170; Beccaria

42–43; German, 45, 46, 47, 61, 236n.

influenced, 169–70, 171, 172, 264n.

21; Irish, 10, 17, 45, 116, 211–12, 216;

10; Bourne letters to, 131–32; Com-

in Massachusetts, 231n. 2; New World

monplace Book of, 170, 171; elites

opportunities for, 3–4, 62; negative

and, 170; Enlightenment and, 166;

qualities of, 3, 4, 212; as religious out-

European influences on, 169–71; lex

siders, 212; Scottish, 45, 46, 236n. 21;

talionis of, 171; modernity of, 170,

“scum,” 42–43, 44, 45, 46; settlement

171; non-rhetorical rhetoric of, 200;

problems, 42, 231n. 2, 233n. 7; Welsh,

on public punishment’s depravity, 183.

47; West Indian, 132

Works: Autobiography, 170, 171; “Bill

imprisonment makes orphans, 7, 221–22n. 8

Proportioning Crimes and Punishments,” 170–72

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

316

Index

jeremiad(s), 174, 226n. 28; Annan’s, 20;

Laurence, John, 8

choras,’ 187, 195; Rush’s, 194, 195;

law: Austin supported the, 31–32; Brit-

Strong’s, 89, 91–92, 94

ain’s harsh, 63; bungling of the, 17;

Jernegan, Marcus, 42

complicated by lawyers, 31; debates,

Johnson, Samuel, 24, 45, 232n. 6

32, 86; “divine,” 202, 204; Enlight-

Johnstone, Abraham, 83; born as Ben-

enment principles and the, 34, 202;

jamin, 135, 145, 146, 257–58n. 22;

execution of the, 25, 32–33; on hang-

framed for a crime, 127, 143, 160;

ing curtailment, 178–79; limitations of

was a free black, 143, 125; hang-

the, 62–63; lynching, 32; New Jersey,

ing of, 39, 125, 127; Quakers and,

149–50, 151; New World, 32, 63;

133, 142; white supremacy and, 125,

lawyers, 66, 72–73; obedience of the,

140–41, 146–47, 155, 157; wife Sally/

9, 25, 34, 90, 123, 188, 255n. 7; Penn-

Sarah, 143. See also Address of Abraham

sylvania, 149–50, 157; property crime

Johnstone

and the, 7–8, 149–50; public spectacles

Jordan, Winthrop, 61, 64, 132–33

and respect for, 70; punishment as de-

Jorgensen, Chester, 166

terrent in, 63; racism produced by the,

Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection

62, 63; as state violence, 32; violence

of the Conspiracy (Horsmanden), 67,

sanctified by, 63; Virginia, 171–72,

68–69, 70, 75, 76–77, 238n. 29, 239n.

184. See also individual Acts by specific

37, 240n. 40, 246n. 19; reveals bad justice system, 73–74 Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

L

Hurt’s, 29–30; Mather’s, 12; Philo-

Journal of the Proceedings in Georgia (Stephens), 18 judge: colonial, 72–73; Horsmanden as a, 73, 238n. 29, 239n. 37. See also Penn, William justice system: execution of, 25; problems, 18, 24; vigilante, 32. See also law

name; justice system “laying by the heels” (“the Bilboes”), 52, 53, 235n. 17 Legal Lynching (Jackson and Shapiro), 19 legislation. See individual Acts by specific name Lepore, Jill, 66, 73, 239n. 37 Les Figures du discours (Fontanier), 111 Lesser, Wendy, 11 Letters from an American Farmer (Créve-

K Kearsley (Dr.), 95, 96, 97

coeur), 3 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the

King George’s War, 236n. 21

Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Dick-

laborers: as a class, 57, 74, 87; elites used

inson), 86

cheap, 44, 46, 50; New World sources

Letters from New York (Child), 109

for, 38, 45, 64, 74; Philadelphia, 47,

Lettsom, John Coakley, 187

58, 64, 83; white slaves, 58. See also

Liberator, The (newspaper), 19

immigration; transportation

liberty, 128; American Revolution and,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

317

Index 28, 30, 33, 82, 84, 96, 128; becomes anarchy, 82; conditional, 28; whiteness and, 159 Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping (Haynes), 155

Museum Maine, 47 “Malcolm” (poor black), 95, 96, 97 Mandeville, Bernard, 43–44, 45, 49, 232n. 5

Liberty Pole, 85

Manual of Peace (Upham), 37

Liberty Tree, 84–85, 243n. 8

manumission, 146

Lieber, Francis, 5–6

Marie; or, Slavery in the United States (Beau-

Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro

mont), 134

Man, The (broadside), 85, 86–87, 115,

Marietta, Jack, 46, 80

119, 244n. 10

Maryland, 84; immigrants, 3

Life, Last Words and Dying Speech of Stephen Smith, 139

Marx, Karl, 240n. 41 Massachusetts, 84

Life of George Combe (Gibbon), 21

Massachusetts Centinel, 165, 208

Life of William Grimes, The Runaway Slave

Masur, Louis, 92, 196, 251n. 43

(Grimes), 134 Linebaugh, Peter, 41–42, 49, 65, 74, 153 literacy, 2, 7 Livingston, James, 98

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

magazines, 111, 164. See also American

Mather, Cotton (son), 14, 110, 201, 224n. 19 Mather, Increase (father), 12, 90, 201, 224n. 19

Locke, John, 20, 49, 188, 268n. 28

Mather, Samuel, 245n. 14

Lockwood (Mrs.), 146, 147, 149

May, Henry F., 29

Lofland, Lyn, 100, 166

May, Jane and Joseph, 2, 5

Logan, James, 59, 63–64, 237–38n. 28

McBride, Dwight A., 136–37

logic: biblical, 200; destructive, 76; of de-

McConville, Brendan, 152

terrence, 215; judicial, 35, 215; Paine’s death, 216; racializing, 121; rhetori-

McDeirmatt, Michael (Mac Dermot, McDiermat), 7

cal, 142, 177, 192, 198, 200; slippery

McGowen, Randall, 27

slope, 197, 215; symbolic, 217; and

McManus, Edgar, 66

violence, 47

ME. See Eleneva, M.

“The Loyal Nine,” 84

Mease, James, 179, 210

lynching, 32, 66, 67, 70, 97. See also hang-

Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs

ing

of New Hampshire, 180 Menard, Russell, 3

M

Meranze, Michael, 57, 80, 178, 183–84

Mach, Zdzislaw, 209

Mercieca, Jennifer, 82, 124, 254n. 6

Maclay, William, 131

metaphors, 33, 112, 117

Magaw, Samuel, 179

Metcalfe, Deborah, 86, 87

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318

Index

M’Fingal (Trumbull), 49, 104, 200, 248n. 29 Mifflin, John, 179 Mifflin, Thomas, 207

“monsters,” 6, 115, 116, 119, 153–54; as metaphors, 117 Montesquieu, 20, 207; Spirit of the Laws, 202

Millennium, The (Bellamy), 173, 174, 175

Moody, Joshua, 224n. 19

Miller, Perry, 12, 42

morality, 6, 121, 128, 184, 205

mimetic corruption, 184, 185, 186, 190

Moretti, Franco, 116

Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylva-

Morgan, Edmund, 124

nia, 220n. 2; aliases in the, 2; Bradford

Morgan, James, 14, 224n. 19

in the, 18; on indentured servants, 46;

Morone, James, 124

“Negroe Man” in the, 58, 59, 61, 62;

Morris, David, 12

racial stereotypes in the, 61, 62, 63;

Morris, Richard B., 79, 84, 249n. 32

Smith in the, 2, 6–7; spelling varia-

Morris, Robert, 179

tions in the, 2; violence in the, 58;

Mott, Frank Luther, 166

Weston in the, 46; Wilemon in the, 2

murder, 8, 32, 35, 46; of M’Kean’s wife,

M’Kean, John: 211–12; allegorical devil’s

211–13, 214, 215–18; as ritual punish-

work by, 213, 214, 215; Angry God

ment, 76; of slave Tom, 125, 148,

and, 216; Execution of John M’Kean

149–50, 155

for the Murder of His Wife, 213, 214,

Murder in the Rue Morgue, The (Poe), 26–27

215–16, 218; propitiation with, 217

N

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

modernity, 20, 24, 26, 40; ABR and cultural, 115–18; activists, 166; American

Nanfan, John, 16

Museum and, 201; Caleb Williams myths

Narrative and Confession of Thomas Powers, a

and, 119; democracy and, 27, 32, 170;

Negro, 138–39

development pace of, 165–66, 169;

Nash, Gary, 45, 80

effect of, 164; elites of, 91; English,

national security, 26; Beccaria on, 208–9

172; enlightened language of, 201;

nationalism: Beccaria and, 208–9; En-

Jefferson and, 170, 171; life shaped by,

lightenment and, 208–10; Freneau

27; Marx’s description of, 240n. 41;

and, 210; “magic of,” 209; post-revo-

Old World assaulted by, 164; pedagogy

lutionary, 124; preordained, 29; states’

and, 91; the print revolution and,

rights and, 209. See also Beccaria,

119–20; public punishment and, 91;

Cesare; Bradford, William (son)

religion and, 2, 13, 18, 38; rhetoric

Native Americans, 10

and, 263n. 4; secular, 164; threats of,

Natural History of North Carolina (Brickell),

195 Monmouth, New Jersey, 35 “Monody on the Death of André” (Seward), 106–7, 249n. 32

51 “Negroe Man” (unnamed), 58, 59, 61, 62, 63 Negroes: as slaves, 46; as “smoked Irish,”

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

319

Index 10. See also Africans; slaves; slavery

ism, 32, 39, 166, 200; rhetoric, 110;

New Hampshire Gazette (newspaper),

Rush on the Glory of the, 167; settlers,

172–73

2, 19; slaves, 46–47, 50, 57, 74, 75,

New-Haven Gazette, 81

136, 240n. 38; society, 46, 61; squalor,

New Jersey, 136; abolition, 155; arson,

165–66; threats to the, 177; transpor-

67; free blacks, 151, 153, 156–57;

tation policy, 41–45; violence basis of

French families in, 132; Johnstone in,

the, 77–78; violence, 49, 58, 124. See

146, 149–50, 151; laws, 149–50, 151; newspapers, 151, 153, 159, 258n. 26;

also poetry; Rush, Benjamin New York City: arson, 64–66, 70–75,

post-Revolutionary, 126, 131, 152,

76, 78, 84; crime in, 66, 72; dread in,

155; slavery in, 153–57; violence, 67,

132; elites, 73, 75–77, 78, 87; execu-

132, 153–54; West Indian immigrants

tions, 16, 17, 66, 75–76, 126–27; Fort

in, 132. See also individual towns by

George and, 65, 84; free blacks in,

specific names; Johnstone, Abraham

64, 65, 76, 153; gender crime in, 5, 7;

New-Jersey Gazette (newspaper), 151, 153,

Haitian revolution and, 132; heteroge-

159 New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 131, 156

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

reformers, 21, 169, 179; republican-

“New Divinity luminary,” 88

neous, 64; Journal of the Proceedings reports on trials in, 67, 68–69, 70, 73–75, 76–77, 238n. 29, 239n. 37, 240n.

New Light movement, 88

40, 246n. 19; lawyers, 66, 72–73;

New World: ABR portrayal of the,

merchant elite in, 77–78; murders, 76;

115–18; anarchy, 80; black revolution

Negroes in, 64; newspapers, 29, 153;

in the, 132; branding of criminals, 4–5;

“People in Ruffles,” 75, 76, 77, 78; pigs

British colonial management in the,

roaming the streets of, 165–66, 263n.

83, 204; capitalism, 64; civil liberty,

5; politics of, 77; population, 64, 77;

161; convicts, 42; economics, 8; death

racializing terror in, 62, 64, 71–72, 75;

penalty, 109, 187; elites, 39, 47,

rebellion in, 64–66, 67–69, 70–75, 84;

50–51, 57, 80; Enlightenment, 167,

ritual punishment in, 76; slavery, 64,

169, 185; ethnicity, 62; execution ritu-

74; slaves imported to, 77; stereotyp-

als, 102; gender crime, 5–6; immigra-

ing in, 76; transportation used by, 64,

tion, 3–4, 42–45, 233n. 7; indenture

66, 76; violence, 153–54

costs, 45; inter-colonial bonds, 83;

New-York Gazette, 153

justice problems, 18; labor sources,

New York Supreme Court of Judicature,

38, 45, 64, 74; law, 32, 63; norms, 57; notions of race, 20, 62; novels, 4; Old World ideas in the, 22, 164, 179; optimists, 194; Penn on the, 47, 50; print capitalist market, 180; racism, 19–20;

65, 66, 238n. 29 New-York Weekly Journal (newspaper), 65, 74, 238n. 29, 239nn. 33, 40 newspapers: American Bloody Register (ABR) 110, 115–18, 124, 125, 168,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

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Index

186, 212; Boston, 7, 67, 92–93, 93–94,

Jefferson, 169–70, 171, 172;

102, 153, 219n. 1; Connecticut, 81,

influenced Rush, 185, 202, 207

102; on executions, 7, 17, 18; name errors in, 2, 7; New Hampshire, 172,

of Preventing Crime (Anon.), 37

173; New Jersey, 151, 153, 159, 258n.

“On Slave Keeping” (Rush), 159, 177

26; New York, 29, 153; Philadelphia,

oral history, 119, 134; amanuensis, 136;

7, 17–18, 80, 187; portray colonial life,

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 136;

1–2. See also individual newspapers by

Life, Last Words and Dying Speech of Ste-

specific names; American Weekly Mercury;

phen Smith, 139; Narrative and Confes-

Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal

sion of Thomas Powers, a Negro, 138–39;

Advertiser

Twelve Years a Slave, 136

Nicholson, William, 149

Order of the Cincinnati, 163, 164, 262n. 3

Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn, 132, 259n. 28

Order of Hereditary Knights, 163

Nisbet, Charles, 167

orphans, caused by execution, 7,

norms: allegiance, 97; death penalty use

221–22n. 8

and community, 5; debates on, 76;

O’Sullivan, John, 37

New World, 57; Othering, 62, 75, 97;

Other, 76, 97, 109, 117, 121, 154, 159;

violent events as training for, 97, 127 North Carolina, 51, 52, 84

racialized, 72; rhetoric of, 62; symbolic, 61

Northup, Solomon, 136

Othering, 62, 75, 97

Notes on the United States of North America,

Otherness, 57

During a Phrenological Visit (Combe), 21 Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

On The Punishment of Death and The Means

O obedience, 14; class and, 89, 90, 123; death penalty produces, 89, 127, 185;

Ottley, Roi, 66, 70

P pain, 54, 111 Paine, Thomas, 168, 177, 179, 204, 246n.

debate theme of, 271; debates on, 28;

20, 248n. 31; arrested in Paris, 262n.

divine, 90, 255n. 7; to government,

4; on propitiation, 216; rhetoric of,

90; Hamilton on, 34; indentured ser-

200; as a Washington hater, 107, 178,

vant, 50; of the law, 9, 25, 34, 90, 123,

266n. 19. Works: “Act for the Gradual

188, 255n. 7; political, 113; punish-

Abolition of Slavery,” 159; “African

ment as tool of, 49, 109; revolution-

Slavery in America,” 159; Age of Rea-

ary, 27, 29–30, 90, 109 Observations on the Pernicious Practice of the Law (Austin), 31

son, 216; Common Sense, 4, 96, 97 pamphlets, 5, 80, 87, 113, 125; Address of Abraham Johnstone, 125–27, 139–51,

“Old England” (song), 85

156, 158–60; Address and Petition of a

On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writ-

Number of the Clergy of Various Denomi-

ings (Beccaria), 8, 91, 93; influenced

nations, 195; on Ames hanging, 245n.

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

321

Index 14; Brief Statement of the Argument for the Abolition of the Death Punishment, 16–17; Considerations on the Injustice and

tiser (newspaper), 199, 216; Cato in,

Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death,

188–89, 190, 268n. 28; “Philochoras”

187, 191, 203, 204; Cooper’s, 30–31,

in, 187, 190, 194, 195, 196

32–33, 229n. 38; Enquiry into the Effects

Pennsylvania Prison Society, 187

of Public Punishments upon Criminals,

Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the

181, 183–87, 190, 192, 202; Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania, 36, 187, 191, 206, 207–10, 211, 271n. 47; Execution of John M’Kean, 213, 214, 215–16, 218;

Abolition of Slavery, 130, 177 persuasion: Bellamy’s trope of, 174, 176; Franklin’s tropes of, 141–43, 145, 150, 156, 158 Philadelphia: arsons, 58–59; elites, 63,

Rush’s, 178, 180, 181, 183–87, 218;

206; executions, 8, 15, 18, 66–70, 80,

Vain and Prodigal Life, and Tragical Peni-

164, 211–17; free blacks, 155–56; Free-

tent Death of Thomas Hellier, 50–51

man’s Journal, 80; hanging in, 178–79;

pardons: abolishing the power of, 202

homicide rate in, 46; immigration, 45,

Peale, Charles Willson, 102, 103, 248n. 28

46, 47; Irish in, 10, 45; labor pool, 47,

pedagogy: authority-upholding, 84;

58, 64, 83; magazines, 164; newspa-

elite’s, 120; executions and, 87, 91,

pers, 1, 7, 17, 18, 179; population, 47,

117, 215; hanging as, 87, 91; political,

58, 83; property taxes, 217; riots, 15;

215; of punishment, 109

settlement problems, 42, 63–64; slav-

Penn, William: arrested in London, Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

executions, 7, 17–18 Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Adver-

ery in, 52, 58, 83; Sons of Liberty, 206.

48–49; Bradford complimented, 49; in

See also Bradford, William (father);

Colonial Records of Pennsylvania, 50; cor-

Bradford, William (son); Pennsylvania

respondence to Council from, 50, 51; indentured servants of, 47–48, 50, 51; laws used by, 12, 50–51, 149; on the New World, 47, 50; obedience and, 50; Pennsylvania governor, 46; political authority used by, 47–49, 50; Provincial Council and, 46, 47–48, 233n. 9;

Mercury, and Universal Advertiser Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, 187 “Philochoras” (Annan), 187, 190, 194, 195, 196; defined, 195 Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (Schelling), 173–74

slaves Toney and Quashy and, 51–53,

Pickering, Timothy, 179

54–56; as Weston’s judge, 46, 47, 48,

Pictures at an Execution (Lesser), 11

49, 50

pillory, 15, 57

Pennsylvania, 50, 84; abolished slavery,

Pingeon, Frances, 153, 155, 235n. 15

157; law, 149–50; settlement, 45. See

place and promise, 27

also Philadelphia

Poe, Edgar Allen, 26–27

Pennsylvania Gazette (newspaper): on

poetry, 5, 94, 124; “America

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

322

Index

Independent,” 262n. 2; Anarchiad, 80–

too-damned-much democracy in, 80,

81, 123, 168, 241n. 3; Barlow’s, 162;

123, 163–64, 169; violence, 124, 125,

Burleigh’s, 13; “Cow Chase,” 100–101;

138, 169. See also Bradford, William

“The Gallows Goers,” 94; M’Fingal,

(father); Bradford, William (son);

49, 104, 200, 248n. 29; “Monody on

Enlightenment; Jefferson, Thomas;

the Death of André,” 106–7, 249n. 32;

Johnstone, Abraham; newspapers;

“Present Age,” 172–73; “Rising Glory of America,” 162, 217; Vision of Columbus, 163; Wheatley’s, 134; on women

der and, 6; illegitimate, 34; violence is,

as victims, 6

15–16, 111; Washington’s, 105, 106,

polemics, 31

107, 109

political crime, 8, 9

“power relations”(Brown), 6

political order, 49, 87

Powers, Thomas, 138–39

political poems. See poetry; songs

pregnancy eludes death penalty, 7

politics: elite’s, 30, 63, 85, 91, 110–11;

“Present Age, The” (Anon.), 172–73

failure in, 217; convention debates

Preyer, Kathryn, 172

and, 254n. 6; debates on, 39, 83; per-

print capitalists, 111, 124, 125, 186; mo-

formance for, 49; of punishment, 15–

dernity and, 119–20; New World, 180.

16, 59–60, 111; of states’ rights, 209;

See also individual magazines, newspapers,

symbols, 213, 214, 215; transportation

or printed material by specific name

and, 44–45. See also prosopopoeia Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Rush, Benjamin power, 28; Austin on, 31; failed, 63; gen-

prisons: “abode of misery,” 184–85;

Poor Richard. See Franklin, Benjamin

British, 42–43, 44, 187; failure of,

postmodernism, 168

37; orphans caused by, 7, 221–22n.

post-revolutionary America: culture, 124,

8; Pennsylvania Prison Society, 187;

173; death penalty discussions in, 138,

women in, 221–22n. 8

169; divine government in, 90, 192,

prolepsis, 197, 198, 205

202, 204; elites in, 110; Enlightenment

property: British history of seizing, 41;

and, 169; free blacks in, 125, 151–57;

capital punishment and, 8, 10, 204;

Haitian revolution and, 39, 126,

choras is, 195; confiscation, 87, 90;

132–33, 147, 150, 154, 157; leaders,

crimes, 7–8, 9, 10, 77–78; defending,

166; New Jersey, 126, 131, 155; pigs

40; Hamilton on, 34; laws, 83; liberty

roaming the streets of, 165–66, 263n.

and, 188; N. Carolina seizure of,

5; print capitalists, 111, 119, 124, 125,

51; rights, 78; sacred, 172; slaves as,

180, 186; punishment is lurid during

149–50, 204; taxable real, 207, 217

the, 186; racial hysteria in, 125; “reign

propitiation, 216

of Chaos,” 196–97, 215; republican-

prosopopoeia, 109, 141, 250n. 40; is

ism, 124, 126, 169, 217; rhetoric in,

dangerous, 112; defined, 110–12, 126,

110; slavery in, 126; social status, 152;

138; Johnstone’s, 127, 139–41, 143,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

323

Index

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

145, 151, 160; politics of, 126, 127;

punishment: ambivalence about, 17, 26,

Smith’s manual on, 113, 138; Strong’s,

70; Biblical, 15, 34–35; British harsh,

113; in Wieland, 112

49, 63; brutality of, 35, 58; debates

Provincial Council of Pennsylvania: Amer-

on, 11, 20, 27, 38, 40; as a deterrent,

ican Weekly Mercury pressured by the,

21, 36, 37, 57, 58, 63; effects of, 20,

219n. 1; crime reports to the, 15, 17;

58; humiliation of, 57; justification of,

first meeting of the, 233n. 9; Gordon

34–35; messages sent by, 54; of “mon-

report to the, 15; indentured servant

sters,” 6, 115, 116, 117, 119, 153–54;

contracts and the, 46, 47–48, 50–51;

opposed by Beccaria, 208–9, 210, 217;

“insolence” and the, 64, 66; law and

pain and, 54; pedagogy of, 109; peno-

the, 62, 63, 66; Logan as president of

logical failure of, 38; as pleasure, 109;

the, 59, 63; Penn and, 46, 47–48, 50,

politics of, 59–60; post-Revolution,

51, 233n. 9; political punishment by

138; for property crimes, 8, 10; public,

the, 59–60, 63; powers of the, 62–63,

12, 33–35, 49, 52, 54, 56–57, 180,

66; punishment decisions by the, 46,

182; race created by, 20; racism and,

58, 63; punishment types merged by

19; religion supports, 34–35; slave,

the, 52, 54; racial stereotypes and the,

44, 48, 51–52, 54, 57; as a social tool

61, 62, 63; restitution for executions

of settlers, 13–14, 57; as theatre, 127,

by the, 51–52, 54; slaves and the, 51–

239n. 33; tools and weapons of, 15–

52, 54, 63; synecdoche use by, 61, 62,

17; for treason, 170; became voyeur-

196; transporting by the, 52, 54; and

ism, 186. See also capital punishment;

the “unnamed Negroe Man” 58, 59,

debate(s); execution(s); executioner;

61, 62. See also execution(s); Minutes

Foucault, Michel; Meranze, Michael;

of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania;

Provincial Council of Pennsylvania;

Weston, Anthony public debate. See debate(s) public punishment, 12, 33–35, 49, 52, 54,

Rush, Benjamin; Scarry, Elaine punishment types: banishment, 41, 42, 46, 57; beheading, 35; “bilboes,” 52,

56; Meranze on, 57, 80, 178, 183, 184;

53, 235n 17; boring, 138, 171; brand-

becomes lurid, 186; as performance,

ing, 35, 138, 180; burning, 35, 66,

49, 57, 182–86

138, 239n. 33; burying alive, 170;

public spectacles: colonial cultural his-

carting, 35, 52, 95, 138, 248n. 28;

tory of, 84; hangings as, 33–34; as

castration, 171; chaining, 35, 180;

performance, 49, 57; punishment as,

cutting, 35, 138, 153; deportation,

12, 49, 54, 57; respect for the law via,

66; dismemberment, 171; dissection,

70; ritual as, 35, 52; of seeing and

170; drowning, 35; dung throwing,

knowing, 5. See also demonstration;

57, 101, 109, 236n. 20; dunking, 138,

execution(s); executioner

171; freezing, 182; gallows, 15, 17;

Publius. See Hamilton, Alexander

gibbeting, 170, 182; hanging, 1, 7–8,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

324

Index

35, 51, 66, 95, 138, 170; irons, 52, 53;

Randolph, Edmund, 80, 172, 207

“laying by the heels,” 52, 53, 235n 17;

rape, 86, 116, 171

letter symbolism, 4–5, 221n. 5; naked-

rationality, 164, 168, 170, 174, 176, 201

ness, 180; pillory, 15, 57; sexual, 186;

reason: Bible was Calvinist basis for, 167;

shaming, 25, 248n. 28; starvation,

Bradford and, 216; empire, 208; Rush

182; stocks, 15; stoning, 35; stripes,

and, 186, 190, 191–92, 202; as a trope,

171; tar and feathers, 87, 95; torture,

192

63; transportation, 41, 42, 52, 54, 66,

Reason and Humanity, 208, 216

76; “wheelbarrow men,” 178, 179;

Rediker, Marcus, 42, 49, 65, 74, 153

whipping, 35, 48, 52, 63, 70, 95, 138,

“referential instability of the body,” 54

153, 180. See also execution(s); hang-

Reid, Thomas, 20

ing; punishment; transportation

“reign of Chaos,” 196–97, 215 religion: Catholic[k], 1, 10, 212; crime

Q Quakers, 22–23, 39, 125, 129, 155; Johnstone and the, 133, 136, 137

and, 11, 13; debates on, 23, 167; Emerson on outdated, 13; execution and, 11; factionalism in, 1, 10;

Quartering Act, 85

immigrant, 212; modernity and, 2,

Quashy (slave): banishment of, 57; Penn

13, 18, 38; punishment supported

on 51–56; torture of, 63

by, 34–35; role of, 13. See also Annan, Robert; jeremiad(s); Rush, Benjamin;

R Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

race, 20, 27, 46, 62, 232n. 5; debates, 61, 126 racial stereotypes, 44; creation of, 19; Irish, 10, 212, 216; Provincial Council and, 61, 62, 63 racializing discourse, 62, 64, 71–72, 75, 121

sermons; sin religious rhetoric. See rhetoric “Report on the Subject of Capital Punishment” (O’Sullivan), 37 republicanism: anarchy and, 40, 82, 83; Arnold and, 31–32, 97; backlash against, 80; debates, 83, 167; New World, 32, 39, 166, 200; post-Revolu-

racializing terror, 62, 64, 71–72, 75

tionary, 124, 126, 169, 217; revolu-

racism: capital punishment produces, 19,

tionary, 31, 79, 91; violence and, 34

62; in consciousness, 62; defined, 19,

Revel, James, 35–36, 37

62, 72; democracy and, 19; execution

Revenue Act, 85

and, 19; Irish, 10, 212, 216; synecdo-

rhetoric: ad hominem, 196, 205; Ameri-

che and, 61, 62, 196; in transporta-

can Revolution, 79; of Annan, 197;

tion, 10, 44; violence as training for,

of Arnold, 107–9; arson’s symbolic,

97, 127; white paranoia and, 153–54;

78; black, 154; crime, 154; in the

white supremacy as, 63, 131–32, 139,

Declaration of Independence, 45,

153–58

82, 83, 123; of elites, 80, 110, 115;

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

325

Index of Enlightenment, 160, 207, 208;

Rittenhouse, David, 179

Franklin’s, 141–43, 145, 150, 156,

ritual punishment, 12, 14, 17; alternatives

158; genres in, 113; Hurt’s violence,

to, 170; burnings as, 62; effigies as, 84,

30; manipulates for social control, 34;

102; ethics of, 160; executions as, 115;

modernity and, 263n. 4; New World,

hangings as, 84, 85; New York mur-

110; non-rhetorical, 200; norms

ders as, 76; Old World, 22; power of,

and, 62, 89; of pain, 54; Paine’s, 200;

34–35; as public spectacle, 35, 52; as

post-Revolutionary, 110; racial, 10,

sacrifice to God, 90; of scapegoats, 72

19, 44, 61, 62; racializing discourse

Roach, Joseph, 137

and, 62, 64, 75; of revolution, 89,

robbery, 1, 8, 118

97; revolutionary, 124; of Rush, 160,

Robbins, Ammi, 88

176, 184–86, 205; of science, 166;

Robin, Gerald, 15

Smith’s primer for, 138; of violence,

Roediger, David, 10

30–31, 154; violence function in, 91;

Rome, 15, 17

violence interwoven with, 38. See also

Rose, Charles, 139

Annan, Robert; rhetorical terms; Rush,

Rowe, G. S., 46, 80

Benjamin

Royal Gazette (Tory newspaper), 101

rhetorical terms: allegory, 213, 214, 215; hyperbole, 197, 198, 205; irony, 140;

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

metaphor, 33, 112, 117; mimetic cor-

runaways, 2, 83–84, 134, 157, 220n. 4, 245n. 14, 260n. 34 Rush, Benjamin: “abode of misery” of,

ruption, 184; Other, 62, 76, 97, 109,

173, 184–85; “anarchia” of, 82, 123;

117, 121, 154, 159; Othering, 62, 75,

anarchy and, 196, 198; Angry God of,

97; Otherness, 57; persuasion, 141–43,

177; Annan’s alias and, 195; Annan’s

145, 150, 156, 158, 176; polemics, 31;

attack on, 194–206; army service of,

prolepsis, 197, 198, 205; propitiation,

178; background of, 23; on Beccaria,

216; prosopopoeia, 110–13, 126–27,

202; Biblical passages used by, 270n.

138–39, 141, 143, 145, 151, 160; slip-

40; boldest attack on public practice

pery slope logic, 197, 215; synecdoche,

by, 187; called a heretic, 197; Cal-

61, 62, 196; tapinosis, 192; trope, 35,

vinists and, 167, 193–94; on capital

85, 198; universalizing, 158, 159; ven-

punishment, 180; on democracy,

triloquist, 109, 111, 112, 138, 250n.

123, 177, 180, 194; as an elitist, 180;

40. See also tropes

Enlightenment and, 23, 167, 185–86,

Rhode Island, 84

193; on free blacks, 155; Genesis 9:6

Ricoeur, Paul, 25, 71

and, 192–93, 195, 196; jeremiads, 194,

riots, 33, 86; dung throwing, 57, 101,

195; Luke 9:56 and, 201; as a medical

109, 236n. 20 “Rising Glory of America, The” (Freneau), 162, 217

doctor, 176, 178, 183; on “mimetic corruption,” 184, 185, 186, 190–91; on New World glory, 167; opposed

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Index

alcohol consumption, 187; opposed

Scenes of Subjection (Hartman), 120–21

the death penalty, 56–57, 167–68,

Schelling, F. W. J., 173

178, 187; opposed executions, 167,

Schwartz, Regina, 216

182–83; opposed hanging, 19, 177; op-

science, 20, 117; Beccaria and, 169; En-

posed public punishment for secrecy,

lightenment commitment to, 22–23,

185–86; opposed slavery, 155, 187;

161, 166, 176; rhetoric of, 195; Rush

“Philochoras” debate and, 187, 190,

Scott, Donald, 164, 199

crime, 180, 182; reason and, 186, 190,

Scottish immigrants, 45, 46, 236n. 21

191–92, 202; on religion’s influence,

“scum,” 42–43, 44, 45, 46. See also trans-

192; rejoinder to Annan by, 202, 204; rhetoric of, 160, 176, 184–86, 205; science and, 176; in Scotland, 183;

portation Second Treatise on Civil Government (Locke), 188

on Shays’s Rebellion, 81–82; Smith

security industries, 2

influenced, 183; on truth, 23, 193;

“Self Reliance” (Emerson), 13

Washington’s skill questioned by, 178;

Selfridge, Thomas, 32, 33

as Wideman’s “Dr. Thrush” model,

sentences. See punishment

176–77; writing style of, 177, 187.

Sermon on the Subject of Abolishing Capital

Works: Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death,

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

and, 186, 187; suspect, 208

194, 195; on punishment as increasing

Punishment (Caverno), 37 sermons: Convict’s Visitor, 112–13, 137–38;

187, 191, 194, 202, 203, 204; Enquiry

execution, 26, 37, 89, 100, 113, 176,

into the Effects of Public Punishments upon

194; Hurt’s, 28–30, 82, 228n. 37; Mil-

Criminals, 179–80, 181, 182–87, 202,

lennium, 173, 174, 175; prosopopoeia

204; “Enquiry into the Justice and

in, 111, 113. See also jeremiad(s);

Policy of Punishing Murder by Death,” 187, 188, 190, 191, 192; “On Slave

Mather, Cotton; Strong, Nathan (son) servants: outcasts as, 44–46, 58; white,

Keeping,” 159, 177. See also Bradford,

3, 10, 12, 20, 51, 64, 72, 76. See also

William (son); Enlightenment

indentured servant(s); slaves; violence

Russell, Ezekiel, 115

Sewall, Samuel, 14 Seward, Ann (Anna), 106–7, 249n. 32

S St. George, Robert Blair, 78 Salinger, Sharon, 83 scapegoat, 63, 71, 147, 155, 237–38n. 23;

sex and violence, 6 Shakespeare, William, 26; on punishment, 15, 17 shaming, 25, 248n. 28

executions, 59, 60; “Negroe Man” as,

shaming cart, 248n. 28

58, 59, 61, 62; ritual punishment of,

Shapiro, Bruce, 19

72. See also Johnstone, Abraham

Sharp, Anthony (uncle), as an elite,

Scarry, Elaine, 15–16, 54, 57, 111

152–53, 259n. 27

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

327

Index Sharp, Enoch, 149, 152, 259n. 27

56; white, 3, 10, 12, 20, 44–46, 51,

Sharp, Thomas (grandfather), 152

64, 72, 76. See also immigration;

Shays’s Rebellion, 81–82, 123, 139, 242n.

indentured servant(s); transportation;

3 Shippen, Edward, 179

slippery slope logic, 197, 215

ships: “bilboes” aboard, 52, 53, 235n 17;

Slotkin, Richard, 74, 154

Shield, 146; slaving, 77. See also trans-

Smalley, John, 88

portation

Smith, Abbot, 42–43

shunning, 4, 14, 15 Signs Taken for Wonders (Moretti), 117 Simpson, Lewis, 168 sin, 138, 173, 176, 196; “coherent chain

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

whiteness

Smith, Adam, 267n. 23; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 182–83 Smith, Catherine (Connor)(Katherine): aliases used by, 2, 6, 7; ambiva-

of misconduct” is, 11; crime and, 11–

lence about the background of, 17;

13, 33, 39, 110, 113, 215; denounced,

“Catholick,” 1, 10; child left by, 7;

226n. 28. See also jeremiad(s)

crimes of, 6–7; death penalty and,

Skinner, Richard, 148–49

13–14, 37; hanging of, 1, 5–8, 13, 16,

slavery: abolished, 157; abolitionists,

17; was Irish, 17; Irish racism and, 10;

19, 30–31, 125, 128, 130, 155, 177,

mobility of, 83; Pennsylvania Gazette on,

204; Congress and, 130–31; Constitu-

7, 17; power relations and, 6; reprieve

tion and, 127–30; debates, 130, 132;

of, 7; transportation of, 17

defenders of, 131; elite traders in, 77;

Smith, Joshua Hett, 98, 102

Franklin criticized, 130–31, 141, 177;

Smith, Stephen, 139

Haitian revolution and, 39, 126, 132–

Smith, William (Congressman), 129, 131,

33, 147, 150, 154, 157; New World, 46–47, 50, 57, 74, 75, 136, 240n. 38; post-Revolutionary, 126 slaves: African, 51–56, 77; bad behavior

132 Smith, William (Reverend), 112–13, 137–38, 139 social contract theory, 32, 188

by, 43, 51; costs of, 45, 51, 235n. 15;

social control, 34, 113, 216

execution of, 51; immigrant Irish, 212;

social order, 48, 51, 76–77, 152, 185, 188,

lifestyle of, 52; numbers of, 52, 58,

192, 199; arson attacks the, 78; danger

64, 74, 77; as property, 149–50, 204;

in everyday life and, 87; New World,

Provincial Council and, 51–52, 54, 63;

46, 61

punishment of, 44, 48, 51–52, 54, 57; revolts by, 58, 75, 240n. 38; runaway,

Society for Promoting Political Enquiries, 179

2, 83, 84, 85, 220n. 4; skin color ideas

Socinian, 196

and, 46, 62; “substitution system” for,

songs: André’s verses as, 247n. 26; “black-

235n. 15; transportation of, 44, 51–52,

face,” 139; bravery, 9; “Capture of

77; treatment of, 44, 48, 51–52, 54,

Major André,” 101–2; dehumanizing,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

328

Index

252n. 51; Federalist, 165, 208; “Free

is a divine institution idea of, 90,

America,” 9, 29; “The Grand Consti-

202, 204; jeremiad of, 89, 91–92, 94;

tution,” 165, 208; racial, 120, 139;

on obedience, 89, 90; pedagogy, 90,

rebel, 85; symbols in, 209; “Unhappy

prosopopoeia of, 113, rhetoric of, 114

Transported Felon,” 35–36, 37; unity,

substitute victim, 60, 155; “Negroe Man”

209; violence in, 5, 7, 35–36, 85, 124,

as a, 58, 59, 61, 62; as propitiation,

252n. 51; “What a Court,” 85; of women, 7

216 Sugar Act, 85

Sons of Liberty, 84, 95, 206

Sullivan, John, 116, 126, 212

South Carolina, 84, 129

“Supplement to an Act, intitled An Act to Pre-

spectacle, as “actor training,” 97, 127, 247n. 22. See also demonstration;

vent the Importation of Slaves into the State of New Jersey, A,” 151

execution(s); public spectacles; pun-

symbolic Other. See Other

ishment

Symbolism of Evil, The (Ricoeur), 25, 71

spectatorial sympathy, 182, 183, 186, 206, 267n. 23

symbols: arson, 78; execution, 17, 71, 213, 214, 215; nationalism, 209; pun-

Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 202

ishment letters, 4–5, 221n. 5; sacred,

Stamp Act, 78, 85, 206

209; in songs, 209

State Gazette & New-Jersey Advertiser, 151

synecdoche, 61, 62, 196

state-sanctioned violence, 24–26, 30, 32,

Szasz, Ferenc, 71

47, 58, 60, 227n. 31

T

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

states’ rights, 209 Stephens, William, 18

tapinosis, 198

stereotypes: historically, 19; Provincial

tar and feathers, 87, 95

Council, 61, 62, 63; racial, 10, 19, 44,

Tatem, William, 147, 149

61, 62; synecdoche and, 61, 62, 196;

Taylor, George Keith, 184, 217

of women, 5, 6

Teeters, Negley, 92, 236n. 22, 251n. 43

Stillman, Samuel, 245n. 14

theft, 17, 36, 41, 86, 146, 171, 251n. 48

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 136, 137

Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 182

Strong, Cyprian, 88

Thornton, James, 187

Strong, Nathan (father) (1717–1795),

Thoughts on Capital Punishment (Combe),

family of, 88–89 Strong, Nathan (son) (1748–1816): Angry God of, 89, 90, 91–92, 94; Doane

21 Tom (“murdered” slave), 125, 148, 149–50, 155

execution sermons by, 113, 250n. 41;

Toney (African slave): Penn and 51–56;

Dunbar’s hanging used by, 89, 90–91,

torture of, 63; banishment of, 57

94; as an elite, 88–89, 91; execution

torture. See execution(s); punishment

sermons of, 89, 113–15; Government

Tory, 9, 30, 85, 87, 88, 89; free black

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

329

Index forces, 154; Royal Gazette, 101; vio-

158, 174, 176; punishment, 35; ratio-

lence, 95, 96, 97

nality, 176; reason, 192; rhetorical, 35,

Townshend Act, 85

85, 198; tapinosis, 192; unity of truth,

transference to the hangman, 16

268n. 29; universalizing, 158, 159;

transportation: to Africa, 44; of Africans,

ventriloquism, 109, 111, 112, 138,

44, 77; alternative to death penalty,

250n. 40. See also prosopopoeia

41; America’s system of, 18, 165; arson

Trumbull, John, 49, 80, 104, 200

sentences as, 66, 67–69; banishing as,

truth is a unit, 23

41, 42, 46; Beven’s, 17; colonies popu-

Tucker, Thomas, 129–30, 134

lated by, 42–44; criminal, 17, 18, 41,

Turner, William, 196

44–45, 59, 64; as a deadly process, 41;

Twelve Years a Slave (Northup), 136

elites and, 44, 45–46; of the English,

U

43–46, 236n. 21; Franklin satirized, 4, 43, 45; of Germans, 45, 46, 47, 61, 236n. 21; of Irish, 17, 46, 116, 236n.

“Unhappy Transported Felon, The” (Revel), 35–36

21; New World, 41–45; origins of, 42;

United States Congress, 105, 127–31

political benefits of, 44–45; as punish-

“Unlawfulness and Impolicy of Capital

ment, 41, 42, 52, 54, 66, 76; purposes

Punishment, The” (Citizen of Mary-

of, 44–46; of Scottish, 46, 236n. 21;

land), 187, 191, 205, 206, 207, 270n.

ships, 41–42; of slaves, 44, 51–52, 77;

41

Smith’s, 17; song about “Unhappy

Upham, Thomas, 37

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Transported Felon,” 35–36, 37; whiteness in, 10, 44. See also England

V

treason, 8, 87, 96, 170, 244n. 12, 245n.

Vain and Prodigal Life, and Tragical Penitent

14. See also André, John; Arnold,

Death of Thomas Hellier (Williams),

Benedict; Dunbar, Moses

50–51

Treason Act, 87

Van (Mister), 9

“Treason House,” 98

Vaughan, Charles, 179

Treatise of Human Nature, A (Hume), 24

Vaughan, Samuel, 179

trials: ABR portrayal of, 116–18; for free

ventriloquism: political, 109, 138, 250n.

blacks and slaves, 151 tropes: Bellamy’s, 174, 176; bloody, 251n.

40. See also prosopopoeia Veritas, 16–17

47; conspiracy, 147–51; Enlighten-

violence: abolitionist view of, 10; African

ment, 208; Franklinesque, 141–43,

slave importation led to, 77; against

145, 150, 156, 158; frugal, 143, 156,

immigrants, 4, 14, 15; allegiance and,

158; Liberty Tree, 84–85, 243n. 8;

109; arguments about, 26; broker-

national independence arguments, 29;

ing and, 47; community grows from,

persuasion, 141–43, 145, 150, 156,

109–10; debates, 11, 13, 20, 27, 38,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

330

Index

40, 83, 126; democracy from, 19, 25,

needs of, 105, 107; power needs of,

33; from democracy, 218; for deter-

105, 106, 107, 109; problems of, 105,

rence, 52; elites used, 34–35, 49–51,

106; Presidency of, 113, 207; revered,

57, 60, 75–76, 91, 96; execution as,

178; Rush questioned ability of, 178;

84; humanity shaped by, 27; Hurt on, 30; law and, 63; law as, 32; Locke on, 188; London’s sanctioned, 49; of

wife, 7

masters toward servants, 48, 51–52;

Wayne, Anthony, 97

New World, 49, 58, 124; obedience

Wayward Puritans (Erikson), 38

learned from, 109; power and, 15–16;

weapons, 16

public, 187; racism and, 19; rheto-

Webb, Frank J., 136, 256n. 15

ric interwoven with, 38; rhetorical,

Weekly Rehearsal (newspaper), 153

30–31, 91, 97; sex and, 6; spectacles

Weld, Theodore, 150

as, 84, 97; state-sanctioned, 24, 25, 26,

West, Samuel, 228n. 37

30, 32, 47, 58, 60, 227n. 31; tools and

West Point, New York, 98, 101, 102, 163

weapons of, 15–17; Tories and, 95, 96,

Weston, Anthony, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 57,

97; as training for, 97, 127, 247n. 22. See also debate(s); murder; newspapers

63 “What a Court” (song), 85

Violence and the Sacred (Girard), 66

Wheatley, Phillis, 134

Virginia, 84, 217; laws, 171–72, 184;

“wheelbarrow men,” 178, 179

settlement, 42, 171–72 Vision of Columbus, The, 163 Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Seward criticized, 106–7 Watnell (Watnal, Whatnell), John, 7;

Vulture (ship), 98, 247n. 24

whipping, 48, 63, 70, 95, 138, 153, 180. See also Weston, Anthony whipping cart, 35, 55, 95, 138, 248n. 48; “laying by the heels” variations of a,

W

52, 53, 235n. 17

Wages of Whiteness, The (Roediger), 10

Whiskey Rebellion, 123

Walker, David, 134

White, Alexander, 116, 126, 212

War of Jenkins’ Ear, 58, 74, 236n. 21

white criminals, 65, 66, 71, 100

Ward, Harry M., 172

white paranoia, 153–54

Ward, John, 41

White Servitude in Colonial America (Ga-

Warville, J. P. Brissot de, 165 Washington, George, 29; André trade

lenson), 3 white slaves and servants, 3, 10, 12, 20,

debated by, 99; André execution by,

44–46, 51, 64, 72, 76; as a labor class,

98, 100, 104–6, 203; army of, 178; Ar-

58; punishment of, 57

nold’s letter to, 107–8; as an elite, 107;

white supremacy, 63, 131, 139, 153–58;

Franklin criticized, 163, 178; Order of

free blacks riled, 155; Haitian revolu-

the Cincinnati president, 163; Paine

tion and, 39, 126–27, 132–33, 147,

hated, 107, 178, 266n. 19; political

150, 154, 157; Johnstone and, 125,

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University

331

Index 140–41, 146–47, 155, 157; rhetoric of,

women: abused, 211; criminal, 5; His-

157; violence as training for, 97, 127,

tory of the Captivity and Sufferings of

247n. 22

Mrs. Maria Martin, 186; imprisoned,

whiteness, 232n. 5; and liberty, 159; of slaves, 10, 44, 46

221–22n. 8; orphans of, 7; poems about victimized, 6; pregnancy and

Wideman, John Edgar, 176

punishment, 7; rape of, 86, 116, 171;

Wieland, or the Transformation, an American

stereotypes of, 5, 6; as victims, 6. See

Tale (Brown), 4–5, 60, 112, 125, 168, 180 Wilemon (Wildeman, Wildman), Henry, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7–8, 10, 15, 16; ambivalence about the death penalty of, 13–14, 37; gallows performance of, 36; identity changes by, 84; repeat offender, 18 Williams, Eric, 41, 45

also gender; M’Kean, John; Smith, Catherine Wood, Gordon, 23, 79, 110 Woodbury (Woodberry), New Jersey, 135, 146–47, 149, 151 Worcester, Massachusetts. See “Arthur, a Negro Man” Writing of History, The (Certeau), 164

Williams, Paul, 50–51 Wills, Garry, 71, 178, 216

Z

Wilson, James, 179

Zilversmit, Arthur, 155

Winter, John, 47

Zuckerman, Michael, 47

Copyright © 2010. Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved.

Wollaston, William, 20

Executing Democracy : Volume One: Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807, Michigan State University