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Anti-Gallows Sentiment and Criminal Reform in Antebellum Literature 1772- 1855

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Anti-Gallows Sentiment and Criminal Reform in Antebellum Literature 1772- 1855 PUBLIC PUNISHMENT VERSUS PRIVATE JUDGMENT: ANTI-GALLOWS SENTIMENT AND CRIMINAL REFORM IN ANTEBELLUM LITERATURE 1772-1855 By CHRISTOPHER ALLAN BLACK Bachelor of Arts in English California State University, Long Beach Long Beach, CA. 2000 Master of Arts in English California State University, Fullerton Fullerton, CA. 2006 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May, 2012 PUBLIC PUNISHMENT VERSUS PRIVATE JUDGMENT: ANTI-GALLOWS SENTIMENT AND CRIMINAL REFORM IN ANTEBELLUM LITERATURE 1772-1855 Dissertation Approved: Dr. William Merrill Decker Dissertation Adviser Dr. Richard R. Frohock Dr. Lindsey Claire Smith Dr. Richard C. Rohrs Outside Committee Member Dr. Sheryl A. Tucker Dean of the Graduate College ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................1 II. CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................................................19 III. CHAPTER 2 ..........................................................................................................46 IV. CHAPTER 3 ..........................................................................................................84 V. CHAPTER 4 ........................................................................................................110 VI. CHAPTER 5 ........................................................................................................142 VII. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................173 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................179 iii INTRODUCTION REPUBLICAN LEGAL DISCOURSE AND ANTI-GALLOWS SENTIMENT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY “Ah! What a Spectacle I shall soon be, A Corps suspended from yon shameful Tree.” Levi Ames Legal and philosophical debates over the effectiveness of capital punishment and penal reform have played a significant role in American civic and political life ever since the establishment of the British Colonies in the seventeenth century. Just prior to the American Revolution and up until the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, the public spectacle of the gallows and “Hanging Day” was thought to promote good citizenship and prevent transgressive behavior among the population (Barton 145). During the colonial and early national periods, leaders believed that public execution of criminals contributed to the maintenance of religious and civic order. Yet, the role and nature of public punishment in American legal and political culture changed drastically in the decades immediately following the Revolutionary War. 1 In the post-revolutionary and antebellum United States, criminal narratives and literature in the form of the execution sermon, the gothic novel, autobiographical testimony, and the African-American slave narrative informed the citizenry as to the public abuse of convicted criminals on the gallows and made the individual aware of the need for republican legal reforms such as trial by jury, the creation of penitentiaries, and private punishment1. In the early national and antebellum periods, a less authoritarian system of justice encouraged by the principles of Enlightenment philosophy caused social reformers and philosophers to advocate for a more humane system of public punishment. The late Enlightenment belief in the humanity of each individual along with the growing republican contempt for the right of the state to execute its citizens led prominent literary minds to question the efficacy of capital punishment and public execution as a viable means of criminal reform. This project discusses the development of anti- gallows sentiment in the creative work of authors and progressive reformers from a variety of social backgrounds and ideological perspectives. Socially conscious writers from the Native American clergyman Samson Occom to the physician Benjamin Rush and from the former slave Frederick Douglass to the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville employed the republican legal discourse of the Enlightenment to influence the cultural attitudes of Americans concerning public punishment and transgressive behavior. Literary examinations of capital punishment, executions, and criminal reform in the New Republic are informed by the major Enlightenment philosophical movements of the late eighteenth century. While the philosophical origins of the anti-gallows movement in American culture are difficult to date precisely, historians of criminal reform maintain that anti-capital punishment sentiment first came to prominence in British North America during the 1770s. For nearly a generation before the American Civil War, the movement to abolish the spectacle of 2 public punishment was a significant part of the disciplinary system of republican governments in North America and Europe, which encouraged debate concerning justice and personal responsibility. The sentence of death for secular transgressions such as murder and theft were associated with the development of the modern state. Up until the mid-eighteenth century in England, the number of capital offenses multiplied as the state blurred the distinction between public and private offenses (Davis 23). The death penalty was viewed by the British government as a means for protecting the sovereignty of the king.2 However, capital convictions continued to be perceived from antiquity as a form of retaliation for personal wrongs. In modern societies, capital punishment offered an emotional release from anxiety and resentment exacerbated by criminal acts. By the eighteenth century, public punishment incorporated rational theories of civil self defense and the emotional belief in retribution. The belief in revenge as the catalyst for punishment can be seen in the writings of John Locke who was considered a foremost authority on jurisprudence in American society until the 1820s.3 Locke defended the institution of capital punishment arguing that individual’s forfeited their civil rights when they committed a crime. His system of justice incorporated elements of both retributive and utilitarian philosophy. Advocates of retribution argued that criminals deserved punishment for their actions while utilitarian’s maintained that public punishment was necessary to maintain civil order by deterring crime. Locke “sought to combine the ancient, irrational doctrine of retribution with the rational concept of a social compact, wherein the state chooses the most expedient means to protect life and property” (Davis 24). The social theorist maintained that retribution was an inalienable right granted to man in accordance with natural law. Locke maintained that under the social compact a criminal act such as murder for which there was no reparation should be punished with death. Locke attempted to preserve the doctrine 3 of “blood for blood” within his theory of the social compact. However, in the eighteenth century, progressive liberal reformers began to believe that evil existed in man’s environment not as a result of innate depravity. Due to a persistent resistance to the English belief in retributive justice and the absolute authority of the monarch and the state, the attempt to reform penal law and capital statutes has been a topic of interest in the United States since the early period of British colonization. Opposition to capital punishment existed in the American colonies during the Enlightenment; however, it was not until the political turmoil of the American Revolution that an organized legal reform movement began to develop. Anti-gallows sentiment “grew in the decades following the Revolution as many Americans began to perceive the death penalty as a relic more appropriate to monarchical systems than the New Republic” (Jones 2). Enlightenment thinkers promoted the view that individuals could change society and that civil society was in desperate need of fundamental reform. At the end of the eighteenth century, the continued emphasis on natural law and the right of the individual to self-government took precedence over the absolute authority of the state. This belief in the right of man to protest abuse and inhumane treatment by civil government led prominent European philosophers such as Montesquieu and Beccaria to question the established systems of crime and punishment. Historian Louis Masur argues that Montesquieu established the first standard for an Enlightenment examination of the law. In the Persian Letters (1721) and The Spirit of Laws (1748), Montesquieu claimed that the physical severity of punishments violated the personal liberty of citizens. Masur comments: “Since such severity characterized despotic government, he thought excessive punishments especially unsuitable for republics” (51). For Montesquieu, distinctions between crimes and punishments should come directly from nature. The philosopher 4 argued that to discipline a thief in the same fashion as a murderer was to break down the just proportions between crimes and punishments and promote the commission of the greater rather than the lesser offense. Like Montesquieu, the Marquis Cesare Beccaria also embraced the social ideology of the Enlightenment. After reading Montesquieu’s work, Beccaria joined a society that regularly discussed philosophy and literature and debated the established laws
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