J OHN C YRIL B ARTON The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America Put the scaffold on the Common, Where the multitude can meet; All the schools and ladies summon, Let them all enjoy the treat. What’s the use of being “private”? Hanging is a righteous cause; Men should witness what you drive at, When you execute the laws. - Anti-gallows poem (1849) I. Capital punishment has played an important role in American cultural and political life ever since the inception of the United States. During the colonial period and in the early years of the Republic, “Hanging Day” and its concomitant practices - the execution sermon, the condemned’s last words or dying confession, the public spectacle of the execution itself, and official narratives or popular broadsides documenting the event - served to promote religious order and good citizenship. 1 However, the role and place of the death penalty changed dramatically in the decades following the Revolutionary War. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Enlightenment ideal of a less severe, more proportional government and the belief in the benevolence of human beings, coupled with a Republican disdain for the so-called “right” of a State to take its citizens’ lives, led prominent thinkers from Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison to John Quincy Adams, Lydia Maria Child, Wendell Phillips, and Margaret Fuller to challenge the scope and legitimacy of capital punishment. The reformation of penal codes and capital statutes had long been a concern in Pennsylvania (in 1794 the state abolished the death penalty for all offenses except first-degree murder), but the reform movement became a topic of national interest in the nineteenth century. In the 1820s, influential lawyer and politician Edward Livingston presented landmark arguments for 1 My historical overview of the death penalty draws from the work of Banner, Masur, Halttunen, Mackey, and Davis. 146 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON the abolition of capital punishment before the Louisiana state legislature, and the spirit of reform later peaked in the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s when social organizations such as the New York and Massachusetts Societies for the Abolition of Capital Punishment were formed and debates about the death penalty spread across the nation. During this time, many Northern and some Southern states began revising capital statutes and moving executions from the public square to the enclosed, “private” space of the prisonyard (a practice ridiculed in the anti-gallows poem cited as my epigraph). Moreover, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire came close to abolishing capital punishment in the 1830s and 40s (Davis Homicide 296), while bills calling for abolition passed or nearly passed during this time in one of the legislative houses in New Jersey, Vermont, Ohio, and Connecticut (Mackey Voices xxii). In 1837, Maine passed a bill that sentenced those convicted of capital crimes to solitary confinement and made executions require an executive warrant issued by the governor one year after the pronouncement of a death sentence. The “Main Law,” as it came to be known, helped prevent any death sentence in the state from being carried out for twenty-seven years. By 1853, three states - Michigan in 1847, Rhode Island in 1851, and Wisconsin in 1853 - abolished the death penalty; and it was largely due to the impending Civil War and the inevitable violence associated with the effort to abolish slavery, a movement with which the reformation of capital punishment was intimately connected, that death-penalty abolitionism lost its momentum, not fully to return to the public spotlight until populist and progressive ideas at the turn of the twentieth century prompted a more scientific attitude toward crime and social behavior. 2 2 In Rites of Execution, Louis P. Masur emphasizes the connections between the antigallows movement and the movement to abolish slavery. “In the minds of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips,” he writes, “one campaign, against slavery or the gallows, was inseparable from the other. Both slavery and capital punishment, they argued, represented systems of brutality that coerced individuals, and both institutions merited attack” (157). As Masur notes elsewhere in his study, other prominent opponents of slavery, such as Theodore Parkman and Lydia Maria Child, also spoke out against the death penalty. Among those discussed in Masur’s work, we could add to the list Frederick Douglass, the preeminent African American orator of the day, who, long with Susan B. Anthony, organized an anti-death penalty meeting in Rochester, New York, in 1858. At that meeting, Douglass delivered his essay, “Capital Punishment is a Mockery of Justice.” It is important to note, however, that the political alliances between these two abolition movements were not always so clear cut. For instance, John L. O’Sullivan, the leading proponent for abolishing the death penalty in the 1840s, would later sympathize with the South and support the Confederacy, whereas George Barrell Cheever, the foremost defender of the gallows in the 1840s, would become a leader in the anti-slavery cause and join forces with The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 147 This essay examines the anti-gallows movement in antebellum America. It focuses on legislative reports, political writings, and imaginative journalism concerning the death penalty as well as poetry and especially fiction that represent or respond to capital punishment. The death penalty has a discourse as rich and contentious as any in the history of the United States, and the legal, political, and literary texts I investigate were written at a time when the question of capital punishment was hotly debated and the movement for abolition was advancing its cause on many fronts. Abolitionists during this time drew on religious and political arguments to claim that capital punishment violated both human and civil rights. They also challenged arguments about deterrence, while insisting that the death penalty made juries reluctant to convict criminals of capital crimes. Among the many important legal and political writers of the period, I will concentrate on Robert Rantoul, Jr., who made innovative arguments about the inappropriateness of capital punishment in a republic, and John L. O’Sullivan, a prominent New York Democrat and editor of the influential The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Famous literary figures who contributed to the debate by publishing in O’Sullivan’s journal include Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Walt Whitman. Others, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Herman Melville, criticize the death penalty in their work, while some popular writers - notably George Lippard, Sylvester Judd, and William Gilmore Simms - interrogate the use and purpose of the gallows in their novels. The campaign to abolish capital punishment, I will conclude, should be seen as an important part of the context that helped bring about the American Renaissance. In fact, in some ways that campaign reveals as much about the democratic assumptions informing the American Renaissance as the campaign to abolish slavery. I begin, however, by looking closely at an early popular American novel that portrays an execution scene and, in presenting elaborate commentary on it, sets the stage for arguments to follow. II. The final chapter of David Brion Davis’ Homicide in American Fiction (1957) provides the starting point for any study of U.S. antebellum literature many of those with whom he formerly disagreed about capital punishment. It is also important to note that Phillip English Mackey, another recent historian of the death penalty in America, attributes the gradual demise of the anti-gallows movement to the Mexican-American War. “The reasons were many,” Mackey writes in reference to the movement’s loss of momentum, “but the paramount problem was the Mexican War and the factionalism and sectionalism it fostered” (Voices xxvii). 148 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON and the death penalty. As its title suggests, Homicide in American Fiction attends primarily to questions about murder; but in its final chapter, Davis turns to the subject of capital punishment, claiming that “American fiction in the second quarter of the nineteenth century reveals a curious synthesis of … two positions”: “reformers who emphasized the effect of environment on moral behavior, arguing that criminals should be cured instead of being punished, and traditionalists who finally abandoned the rationalistic theory of deterrence and fell back upon a doctrine of intrinsic and absolute justice” (299). As helpful as this formulation is, it needs to be complicated. More than a “curious synthesis,” U.S. fiction written during this time responded to and participated in cultural debates over capital punishment. A case in point can be found in John Neal’s Logan: A Family (1822), a popular novel that dramatizes a scene of public execution and offers an extended discussion of it. Early in Volume II of Logan, Neal’s protagonist, Harold, witnesses the hanging of several men convicted of piracy while on board a ship heading to England. The narrator vividly portrays the executions, describing how the condemned were “successively drawn up … and then let down part way, with a sudden jerk, which caused the dislocation of their necks, like the report of a pistol” (8). At the sight and sound of these acts, Harold’s “blood curdled” and his “heart turned sick, cold, cold as ice” (8). After the last of the men is hanged (one is pardoned at the last moment), Harold tells a stranger near him that he feels as if he “were a witness against these men” (9). In response, the stranger asks: “And what think you of the reprieve? ,” to which Harold replies: “I like that. I love mercy. I could kneel down and thank them for sparing one life. And the very sailors - see how they are affected by it! The populace too, in the boats - they are crying” (9). The sentiment of Harold’s answer prompts a firm rejoinder from the stranger: “No. You are deceived. … That reprieve was injudicious. Punishment should be certain. Certainty does more than quantity, in penal codes, to counterbalance temptation. Were there but one man in a million pardoned, every criminal would hope that himself would be that man. Each expects the prize in a lottery. No! these people are not weeping. … They love sensation - they love spectacles” (emphasis original 9). As Harold persists in his objections, the dialogue takes shape as an object lesson in Enlightenment attitudes toward hanging and the deleterious psychological effects of public executions. In this exchange, Harold represents the young romantic subject (Byron’s Childe Harold serves as a model), while the older stranger plays the role of the wise and skeptical philosopher who has thought much about the institution and practice of capital punishment. When Harold insists that the sympathy of the spectators for the condemned at an execution reflects society’s innate love of humanity and abhorrence The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 149 of a justice system that inflicts death for crime, the stranger again corrects him: “The populace,” he tells Harold, “will assemble to execute a felon to day, with their own hands, and to morrow beset the throne of justice for his pardon. I have seen this, again and again. I have seen ten thousand people in tears because a handsome boy was to be executed; and I have seen the officer who brought his pardoned, hooted and pelted from the ground, by a part of the same mob. Men sometimes sit down to cry - and it is dangerous to disappoint them. They have made up their minds to be sentimental, and woe to him who interferes or interrupts them” (9). The stranger’s remarks on the psychology of the death penalty’s spectacle of violence occasion further commentary about its harmful effects: “The are several things to condemn in this affair,” he later says. “In the first place, all the pirates are represented as penitent, and assured of heaven. In the next place, he who is pardoned is kept in ignorance of it, till the last moment” (emphasis original 10). The dramatic effect of the pardon prompts Harold to interrupt the stranger in order to comment on the spectacle they just witnessed: “not the criminal only,” Harold says, “but the populace [will] remember it, with greater seriousness,” since the pardoned convict “has suffered all but death: - the ignominy, the anticipation, the horrour, and the pain of such a death is nothing, absolutely nothing” (11). In fact, Harold adds, the executions themselves were relatively uneventful and even merciful when compared to the hangings themselves: “I felt relieved when their necks were snapped. I expected something a thousand times more horrible - but how instantly they were motionless! Oh, there is no death so easy! ” (11). Yet Harold’s sentiment perfectly illustrates the stranger’s argument against both the mode in which capital punishment is presently administered and the popular practice of issuing last-minute pardons: “Right, young man,” the stranger replies, “hence the glaring impolicy of such executions; hence too the frequency of suicide by hanging. Poor wretches! they see that the pain is momentary; all feel as you did, at the sight of the first execution. They expect to fall down, when the signal is given, and yet they find that the reality is nothing to the terrours of their own imaginations. But let me proceed. By delaying the reprieve until the last moment, for a presumptuous and idle piece of dramatick effect - they teach every man, at the gallows, to expect, even to the last moment, the very last, a reprieve.” (emphasis original 11) The exchange between Harold and the stranger in Logan highlights some of the concerns which would come to preoccupy the anti-gallows movement in the decades preceding the Civil War: (1) the horrors and deleterious affects of public executions and staged reprieves; (2) the implication of spectators as witnesses in the executions themselves; (3) the Enlightenment principle of certainty over quantity or severity in punishment as a useful deterrent; (4) the base desires of violence and spectacle to which public 150 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON hangings cater; and (5) the false pretense of forgiveness and salvation the ritual of lethal public violence instills upon the criminal mind. As the dialogue continues, Harold’s response to the stranger’s argument helps to bring out this fifth and final point: “Gracious God,” he exclaims, “Hence, every man goes out of the world unprepared, in reality! ,” to which the stranger replies: “Yes - and hence too, the hardihood and carelessness, with which the most detestable ruffians go out of it; depriving the scene of all its terrours, making it a brutal farce, a trial of insensibility” (11). When Harold goes on to ask why the stranger should condemn the condemned’s repentance, the stranger replies that he does not in principle, but does so in practice because such “penitence” is likely to be affected and insincere: “Listen to me,” he urges Harold: “Our system of punishment, reprieve, and penitence produces in every villain’s heart just this process of reasoning: - “I will indulge my mortal appetite for blood - because at the worst, if I cannot escape suspicion - cannot bribe the witnesses, nor the jury - and if my lawyer cannot get me clear by his wicked eloquence, by some flaw in the proceedings - and if I cannot get a new trial - nor escape by subornation - nor break prison - nor bribe the gaoler - nor get a pardon - nor a reprieve - nor a commutation of punishment - nor get clear by some revolution, political or moral, why, at the worst I can repent, and go to heaven, at any rate, with the whole publick opinion in my favour, and the passport of many a pious clergyman in my behalf; nay, who knows? I may have a procession, a monument, an epitaph, be interred in consecrated ground, and pass for a martyr, a martyr to what! to the inexorable cruelty of my country’s laws. -A pretty way to have those laws respected! a most effectual antidote to temptation, and profligacy, indeed! ” (emphasis original 11-12) Logan was published in 1822, the same year Edward Livingston presented the first of his influential arguments against capital punishment before the Louisiana state legislature. A former congressman and mayor of New York forced to Louisiana by financial scandal, Livingston was elected a member of the state Assembly in 1820. In 1821, he drafted a revision of the state’s criminal statutes. A year later he delivered his Report on the Plan of a Penal Code, a lengthy section of which called for the abolition of the death penalty. Eloquently written and powerfully argued, Livingtson’s Report centered on the psychological effect of public executions. Like the stranger in Logan, Livingston found the current administration of capital punishment to be barbarous and ineffective. Livingston, however, attended to the criminal passions (notably ambition and avarice) aroused in the spectators of executions. When the “inflection of death” becomes frequent “it loses its effect,” Livingston claimed; “the people become too much familiarized with it to consider it as an example; it is changed into a spectacle, which must frequently be repeated to satisfy the ferocious taste it has formed” (43). At the The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 151 same time, when executions are infrequent and “kept for great occasions, and the people are seldom treated with the gratification of seeing one of their fellow-creatures expire by the sentence of the law; a most singular effect is produced; the sufferer, whatever be his crime, becomes a hero or a saint; he is the object of public attention, curiosity, admiration, and pity” (44). In either case, Livingston argued against public hangings; and in this respect, he echoed the general arguments against such punishment in Neal’s novel, especially the claim that the condemned becomes an object of sympathy - a hero or martyr even - in the eyes of the populace. 3 “Thus the end of the law is defeated,” Livingston concluded, “the force of the example is totally lost, and the place of execution is converted into a scene of triumph for the sufferer, whose crime is wholly forgotten, while his courage, resignation, or piety, mark him as the martyr, not the guilty victim, of the laws” (45). Livingston and Neal, one from law and the other from literature, speak out against the death penalty near the beginning of a reform movement that would come to occupy a prominent place in the cultural politics of the 1830s and 40s. Indeed, as a Pennsylvania paper declared in 1844: “The subject of capital punishment is claiming much and increasing attention, not only in our own State, but in many other parts of the country” (qtd. in Masur 117). Drawing on such statements, historian Louis P. Masur writes: “During the 1840s, books, pamphlets, and reports by scores of writers flooded the public with arguments against capital punishment. Ministers, editors, and lecturers better known for their devotion to other moral and social causes adopted the anti-gallows movement as their own” (117). If the anti-gallows reform movement came to fruition in the 1840s, it had its origins before then. Reflecting upon his life in an 1866 autobiography, Neal credited Logan with prompting a particular development within that reform: the movement of executions from the public square to the enclosed, less public space of the prison yard. “I believe that the changes which have followed,” Neal writes, “year after year, both abroad and at home, in the mode of execution, originated with my ‘Logan’” (Wandering Recollections 390). 3 It is important to note that both Neal and Livingston are making an argument about the spectacle of sovereign violence inflicted upon the body of the condemned long before Foucault developed that argument in the opening chapters of Discipline and Punish. It should also be noted that Livingston’s writings against the death penalty were extremely influential in France when that country experienced its own movement to abolish capital punishment, from roughly 1826 to 1831. Indeed, Livingston’s work, which was widely reviewed and discussed in French newspapers (most notably Le Globe), helped initiate the debate in that country. For a discussion of Livingston’s impact on the abolition movement in France, see Sonja Hamilton’s La Plume et le Couperet, 71-73. 152 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON In his autobiography, Neal also identifies himself as someone who has “written much, and not a little to the purpose; having no belief in the wisdom of strangulation, for men, women, and children, however much they might seem to deserve it, and being fully persuaded that the worst men have most need of repentance, and that they who are unfit to live, and still more unfit to die” (390). Moreover, Neal describes the experience which both inspired his anti-death penalty politics and served as the source for the gallows scene in Logan: When I wrote “Logan,” after having seen two pirates, and two young men strangled by law, in the midst of a noisy, riotous crowd in Baltimore, at noon-day, with the blue heavens, the green earth, and the golden sunshine testifying against their dread “taking off,” I urged our lawgivers, if they would still insist upon strangling men, women, and children, to do it within the walls of a prison, at midnight, and with the tolling of a large, ponderous bell, or the sound of cannon, like minute-guns at sea; that murderers, and ravishers, and house breakers, and thieves, and highwayman, might be startled from their sleep, and set a-thinking; or be disturbed in their midnight revels, or their unaccomplished depredations, as by a voice from the other world, filling them with dismay, or with a mysterious unutterable horror, according to their guilt, in their dread loneliness and desolation. (390) Neal’s suggestion here echoes an idea for a more effective means of administering capital punishment hinted at by the stranger in Logan: “Another defect is this,” the stranger tells Harold; “men are executed in daylight, and the mob go home, about their usual occupations. … But let executions be conducted at night, by torch light, with tolling bells, at midnight, and what would be their sensations then! ” (13). This idea, of course, was never implemented, although the argument for prohibiting public executions in Logan preceded the first actual state law of that kind by more than ten years. 4 Even 4 Mackey provides a description of public executions and legislative responses to them that resonates with Neal’s account in Logan and is therefore worth quoting at length: “To many Americans in the 1820s and 1830s,” Mackey explains, “the most obvious flaw in the institution of capital punishment was public executions, which, intended as a sobering and edifying ceremony, had too often turned into a disgraceful scene of commercialism, riot, and bloodlust. A scheduled hanging could be expected to draw thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of eager viewers. Exploited by local merchants, plied with drink and excited by the prospect of a bloodcurdling event, witnesses often become unruly. Pushing and fighting were not uncommon as the victim was led to the scaffold or as the crowds surged to view the corpse. Cursing onlookers might revile the widow or tear at the scaffold and rope for souvenirs. Drunkenness and violence at times ruled the town far into the night after such a display of public justice” (Voices xx). Following this description, Mackey then writes: “Appalled by such scenes, legislators in northern states, beginning with Rhode Island in 1833, Pennsylvania in 1834, and New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey in 1835, enacted laws calling for private hangings” (xx). The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 153 so, the anti-gallows movement in the United States has a richer, more complex history than Neal suggests. It is to that history, especially as it relates to questions of civil liberties, that I shall now turn. III. The origins of the movement to abolish capital punishment in antebellum America can be found in Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishment, a short treatise on the reformation of criminal law first published in 1764. Upon its publication in Italy and translation throughout Europe, Beccaria’s book attracted much attention and sparked heated debates about criminal law reform and the death penalty on the European continent. Interest in Beccaria’s ideas were every bit as keen in England and colonial America. The first English edition of On Crimes and Punishment was published in London in 1767 and was advertised in New York in 1773. The first American editions of Beccaria’s treatise were published in Charleston in 1777 and in Philadelphia in 1778. What is more, On Crimes and Punishment was widely catalogued by American booksellers in the 1780s, “and newspapers such as the New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine serialized Beccaria for their readers” (Masur 52). 5 Drawing upon Montesquieu’s The Sprit of Laws (1748), Beccaria argued for less severe, more proportionate punishments in criminal law and reasoned that the death penalty was neither necessary nor useful. Capital punishment was not necessary, he claimed, because in times of peace life imprisonment would sufficiently protect society from any of its dangerous members. 6 Similarly, it was not useful because the harshness of the penalty did not leave a lasting impression upon those whom it intended to deter. In Beccaria’s words, “It is not the severity of punishment that has the greatest impact on the human mind, but rather its duration, for our sensibility is more easily and surely stimulated by tiny repeated impressions than by a strong but temporary movement” (49). Thus, according to Beccaria, life imprisonment provided a more effective deterrent to crime because the punishment would be “spread out over a lifetime,” whereas “capital punishment exercises all its powers in an instant” (50). If, as Montesquieu repeatedly stated in Spirit of Laws and Beccaria reiterated in On Crimes and Pun- 5 See also Spurlin for a reception history of Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishment in eighteenth-century America. 6 Beccaria found the death penalty justifiable only in times of war when the imprisonment, rather than execution, of a condemned political figure jeopardized the security of the state or when the execution of a condemned citizen was “the one and only deterrent to dissuade others from committing crimes” (48). 154 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON ishment, any punishment that was unnecessary was “tyrannical,” the death penalty epitomized that tyranny. 7 Beccaria’s utilitarian attack on the death penalty challenged the social contract theories of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Like Rousseau, he subscribed to a theory of government in which citizens renounced part of their individual liberty in order to form a social compact. According to Beccaria, however, members of a social contract never gave the State the right to take their lives. To do so would be to contradict the underlying principle of the contract itself. “By what alleged right can men slaughter their fellows? ,” Beccaria asked in criticizing the all-but-universal practice of capital punishment. “Certainly not by the authority from which sovereignty and law derive. That authority is nothing but the sum of tiny portions of the individual liberty of each person; it represents the general will, which is the aggregate of private wills. Who on earth has ever willed that other men should have the liberty to kill him? How could this minimal sacrifice of the liberty of each individual ever include the sacrifice of the greatest good of all, life itself? ” (48). As his repeated emphasis upon “liberty” suggests, Beccaria’s argument against the death penalty hinged upon the rights and individual liberties the social contract was initially created to protect. First and foremost among these liberties was the right to life, “the greatest good of all.” From this line of reasoning, Beccaria drew the following conclusion: “The death penalty, then, is not a right … but rather a war of the nation against a citizen, a campaign waged on the ground that the nation has judged the destruction of his being to be useful or necessary” (48). This description of capital punishment as a civil war between a nation and its citizens must have caught the attention of Beccaria’s many liberalminded American readers, for whom the death penalty was made anathema to a republican ideal of government. As Masur notes: “No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson credited Beccaria with awakening the world to the unnecessary severity of capital punishment” (53). When once asked as President in 1806 for a list of authors whose works were essential to understanding the 7 Montesquieu takes up the general question of sovereign authority in relation to civil and criminal laws in Volume 1, Book VI of The Spirit of Laws. He writes specifically about tyranny in Book XIX, in the course of which he coins the influential phrase: “All punishment which is not derived from necessity is tyrannical” (Montesquieu 299). Beccaria makes this broad point the specific focus of On Crimes and Punishments. For instance, he begins Chapter II, “The Right to Punish,” with the following claim: “Every punishment which does not derive from absolute necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrannical. The proposition may be made general thus: every act of authority between one man and another that does not derive from absolute necessity is tyrannical. Here, then, is the foundation of the sovereign’s right to punish crimes: the necessity of defending the depository of the public welfare against the usurpations of private individuals” (Beccaria 8). The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 155 proper “organization of society in civil government,” Jefferson responded with only five names: Locke, Sidney, Chipman, the Federalist Papers, and Beccaria (53). Benjamin Rush was another influenced by Beccaria’s utilitarian arguments against the death penalty. The foremost physician in America in the late eighteenth century and, like Jefferson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Rush emerged as the first great spokesperson for the antigallows movement in the newly formed United States. He first aired his views on the death penalty in an essay he delivered on March 9, 1787, at the home of Benjamin Franklin (the essay was later published as An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals and upon Society). However, it was not until 1792, a year after the Bill of Rights was ratified, that Rush published Considerations on the Injustice and Impolicy of Punishing Murder by Death, his definitive statement for the abolition of capital punishment. Clearly influenced by Beccaria (Rush references him twice in the essay), Rush added the claim that mandatory death sentences for capital convictions made juries less willing to reach guilty verdicts as well as the argument that the death penalty encouraged murder by those who, believing suicide a graver offense than murder, took a life in order that the state might take their life in turn. His attack, however, was centered around moral and religious objections to punishment by death - a dominant line of reasoning in the abolition movement from the late eighteenth to the midnineteenth century and one to which I will return later in this essay. But with the question of capital punishment and civil liberties in mind, I want, at this point, to consider only the conclusion of Rush’s Considerations, which draws an extended comparison between monarchical and republican forms of government. In that conclusion, Rush claims: [C]apital punishments are the natural offsprings 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 as 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. They teach us the absurdity of the divine origin of kingly power. They approximate the extreme ranks of men to each other. They restore man to his God - to society - and to himself. They appreciate human life, and increase public and private obligations to preserve it. They consider human sacrifices as no less offensive to the sovereignty of the people, than they are to the majesty of heaven. They view the attributes of government, like the attributes of the deity, as infinitely more honoured by destroying evil by means of merciful than by exterminating punishments. The united states have adopted these peaceful and benevolent forms of government. It becomes them therefore to adopt their mild and benevolent principles. (emphasis original 18-19) 156 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON To highlight the disparity between monarchies and republics in terms of capital punishment, Rush closes his essay with the following comparison: “An execution in a republic is like a human sacrifice in religion. It is an offering to monarchy, and to that malignant being, who has been stiled a murderer from the beginning, and who delights equally in murder, whether it be perpetrated by the cold, but vindictive arm of the law, or by the angry hand of private revenge” (16). By likening an execution in a republic to a “human sacrifice in religion,” Rush calls attention not only to the moral horror of capital punishment but also to its logic of give and take - a logic that, for him, is deeply problematic, because only God has legitimate power over life and death. Yet perhaps the most telling aspect of the analogy comes in the final image of the king himself as a “malignant being” and “murderer.” Such a conflation of licit and illicit forms of capital punishment suggests an undeniable similarity between them - a similarity the State tries to mask by building elaborate rituals and formal procedures around the lawful administration of punishment by death. Beccaria’s and Rush’s attacks on capital punishment laid the foundation for what we can call the republican argument against the death penalty. Many antebellum reformers, including Livingston, would draw upon this argument. But it reached its fullest expression in the legal and political writings of Robert Rantoul, Jr., a prominent lawyer and leading Democrat in Massachusetts who was the foremost opponent of the gallows in the 1830s. Indeed, Rantoul’s writings were foundational to the antebellum campaign for abolition, and for this reason his work deserves close attention. Rantoul, Jr. grew up in a home committed to the reformation of capital punishment. Both his parents supported abolition, and his father publicly expressed his views in 1809, his first year as a member of the House of Representatives. Rantoul, Sr. represented Massachusetts in the House or the Senate for the next twenty-four years, and in 1829 he was appointed to a house judiciary committee to consider revising Massachusetts’ penal code, particularly its capital statutes. Six years later, Robert Rantoul, Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps. In 1834 he was elected to the House as a representative for Massachusetts, and the following year he chaired a committee to consider the “expediency of repealing all … laws” that “provide for the inflection of the punishment of death” (Memoirs 428). From 1835 to 1838, Rantoul delivered annual reports in favor of the abolition of capital punishment. The most famous was his 1836 Report on the Abolition of Capital Punishment. It was printed several times and “obtained a high reputation in Europe,” writes Luther Hamilton, Rantoul’s nineteenth-century biographer, “being considered standard authority, and quoted as such in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy” (429). The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 157 Rantoul begins his 1836 Report by identifying the question of capital punishment “as one of momentous importance, - deeply concerning the general welfare of society by its connection with, and influence upon the prevailing standard of moral rectitude” (436-37). This question, for Rantoul, is paramount because it involves “not only each legislator, but every member of the community [who] ought to feel a solemn interest and an individual responsibility” when weighing the “ultimate decision” over life or death (437). Emphasizing the “individual responsibility” citizens bear when an execution is carried out in their names situates the question of capital punishment in relation to sovereign authority and the people’s responsibility, a vexed and complicated relation since the people in this case are the sovereign. Drawing upon utilitarian and social contract theorists, Rantoul defines society as “nothing but a partnership” - “a limited partnership” - created and maintained for “benevolent and philanthropic” purposes; and the United States, he contends, has accomplished these goals “more uniformly and completely, and with less unnecessary suffering or avoidable injustice, than any association of men that has ever preceded us” (439). Nonetheless, as “the work of finite human faculties,” the laws and administration of any government bear room for improvement, and Rantoul aligns his committee’s report with a “class of reasoners” who “hold the infliction of capital punishment to be one of the most obvious vices in our present mode of administering the common concerns” (439). This preamble on the role and place of government sets up the central question that Rantoul’s Report seeks to address: “We are all of us members, they say,” Rantoul says, “of the great partnership. Each one of us has not only an interest, but an influence, also, in its proceedings. Shall the partnership, under certain circumstances which will probably happen now and then, proceed deliberately, with much ceremony, and in cold blood, to strangle one of its partners? Has society the right to take away life? ” (439). As his attention to society’s deliberate, ceremonious, cold-blooded administration of capital punishment suggests, Rantoul’s answer to the question is a resolute “No.” He goes on to support that answer by elaborating two propositions of Jeffersonian democracy, the first being: “The whole object of government is negative” (439). The purpose of government, Rantoul explains, “is for the protection of property, life, and liberty. It is not for the destruction of any of them. It is not to prescribe how any one may obtain property, how long one may enjoy life, under what conditions he may remain at liberty. It was precisely to prevent the strong from controlling the weak in all these particulars, that government was instituted. It is to take care that no man … shall injure the person, or shorten the life of another” (439). This description of what government is and is not culminates with 158 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON an image of the potential danger to which any government that encroaches upon civil liberties is susceptible: “It is not to become itself the most terrible invader of the interests it was created to protect, acting the part which the lion acted when he was made king of the beasts; nor, except where men are sunk in beastly degradation, will they permit it to usurp and monopolize all the prerogatives which elevate man above the brutes, and make him lord of the lower world” (439). Rantoul’s emphasis on the negative objective of government and its potential for despotism brings him to his second proposition of democracy: “Government is a necessary evil” (439). In elaborating this tenet, Rantoul identifies “protection” as “the only object of society” and claims that we, as citizens, surrender “only so much liberty as it is necessary” in order to preserve “our natural rights” (440). Rantoul, in this respect, follows Montesquieu and Beccaria in invoking a social contract model of government; and like Beccaria, he rejects the notion that “any people has entered into a compact giving unlimited powers for all possible purposes to its government” (440). Rantoul associates this particular position with Rousseau, who “supposes that in consequence of the social contract between the citizens and society, life becomes ‘a conditional grant of the State,’ to be given up whenever the State shall call for it” (440). He belittles this idea as “an obvious absurdity” and denounces Rousseau’s theory as “anti-republican and slavish” (440). The death penalty, for Rantoul, epitomizes this “obvious absurdity” given that it destroys rather than punishes, thereby depriving a citizen of the essential liberty the social contract was designed to protect. Because the social contract only makes sense insofar as it protects the lives of its members, Rantoul claims that the burden of “positive proof” (443) lies with those who support capital punishment by virtue of a social contract theory. In his words, “Let there … be shown some reason for supposing that any sane man has of his accord bartered away his original right in his own existence” (442). According to Rantoul, such an argument presupposes a “preposterous sacrifice,” and he takes this point a step further by examining the question of society’s right to execute its condemned citizens from the perspective of Christian morality: “Not only has no man actually given up to society the right to put an end to his life,” he argues, “not only is no surrender of this right under a social compact ever to be implied, but no man can, under a social contract, or any other contract, give up this right to society, or to any constituent part of society, for this conclusive reason, that the right is not his to be conveyed” (443). That right, Rantoul claims, belongs only to God, the absolute sovereign who alone can take life since he gave it. Thus, by situating an analysis of the death penalty via the social contract within a Christian paradigm, Rantoul redefines the subject positions of individuals and society The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 159 as a whole. If, on the one hand, no individual has the right to relinquish life and, on the other, society has no right to take it, then any social contract under which a death sentence is enacted “would involve the one party in the guilt of suicide, and the other in the guilt of murder” (433). 8 To bolster his argument for abolition, Rantoul cites the opening sentence of Massachusetts’ State Constitution, emphasizing its declared protections of “natural rights, and the blessings of life” (emphasis original 450). He then shows, on the one hand, that the “celebrated instrument” in no way implies that individuals “surrender” this right and, on the other, that the state possesses no right “to take away any natural right of an individual, much less the last and dearest, or to debar him … from life itself.” Rantoul supports this point by referencing Federal law and citing the “first article of the declaration of rights” which protects a citizen’s “liberties” and “those natural, essential, and unalienable rights which are common to all mankind” (450). This reference to the Declaration of Rights is followed in turn by a direct invocation of the U.S. Constitution and its protections of civil liberties. The Bill of Rights, Rantoul argues, is constructed around protecting a citizen’s “unalienable right of enjoying and defending life.” That “right,” he acknowledges, “may be abridged, by the iron rule of stern necessity, when it comes in direct conflict with the same right in another, but, according to our Constitution, it can never be alienated. Let it not be said our Constitution does not forbid capital punishment; for neither does it, by that name, forbid slavery, or the whipping-post, or the pillory, or mutilation, or torture, yet all these are confessedly contrary to the spirit of the Constitution” (450). Claims of capital punishment as barbaric and as a remnant of despotic regimes of bygone eras were common enough in the nineteenth century; but, as death-penalty critic Hugo Adam Bedau suggests, Rantoul was perhaps the only abolitionist prior to the mid-twentieth century to argue against capital punishment on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the Constitution’s Bill of Rights (v). In his Report, this argument becomes overt when Rantoul goes on to associate the death penalty with the Eighth Amendment and its prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment: “The whipping-post and the pillory survived, for a period, the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments. They have disappeared, and the gallows, which is more unusual than either of those barbarities had been, and infinitely more cruel and revolting, must soon follow in their train” (451). In turning from Rantoul to the proliferation of anti-gallows arguments in the 1840s, we will 8 Rantoul’s Christian argument was popularized by Charles Spear in Essays on the Punishment of Death (1844), a study that, by May 1845, had sold over 5,000 copies and by 1846 had gone through seven editions (Masur 136-37). 160 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON find a range of attacks upon the institution of capital punishment deployed by reformers; none of them, however, will explicitly invoke the Bill of Rights as Rantoul does. IV. If Robert Rantoul, Jr. was the leading opponent of the gallows in the 1830s, John L. O’Sullivan was the foremost advocate for abolition in the 1840s. Like Rantoul, O’Sullivan was trained as a lawyer and deeply committed to the Democratic party; however, he came to politics as a young newspaper and periodical editor. In 1840, O’Sullivan ran for a seat in the New York State Assembly. He won, and the campaign that secured him the election was largely based on the reformation of capital punishment. During his two years in office, O’Sullivan dedicated most of his time to effecting that reform. In 1841, he was appointed chair of a special committee to consider the expediency of abolishing the death penalty in New York. That committee exhaustively researched the subject and presented an abolition bill that, after considerable delay in the House and negative publicity by opponents, was defeated by a slim margin. O’Sullivan was convinced that the measure would pass the following year, but it failed by the same margin. O’Sullivan’s labor, however, was not wasted. It resulted in the production of his Report in Favor of The Abolition of the Punishment of Death by Law, an eloquent compendium of, in his words, “the leading arguments and evidences, derived from revelation, reason, and experience, which are necessarily involved in the general discussion of the subject of Capital Punishment” (Report 5). First printed in great number for presentation before the New York state legislature on April 14, 1841, O’Sullivan’s Report was reprinted as a book for popular consumption later that year. By October, “being called for by public demand” (4), a second edition of O’Sullivan’s book was published, and for the next twenty years it served as the standard reference in debates about the legitimacy and place of capital punishment in the United States (Sampson 101). The strength of O’Sullivan’s Report lies in its popular appeal as well as its reformulation and polishing of powerful arguments developed earlier by Beccaria, Rush, Livingston, Rantoul, and others. For instance, O’Sullivan closely attends to “scriptural evidence” to argue that the Bible condemns rather than supports capital punishment. He also points to historical precedent, showing not only that ancient Rome and Egypt experimented with periods of abolition but that abolition in contemporary Tuscany, Belgium, and even despotic Russia (under Elizabeth and the Catherine II) has led to decreased rates of crime and murder. Turning to the United States, The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 161 O’Sullivan claims that the drastic reduction in the number of capital statutes over recent years and the increasing reluctance of juries to convict in capital cases reflect evolving standards of morality. Such evidence, he reasons, suggests that changing the maximum punishment from death to life imprisonment would result in lower crime rates and higher rates of conviction. In addition to these arguments, O’Sullivan calls attention to the horrors of executing the innocent, emphasizing the fact that once a death sentence is carried out there is no way to undo it in the event of error. In this way, he synthesizes disparate arguments in favor of abolition - and he does so through a range of approaches. Part statistical analysis and use of utilitarian and republican arguments against the death penalty, and partly moral anecdote and exegesis of Biblical authority on capital punishment, the Report makes appeals to sympathy, reason, and historical example in its broadscale assault upon the gallows in America. While deploying a range of arguments and rhetorical strategies, the Report is centered around the question of deterrence and the psychological impact of executions, a mainstay in debates about the death penalty and an argument developed at length by Edward Livingston, from whose work O’Sullivan draws heavily. The punishment by death for murder, Livingston had argued in his introduction to the Codes of Crimes and Punishment, not only “fails in any repressive effect, but … promotes the crime” (201). Livingston made this point after citing a recent incident published in a Pennsylvania newspaper in which a man committed murder on the way back from witnessing a public execution. This example, Livingston claimed, illustrates the proclivity of the human mind “to imitate that which has been strongly impressed on the senses,” and it led him to conclude: “The lawgiver, therefore, should mark this … propensity of human nature; and beware how he repeats, in his punishments, the very acts he wishes to repress, and makes them examples to follow rather than to avoid” (201-02). Reformulating and quoting Livingston at length (he even cites the example from the Pennsylvania paper), O’Sullivan lays out his argument about the death penalty’s failure as a deterrent and its adverse psychological affects roughly halfway through his Report. In doing so, one gets the sense that he has built up to this argument as he singles it out as the “strongest objection against the punishment of death” (84) and spends considerable time working through all its implications. In fact, he condenses the multiple dimensions of the argument into a pithy statement that he italicizes and repeats verbatim some fifteen pages later: “the executioner is the indirect cause of more murders and more deaths than he ever punishes or avenges” (85, 98). This statement sums up a central objection to the gallows in a memorable trope. It turns the very instrument intended to deter capital crimes into an “indirect cause” of them. As the language of the trope indicates, O’Sullivan 162 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON is more interested in the executioner than the gallows itself. Highlighting the role of the executioner calls attention to human agency; it places responsibility for the death penalty as a failed deterrent not only upon the actual hangman who stands upon the scaffold and executes the law but, more importantly, upon anyone who stands in support of the gallows in the face of the surging reform movement. O’Sullivan’s figure of the executioner as “indirect cause” is further complicated by the fact that, in many states in the early 1840s, the death penalty was no longer enacted publicly, as it was at the time when Livingston was writing his reports. But just because executions were no longer performed publicly in states such as New York, to whose legislature O’Sullivan’s Report is addressed, by no means made them “private.” For one thing, the common designation of “private” is a misnomer, because executions were still carried out in the name of “the people” and through civil or public authority. There is, however, even more at stake here. As executions moved from the public square to the enclosed space of the jail-yard, where fewer spectators could see them, print media became the central means by which executions were made public. To be sure, capital crimes and capital punishment had been newsworthy and represented or documented - in some form - since colonial times. Advances in print technology and the emergence of the penny press in the 1830s, however, contributed substantially to the proliferation of “gallows literature”: that is, representations of, or responses to, the cultural ritual of capital punishment in newspapers, magazines, trial reports and pamphlets, short stories, poems, and novels. Thus, precisely when the actual spectacle of lawful executions moved behind prison walls and became less and less visible, the gallows as trope and discursive topic of debate became more and more visible, thereby rendering executions and the controversy surrounding them more public than ever. At the center of these debates was The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, a leading antebellum journal founded and edited by O’Sullivan. In the 1840s, the Democratic Review published dozens of articles advocating the abolition of the death penalty, including feature essays devoted to the subject, reviews of important books on the topic, proceedings from anti-gallows conventions, and reports from legislative committees. O’Sullivan wrote some of these articles himself, such as “Capital Punishment” (April 1843), an extended reflection upon the cultural wars surrounding the death penalty, and “The Anti-Gallows Movement” (April 1844). The latter took shape as an “Address to the Public” (430), which called to action reform-minded Americans through the announcement of Anti-Draco, a new “monthly” to be published by The American Society for the Collection and Diffusion of Information in Relation to the Punishment The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 163 of Death. 9 O’Sullivan was the corresponding secretary of the society; its president was the famous poet William Cullen Bryant; and other committee members included Horace Greely, a well-known lecturer and the founding editor of both The New Yorker and the New York Tribune, and William H. Channing, a Unitarian clergyman with strong ties to Emerson and the Transcendental movement. O’Sullivan’s journalism in the Democratic Review did much to galvanize public opinion about the death penalty. Perhaps nothing was more stimulating than “The Gallows and the Gospel: An Appeal to Clergymen Opposing Themselves to the Abolition of the One, in the Name of the Other,” the lead article in the journal’s March 1843 issue. During the antebellum period, abolitionists and retentionists alike relied heavily on biblical authority and Christian morality; and we can get a clear idea about how O’Sullivan appealed both to the Bible and Christianity through a comparative analysis of “The Gallows and the Gospel” and the scriptural arguments he developed earlier in his 1841 Report to the New York State Legislature. Framed as “An Appeal,” “The Gallows and the Gospel” begins by attacking the position of clergymen who, in face of the growing reform movement, have recently come out in defense of the death penalty. “Some of you,” O’Sullivan writes, “appear to have felt especially called upon to cast yourselves in the path of this advancing movement of opinion; to have taken the institution in question under your particular professional patronage and protection, and marshalling yourselves in organized array, as it were, around the foot of the Scaffold, have seemed ambitious to assume the function of the very Body-Guard of the Hangman” (227). As his language indicates, O’Sullivan envisions the debates surrounding capital punishment as a virtual war: on one side, reformers such as himself firing salvos at the gallows; on the other, retentionist clergymen “marshalling” themselves around the scaffold to serve as the Hangman’s “Body-Guard.” Such imagery calls to mind O’Sullivan’s memorable trope from the Report (i.e. “the executioner is the indirect cause of more murders and more deaths than he ever punishes or avenges” [O’Sullivan 85, 98]), thus implicating these clergymen in a process which, from the reformers’ perspective, produces rather than deters the crime of murder. Although ostensibly addressed to clergy opposed to abolition, O’Sullivan’s main audience turns out to be “the large number of the undecided and indifferent, who may never have had a combined opportunity and disposition” to interrogate the death penalty through “Biblical criticism” and applied Christian ethics (228). He seeks to 9 The Society soon changed its name to the New York State Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. The Anti-Draco, edited by O’Sullivan, was not published beyond its maiden issue of March 1844. 164 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON provide that opportunity by presenting “an outline of the Scriptural Argument by which we refute the common objections opposed to us from the Bible, and on which we claim the right to invoke their favor and co-operation with these efforts” (228). The argument O’Sullivan outlines in “The Gallows and the Gospel” is essentially an elaboration of the position he asserts at the outset of his Report. That position holds that, contrary to popular opinion, the Bible condemns rather than sanctions the death penalty. For instance, O’Sullivan claims that “the Bible contains no injunction nor sanction of the practice of capital punishment; but … the very reverse is most unequivocally impressed upon its pages, in their outset as in their close” (29). Rehearsing a familiar argument of Benjamin Rush and others, he reads Genesis 9: 6 (“Whoso sheddeth the blood of man, by man his blood shall be shed”) as prophecy rather than injunction. That is, the verse serves as a prediction or a denunciatory warning of a possible future event, much like the proverb derived from Matthew 26: 52, “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword,” or the one from Revelations 13: 10, “He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity.” It does not function as a universal commandment, such as “Thou Shall Not Kill” (Exodus 20: 13). As one might expect, the sixth commandment plays a crucial role in O’Sullivan’s scriptural argument. That commandment stands, he says, “naked and sacred” in its “simplicity” and is “absolute, unequivocal, universal” (Report 22). It cannot be transformed into “Thou shall not commit murder - but mayest kill him who has committed murder” (22). To be sure, it contains “no proviso - no exception - no qualification” (22). O’Sullivan also finds evidence against capital punishment in the story of Cain and Abel, which he identifies in “The Gallows and the Gospel” as the “lesson set by the example of God himself in the case of the first murder” (233). In the Report, O’Sullivan had pushed this reading further: “Yet was death the sentence of Cain? ,” he asks rhetorically. “On the contrary, his doom is written that he should be ‘a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth,’ the earth ceasing to yield her strength to his tillage and a mark being set on him, ‘lest any finding him should kill him’” (Report 28). What is more, O’Sullivan points out, God reiterated the proscription against taking Cain’s life with these words: “Whoso slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold …” (28). In “The Gallows and the Gospel,” O’Sullivan adds to and complicates his biblical criticism through a linguistic analysis of Genesis 9: 6. He begins this line of argument by situating the verse within its supportive context, reminding readers that it should not be interpreted “in the absolute imperative sense for which our opponents contend - and made universal and perpetual, as they interpret its intended application” (“Gallows” 299). He then attends to the linguistic construction of the verse in its original Hebrew and The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 165 provides a literal translation of it: “Shedding blood of man in man his (or its) blood will be shed” (299). To produce the common English translation of the verse, O’Sullivan argues, three assumptions must be made - none of them “necessarily resid[ing] anywhere in the terms of the Hebrew itself” (299). Those assumptions are: 1. the participle shedding is not only made personal and masculine, but it is confined to the personal and masculine sense, in the words, “whoso sheddeth; ” 2. The verb which in the original is the simple future tense, so as to be rendered in Latin effundetur and in English will be shed, must receive an imperative sense so as to be read, shall be shed; and 3. The expression which is literally in man in the original, must be made to denote agency, by selecting and assigning to the preposition employed one only of its numerous meanings, so as to be converted into “by man.” It is only after the performance of this triple process that the original Hebrew … becomes translated, or rather transformed, into the common English reading of our Bibles. (229) Of these three assumptions, O’Sullivan focuses on the second. The third is important because it denotes human agency and limits the traditional application of the verse, while in the original Hebrew the object pronoun (him/ its) could be granting permission to put to death beasts - not men - who kill men. But the second assumption goes to the heart of the matter: should Genesis 9.6 be read as an injunction and thereby given “imperative force” (299); or should it be interpreted as simply declarative of some “denunciatory future”? (230) By rigorously analyzing the mode and mood of the Hebrew verb shophaich (i.e. shedding/ will shed/ may shed), O’Sullivan attends to what we would call today the performative force of the biblical verse in question. To do so, however, is not merely to engage in an academic exercise in splitting theoretical hairs. It goes to the heart of the matter by questioning the Biblical authority upon which many prominent defenders of the gallows have staked their claims. In a powerful analogy that challenges the performative force often granted to Genesis 9.6, O’Sullivan links his Biblical criticism to the republican argument against the death penalty: “To give it [shophaich] the imperative sense,” he claims, “and then to claim our obedience as a command is not only to beg the whole question, but even impiously to clothe in the garb of a divine authority that which is the mere imposture of human assumption. In the present application of it, it may not unfairly be compared to an act of forging a sovereign’s signet to a death warrant” (230). By likening traditional interpretations of Genesis 9.6 as divine injunction to “the forging of a sovereign’s signet to the death warrant,” O’Sullivan goes so far as to imply perjury, charging those who continue to insist upon the verse as a commandment of “impiously” dressing up a mere “human assumption” in the garb of “divine authority.” In doing so, he broaches the complicated ques- 166 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON tion of civil liberties and capital punishment - a question he, like Livingston and especially Rantoul before him, takes up in his Report, but one that lies beyond the scope of his analysis in “The Gallows and the Gospel.” In his spirited assault upon traditional interpretations of Genesis 9.6, O’Sullivan certainly had in mind Reverend George Barrell Cheever, a Presbyterian minister and the foremost defender of the gallows who had recently authored Punishment by Death: Its Authority and Expediency (1842). In that book, the most famous defense of capital punishment in American history, Cheever unequivocally champions the gallows, building his argument primarily around an appeal to divine authority by virtue of Genesis 9.6. But it was not just the recent publication of Punishment by Death that would have prompted O’Sullivan to think of Cheever. A month before “The Gallows and the Gospel” was published, O’Sullivan had publicly debated Cheever in New York City on the question, “Ought Capital Punishment to Be Abolished? ” 10 The debates - which were held at the Broadway Tabernacle and took place on January 27, February 3, and February 17 - were well attended and generated much press and further coverage for some time to come. In fact, we get a literary rendition of the O’Sullivan-Cheever debate from the pen of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a close friend of O’Sullivan as well as a contributor of over twenty works to the Democratic Review, including “Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent,” which was published alongside of “The Gallows and the Gospel” in the March 1843 issue of the magazine. 11 The allusion to the O’Sullivan-Cheever debate occurs in a pivotal moment in “Earth’s Holocaust,” Hawthorne’s 1844 tale which recounts its nar- 10 In his public debate with O’Sullivan at the Tabernacle, Cheever built his defense of the gallows around divine authority, identifying Genesis 9.6 as the “citadel of the argument, commanding and sweeping the whole subject” (Capital Punishment 39). In the introduction to the Second Part of Punishment by Death, Cheever had first made this argument in light of opposing interpretations of Genesis 9.6 as prediction rather than command: “It is argued by our opponents that the statute in Genesis is simply and merely permissive, but not an injunction. But it follows, according to this construction, that God gives to any and every man the permission to kill the murderer” (120). For discussions of the O’Sullivan-Cheever debate, see Masur, Sampson, and Mackey (Hanging). 11 Between October 1837 and April 1845, Hawthorne contributed twenty-three works to the Democratic Review (Hawthorne Selected Letters 139). In addition to “Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent,” Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” was published along with “Capital Punishment: The Proceeding of the Recent Convention of the Friends of the Abolition of the Punishment of Death” in the Democratic Review’s June 1844 issue. In August 1846, moreover, an article Hawthorne edited, “Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner,” was published alongside “An Essay on the Ground and Reason of Punishment,” a featured work which attacked the death penalty and advocated for its abolition. The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 167 rator’s journey to the American Midwest to witness the immolation of all the world’s “worn-out trumpery,” its “condemned rubbish” (Mosses 381). Midway through the tale, following the successive destruction of signs of rank and social prestige, liquors and tea, articles of high fashions, and instruments of war, the body of reformers responsible for maintaining the great bonfire - this “Earth’s Holocaust” - turns its attention to instruments of capital punishment: “old implements of cruelty - those horrible monsters of mechanism - those inventions which it seemed to demand something worse than man’s natural heart to contrive, and which had lurked in the dusky nooks of ancient prisons, the subject of terror-stricken legends” (392). Halters, headsmen’s axes, and the guillotine are among the instruments of death thrown into the fire, but the imminent destruction of the gallows generates the most interest from the crowd, even sparking a debate between two men likely drawn from Cheever and O’Sullivan respectively: “Stay, my brethren! ,” cries a defender of capital punishment as the gallows is about to be thrust into the fire. “You are misled by a false philanthropy! - you know not what you do. The gallows is a heaven-oriented instrument! Bear it back, then, reverently, and set it up in its old place; else the world will fall to speedy ruin and desolation! ” (393) In response to these assertions, “a leader in the reform” commands his brethren: “Onward, onward! … Into the flames with the accursed instrument of man’s bloody policy! How can human law inculcate benevolence and love, while it persists in setting up the gallows as its chief symbol! One heave more, good friends, and the world will be redeemed from its greatest error! ” (393). The gallows is finally pushed into the fire, and this act appears to be a good thing, as Hawthorne’s narrator had moments earlier applauded the destruction of halters, axes, and the guillotine, commenting that their immolation in the fire “was sufficient to convince mankind of the long and deadly error of human law” (392). Yet one cannot say for certain that this radical reform is a good thing, since the tale slips unmistakably into parody as marriage certificates, written constitutions of all kinds, works of literature, and even the Bible later become fuel to feed the reformers’ fire. While it might be a stretch to call “Earth’s Holocaust” abolitionist in orientation, one could say that about Hawthorne’s “The New Adam and Eve,” a story first published just one month before O’Sullivan’s “The Gallows and the Gospel” in the February 1843 issue of the Democratic Review. In that story, Hawthorne imagines the return of the world’s primogenitors after the “Day of Doom has burst upon the globe, and swept away the whole race of men” (Mosses 247). Roughly midway through the tale, the “New” Adam and Eve are depicted as they enter a prison and wander through its bleak corridors and narrow cells. The novelty of Adam and Eve’s experience provides Hawthorne’s narrator with the opportunity to comment generally 168 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON on the sad state of crime and punishment with which the recently deceased world was plagued, but nothing within the prison provokes strong reaction from either Adam and Eve or the narrator. All that changes, however, when, “passing from the interior of the prison into the space within its outward wall, Adam pauses beneath a structure of the simplest contrivance, yet altogether unaccountable to him” (255). This structure, we are told, “consists merely of two upright posts, supporting a transverse beam, from which dangles a cord” (255). The menacing object that Adam finds “altogether unaccountable” is, of course, the gallows; and its foreboding presence elicits the following exchange between Adam and Eve: “Eve, Eve! ” cries Adam, shuddering with a nameless horror. “What can this thing be? ” “I know not,” answers Eve; “but, Adam, my heart is sick! There seems to be no more sky, - no more sunshine! ” (255) Without knowledge of the world to which the gallows belongs, neither Adam nor Eve can place “this thing” within their interpretive frame. Nonetheless, intuition into the instrument’s cruel design sends a “nameless horror” through Adam and affects Eve with heartache and a momentary sense of despair. Adam and Eve’s response prompts the narrator to justify the couple’s reaction: Well might Adam shudder and poor Eve be sick at heart; for this mysterious object was the type of mankind’s whole system, in regard to the great difficulties which God had given to be solved - a system of fear and vengeance, never successful, yet followed to the last. Here, on the morning when the final summons came, a criminal - one criminal, where none were guiltless - had died upon the gallows. (255) This authorial intrusion serves not only to endorse Adam and Eve’s moral response but also to raise questions about the institution of capital punishment, “a system,” the narrator asserts, “of fear and vengeance, never successful, yet followed to the last.” Such a description calls attention to negative affects of the death penalty (i.e. “fear” and “vengeance”), and these affects are given dramatic expression through the example of that “final summons” when “a criminal - one criminal, where none were guiltless - had died upon the gallows.” By shifting mid-sentence from the indefinite, “a criminal,” to the definite, “one criminal,” the narrator at once suggests the finality of all executions and the singularity of this one, while the emphasis upon the universal guilt of humanity undercuts the position of moral superiority from which a society typically justifies the death penalty. In addition to Hawthorne, other prominent literary figures of the day wrote anti-gallows work for the Democratic Review. Four months before The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 169 the publication of “The New Adam and Eve,” John Greenleaf Whittier published “Lines, Written on Reading Several Pamphlets Published by Clergymen Against the Abolition of the Gallows” in the October 1842 issue of the journal. Through an appeal to sympathy and compassion, and by situating the gallows at the tail end of a history of torture and cruelty inflicted by men in the name of God, Whittier indicts the practice of capital punishment in contemporary America, asking those of “milder faith” near the poem’s end: “Will ye become the Druids of our time? / Set up your scaffold-alters in our land, / And, consecrators of Law’s darkest crime, / Urge to its loathsome work the Hangman’s hand? ” (“Lines” 375). Besides writing this poem in reaction to clergymen defending capital punishment, Whittier’s anti-gallows poetry (he also published the anti-gallows poem, “The Human Sacrifice,” in 1843) was motivated by the great British poet William Wordsworth, who had recently written a series of sonnets in support of the death penalty. In fact, in the March 1842 issue of the Democratic Review, Whittier attacked the renowned poet’s position in a featured essay titled “Wordsworth’s Sonnets on the Punishment of Death.” Whittier begins the essay by expressing sad regret that the “great English master” has written “in justification and support of the practice of Capital Punishment,” a practice which Whittier calls “one of the most hideous and horrible barbarisms yet lingering to disgrace the statute-books of modern civilization” (“Wordsworth’s Sonnets” 272). Whittier acknowledges that, because of “the strongly conservative cast of his mind and political opinions,” one could not expect Wordsworth to come out in favor of abolition. “Yet,” he continues, “to behold him take to the sacred lyre, and attune its chords to the harsh creaking of the scaffold and the clanking of the victim’s chains, seems almost a profanation and a sacrilege - as though a harp of heaven were transported from its proper sphere and its congenial themes, to be struck by some impious hand to the foul and hideous harmonies of hell” (273). Following these introductory remarks, Whittier cites in full Wordsworth’s fourteen “Sonnets on the Punishment of Death” and then offers a stanza-by-stanza analysis of them. In doing so, he does not focus on the tone and meter of Wordsworth’s verse, as one might expect him to do given his metaphor of the “sacred lyre” and his description of the “harsh creaking of the scaffold and the clanking of the victim’s chains” to which, he claims, Wordsworth’s poems are attuned. Rather, he attends primarily to the assumptions informing Wordsworth’s position and to the arguments his poetry produces, exposing the false premises he finds in the sonnets and providing counterarguments to them. For instance, when Wordsworth’s speaker at one point celebrates the gallows as an instrument of deterrence, Whittier references empirical evidence suggesting the contrary and 170 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON evokes the memorable image of the executioner as “indirect cause” which O’Sullivan first coined in his Report: “that the executioner has been himself the very cause of a far greater number [of murders] than he has ever punished or avenged” (279). Near the end of the essay, however, Whittier employs a different strategy by citing in full an anti-gallows poem by Lydia Huntley Sigourney. By quoting Sigourney’s “The Execution” and by later writing his own anti-gallows poems, Whittier attempts to displace Wordsworth’s “Sonnets” with memorable imagery and poetic language that argue for abolition. Whittier was not the only famous poet to publish an anti-gallows essay in the Democratic Review. In November 1845 Walt Whitman published “A Dialogue,” an imaginative essay that stages a conversation between a condemned murderer and society on the eve of the condemned’s scheduled execution. An analysis of Whitman’s essay returns us to and complicates a central argument of my essay: that the high stakes and sharply delineated contours of capital punishment dramatize the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority in its starkest terms. Like Hawthorne’s “The New Adam and Eve,” Whitman’s “A Dialogue” is framed as a parable. It begins by posing the following question: “What would be thought of a man who, having an ill humor in his blood, should strive to cure himself by only cutting off the festers, the outward signs of it, as they appeared upon the surface? ” (360) Starting off in this way enables Whitman to foreground questions about social complicity and responsibility for criminal acts; the “man” represents society as a whole, whereas the “festers” signify criminals who are, in turn, “outward signs” of a diseased social body. As Whitman explains: “Put criminals for festers and society for the diseased man, and you may get the spirit of that part of our laws which expects to abolish wrong-doing by sheer terror - by cutting off the wicked, and taking no heed of the causes of the wickedness” (360). Following this short preamble, Whitman proceeds with the dialogue, which takes shape as an exchange between “the imposing majesty of the people speaking on the one side, a pallid, shivering convict on the other” (360). The convict initiates the discussion by admitting to have committed a “wrong … in an evil hour” when “a kind of frenzy came over me, and I struck my neighbor a heavy blow, which killed him” (360). Summarizing the convict’s crime in this manner emphasizes murder as typically an act perpetrated in a heat of passion and committed by a person much different in mind and disposition than the one now awaiting execution. To the convict’s admission of guilt, society flatly responds: “you must be killed in return” (361). When the convict then asks, “Is there no plan by which I can benefit my fellow-creatures, even at the risk of my own life? ,” society again replies tersely in the negative: “None … you must be strangled - choked to death. The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 171 If your passions are so ungovernable that people are in danger from them, we shall hang you” (361). To this response the condemned asks “Why? ,” suggesting that incarceration in a strong prison would protect society from him and that he would gladly work while in prison to defray the expense of housing him there. Once again, society gives its blunt response of “No,” adding this time that “we shall strangle you; your crime deserves it” (361), to which the “murderer” (as Whitman now refers to him) replies: “Have you, then, committed no crimes? ” (361) Putting society on the defensive enables Whitman’s murderer to implicate “the people” in the production of crime. The dialogue now shifts to a discussion of a variety of crimes that, in society’s words, have not “come within the clutches of any statute,” but nonetheless lead daily to the ruination and even death of many (361). This inadvertent admission of guilt provides the convict the opportunity not only to comment generally on social responsibility, thereby implicating society in the cause of crimes such as the one for which he himself is to be executed; it also enables Whitman to expose a double standard in a theory of justice which holds that an individual, when sinned against, should forgive, while society ought to withhold forgiveness and exact payment in kind for murder. When the convict argues this latter point and asks why should not the people, like the individual, be guided by the principle of forgiveness, society responds: “The case is different. … We are a community - you are but a single individual. You should forgive your enemies” (361). The condemned then poses a rhetorical question which he answers by way of analogy: “And are you not ashamed,” asks the culprit, “to forget that as a community which you expect me to remember as a man? When the town clock goes wrong, shall each little private watch be abased for failing to keep the true time? What are communities but congregated individuals? And if you, in the potential force of your high position, deliberatively set examples of retribution, how dare you look to me for self-denial, forgiveness, and the meekest and most difficult virtues? ” (361) The convict’s comparison of the “town clock” to “each little private watch” is telling. It suggests that the internal watches (or alarm clocks) of each private citizen are set according to the town clock which is set up high as a model. Therefore, when society sets the example of retribution when a murder is committed, how can the people expect an individual, when provoked or enraged, to act according to a different and higher standard? The convict reinforces this point by saying that he killed simply because his “blood was up” (361), even though he knew the lawful penalty for such a crime would be death. With society now squarely on the defensive, the convict mounts an assault upon the death penalty, deploying a series of questions which the 172 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON people cannot answer satisfactorily. Readers of the Democratic Review are thus left with a clear sense of the moral horrors and contradictions of a justice system that not only condemns lethal violence by using such violence itself, but also demands forgiveness from its private citizens for acts it deems unforgivable. Near the end of “A Dialogue,” the conversation takes an interesting turn when the issue of the death penalty’s spectacle of violence is broached. Both the convict and society agree that such a spectacle is “degrading and anti-humanizing” (362), and the people congratulate themselves on the passage of recent laws making executions in many states private. The convict, however, points out that executions are still public in many states and, more importantly, that so-called “private” executions are by no means private when “everybody reads newspapers, and every newspaper seeks for graphic accounts of these executions” so that “such things can never be private” (362). Continuing in this vain, the convict accuses newspapers and various print media in carrying out, as it were, “literary executions” (my phrase). Thus, he disabuses the people of the notion that executions have become private and less visible in society. In fact, the convict argues precisely the opposite point, using press coverage of political acts in Congress as a heuristic analogue: “What a small portion of your citizens are eye-witnesses of things done in Congress; yet they are surely not private, for not a word officially spoken in the Halls of the Capitol, but is through the press made as public as if every American’s ear were within hearing distance of the speaker’s mouth. The whole spectacle of these … executions is more faithfully seen, and more deliberately dwelt upon, through the printed narratives, than if people beheld it with their bodily eyes, and then no more. Print preserves it. It passes from hand to hand, and even boys and girls are imbued with its spirit and horrid essence. Your legislators have forbidden public executions; they must go farther. They must forbid the relation of them by tongue, letter, or picture; for your physical sight is not the only avenue through which the subtle virus will reach you. Nor is the effect lessened because it is more covert and more widely diffused. Rather, indeed, the reverse. As things are, the masses take it for granted that the system and its results are right.” (362-63) By advocating restrictions upon the press and its coverage of executions, Whitman’s convict pushes the argument forbidding the representation of lawful executions further than Whitman himself would take it. 12 After all, 12 In light of the convict’s argument, it is interesting to note that, for a short time in the nineteenth century, the state of New York did make it illegal for the press to represent or provide the details of an execution. As legal scholar Michael Madow explains: “In 1888, the New York legislature, having grown impatient with what it believed were sensationalistic news reports, made it a crime for any newspaper to publish the details of an execution. The New York press defied the ban and waged a vigorous and successful campaign for its repeal on behalf of ‘the people’s right to know’” (467). The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 173 in publishing “A Dialogue” Whitman participates in the very discursive activity against which the convict speaks. And Whitman, the journalist, did go on to publish other such pieces, including a bitterly sarcastic article, “Hurrah for Hanging! ,” in the March 23 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1846). That article, Whitman writes in the piece, was occasioned by “the butcher[ing] of five human beings last week in Cayuga co., in this state - as we have already published the dark and dreadful narrative” (Uncollected Poetry and Prose 108). He went on to conclude the Daily Eagle report by ironically urging readers to “let the law keep up with the murderer, and see who will get the victory at last” (109). Yet Whitman’s political agitation did not stop there. He also promoted the discussion of reports concerning capital punishment in the meetings and social activism of the Brooklyn Association for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, an organization Whitman co-founded in 1846. Nonetheless, the point Whitman’s sympathetic convict makes is an important one: the so-called “privatization” of lawful hangings in no way diminishes the psychological impact they may have upon society. Indeed, the proliferation of “printed narratives” (“A Dialogue” 34) of executions occurred in large part because the actual spectacle of lawful violence had moved behind prison walls and had therefore become much less visible. For this reason, and due to the unprecedented debates about capital punishment in the decades preceding the Civil War, one could follow the convict and say that executions in the 1840s and early 50s had never before been so public. V. More public than ever before, but today these debates are largely forgotten by critics of American literature. Yet a case can be made that the controversy surrounding the death penalty should be seen as a crucial part of the context for the flowering of the so-called “American Renaissance” in the early 1850s. Whitman, of course, was a crucial figure in that movement, and if, as David S. Reynolds has suggested, Whitman’s 1846 article “Hurrah for Hanging! ” was likely influenced by “Hurrah for the Gallows! ” (Quaker xxxi), a sardonic chapter lampooning capital punishment in George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845), then the debates about capital punishment themselves lie “beneath the American Renaissance” and constitute some of the roots which lead to the invigoration of American literature at mid-century. In fact, these debates have left an indelible imprint on many works by classic American Renaissance writers. There is, for instance, the famous opening scene in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), which 174 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON stages the scene of capital punishment, even though an execution itself does not occur. Drawing upon the dramaturgy of the death penalty, the scene begins with the image of “The Prison Door,” out of which Hester Prynne emerges like a “condemned criminal” coming “forth to his doom” (36). Readers are then told that the crowd gathered to witness Hester’s punishment “betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment” (37). And just before the punishment commences, some of the spectators push their way forward as if to be “nearest to the scaffold at an execution” (38). Even the dialogue among these spectators concerns the place and purpose of capital punishment: “This woman has brought shame upon us all and ought to die,” a matronly woman declares. “Is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book.” In response, a man from the crowd asks, “is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome fear of the gallows? ” (39). Hester, of course, is not executed; neither she nor the crowd expects such a punishment to occur. Nonetheless, her presence upon the scaffold around which the community gathers plays off and becomes part of the cultural ritual of capital punishment that is dramatized in many novels and romances of the period, such as Lippard’s The Quaker City, Sylvester Judd’s Margaret: A Tale of the Real ands the Ideal (1845; 1851), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Ways of the Hour (1850), and William Gilmore Simms’ Beauchampe; or the Kentucky Tragedy (1842; 1856). Hawthorne certainly knew the writings of Rantoul as well as those of O’Sullivan. After all, Rantoul served as an attorney for the defense in Salem’s famous Joseph Knapp murder trial (1830), an important source Hawthorne drew upon when writing The House of the Seven Gables (1851). What is more, while an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, Hawthorne was an avid reader of John Neal, the author of Logan, whose execution scene and dialogue I began this essay by analyzing. 13 Yet the most overtly dramatic enactment of a death sentence in antebellum fiction occurs in a scene from White Jacket (1850), Herman Melville’s autobiographical novel of his tour aboard a U.S. frigate in 1843-44. That scene takes place in Chapter 70, “Monthly Muster Round the Capstan.” In it, White Jacket, Melville’s principled yet good-natured narrator, describes an event singular but hardly exceptional in the world of a man-of-war: the reading of the Articles of War, the U.S. Navy’s code of prohibitions and 13 In “P.’s Correspondence,” Hawthorne pays odd homage to Neal: “How slowly our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else he never could keep himself so quiet” (Mosses 426). For accounts of Neal’s influence on Hawthorne, see Reynolds and Lease. The Anti-Gallows Movement in Antebellum America 175 punishments. The scene dramatizes a subject’s direct confrontation with the death sentence as such, and for this reason it is worth citing at length. It begins by staging the solemnity of the monthly muster, “which is rendered even terrible,” White Jacket says, “by the reading of the Articles of War by the captain’s clerk before the assembled ship’s company, who, in testimony of their enforced reverence for the code, stand bareheaded till the last sentence is pronounced” (295). White Jacket then continues: To a mere amateur reader the quiet perusal of these Articles of War would be attended with some nervous emotions. Imagine, then, what my feelings must have been, when, with my hat deferentially in my hand, I stood before my lord and master, Captain Claret, and heard these Articles read as the law and gospel, the infallible, unappealable, dispensation and code, whereby I lived, and moved, and had my being on board of the United States Ship Neversink. Of some twenty offences - made penal - that a seaman may commit, and which are specified in this code, thirteen are punishable by death. “Shall suffer death! ” This was the burden of nearly every Article read by the captain’s clerk; for he seemed to have been instructed to omit the longer Articles, and only present those which were brief and to the point. “Shall suffer death! ” The repeated announcement falls on your ear like the intermitting discharge of artillery. After it has been repeated again and again, you listen to the reader as he deliberately begins a new paragraph; you hear him reciting the involved, but comprehensive and clear arrangement of the sentence, detailing all possible particulars of the offence described, and you breathlessly await, whether that clause also is going to be concluded by the discharge of the terrible minute-gun. When, lo! it again booms on your ear - shall suffer death! No reservations, no contingencies; not the remotest promise of pardon or reprieve; not a glimpse of commutation of the sentence; all hope and consolation is shut out - shall suffer death! (emphasis original 295-96) The passage begins with marked solemnity, as White Jacket notes how each sailor’s subjectivity is constituted through the Articles of War, a document “read as the law and gospel, the infallible, unappealable, dispensation and code, whereby I lived, and moved, and had my being on board of the United States Ship Neversink.” The passage also starts off matter-of-factly, stating the number of penal offenses under military law and specifying that thirteen of the twenty are “punishable by death.” It then shifts dramatically in tone and perspective as White Jacket cites the operative phrase of these thirteen statutes, “Shall suffer death! ,” and provides his subjective response to it. In doing so, he moves from the first-person, past tense to the second-person, present tense in order to put readers in the position of the sailors (the potentially condemned) upon whose ears the death sentence falls “like the intermitting discharge of artillery,” and to whom they (“you”) “listen to the reader as he deliberately begins a new paragraph,” which ends with the same terrible sentence, “shall suffer death! ” Within the scene, the “reader” (i.e. 176 J OHN C YRIL B ARTON captain’s clerk) plays the role of the executioner as his reading takes shape as a carefully delivered performance that maximizes fear and promotes terror. Indeed, White-Jacket tells us the reader seems even “to have been instructed to omit the longer Articles, and only present those which were brief and to the point.” Again, particularly to the point is the Articles’ operative phrase, “shall suffer death! ” Exclamatory and italicized throughout, the repeated phrase embodies the letter of the law and, within the context of the scene, functions as a sort of poetic refrain. In addition to influencing the works of Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville, the debate over capital punishment also affected Henry David Thoreau. Holding a theory of individual rights and the state very close to Rantoul’s and using the motto of O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review to start his famous essay on civil disobedience, Thoreau made his own argument against hanging as a deterrent to crime in “A Plea for John Brown” (1859). In that speech, which was delivered on several occasions in the weeks following the raid upon Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau turned the imminent execution of John Brown into a call for continued and even violent disobedience to laws supporting slavery. He also deified Brown, transforming him into a martyr as well as an executioner of a higher law. Indeed, near the end of the plea, Thoreau went so far as to say: “Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are two ends of a chain which is not without its links” (156). Considerable energy has been devoted - and rightly so - to revising our understanding of the American Renaissance in terms of the movement to abolish slavery. In this essay, I have tried to lay the groundwork for understanding the American Renaissance in terms of that “other” antebellum abolition movement, a movement still unfulfilled in a country that once was a worldwide leader in a campaign to keep the state from exercising the power to curtail the most important civil liberty of all - life. 14 I thank Ryan Davidson for timely research assistance and Martha Johnson- Olin for her careful proofreading. I am especially grateful to Brook Thomas for his comments and suggested revisions on the penultimate draft of this essay. 14 Alexis de Tocqueville provides an international perspective on the anti-gallows reform movement in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840): “There is no country where criminal justice is administered with more kindness than in the United States. 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