Punishment’s Prisms: Execution and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

During a recent GOP debate, audience members cheered when the moderator noted that, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas had authorized the execution of 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Pressed for his interpretation of the audience’s applause, Perry responded, “I think Americans understand justice.” The “execution cheer,” as it was soon named, triggered consternation and head scratching as the media sought to reconcile the sober business of state-sanctioned death with the crowd’s perceived enthusiasm and Perry’s untroubled response.

Perry’s explanation invoked a particular strain of American exceptionalism, one that interpreted the shouts of the few as the mark of consensus and an emotional outburst as evidence of careful reflective practice—of “Americans understand[ing] justice.” The incident cemented the strong association between the death penalty and American identity while highlighting our own historical amnesia. Support for and opposition to the death penalty have long been argued by asserting our nation’s claims of justice against another’s, whether by arguing that the death penalty is essential to America’s practice of democracy or the reverse. The movement between affective response and sober reflection, between consent and repudiation, lies at the core of our historical response to the death penalty.

Influential histories of early modern punishment theorized public execution as a form of public theater, enacted on bodies for spectacular effect and reliant on the sensational display of bodies in pain. A subsequent body of scholarship by literary historians recast this narrative, highlighting the role of print culture in shaping the ritual effects of punishment. Many witnessed executions, but even more imagined them; the particular strains of “gallows literature” that took hold in colonial New England and proliferated throughout the eighteenth century appealed to readers’ powers of reflection and imagination, embracing the power of print to convey the pedagogy and the sensational effects of public execution.

Narratives on the American history of punishment frequently construct the colonial era as the barbaric forerunner to a more enlightened form of justice that would evolve after the American Revolution, when the penitentiary replaced the public scaffold and more scientific forms of bodily control (confinement, discipline, labor) replaced spectacular punishment (branding, whipping, cropping). More recent work has complicated this divide, particularly by highlighting the ways that violence and torture were constitutive of the penitentiary and its regimes of reformation, not merely unfortunate side effects. Static notions about colonial execution rituals persist, however, most readily through arguments that rituals of public execution were crafted by colonial elites to enforce social control and hierarchies. A notable body of work, most of it by literary historians (including Daniel Williams, Daniel Cohen, and Karen Haltunnen), contested this narrative by analyzing the diverse effects of colonial execution rituals, from eliciting sympathy for the condemned to contesting the authority of elites, to inspiring the proliferation of a diverse tradition of American crime writing. Yet histories of punishment generally ignored the implications of literary historians, content to invoke the colonial era in cursory strokes in order to foreground the emergence of a privileged era of reform that emerged by the 1790s.

Over a decade later, a new cluster of scholarship from other disciplines revisits the literature of colonial punishment and draws inspiration (in varying degrees) from the work of literature scholars. This new work further establishes the literature of execution—sermons, criminal biographies, confessions, dying warnings, last words, broadsides—as a window into the age’s most pressing concerns. More than just acknowledging print culture’s role in shaping ideologies of punishment, these works are premised on a belief in the execution genre’s imaginative possibilities and rhetorical complexities...