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13. Class and Capital Punishment in Early Urban North America
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13 Class and Capital Punishment in Early Urban North America Gabriele Gottlieb In 1769, Dolly and Liverpoole were burned at the stake on the green in front of the Charleston workhouse. Dolly was convicted of poisoning her mistress’s child and attempting the same on her master. Liverpoole, a “negro doctor,” supplied the poison. Four years later, twenty-one-year-old Levi Ames, condemned for burglary, “was turned off just at four o’clock” in front of a“vast concourse of people, who attended this awful scene, supposed to consist of seven or eight thousand people.” In 1789, five “wheelbarrow men”—convicts sentenced to public labor—were hanged in Philadelphia. They had escaped from prison and killed a person while burglarizing a house.1 These offenders numbered among the more than two hundred people who were executed in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston during the second half of the eighteenth century. Most were young, poor, and male (although a few were women). Many had knocked about the Atlantic World, mostly working as slaves, sailors, soldiers, laborers, and artisans. All were hanged, gibbeted, shot, or burned at the stake. The nature of criminality and situations in which officials deal out the harshest punishment of execution reveal a great deal about every society. The activities defined as “criminal,” the manner in which lawbreakers are treated, and the vigor with which certain infractions are prosecuted reflect what communities (or at least those exercising authority) value most or prize least. Crimes against property (such as burglary), for example, suggest something different about a society than do crimes against people (such as assault). The characteristics of the executed likewise reflect the class that wields power. In early North America, the white lower classes and black people were much more likely than merchants or ministers to be put to death for their misdeeds. In addition, most of the capital offenses involved crimes against property. An execution was meant not only to achieve retribution and justice but also to maintain social control over poorer classes by wealthier groups. Authorities applied it to restrain the behavior and actions of working people, whether bound or free. Local conditions in early urban centers, especially the ways in which the labor force was organized, shaped the application of the death penalty: the higher the proportion of forced labor, the higher the execution rate. Reflecting the social control aspect of the death penalty, officials in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston (the three cities considered in this chapter) designed execution rituals that would build community cohesion and uphold social order. Judges and juries used capital punishment more frequently in times of crisis, either perceived or real, while its implementation tended to decline in moments of relative social tranquility. A relatively high number of executions occurred in the mid-1780s, for example, when many laboring people in the newly independent nation experienced extreme economic hardship, unemployment, and poverty. Shays’s Rebellion intensified the fear of social upheaval and threats to property among the country’s ruling elites. An expanded use of the death penalty enabled them to maintain and strengthen the power and authority of their class.2 The protection of property likewise was vital in capital cases. In nearly two-thirds of the cases in the second half of the eighteenth century, officials executed people for offenses against property.3 The percentages of executions for property crimes were especially high immediately after the Revolutionary War: 95 percent in Boston; 67 percent in Philadelphia; and 69 percent in Charleston. As Thomas Humphrey argues in the previous chapter, power and authority in the newly founded nation relied on the relationship between economic autonomy and political independence. How to discipline labor— free or bound—and how to protect private property thus became a dominant agenda of the courts. In the late morning hours of May 9, 1800, the pirates Peter Lacroix, Joseph Baker, and Joseph Berouse, dressed in white and accompanied by two ministers , were “brought from the prison by civil officers, and conducted in a cart to Market-street wharf.” After winding their way past curious crowds in Philadelphia’s streets, they stepped into a boat to be conveyed to the place of execution, an island in the city’s harbor. Arriving “at the fatal spot, the prisoners kneeled down, and after some time spent in prayer, . . . they were prepared for the conclusion of the awful scene.” Before they were “launched into eternity, in the view of an immense concourse of spectators, who crouded the wharfs and...