In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity

5. How Freeman Was Made a Madman: Race, Capacity, and Citizenship

Chapter 5 How Freeman Was Made a Madman: Race, Capacity, and Citizenship Ignorance and depravity, and the inability to rise from degradation to civilization and respectability. . . . The evils most fostered by slavery and oppression, are precisely those which slaveholders and oppressors would transfer from their system to the inherent character of their victims. Thus the very crimes of slavery become slavery’s best defence. —Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered (1854) In contrast with the thousands who flocked to early American Execution Day rituals, only about three hundred people attended the prison-yard hanging of Edward Coleman, and doubtless fewer still watched Dr. Chilton apply his Galvanic Multiplyer to the murderer’s corpse.1 All the more important, then, that Edgar Allan Poe and others were able to follow the proceedings in print.2 Withdrawn from the civic landscape, convicts more deeply penetrated the national imaginary.3 In keeping with the gradual legal reorientation from “individual lives to individual rights,” published crime accounts extended their reach beyond the communities directly affected by a particular offender’s acts to a national audience that tended to attach broader political significance to local instances of social disorder.4 Thus the enslaved man known to Southampton whites simply as “Nat” entered American consciousness as the “Nat Turner” of Gray’s Confessions. “Having the true negro face,” did Turner represent the true negro race as, “in the recesses of How Freeman Was Made a Madman his own dark, bewildered, and overwrought mind,” he revolved “schemes of indiscriminate massacre to the whites”?5 Rural New York families may have feared so as they gazed upon a series of oil paintings commissioned by antebellum impresario George J. Mastin. Done on mattress ticking, the four larger-than-life images depict the “Murder of the Van Ness [sic] Family by the Negro Freeman, which took place in Cayuga County, NY.”6 The paintings toured Central New York in a traveling show that also featured “sentimental and comic singing, a double clog dance and a lecture by Mr. Mastin on phrenology.”7 Even without the clogging, the story of the killings was compelling: on March 12, 1846, William Freeman, an ex-convict of color, had senselessly slaughtered a white family ranked Figure 12. Freeman Stabbing Child, 1847–1850, unidentified artist, oil on bed ticking, H: 7N x W: 8N11O, F0111.1954. The Farmers’ Museum, Cooperstown, New York. 207 208 Chapter 5 “among the most respectable people in the county.”8 Night after night audiences , guided by Mastin’s narration, viewed the macabre scenes under dramatically flickering candlelight. There was the black man at the bedside of little George Van Nest, the two-year-old’s pale, gleaming chest awaiting the knife that hung in the air before him, his father John lying dead on the floor (see Figure 12); next, outside the stately Van Nest house, Freeman contended with Phebe Wyckoff, the boy’s blood-soaked grandmother, while her daughter, pregnant Sarah Van Nest, tottered in the background, bleeding from a stab wound; inside, two female survivors formed a tragic group with the dead infant and the mortally wounded hired man as the killer peered in Figure 13. Hanging Freeman, 1847–1850, unidentified artist, oil on bed ticking, H: 7 ½N x W: 8 ½N, F0110.1954. The Farmers’ Museum, Cooperstown, New York. How Freeman Was Made a Madman 209 from a window, eyes and knife blade gleaming against the exterior darkness. Hanging Freeman, the final painting in the series, depicts the story’s predictable end: a crowd of townspeople look on as the murderer hangs limply from a tightened noose, his dark skin set off by the white execution cap and robe (see Figure 13). But, as Mastin’s voiceover acknowledged, the condemned murderer “had a new trial Granted and Was not hung.”9 Most likely, the paintings had been completed before the New York Supreme Court had granted abolitionist lawyer William H. Seward’s appeal on behalf of his allegedly insane client.10 Inaccurate as it was, the final painting offered iconographic compensation to Cayuga County communities shaken by the puzzling killings and their unsatisfying resolution. Mastin’s haunting visual fiction graphically affirms the continuing power of the outmoded execution rite in framing the black subject in the popular imagination. Critical as criminality had become to the assertion of a more expansive, civil form of African American subjectivity, the black felon’s persistence...