INTRODUCTION
In hopes that these remarks may meet the attention of many who have hitherto considered it an innocent gratification to witness the death of a fellow being by hanging, they are respectfully offered to the public. They are the result of considerable reflection and careful observation during the scene of a late execution. It must be some uncommon and powerful motive which can impel multitudes to come from great distances, in a stormy season, and on a stormy day, avowedly for no other purpose than to witness such a scene.
The Record of Crimes in the United States (1834)
So begins “Observations on the Curiosity of Those Who Go to Witness Public Executions,” the 1833 preface to The Record of Crimes in the United States, a collection of biographical essays on America’s most notorious criminals that was one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s favorite books.1 Published anonymously but signed “Humanity,” the preface attempts to explain not only why people attend public executions but why some commit murder in the first place. For Humanity, both killing and watching lawful killing are interrelated phenomena; what compels people to do both stems from “the organ of destruction” in the human brain.2 Linked to hunting and self-defense, this propensity for violence is a necessary evil. More pronounced in some individuals than in others, it is manifestly present at any execution scene, not only in the condemned but in the spectators attracted to the scene of lawful death.
Humanity’s phrenology-inspired “Observations,” written the same year Rhode Island became the second state to abolish the practice of public executions (Connecticut was the first in 1830), is one of hundreds of works that participated in a larger debate over “criminal jurisprudence”—what we would today call criminology—in the decades preceding the Civil War. Like much of that discourse, these observations lent support to the campaign to abolish the death penalty: “I perhaps need not add,” Humanity later declares, as if it went without saying, “that I am opposed to all executions, for crime, and especially to those which are made public” (xi). Such a statement was far from radical for the period. Influential legislators and politicians, as well as prominent reformers, ministers, and writers, made such declarations in their published work. Once a cultural given, capital punishment thus became a major point of contention. For many, in fact, the practice was condemned rather than condoned by scripture, and it promoted rather than discouraged violent crime. Indeed, Humanity had precisely the latter argument in mind when he addressed his “Observations” to those who considered witnessing executions “an innocent gratification” and when he later objected to the death penalty “because,” he affirmed, “crime is increased by such spectacles” (v, xi).
If earlier opponents like Humanity in the 1830s implicated spectators in the inhumanity of the public execution, later ones around midcentury often stressed the individual responsibility that citizens bore each time an execution, although now largely removed from the public eye, was carried out. Walt Whitman drew from this argument in “Capital Punishment and Social Responsibility” (1842), one of his earliest anti-gallows writings published in New York’s The Sun. “In a democratic republican form of government like our own,” Whitman’s article began, “the people, all the people, all cliques, all classes, all professions, all religious sects are immediately and directly responsible for wrong, oppressive, inhuman, cruel and tyrannical laws.”3 Universalist minister George Washington Quinby developed such an argument at length in The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House (1856). Subtitled a Plea for Humanity, Quinby’s book provided an impassioned call for the abolition of capital punishment, a subject briefly touched upon in the preface to The Record of Crimes. In a chapter titled “Individual Responsibility” (and subtitled “Each Citizen’s Responsibility”), Quinby reminded readers that every so-called private execution was nonetheless a public act for which a given state’s citizens were collectively and individually responsible. He, in fact, began the chapter by foregrounding his own sense of responsibility as rationale for a principled stance against capital punishment: “Another reason why I labor for the abolishment of the gallows, is, that so long as men are executed in the State of which I am a citizen, I feel that as a citizen, I with others, am responsible for the act; a sort of particips criminis—‘accessory before the fact.’ ” Appropriating the language of criminal law, Quinby defined the death penalty as murder and charged himself and others as accessories to a crime they commit not “as individuals” but “as citizens of the State.” Citizens, he went on, committed these crimes not “with their own hands, but through the instrumentality of the hangman” For his own part, Quinby concluded, “I desire not to participate in any such responsibility.”4
Today, the United States stands alone as the only so-called First World nation that still imposes the death penalty. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, America was a worldwide leader in the campaign to abolish capital punishment. A perennial topic in the fields of law and sociology, the death penalty has attracted the attention of historians in recent years. Important studies such as Louis P. Masur’s Rites of Execution (1989), Daniel A. Cohen’s Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace (1993), and Karen Halttunen’s Murder Most Foul (1998) have used capital crimes and punishment as touchstones for evaluating U.S. intellectual and cultural history from the colonial period to the Civil War, whereas Stuart Banner’s The Death Penalty (2002) provides the first comprehensive legal history of the subject. Two literary studies, Ann Algeo’s The Courtroom as Forum (1996) and David Guest’s Sentenced to Death (1998), look at the twentieth-century American novel (primarily after 1925) in conjunction with capital punishment, and Kristin Boudreau’s The Spectacle of Death (2006) explores literary and populist responses to well-known capital trials in U.S. history from the infamous 1833 “Haystack murder” (the subject of Catherine Williams’s 1833 “docudrama” Fall River, an early nineteenth-century analogue to Capote’s and Mailer’s nonfiction novels, In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song) to the 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker (whose story served as the basis for the 1996 film Last Dance, starring Sharon Stone).5 In addition to these studies in American literature, Mark Canuel’s The Shadow of Death (2006) examines British romanticism in light of capital punishment specifically and “the subject of punishment” more generally. Most recently, Paul Christian Jones has examined a range of antebellum writers in relation to the reformation of capital punishment in Against the Gallows (2011).6
Building on this work, Literary Executions analyzes representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States over the long nineteenth century. It puts novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction in dialogue with legislative reports, trial transcripts, and legal documents pertaining to criminal law, as well as newspaper and journal articles, treatises, and popular books (like The Record of Crimes and The Gallows, the Prison, and the Poor House) that participated in debates over capital punishment. The book focuses on several canonical figures—James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Theodore Dreiser—generating new readings of their work in light of the controversy surrounding the punishment of death. It also gives close attention to a host of then-popular-but-now-forgotten writers—particularly John Neal, Slidell MacKenzie, William Gilmore Simms, Sylvester Judd, and George Lippard—whose work helped shape or was shaped by the influential anti-gallows movement. In this respect, I extend the project of David S. Reynolds and others in looking “beneath the American Renaissance” and bringing to light neglected or forgotten texts in order to read them alongside canonical or well-known works from the period.7 Whereas Reynolds, however, surveys such literature in terms of various reform movements and cultural trends of the day, I offer sustained readings of literary works in relation to a single reform movement that, until recently, has been largely neglected by literary critics and historians of American literature.8 Drawing from legal and extralegal discourse but focusing on imaginative literature, my study shows not only how novels, stories, poems, and creative non-fiction participated in debates over capital punishment but how this literature was often structured around the drama of the death penalty and the scene of execution.
I complement my analysis of how capital punishment influences the form and context of works of literature by giving sustained attention to the language and rhetorical form of important legal documents from the period. For example, I look closely at courtroom arguments and summations in famous capital cases delivered by Daniel Webster, Clarence Darrow, and others, as well as widely circulating legislative reports written by prominent lawyers and politicians, such as Edward Livingston, Robert Rantoul Jr., and John L. O’Sullivan. In this respect, I read law as literature as well as law in literature. If “Literary Executions” in my book’s title most obviously refers to dramatic renderings of or responses to the death penalty in imaginative literature, it also calls attention to the care with which many of the works I examine are themselves rhetorically executed—literary executions, if you will. Reading literature against law (and law against literature), my study raises larger questions about sovereign authority and responsibility—two interrelated concepts, I argue, that cut to the quick of any discussion concerning the (il)legitimacy of the death penalty in liberal democracies in which “the people” lawfully put to death a person. Still resonant today, these questions enlivened political debate and animated a surprising number of literary works over the long nineteenth century. An object of analysis in and of itself, capital punishment was also a crucial site or scene in larger cultural narratives about universal human rights as well as the civil rights and liberties of U.S. citizens. I argue, in fact, that the death penalty for many of my writers dramatized the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority in its starkest terms.
Formulating the conflict in these terms enables me to highlight what was for many a hypocrisy of American democracy: the execution of a citizen under a system of government in which citizens themselves are sovereign. In exploring this conflict, I give special attention to the subject position(s) occupied by what I call the “citizen-subject.”9 By compounding these terms—two discrete but by no means oppositional categories—I consider the individual before the law as both citizen, with certain protected civil rights and liberties, and subject, subjected not only to positive law and its ideological state apparatuses but to a psychological subject formation beyond an individual’s control. By the same token, I use citizen-subject to register the productive tension between the two terms in question, since for many of my writers the concept of U.S. citizenship was defined against an understanding of the European subject and traditional modes of political subjection under monarchical forms of government.
A prime example of this tension can be found in James Fenimore Cooper’s The American Democrat (1838), a political primer that presented a systematic review and defense of the republican institutions on which the United States was founded. In part a response to Whig critics and Cooper’s own fears of democracy run amok, The American Democrat begins by differentiating a true republic from false ones then existing in Europe which in practice were “aristocracies, “limited monarchies,” or even outright “despotisms.”10 In chapter 2, titled “On Republicks,” Cooper identifies “direct representation” (15) as the fundamental basis for any republican form of rule, and in chapter 3, “On the Republick of the United States of America,” he finds that element only (albeit imperfectly) guiding the political structures of U.S. government. In a later chapter, “On the Duties of Publick or Political Station,” Cooper links “the private citizen” to the political processes carried out in his or her name, thus proclaiming that “American citizens are possessed of the highest political privileges that can fall to the lot of the body of any community; that of self-government” (84). Self-governance, made possible through direct representation in a true republic, is what “distinguishes the citizen from the subject” (85). Elaborating the differences between the two, Cooper continues: “The one rules, the other is ruled; one has a voice in framing the ordinances, and can be heard in his efforts to repeal them; the other has no choice but submission” (85). Such a definition of the citizen contra the subject raises important implications for any theory of popular sovereignty that necessarily underlies a republic—a term derived from the Latin, res publica, which, as Cooper reminds us, literally “means the public things or the common weal” (11). Since private citizens are linked to “the public things” that their representatives authorize and execute, the people of a republic bear responsibility each and every time the state kills in their names. It is for this reason that Whitman begins his anti-gallows Sun editorial by emphasizing how “the people, all the people” are responsible for executing laws in “a democratic republican form of government like our own,” and why Quinby in his anti-gallows treatise feels that he participates in “murder” each time an execution takes place in the state wherein he is a citizen.
If questions concerning sovereignty and responsibility drive my investigation, novels provide a major focal point for several reasons. To begin with, the novel as a literary form would become the dominant genre of the nineteenth century, as critics from Ian Watt and Georg Lukács to Frederic Jameson and Michael McKeon have shown.11 The novel is also the century’s literary genre most closely connected to popular discourse and public opinion, a traditional view given new life in U.S. literary studies by way of Jürgen Habermas’s influential theory of the public sphere exemplified, for him, in the role the eighteenth-century English novel played in shaping British culture. Kristin Boudreau, for instance, has recently drawn from Habermas to articulate what she calls “execution literature,” an understanding of crime literature and the discourse of capital punishment close in some respects to what I am calling literary executions. Likening “early American execution literature to the eighteenth-century novel,” Boudreau argues that such literature was a primary means by which private citizens were moved to public action. Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, she demonstrates, recognized the “grave power of literature” in shaping popular ideas and public attitudes. Both Jefferson and Rush (the latter of whom is an important figure in my study) saw the virtues and dangers to which popular fiction could be put, and novels in particular created what Boudreau calls “a literary realm, where individuals could be drawn toward or repelled from particular conduct depending on their private responses to strong characters and narrators.”12
In addition to fomenting public sentiment, novels are unique among forms of crime literature in that they, as Lisa Rodensky contends, grant readers direct access to their characters’ minds. In this way, they enable an examination of motive, intention, and responsibility unavailable through the law, a disciplinary mode that necessarily presumes certain facts about its subject and must approach such an examination from outside a criminal’s head. As Rodenksy explains in The Crime in Mind, a study of criminal responsibility and the Victorian novel, “Novels invite readers to imagine that they are in the mind of the criminal. This access to the mind distinguishes fiction—and the novel in particular—from law, from history, from psychology, and even from other literary genre, like biography and drama.”13 My work extends Rodensky’s insight but shifts its focal point. Rather than emphasizing the interiority of a criminal’s mind and the privileged perspective granted through the novel’s “third person narrator,”14 I stress the novel’s free indirect discourse as well as its narratological and rhetorical strategies in representing or responding to the death penalty, an event whose complex structure and dramatic unfolding demand an analysis from the plurality of voices and perspectives that novelistic discourse puts into play.
Literary Executions thus relies on the socio-rhetorical theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concept of dialogism (i.e., every word repeats or reenacts its previous uses and is saturated with prior dialogues) informs my thinking on a fundamental level. Drawing particularly from Bakhtin’s notion of the “dialogized image” (e.g., the image-as-trope), I examine both fiction and nonfiction in relation to what I call the cultural rhetoric of capital punishment: that is, the tropes, arguments, and narratives that animated death penalty debates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this way, I combine a Bakhtinian theory of language with a literary practice that Steven Mailloux describes as “rhetorical hermeneutics,” explained in his most recent book as “a tracing of the rhetorical paths of thought in various cultural spheres.”15 Rhetoric, in these terms, refers not only to persuasive language but to what Mailloux calls “the political effectivity of trope and argument in culture,”16 and the rhetorical paths I follow transverse various spheres—not only literature and law but politics and religion—in which debate over the death penalty has left a demonstrable trace.
Recent historians of U.S. culture, some of them writing on the death penalty, others on crime and murder more generally, have traced different contours of such thought from America’s colonial origins through the antebellum period. Whereas Masur provides an astute intellectual history of death penalty debates from the American Revolution to the Civil War, emphasizing political assumptions in the formation of a republican ideology that opposed capital punishment,17 Halttunen and Cohen have assessed crime and print culture from the Puritan execution sermon to popular literature (broadly construed) of the 1830s and 1840s. Halttunen, for instance, examines the paradigm shift in the interpretation of murder from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century execution sermons, in which Puritan ministers and magistrates controlled the interpretation of crime and promoted a view of the criminal as “common sinner,” to the diffuse body of secular authority that portrayed the murderer as monster or moral aberration. This shift in the cultural construction of crime and the criminal in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to what Halttunen calls the “gothic imagination” and the “new murder narrative,” which, in contrast to the execution sermon, focused on the details of crime as well as the mental and environmental factors that contributed to it.18
Cohen traces a similar shift from the New England execution sermon and early forms of crime literature—such as criminal conversation narratives, execution reports, crime ballads, and broadsides—to popular literature and print culture in the decades before the Civil War. Situating “romantic fiction” alongside trial reports and journalism, Cohen explains:
The emergence of the trial report, the development of popular journalism, and the rise of romantic fiction were related cultural developments. Each was associated with the transition from a literary culture of piety, scarcity, and intensive reading to one of variety, abundance, and, at times, casual consumption. Each form was committed to an essentially modern epistemology that conceived social reality not primarily in transcendent, universal, or typological terms (as in early execution sermons) but as an aggregate of individual worldly events or experiences, each firmly if elusively embedded in its own particular spatial and temporal setting. Each also implied a conception of collaborative product of a multiplicity of independent speakers and viewpoints.19
Of the various forms that contributed to these cultural developments, nothing captured the “multiplicity” of voices and viewpoints quite like the novel. Whether or not the individual novels I examine directly take up the subject of capital punishment, each helps us see multiple positions within legal discourse—a discourse that is too often dismissed as simply monological. Trials, after all, have both a prosecution and a defense, while judicial opinions may contain a dissent that directly challenges the court’s opinion. My work thus complements Cohen’s and Halttunen’s historical treatments of crime and popular culture through a Bakhtinian approach to the novel, short fiction, and popular discourse concerning capital punishment that strives to show the polyphony in what is frequently considered the monologic authority of (the) law.
If my methodology owes a general debt to Bakhtin, it owes a particular one to Brook Thomas, whose method of “cross-examinations” provides a model for my investigation of literature and law in each of the book’s chapters. Such an approach, as Thomas has shown, helps to expose underlying cultural logics at play in a given historical moment.20 It also affords a perspective in the disciplines that is unavailable when one studies each independently, thus enabling one to tell a story that otherwise might not be told. The story I tell stretches back to the late eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment critique of capital punishment first acquired popular currency in Europe and America, and projects into the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth, but it concentrates on works from the American Renaissance, a literary period that roughly coincides with what one death penalty historian has called “the first great reform era” (1833–53) in the history of U.S. capital punishment.21
If the death penalty had its first great era of reform in the decades preceding the Civil War, my primary focus, the second great reform era began in the late 1880s in New York with debates over the electric chair and electrocution, a neologism for lawful death by electricity (the term “ electrocide, constructed from the Latin root cida, “to cut or kill,” as in homicide, was also introduced but did not stick). That debate reached a national level when the Supreme Court approved New York State’s use of the electric chair in In re Kemmler (1890) and later that decade, in 1897, when the federal government drastically reduced its number of capital offenses. It was also during this year that Massachusetts prison reformer Florence G. Spooner founded the Anti-Death Penalty League and that Colorado, following Iowa in 1872 and Maine in 1876, became the sixth state to abolish capital punishment (Colorado, however, reinstated the death penalty in 1900 when retentionists successfully argued that several recent lynchings resulted in part because official capital punishment was no longer a legal option). Thanks to the efforts of Spooner and others, Massachusetts came closer than it ever had to abolishing capital punishment in 1900, and during the 1910s there were more organizations advocating the abolition of capital punishment than at any time since the 1840s.
By 1917, nine more states had stricken the death penalty from their statutes, while several others since the turn of the twentieth century—Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey among them—had come close to passing legislation entirely banning the practice. A crime wave following the aftermath of World War I led several states to reinstate the death penalty (e.g., Missouri, Washington, and Arizona re-enacted capital statutes in 1919), and in the early 1920s the reform movement began to slacken. But by the mid-1920s reformers regrouped and intensified their efforts. In 1925, prominent activists from different parts of the country joined forces to establish the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, a national organization (with central offices in New York City) that “sought to organize and coordinate abolition attempts in state legislatures” across the country.22
Cross-examining literary and legal discourse on the death penalty enables me to give an account of the changing assumptions and evolving conceptions of sovereignty and (social) responsibility in terms of the state’s—or, under our complex federal system, a plurality of states’—ultimate sanction against its citizens. My story begins in the early 1820s, when influential lawyer and politician Edward Livingston presented landmark arguments for the abolition of the death penalty and when early popular novels, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821) and John Neal’s Logan (1822), directly responded to capital punishment or used its drama as an aesthetic principle. It concludes a century later with an examination of capital punishment and the criminal justice system represented in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), the first major U.S. novel to attack the death penalty directly. Covering this hundred-year period helps me highlight changes in social attitudes toward crime and capital punishment as well as important shifts in the administration of lawful death. For instance, whereas religious arguments in the first half of the nineteenth century strongly influenced popular opinion about the death penalty and were a requisite for anyone who wanted to be taken seriously in debates for or against the practice, toward the end of century such arguments were deemed antiquated and passé. Thus, when Samuel Hand argued for capital punishment in an 1881 North American Review article, he consciously avoided standard appeals to Genesis 9:6 (“Whoso sheddeth the blood of man, by man his blood shall be shed”) and God’s covenant with Noah, assuming his readers would be “inclined to look with scant credulity upon the book of Genesis, its deluge, its ark, and its Noah.”23 Likewise, by the turn of the century, those who argued for abolition ceased to cite the Sixth Commandment (“Thou shall not kill”) and God’s prohibition against Cain’s execution for fratricide to support their position. Instead, they often drew from theories of biological and environmental determinism informed by new scientific and sociological approaches to criminal behavior. And in the early twentieth century, proponents and opponents of capital punishment alike marshaled forth sophisticated statistical analyses of recidivism rates among murderers and murder rates in states or other nations with and without the death penalty.
Changes in the administration of capital punishment were just as significant. Following the Civil War, for instance, some states moved away from mandatory death sentences, thus allowing juries to find a verdict short of death for cases of first-degree murder.24 In 1867, Illinois became the first state to adopt this procedure; it was followed by Minnesota and Nebraska in 1868 and 1869. Nine more states or territories would ratify such laws in the 1870s and 1880s—including California in 1874, whose distinguished Judge Robert Y. Hayne would indirectly take up the issue a decade later in the North American Review. “Men are no longer of that stern stuff which exacted an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Hayne mildly complained in an essay provocatively titled “Shall the Jury System Be Abolished?” (1884). “Sentiment, benevolence, and philanthropy have become potent forces,” he continued. “Conscientious scruples against capital punishment are common, and numbers of men shrink from the idea of having blood on their hands, even in a legal way; some would no more condemn a man to death than they would carry the sentence into execution.”25 Hayne’s remarks not only suggest the necessity of allowing for life sentences, so that jurors with such “scruples” would vote to convict rather than acquit if the only punishment were death; they also point to a deeper tension: the guilt jurors may feel when directly participating in a procedure that authorizes lawful death. Whereas Whitman and Quinby, as we have seen, appealed to that logic in arguing against capital punishment, Hayne, from the other side of the argument, ridicules the idea here of jurors “shrink[ing] from the idea of having blood on their hands, even in a legal way,” in an effort to get not only jurors but private citizens to acknowledge and accept the role they play in legitimizing the lethal violence of law.
Besides the major move from private to public executions in the mid-nineteenth century, the most obvious administrative change in the death penalty over the long nineteenth century occurred in the mode of executions. Between 1888 and 1913, as Banner notes, fifteen states switched from hanging to electricity as the means by which death was legally administered. The change was directly related to new concerns about the physical suffering of those executed and the unnecessary pain inflicted through hanging in particular. Thus, when Texas became the sixteenth state to adopt the electric chair in 1923, it did so because the gallows, the state legislature declared, “is antiquated and has been supplanted in many states by the more modern and humane system of electrocution.”26 With this change in mode came a change in the spectatorship (or aesthetics) of executions, as much fewer witnesses could fit within the electrocution room as could stand within a prison yard to see a hanging. A shift in this “aesthetics” again occurred when some western and southern states, beginning with Nevada in 1921, turned to lethal gas as a more “humane” and cost-effective way (compared to the electric chair) to end life lawfully. By confining the condemned to a chamber, even fewer people could witness an execution, and this so-called advance in the technology of lawful death brought to mind horrors of its own. For instance, when in 1924 Chinese immigrant Gee Jon became the Nevada gas chamber’s first victim, the Philadelphia Public Ledger invoked the gothic horrors imagined by Poe in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a story told from the perspective of a man sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition during the Napoleonic Wars: “There is a terror in this thing that Edgar Allan Poe could not equal,” the Ledger observed. “There is a hissing from the walls, like Satan’s hiss of the hooded cobra . . . The Invisible Thing strikes.”27
In addition to these administrative changes, a subtler and perhaps more significant trend developed over the period I examine. Whereas the 1830s and 1840s witnessed a dramatic change from public to private executions, the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century saw a shift from locally to state administered executions. In fact, the first state-sanctioned execution (as we now think of it) did not take place until 1864, and executions were carried out by local officials and in county (as opposed to state) facilities well into the twentieth century.28 As criminologist Raymond Paternoster explains, “Local authorities maintained control over the executions of condemned offenders until the early part of the twentieth century . . . Although the centralization of capital punishment under state control came slowly, it had (except in the South) replaced local authority by the 1920s. In the 1890s, 86 percent of all executions were performed under local authority, but by the 1920s almost eight out of every ten executions were conducted under state authority.”29 It was not, then, until the publication of An American Tragedy (1925), the end point of my study, that almost every state had centralized the administration of capital punishment under state authority. If earlier works I analyze illustrate a conceptual tension between sovereignty and responsibility in the republican procedures by which citizen-subjects were put to death, Dreiser’s novel exposes a disjunction between these two concepts in the modern criminal justice system—a system that claims absolute authority over those it executes while endlessly deferring responsibility for those acts through the system itself.
Literary executions—like representations of or responses to the death penalty in newspapers, magazines, and other print media—provide crucial insight into this modernization process insofar as they dramatize, as my central thesis holds, the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority in its starkest terms. By rendering the spectacle of lawful death both visible and public as it became increasingly less visible and moved behind closed doors, literary accounts of capital punishment play an important role in a complex network of discursive practices that raise challenging questions about state sovereignty and social responsibility. Central among such questions, as I suggested earlier, was the presumed right of the state (or again states, in the U.S. federal system) to take the lives of its citizens under a republican form of government. For many Americans in the early republic and later, that so-called right contradicted a fundamental principle of American democracy, because the lawful authority to execute properly belonged to a monarchy, in which a king wielded ultimate authority over the people (his subjects) but not in a republic wherein the people themselves are “kings.” Masur, writing about the postrevolutionary era, notes that “if severe and excessive punishments marked monarchies, mild and benevolent ones would have to characterize republics. The logic of republicanism forced some Americans to reconsider the problem of deviance and to oppose capital punishment as unrepublican.”30
Building on what Masur elsewhere describes as a “republican ideal” and “republican ideology” in death penalty debates, I give specific attention to what we might call the republican argument against the death penalty—a key component in capital punishment’s broader cultural rhetoric. That argument had deep roots in the Democratic Party in the first half of the nineteenth century and strong advocates among prominent party members. Thomas Jefferson himself opposed the death penalty in principle, and later Jeffersonians and Jacksonians alike drew upon his theory of government in drafting influential proposals for abolishing capital punishment that were presented in state legislatures across the country. Originally delivered in legislative halls and courtrooms, these writings found their way to the court of public opinion and influenced an extralegal argument for abolition that made the death penalty an anathema to republican institutions and values.
One influential reformer from midcentury who embraced this argument and denigrated the gallows as “anti-republican” was William Lloyd Garrison.31 Best known of course for his leadership in the campaign to end slavery, Garrison was also an active participant in the movement to abolish capital punishment. His participation in the anti-gallows campaign suggests the close affinities between what Mark Canuel, in writing about British romanticism, has recently called “the two abolitions” of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.32 In addition to Garrison, many other U.S. leaders in the campaign to end slavery, particularly in Massachusetts and New York, were staunch opponents of the death penalty. Lydia Maria Child, a Garrisonian and native Bostonian, passed out anti-gallows material at antislavery rallies, assuming shared interests and beliefs among those who supported each campaign.33 She also wrote powerfully against capital punishment in several of her wildly popular “Letters from New York,” a subject I take up at length in this book. The prominent Boston minister Theodore Parker preached against the death penalty in some of his sermons, denouncing it as “backwards law-making,”34 while Wendell Phillips, one of Massachusetts’s most celebrated slavery abolitionists, was an officer in Massachusetts’s Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment and one of the few important antebellum writers to take up the cause when the movement resurged in the 1880s.
Important Boston-based poets who opposed slavery also wrote against the gallows. John Greenleaf Whittier, for instance, published poems against the death penalty alongside ones against slavery in Songs of Labor and Reform (1848). In fact, his “Human Sacrifice” and “Lines, Written on Reading Several Pamphlets Published by Clergymen against the Abolition of the Gallows,” as the latter’s title suggests, were both written expressly to support the anti-gallows cause. Similarly, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote his Poems of Slavery in the early 1840s, later wrote a letter for Marvin H. Bovee’s Christ and the Gallows (1869), an anti-gallows book that included numerous statements against capital punishment by famous Americans. Longfellow began his contribution by declaring, “I am, and have been for many years, an opponent of capital punishment.” He concluded it by wishing Bovee, a Democrat and tireless anti-gallows reformer who had successfully led Wisconsin’s campaign to abolish the death penalty in 1853, “complete success in effacing the death penalty from all the statute books of our country.”35
A decade earlier, Longfellow had expressed such sentiments poetically in “Ropewalk” (1859), a work tracing the cultural life of rope in a representative New England community. In one of the poem’s meandering stanzas, Longfellow’s speaker takes readers behind prison walls where he is horrified to find “the gallows-tree!,” thus commanding: “Breath of Christian charity, / Blow, and sweep it from the earth!” In linking the rope of the gallows to that from which “fair maidens” swing and church bells ring (uses mentioned earlier in the poem),36 Longfellow weaves the thread of capital punishment into the daily fabric of American life, thereby making it a vital (if hidden) part of a broader cultural narrative. Though not present in Longfellow’s poem, the specific rhetorical threads of capital punishment and slavery were interwoven every time an antislavery newspaper or periodical reported on an execution when race was a factor. Ironically, by far the most famous of such executions concerned not one of the hundreds of slaves or free persons of color lawfully put to death but that of the famous white abolitionist, John Brown, whose impending hanging or “martyrdom,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson infamously put it, “will make the gallows as glorious as the Cross.”37
Not only individuals but antislavery periodicals frequently spoke out against the death penalty. For example, Child’s widely reprinted New York letters were first published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, whereas Garrison’s Liberator chronicled the anti-gallows activism in the Massachusetts state legislature. In fact, a May 1844 article from the Liberator reported the role its editor played in supporting an anti-gallows bill that challenged a countermovement among conservative Congregationalists and Presbyterian ministers to retain the death penalty: “A number of individuals, with Mr. Garrison at their head,” the article began, “have been petitioning the Massachusetts Legislature to abolish capital punishment, and, in case their prayer should be denied, they ask that the gallows be erected near a meeting house, that the execution take place on the Sabbath day, and that the minister be the executioner.”38 By suggesting that pro-gallows ministers administer executions, Garrison put into practice the kind of argument Whitman had made some two years earlier in his Sun editorial, “Capital Punishment and Social Responsibility.” Garrison’s “prayer” was not answered, for the House of Representatives fell just short that year of passing a bill that would have abolished the death penalty in Massachusetts.39 Even so, all was not lost. Anti-gallows activism in Boston helped to spark an interstate movement for abolition in other cities across the North and Midwest, particularly in New York and Philadelphia.
Evidence for that alliance can be found in the widely circulating New York Tribune, which covered progress of Massachusetts’s abolition bill, reporting that
the awfully solemn duty of hanging the convicted criminal . . . instead of being longer imposed upon the sheriffs, whose humane feelings are often shocked by such brutality, may hereafter by assigned to hangman, such as your wisdom may enable you to select out of that numerous portion of the clergy, who are the most zealous advocates of judicial murder, and through whose influence the inhuman practice has been so long continued. (emphasis in original)40
In a dialogized discourse characteristic of a novel, this newspaper report mocks and debases traditional religious authority cloaked in the minister, making him a barbarous “hangman” and ridiculing his sanctioning of capital punishment as “judicial murder.” In the Tribune’s frequent coverage of anti-gallows activism, which included a recurrent column headed “The Punishment of Death,” we also see the emergence of the “National Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death” (as the organization was called), with central offices and annual meetings in Philadelphia. The goal of the society was, as a May 17, 1845, Tribune article reported, to promote “this reform in all of the States of this Union.” Horace Greeley, the Tribune s influential editor, was himself a major player in the national campaign to end slavery, but he also assumed a leadership role in New York’s own Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, an organization for which he served as treasurer. Other members included the poet William Cullen Bryant, as president, and William H. Channing, Josiah Hopper, and John L. O’Sullivan as officers. With the exception of O’Sullivan, each of these committee members was a staunch opponent of slavery, and both Bryant and O’Sullivan were important literary figures and newspaper men.
Besides the Tribune, numerous New York papers endorsed the abolition of lawful death, including New York’s World, Herald, Evening Post (which Bryant edited), Evening Star, Commercial Advocate, News (which O’Sullivan edited), Mirror, and True Son, as well as Albany’s Citizen and Daily Advertiser, and Brooklyn’s Daily Eagle (for which a young Walt Whitman wrote anti-gallows articles).41 In addition to editing the News, O’Sullivan was founder and editor in chief of the United States Magazine and the Democratic Review, one of the nation’s premier literary journals and a principal organ for promoting the anti-gallows cause. Another venue for reform was Boston’s The Hangman, founded in 1845 and later titled the Prisoner’s Friend, which was exclusively devoted to anti-gallows activism.42 In fact, the magazine was designated by the National Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death as its official publication.43 The founder and editor of The Hangman was Charles Spear, an influential Boston Unitarian minister who also opposed slavery but for whom death penalty abolitionism was a cause célèbre. Spear, in 1844, authored Essays on the Punishment of Death, what would become a key monograph in the movement. By May 1845, Spear’s Essays had sold more than five thousand copies, and by 1846 it had gone through seven editions.44 A dedicated anti-gallows reformer, Spear served in 1845 as the first president of Massachusetts’s Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment.
Yet not every influential reformer who opposed slavery also opposed capital punishment, and vice versa. Crucial exceptions were O’Sullivan, the influential politician and editor who led the anti-gallows campaign in the 1840s, and George B. Cheever, a prominent Presbyterian minister and the period’s foremost spokesperson for the gallows who wrote two books in the name of its defense: Punishment by Death: Its Authority and Expediency (1842) and A Defence of Capital Punishment (1846). While O’Sullivan, in the years leading up to the Civil War, sympathized with slaveholders and would become a supporter of the Confederacy, Cheever during this time became a leader in the antislavery cause and joined forces with many of those with whom he formerly disagreed on the subject of capital punishment. Exceptional though they were, both O’Sullivan and Cheever serve as touchstones in my study, not only because of the leadership positions they occupied on opposing sides of the death penalty debates but because of the influential role they played in literary politics of the day. O’Sullivan, along with Evert Duyckinck (who incidentally also wrote against capital punishment, calling it in one article a “remnant of barbarity”),45 helped to orchestrate the “Young America” movement in literature.46 In fact, he recruited members of that group—notably Hawthorne, Whittier, William Starbuck Mayo, and a young Whitman—to publish anti-gallows work in the Democratic Review, while William Gilmore Simms, the only Young-America southerner, had proposed, through his agent Duyckinck, to write “a series of Sonnets agt. the punishment for death” for O’Sullivan’s magazine.47 Cheever, a college chum of Hawthorne’s and Longfellow’s at Bowdoin College, edited Poets of America (1847), the first anthology of American poets, and wrote literary criticism and fiction himself, including a temperance tale, “Deacon Giles’ Distillery” (1835), for which he received minor celebrity and Hawthorne’s sympathy when the story’s representation of a particular distillery landed him in a Salem prison for libel.48
Cheever—like Garrison, Child, Greeley, Parker, and countless other reformers—saw in slavery a demonstrable conflict of laws: between positive laws, on the one hand, that legitimated slavery and a higher moral law, on the other, that condemned it.49 The scene of enslavement or “subjection,” as Saidiya V. Hartman would have it, dramatized this conflict in the same stark terms with which I have characterized the scene of capital punishment—a scene pitting the subjected subject (but not a citizen) against the tyranny of the state government.50 Just as some antislavery activists like Cheever failed to see the slave’s plight as analogous to that of the condemned citizen or alien, some anti-gallows reformers like O’Sullivan failed to see the significance of the analogy from the other end. For the latter group, capital punishment was particularly horrifying in that it could take the life of any person, regardless of race or class—although proportionately the greatest number of the gallows’ victims came from the working classes, while the most draconian of capital statutes applied only to slaves in the South. Spear pointed to the double standard in crimes with a racial component in cataloging capital offenses in the appendix to Essays on the Punishment of Death (1844). Whereas northern states in the 1840s had capital statutes usually only for murder and treason (but sometimes for arson and rape as well), southern states often had capital penalties for those offenses and additional ones, “if a slave.” Georgia, for example, had several: “Rape on a free white female, if a slave. Assaulting a free white female with intent to murder, if a slave. Burglary or arson of any description contained in penal code of state, if a slave. Murder of a slave or free person of color, if a slave.”51
Hence, despite some differences among reformers epitomized in O’Sullivan and Cheever, it would be difficult to overestimate the intimate connections between these two antebellum abolition movements. As Masur puts it, “In the minds of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, 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.”52 While Masur does not mention it, it is important to note that besides liberal white reformers none other than Frederick Douglass, the preeminent black abolitionist of the day, spoke out against the death penalty on the eve of the Civil War. Joining Susan B. Anthony, a leader in the Women’s Rights campaign, Douglass co-organized a meeting against the death penalty in Rochester, New York, in 1858, where he delivered his essay, “Capital Punishment Is a Mockery of Justice.”
That Douglass was joined by Anthony in organizing this meeting suggests important affiliations between the anti-gallows and another major reform movement of the nineteenth century: the campaign for women’s rights. In addition to Anthony and Child, other leaders in this reform vocally supported the abolition of capital punishment. Margaret Fuller, for instance, wrote anti-gallows articles for Greeley’s Tribune while writing Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), arguably the most important U.S. work on the “woman question” before the Civil War.53 After the war, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a collaborator of Anthony’s who headed the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1869 to 1890, lent her voice to the anti-gallows cause in Bovee’s Christ and the Gallows, which included the Longfellow letter I cited earlier. In her letter, Stanton identified herself as a longtime opponent of capital punishment and told the story of an execution that took place in her hometown in upstate New York when she was twelve years old. Like the heroine of Sylvester Judd’s Margaret (1845; revised 1851) who visits and brings flowers to a condemned man before his execution, a young Stanton frequently visited a condemned murderer in the weeks leading up to his execution. Recognizing this man’s humanity and the inhumanity of the death penalty, she even tried to stop the execution by attempting to sabotage its proceedings the day the hanging took place. When it occurred anyway, the event left her traumatized. In the letter written some forty years later, a mature Stanton reflected that “every execution I now read of in our public journals brings back that terrible memory.”54
While this anecdote concludes the letter, Stanton begins it by declaring her general opposition to the death penalty and expressing her disgust at how the criminal justice system is currently administrated: “It makes me shudder to think of the cruelties that are inflicted on criminals in the name of justice, and of the awful waste of life and force—of the crushing out of hundreds and thousands of nimble men and promising boys in these abominable bastilles of the nineteenth century.”55 Drawing on the idea of capital punishment as a “relic of barbarism”—a commonplace in the rhetoric of anti-gallows abolitionism used by Duyckinck, Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, Charles Sumner, and others56—Stanton emphasizes the cruelty and inutility of the criminal justice system while eliciting the sympathy of her readers. She continues in affective language to attack the practice of lawful death itself: “As to the gallows, it is the torture of my life. Every sentence and every execution I hear of, is a break in the current of my life and thought for days.”57 If, as Halttunen argues, the murderer was often constructed as a monster in the nineteenth century, Stanton, in the spirit of the Puritan execution sermon, saw the murderer as a “common sinner,” a member of a compassionate community to be brought back into the fold rather than made alien to it. Whereas variations on the republican argument against the death penalty constitute the primary focus of my study, sentimental salvos like the one Stanton levies here account for an important subsidiary line of argument I explore in several chapters.58 In chapter 2, for instance, I analyze a similar strategy in Lydia Maria Child’s New York letters, wherein Child’s contemplation of the beautiful, like the life current of Stanton’s thought, is marred by the jarring reports of executions and the presence of capital punishment and the criminal justice system.
Stanton is best known for her leadership in the women’s suffrage movement, but she began her career in reform with the campaign for temperance, the last of the major nineteenth-century reform movements with ties to anti-gallows activism. Of course, not all temperance reformers protested capital punishment—Cheever, again, marks a notable exception—but many did. And some temperance magazines, such as the Journal of the American Temperance Union and the American Temperance Magazine and Sons of Temperance Offering, made anti-gallows statements, just as Spear’s The Hangman and The Prisoner’s Friend frequently preached the virtues of temperance and linked murder to the consumption of spirits. The July 30, 1845, edition of The Hangman serves as a case in point. Among its many contributions, including one by Child, were two articles about one Henry G. Green, an intemperate man who murdered his wife, a temperance performer; a report titled “Another Capital Case in Massachusetts,” in which a fight between two drunk brothers resulted in the murder of one of them; an article, “A Man Killed in Broadstreet, Boston,” that tells how a man who was “intoxicated, for he vomited freely at the time the deed was done,” was murdered for insulting a woman; and a temperance poem titled “The Drunkard’s Home and Furniture.” This edition of The Hangman also included humorous anecdotes of a popular street temperance performer, “Henry Smith, the Razor Strop Man,” and a lead article, “Reasons Why Capital Punishment Should Be Abolished,” by Unitarian minister Samuel J. May. The third of May’s six reasons for abolition dealt with grog shops and liquor dispensation. “How large a proportion of criminals are,” May asked rhetorically, “made insane by intemperance?” Blaming society in part for such inebriated insanity, he concluded that “so long as the Commonwealth licenses the sale of intoxicating drinks, and men of the highest respectability countenance the use of them by their example, so long no one should be held to pay the forfeit of his life for any crime, he may commit under their maddening influence.”59
In a later edition of The Prisoner’s Friend, Spear himself lent support to the idea that intemperance was a leading cause of crime. In his article, “Statistics: Temperance” (1849), Spear estimated that the approximate 10,500 distilleries in the United States would yield 41,502,707 gallons of liquor, “which, if sold at 20 cents per gallon, would produce 80,000,000,000 of quarrels, half a million of assaults and batteries, 100,000 thefts, 800 suicides, and about 100 murders.”60 Such “statistics” brought together an argument for prohibition with an argument for abolition—a term I use in this book, unless otherwise specified, for death penalty abolitionism rather than its more common usage for antislavery activism. Similarly, popular fiction that criticized capital punishment or at least analyzed the circumstances surrounding a homicide often linked alcohol consumption and murder. Poe, for instance, demonized the gin bottle as “that fiend Intemperance”—a primary factor, the confessed murderer of “The Black Cat” tells us, that led him to kill his wife and his pet cat. In linking the bottle to murder in “The Black Cat,” a tale David S. Reynolds has classified in the “dark-temperance tradition,”61 Poe was not making an anti-gallows argument; many writers, however, did precisely that when they drew such a connection. For instance, Whitman’s passionate Phillip March in “Revenge and Requital” commits murder shortly after, we are told, “he drank not one glass, but three or four, and strong glasses they were to him, for he was habitually abstemious”; Sylvester Judd’s sympathetic Chilion in Margaret angrily flings a file while drunk at a community husking bee that kills a man attempting to seduce his sister; E. D. E. N. Southworth’s jilted lover in “Thunderbolt to the Hearth” commits an impassioned murder not long after his wife poured him a portentous draft—“I would she had not given him that brandy!” Southworth’s narrator exclaims, foreshadowing the murder to come; and Clarence Darrow’s representative murderer Hank in his novel An Eye for an Eye (1905) is drunk on whisky the night he kills his wife.62
Temperance, in contrast to capital punishment, has generated quite a bit of literary scholarship in recent years.63 Women’s rights, for all the right reasons, has produced even more interest. More work still has been done—and rightly so—relating American literature to the campaign to end slavery, certainly the most important reform movement of the nineteenth century.64 If our critical appreciation of the nineteenth century has been enriched in recent years by our understanding of how the antislavery, the women’s rights, and the temperance movements have influenced American literature and how particular literary works have influenced these movements in turn, it is equally important to recognize how American literature and culture was affected by the campaign to end capital punishment—a major culture movement that, as I suggested earlier, has been largely neglected by literary historians until recently. To put matters in perspective, temperance and women’s rights did not attain their major victories until Prohibition and the ratification of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments in the early 1920s. Before the Civil War, however, three states had entirely abolished the death penalty, and by the time the federal suffrage bill passed and national prohibition went into effect, ten more states had stricken the death penalty from their statutes (although four of them, by 1921, had reinstated it).
Yet the campaign against capital punishment, unlike these other movements, is not only important to American literature for its content and context of reform. It is equally important in terms of how death penalty reform informed literary forms, particularly the novel. Cohen, as noted earlier, has persuasively shown how social and legal practices built up around the administration of capital punishment in colonial and revolutionary America gave rise to several popular genres of early gallows literature, most notably the execution sermon—an indigenous art form that, like the captivity and slave narratives, is a uniquely American contribution to world literature. In contrast to Cohen, I show how the forms and procedures of criminal law—particularly the capital trial and the enactment or prevention of an execution—significantly impacted novels and works of short fiction, providing writers with a dramatic structuring device that helped them initiate or resolve conflict, or bring the central drama of a narrative to a climax. For if, as more than one critic has suggested, the criminal and especially the capital trial—with its investigation, testimony, courtroom drama, verdict, and execution (or prevention of one) operates according to dramatic structures and principles, then an execution makes for the ultimate dénouement in the dispensation of justice.65 The finality of such an outcome, with its elaborate review process, last-minute appeals, and so on, enacts the two counterpoints of Aristotelian poetics: plot and spectacle, the high and low respectively in classic literary aesthetics.66
Attending to questions of aesthetic form—a “cultural poetics,” if you will—the chapters that follow examine mainstays within the cultural rhetoric of capital punishment, such as republican arguments against the death penalty or appeals to biblical dictates for or against its practices; tropes or diologized images of the sympathetic prisoner or “great criminal,” the Hangman, and the gallows itself; and narratives about actual innocence, deterrence, and justice, along with biblical parables like Cain’s fratricide and Genesis 9:6 (“Whoso sheddeth the blood of man, by man his blood shall be shed”), which themselves became thematics that sounded keynotes in arguments both for and against the death penalty. Thus engaging the politics and poetics of capital punishment, this volume explores three central interrelated aims: how literature could and did influence death penalty reform; how legal forms informed literary forms; and how the figure of capital punishment was configured into a broader metaphor for the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority.
A recent essay on “Capital Punishment” in American Literature through History has discounted the impact of the death penalty in American literature before the 1920s. “Although the debate about capital punishment was quite ardent,” Nancy Morrow claims, “it served relatively infrequently as the source of inspiration for imaginative literature before the 1920s, especially in comparison with its widespread use in novels, plays, and films since then.”67 Literary Executions dispels this misconception, arguing that imaginative literature before 1920 was significantly influenced and shaped by the great debates surrounding capital punishment in the middle of the nineteenth century and again in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.
Chapter 1 presents an overview of the anti-gallows movement in antebellum America by cross-examining a range of legal and literary works participating in death penalty debates. Laying the foundation for the chapters to follow, it traces the development of several prominent arguments against capital punishment—especially the republican argument—in legislative reports and proposals written by Benjamin Rush, Edward Livingston, Robert Rantoul Jr., and John L. O’Sullivan, as well as fiction and poetry by John Neal, Hawthorne, Whitman, Whittier, and Melville. A principled objection to capital punishment—and the pet cause of O’Sullivan, who spearheaded the Young America movement in literature—was a key ideological issue of the Democratic Party of the 1830s and 1840s and one that runs through the works of many now-famous or then-popular writers from the period. The campaign to abolish the death penalty, I argue, should thus be seen as providing an essential part of the context that cultivated the flowering of the American Renaissance. In some ways, in fact, that campaign reveals more about the democratic assumptions informing the work of American Renaissance writers than the campaign to end slavery.
Chapter 2 goes “beneath” the American Renaissance to develop an aesthetic theory of crime and punishment that informs each of the book’s remaining chapters. It focuses on Simms and Child, two of the period’s most popular writers whose work has been largely neglected by critics of the period. By reading several of Simms’s Border Romances in conjunction with Child’s innovative journalism and fiction, I show how a common interest in anti-gallows reform similarly influenced two writers from opposite ends of the political spectrum and in opposing camps on the issue of slavery. Yet this shared interest in crime reform gives way to a sharp difference in each author’s representations of crime and capital punishment. Simms, on one hand, obsesses over the details of murder and explores the psychological states of criminals; Child, on the other, ignores criminal acts themselves and turns our attention instead to environmental factors that produced crime. What I call Simms’s psychological realism and Child’s literary sociology provides me with two aesthetic models for literary interventions into death penalty debates that I draw upon and complicate in ensuing chapters.
Building on these aesthetics but emphasizing their cultural rhetoric, Chapter 3 broadens the scope by examining capital punishment as both topic and trope in a diverse range of antebellum novels, stories, and literary sketches. Whereas chapter 2 juxtaposed Simms and Child in an improbable pairing, this one focuses on a disparate trio—James Fenimore Cooper, George Lippard, and Sylvester Judd—in whose work executions (or near executions) figure prominently. Examining dialogues, exchanges, arguments, and particularly the scene of lawful death itself, I show how rhetorical performances within specific works not only engaged in cultural debates about the death penalty but used capital punishment as a metaphor or figural site to address broader questions about sovereign authority and social responsibility in a democratic republic. In doing so, the chapter goes beyond the question of anti-gallows reform per se to show how capital punishment (as trope and figure) was configured in larger cultural narratives or national mythologies dramatizing the confrontation between the citizen-subject and sovereign authority.
Chapter 4 signals a shift in focus. It not only turns to questions of evidentiary value in death penalty debates but looks at courtroom discourse and concentrates on the work of a single author. Hawthorne, I argue, presents a particularly interesting case study; for while he makes explicit statements against the gallows in several early tales, he draws upon the logic of capital punishment in complicated (at times, contradictory) ways in each of his major romances. In particular, the chapter explores the complex plotting of death sentences and figural executions through a cross-examination of The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and two famous capital trials that likely influenced its composition: the infamous 1830 “Salem murder,” which took place in Hawthorne’s hometown; and the even more infamous 1850 “Boston tragedy,” which transpired in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Hawthorne was writing The House of the Seven Gables. Through his cross-examination, I show how Hawthorne, on the one hand, constructs a literary counterargument to such legal narratives of guilt based on probability and circumstantial evidence, while, on the other, he resolves the crime romance by approximating the violence of capital punishment through what I call the literary execution of Judge Pyncheon.
Whereas chapter 4 examines Hawthorne’s work in terms of two notorious criminal trials as they played out in legal courtrooms, chapter 5 revisits Melville’s in light of the 1842 Somers affair—a notorious military case involving a triple execution at sea—as it dramatically unfolded in the court of public opinion. One of two famous cases that promoted death penalty debate in New York in the early 1840s, the Somers affair again attracted public interest in the late 1880s, when the controversy in a postbellum context resurged in New York (and across the nation) as Melville wrote Billy Budd between 1886 and 1891. My examination of Melville’s work is further complicated by reading it against that of Slidell MacKenzie, the commander who authorized the Somers executions and who had written extensively about two executions he witnessed in two popular travel narratives published in the 1830s. This chapter differs from earlier ones in its attention to relations of authority behind the law rather than primarily considering the citizen and criminal subject before it. Moreover, the chapter attends to a Civil War and postwar context of military executions and examines what I call the Republican justification for capital punishment, a political argument to be associated with the (emerging) Republican Party and the widespread use of military executions carried out by the Lincoln administration during the Civil War. Moving as it does from White-Jacket, a Democratic reform novel of the 1850s, to Billy Budd, a work produced in post-Reconstruction America, the chapter provides a brief cultural history of capital punishment from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, thus paving the way for my concluding chapter.
If chapter 1 surveys the controversy over capital punishment in antebellum literature and law broadly defined, chapter 6 concludes this volume by examining the complexities of that controversy almost a century later in a single work, An American Tragedy. It begins, however, with an analysis of sovereign authority and social responsibility in Dreiser’s “Nigger Jeff” (first written in 1895), whose extralegal execution scene provides a foil against which I read Dreiser’s representation of the criminal justice system and the modern institution of capital punishment in An American Tragedy. In doing so, I show how the novel dramatizes a fundamental disjunction between sovereignty and responsibility in the modern administration of lawful death, one that assumes absolute sovereignty over its condemned citizens while endlessly deferring responsibility for those supreme acts of authority. The chapter develops this argument by cross-examining An American Tragedy with Clarence Darrow’s famous summation in the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case and his arguments against the death penalty later that year in a widely publicized debate, “Is Capital Punishment a Wise Policy?” It concludes by reading the novel against a law professor’s 1927 prize-winning essay on the novel for a contest sponsored by Dreiser’s publishers and in light of Darrow’s long-forgotten An Eye for an Eye (1905), the first American novel written solely for the purpose of protesting capital punishment.
Ending with Dreiser (and Darrow), my book concludes where two earlier studies on capital punishment and the twentieth-century American novel essentially begin: a reading of An American Tragedy in terms of what David Guest, in Sentenced to Death, calls the “execution novel,” a novel that tells “the story of a life that leads to the gallows (or to the electric chair, the gas chamber, the firing squad, or the injection table)” and participates in a “discourse that enables both capital punishment and the criminal justice system.”68 While sharing some of Guest’s concerns and strategies in my study of American literature over the long nineteenth century, I go beyond telling “the story of a life that leads to the gallows” to show how the works I examine were shaped by or helped shape the (extra) legal movement to abolish capital punishment during this transformative period in American history. In an epilogue that brings the book to a close, I reflect on nineteenth-century literature and the death penalty in an early twentieth-century transatlantic context and in terms of the contemporary situation in which the United States, once a leader in the fight to end capital punishment, is now among the very last Western nations still to impose it. But it is with America’s progressive anti-gallows politics in the early nineteenth century that Literary Executions begins.
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