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36 Introduction But if they murder, rob or steal when there, Then straightaway hang’d, the Laws are so severe; For by the Rigour of that very law They’re much kept under and to stand in awe. First published in England in 1725, Revel’s account was widely distributed for the next seventy-five years, standing along with Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders as one of the eighteenth century’s most popular cautionary tales regarding the difficulties and dilemmas of leading a life of crime. But whereas Revel’s account portrayed the threat of the gallows as a viable form of deterrence, as a spectacle used to keep servants “in awe,” Moll Flanders encountered criminals either so hardened that they welcomed executions or so daft that they couldn’t care less when it was their turn to hang. In one particularly creepy scene Moll speaks with a woman scheduled for hanging: Well says I, and are you thus easy? Ay, says she, I can’t help myself, what signifies being sad? If I am hang’d there’s an End of me, says she, and away she turns Dancing, and Sings as she goes the following Piece of Newgate wit, If I swing by the String, I shall hear the Bell ring. And then there’s an End of poor Jenny.44 As I demonstrate again and again in the work that follows, as portrayed in Jenny’s death dance, and as witnessed in the gallows performance of Wilemon and Smith in 1737, Revel’s “stand[ing] in awe” of the gallows was not matched by many of his fellow criminals. In fact, time and time again we find those sentenced to die, witnesses at hangings, and other commentators observing that the threat or even imminent practice of capital punishment left them unimpressed. This point received much attention in 1793 in William Bradford’s Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania, where he observed that “the prospect of death can be no restraint to the wretch whose life is of so little account, and who willingly risks it to better his condition.” A similar critique of the death penalty as a deterrent was raised in 1828 in On The Punishment of Death and The Means of Preventing Crime, where the anonymous “A Very Hard Choice” 37 author observed that “criminals accustomed in a long career of guilt to stifle all reflection and compunction” will never be deterred by the threat of executions because “they have never viewed it [life] as a prelude and preparative to another, or perceived the eternal consequences involved in their exit from the world.” Thus, “the assumption that a reprobate apprehends death as the greatest punishment, betrays an equal ignorance of human nature generally, and recorded cases of fact.” This argument was repeated seven years later by Arthur Caverno in his 1835 anti-deathpenalty Sermon on the Subject of Abolishing Capital Punishment, and then again the following year in Thomas Upham’s Manual of Peace, where we are told that “the most hardened villains” do not fear death, for they have seen that “in a mere moment of time, the consciousness . . . is extinct, and the suffering actually endured is not worth naming.”45 These arguments were summarized and popularized in the late 1830s and early 1840s by John O’Sullivan, perhaps the most famous death penalty abolitionist of the antebellum period (and thus one of the central characters in volume 2). In his canonical “Report on the Subject of Capital Punishment” from 1841, O’Sullivan observed that factory workers, sailors, soldiers, and hard drinkers all engage in activities surely bound to lead to bodily harm if not death, yet such men are in no short supply and happily manifest “a disregard of life the most reckless.” Much like factory workers, sailors, soldiers, and hard drinkers, O’Sullivan argues, criminals with few prospects of economic advancement, little regard for their lives, and few entangling dependents to moderate their behavior have no reason to fear the death penalty. Bradford, Caverno, Upham, the anonymous author of On the Punishment of Death, O’Sullivan, and a host of their fellow abolitionists thus argued, in contrast to Revel’s ballad and Hamilton’s hope, that the death penalty was not feared by those members of society—like Catherine Smith, Henry Wilemon, Isaac Bradford, and Joseph Beven—who were already predisposed to live dangerously and who...

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