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xi PREFACE “What Follies and Monstrous Barbarities” • I n 1841, fourteen years before he would announce himself to the world as the no-holds Bard of All Things, young Walter Whitman began plying the rough-and-tumble world of New York’s newspaper scene with gritty articles depicting life in the Big Bad City. Competing against some pretty hot pens, Whitman was always on the prowl for characters and situations that might help distinguish his writings from those of his competitors. Like most antebellum hipsters in and around New York City, Whitman was attuned to the city’s exploding appetite for crime stories and its infinite hunger for news of hangings, and so he “reported murders for the Tattler and wrote police and coroner’s stories for the Sun,” two of the city’s new rip-roaring experiments in mass-mediated titillation. In 1845 Whitman waded into the city’s cantankerous debates about the death penalty with a blistering faux-dialogue published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, a trend-setting journal, one of Whitman’s regular outlets, and a hotbed of antigallows activism that was founded and edited by John L. O’Sullivan, the most famous death penalty abolitionist of the era. The dialogue involves two figures, “the imposing majesty of xii Preface the people” and “a pallid, shivering convict”; their topic of conversation is “that part of our laws which expects to abolish wrong-doing by sheer terror —by cutting off the wicked, and taking no heed of the causes of wickedness .” The convict announces that the philosophy underwriting these laws is based on “exquisite nonsense”; by the end of the article, Whitman switches back to his own voice and laments how, when thinking about the death penalty, “my soul is filled with amazement, indignation and horror.” Like their fellow antebellum death penalty abolitionists, both the convict and Whitman are particularly lathered up about the role of prominent Calvinists—like the Reverend George B. Cheever, to whom I turn below in detail—in promoting hangings. And so Whitman confesses that “when I go by a church, I cannot help thinking whether its walls do not sometimes echo, ‘Strangle and kill in the name of God!’ . . . ‘O, Bible,’ say I, ‘what follies and monstrous barbarities are defended in thy name!’” In the antebellum death penalty debates considered herein, as in so many other respects as well, Whitman was almost magically representative of the age, for as we shall see in this second volume of Executing Democracy, to argue about capital punishment in antebellum America meant that you were also arguing about the Lord and his contested roles in governing the world’s biggest, most rollicking, sex-crazed, violence-drenched, and God-fearing republic of democracy-loving sinners and utopian dreamers.1 In Executing Democracy I offer a two-volume rhetorical history of public debates about crime, violence, and both corporeal and capital punishment in America. Volume 1 began in 1683, when William Penn first struggled to rule the rowdy indentured servants, impoverished immigrants, and bound laborers of Philadelphia; volume 2 ends in 1843, at the close of one of the nation’s most heated periods of debate regarding executions, just two years before Whitman would excoriate those who called for hangings while “taking no heed of the causes of wickedness.” I argued in volume 1, and contend here in volume 2, that crime, violence, and punishment are not peripheral issues triggered by aberrant behaviors but central components of how our society has functioned ever since the first European settlers ventured to the New World. As my subtitle suggests, studying the history of capital punishment amounts to an opportunity for revising some of our core notions about the making of America. To prove this thesis, I have offered two thematically linked, chronologically Preface xiii ordered, yet methodologically different books. Volume 1 consisted of an introduction and four chapters examining public debates from 1683 to 1807. Those materials offered a sweeping macrohistorical overview of how questions of crime, violence, and punishment influenced the settling of the New World, the eventual American Revolution, and the frantic political scrambling following the Revolution to establish the norms that would govern the New Republic. Within that broad historical train of events, debates about crime, violence, and punishment helped colonials and then Americans to focus their thinking regarding six key themes: identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, religion and modernity, race and slavery, and the Enlightenment and democracy. Volume...

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