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1 CHAPTER ONE The Second Great Awakening and the “Grotesque Sublime” of Antebellum America • There the law stands all ghastly and bloody! —Charles Spear, Essays on the Punishment of Death T he winter and spring of 1843 found politically minded New Yorkers in an uproar. While the pros and cons of Texas annexation, Martin Van Buren’s anticipated return from oblivion to presidential contention , possible war with Britain over Oregon, the “cold water” frenzy of temperance, the fate of slavery, and the rowdy radicalism of local workingmen ’s associations were all prominent in the news, some of the most passionate arguments in the local papers, oyster bars, and churches concerned hanging, for John L. O’Sullivan, the young cosmopolitan Democrat who edited the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and George B. Cheever, the right Reverend of Calvinist orthodoxy, had launched the new year with three evenings of heated and sometimes acrimonious debate regarding the death penalty. Held before standing-room-only crowds in the immense Tabernacle Church on the corner of 34th and Broadway 2 Chapter One on the last Friday night in January and two of the first three Friday nights of February, the debates quickly became a cause célèbre complete with a corresponding culture war carried out in the city’s leading papers, the nation’s best magazines, and pulpits everywhere. Charles Spear’s gothic charge—“There the law stands all ghastly and bloody!”—in which the law looms before the reader, blood-soaked and horrific, points toward two of the central questions of the debate: What is the function of law in a democracy? And what is the relationship between law and violence? Like Benjamin Rush, William Bradford, and the Revolutionary- and Federal-era reformers addressed in volume 1, Spear and his antebellum abolitionist colleagues approached these questions via a focused query: can democracy coexist with hangings? Spear’s graphic answer to this question, while perhaps striking twenty-first-century readers as overwrought, is typical of the rhetoric of the debates considered in this book. For example, we may gather a sense of the main points and measure the rhetorical severity of the arguments involved by considering R. H. Bacon’s “The Law of Blood,” a poem published in the midst of the O’Sullivan versus Cheever debates. Stanza one depicts “pagan lands” where “Superstition’s rod” and “rites accursed” combine; “There human gore drenches the steeping sod!” There “the Priest on high / Lifts up his reeking hands that Heaven may bless / The smoke of sacrifice which dims the sky.” In this premodern land of superstition and sacrifice, “Truth has not poured her bright and piercing ray” to “drive away / The mists and clouds that hide her glorious day.” Stanza two transports readers away from the horrors of there to “our own shores, the boasted land of light,” where we expect the Enlightenment and republicanism to have directed citizens toward “the true worship.” Yet even “here man heedeth not the Right,” as “the tree of blood”—a gallows—is guarded by “Priests [who] stand by, to bless the horrid crime.” The poem ends in a bitter lament that typifies the tone of some of the abolitionists who joined the debates: “Oh! may the time / Come swiftly, when the sacred Book of God / Is read aright with all its truths sublime!” Bacon’s “The Law of Blood” thus asks: Is America a land of enlightened modernity or “pagan” “rites accursed”? Shall America follow the benevolent precepts of the New Testament or the merciless “smoke of sacrifice” called for in the Old Testament? Will America mature into a gentle republican land of “true worship,” or will it muddle along like some brutal Old World monarchy where the death penalty’s “human gore drenches the steeping sod”?1 The Second Great Awakening 3 These questions highlight the broad contours of one of antebellum America’s most passionately argued political battles. Indeed, the debates regarding capital punishment in New York prompted a series of parallel arguments about how Americans understood democracy and justice, the relationship between church and state, and ultimately the nature of modernity itself. Moreover, because these issues emerged precisely as the nation was undergoing a series of dramatic transformations in the markets , technologies, and practices of mass communication, they became entwined in the period’s concerns about persuasion and argumentation. I thus frame the death penalty debates addressed here as windows onto the political and cultural dynamics of what I...

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