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211 CONCLUSION Capital Punishment and the Dilemmas of Antebellum Modernity • I n 1852 Herman Melville published one of his strangest books, Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Apparently intended to be a best-selling romance novel, something went so wrong that the Boston Post railed that “the amount of utter trash” in the novel was “almost infinite.” The Albion chastised the work as a “crazy rigmarole.” The book is indeed an odd affair, including rambling passages suggesting incest, a sensational jail-cell suicide, page upon page of cranky philosophizing, and a heartbreaking critique of the early stages of the culture industry, all wrapped up in Melville’s gloomy skepticism and haywire allegorical imagery. It is never clear what Melville believes in, or longs for, but it is painfully evident what he finds worthy of condemnation—as is often the case in his later writings, organized religion comes in for particularly rough handling. In this regard, Melville’s contempt for the church makes John O’Sullivan’s 1843 “The Gallows and the Gospel” essay appear mild. For example, Melville takes us to lower Manhattan to observe “a rather singular and ancient edifice, a relic of more primitive times.” Because of the skepticism practiced by O’Sullivan and the more secular of his abolitionist allies, the church has 212 Conclusion lost members at such an alarming rate that it can no longer function; when the “good old clergyman” who has been leading the church passes away, the “venerable merchants and accountants” who constitute the church’s elite make a momentous decision. Because “the building could no longer be efficiently devoted to its primitive purpose,” they conclude that “it must be divided into stores; cut into offices; and given for a roost for the gregarious lawyers.” And so Melville chronicles the same historical passing that haunts the Reverend George B. Cheever and his executionist allies: Protestant glory has fallen into capitalist hubbub, God-worshipping architectural grandeur has given way to a Mammon-worshipping warren of offices divided into so many anonymous work stations, and theological erudition has given way to loudmouthed lawyers, that newly professionalized class of urban obfuscators characterized by Charles Sellers as “the shock troops of capitalism.” Whereas O’Sullivan welcomed this shift away from the trappings of the Old World’s “ancient” and “relic”-driven life, for Melville, as for Cheever, this is a deeply unsettling transformation, for it marks life’s descent into endless ambiguity and cheerful greed. Whereas Melville seemed to believe that artistic genius could somehow help to salvage the nation from this crass fate, and while O’Sullivan, Horace Greeley, and their allies believed the Enlightenment mandated a national ascent to greatness driven by Jacksonian Democrats, Cheever and his oldschool allies were convinced that the gallows was part of the last line of defense against modernity’s chaos. In placing their hopes in hangings, decried by abolitionists as another “relic of more primitive times,” executionists were obviously wrong, yet we should not lose sight of the fact that antebellum modernity struck them, as it did Melville, as nothing less than a catastrophe.1 One of the many complexities of modernity in America, however, is that while its new means of political participation, media production, consumer choices, and intellectual skepticism may have seemed to Cheever and other traditionalists to have spawned a new world of despicable devils and decadent Democrats—recall Cheever’s seething line about the permanently misbehaving “children of disobedience”—it also coincided with awesome new regimes of social control. The factories, courts, shops, social clubs, reformist societies, and public schools that fueled antebellum modernity all shared a commitment to bodily regimentation and behavioral conformity that, more than any moralizing thumping from the pulpit, taught midcentury Americans how to control themselves and Capital Punishment and Modernity 213 act like well-tempered Protestants. In fact, at the close of Violent Death in the City, his examination of crime and violence in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, Roger Lane offers this remarkable conclusion: “The data strongly support the thesis that the decline in violently reckless behavior was a product of the discipline demanded by the Industrial Revolution and taught in the classrooms, on the railroads, and in the factories and offices of nineteenth century America.” In short, the same modernizing forces that Cheever and his allies saw as the engines of catastrophe were also doing the disciplinary work the church had aspired to fulfill but had failed to accomplish. Talk of God may not...

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