In this Book

  • Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment
  • Book
  • Paul C. Jones
  • 2011
  • Published by: University of Iowa Press
buy this book Buy This Book in Print
summary

 In Against the Gallows, Paul Christian Jones explores the intriguing cooperation of America’s writers—including major figures such as Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Herman Melville—with reformers, politicians, clergymen, and periodical editors who attempted to end the practice of capital punishment in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. In an age of passionate reform efforts, the antigallows movement enjoyed broad popularity, waging its campaign in legislatures, pulpits, newspapers, and literary journals.

 
Although it failed in its ultimate goal of ending hangings across the United States, the movement did achieve various improvements in the practices of the justice system, including reducing the number of capital crimes, eliminating public executions in most northern states, and abolishing capital punishment completely in three states.
 
Although a few historians have studied the antebellum movement against capital punishment, until now very little attention has been paid to the role of America’s writers in these efforts. Jones’s study recovers the relationship between the nation’s literary figures and the movement against the death penalty, illustrating that the editors of literary journals actively encouraged and published antigallows writing, that popular crime novelists created a sympathy toward criminals that led readers to question the state’s justifications for capital punishment, that poets crafted verse that advocated strongly for Christian sympathy for criminals that coincided with an antipathy to the death penalty, and that female sentimental writers fashioned melodramatic narratives that illustrated the injustice of the hanging and reimagined the justice system itself as a sympathetic subject capable of incorporating compassion into its workings and seeing reform rather than revenge as its ends.

Table of Contents

restricted access Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Frontmatter
  2. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Contents
  2. p. vii
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. ix-x
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Chapter One | Haunted by the Gallows: Antebellum American Literature and Capital Punishment
  2. pp. 1-33
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Chapter Two | The Politics of Poetry: The Democratic Review and Anti-Gallows Verse in 1840s America
  2. pp. 34-64
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Chapter Three | The American Newgate Novel: Amtebellum Crime Fiction and Anti-Gallows Sympathy
  2. pp. 65-94
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Chapter Four | Walt Whitman’s Anti-Gallows Writing: The Appeal to Christian Sympathy
  2. pp. 95-122
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Chapter Five | Women’s Anti-Gallows Writing: The Sentimental Strategy of E.D.E.N. Southworth
  2. pp. 134-159
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Chapter Six | Herman Melville’s Billy Budd: The Legacy of Antebellum Anti-Gallows Literature
  2. pp. 160-181
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 183-203
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 205-222
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 223-230
  3. restricted access
    • Download PDF Download
Back To Top

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.