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5. Doing Time: The Cannon, the Clock, and Civil War Prisons
- University of Georgia Press
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5 DOING TIME The Cannon, the Clock, and Civil War Prisons Dick Turner, the warden of Libby Prison, “seemed an excellent disciplinarian. Everything went like clockwork. We knew what to expect or rather what not to expect, and when.” union prisoner homer b. sprague “Indolence,” Dorothea Dix maintained, “opened the portal . . . to vice and crime” and thus threatened to disrupt the desired industrious nature of antebellum society by undermining order and damaging the country’s republican fabric. Not only did criminals waste their own time, but their crimes resulted in “the loss of time of officers and others, in pursuing and arresting criminals.”1 Because criminals served time for using time unwisely, antebellum penitentiaries attempted to rehabilitate offenders by inculcating appropriate habits. While some southern penitentiaries embraced these systems, the racial situation in the South complicated criminal prosecution. Slavery forced the creation of two discrete systems of punishment because in most cases, the hierarchical relationship between blacks and whites prohibited equal treatment under the law. Consequently, state penitentiaries largely housed white criminals, while planters and the plantation system dealt with the majority of black criminals. Both systems, however, functioned in multiple times determined by God, nature, and the clock. In the antebellum era, society sought to rehabilitate criminals by forcing them to abandon their idleness and sloth and to substitute habits of labor, industry, and thrift. The clock was the mechanism for achieving this 89 90 Chapter Five transformation, and the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems were the ways in which it was to be implemented. Adopted in New York, New Hampshire, Arkansas, and Maryland, among other places, the Auburn system required prisoners to sleep alone and work together during the day in complete silence. Day labor, advocates argued, drove idleness from the prisoner and substituted habits of industry. Silence permitted the blending of labor and solitude. It extended evening reflection into the daytime while engaging the body as well as the mind in industry.2 In contrast, the Pennsylvania system did not require complete silence. The Pittsburgh and Eastern State penitentiaries required inmates, “men of idle habits, vicious propensities, and depraved passions,” to be kept in solitary confinement and, for the first week of their imprisonment, forced idleness. Such deprivation was intended to encourage convicts to face their crimes, develop distain for indolence, and prevent its spread through contact with other idlers. Advocates believed that the “want of occupation . . . produce[d] feelings of tedium or irksomeness—the state of mind in which labor or employment . . . appear[ed] to the convict—perhaps for the first time in his life, as a means of preventing uneasy feelings, or producing relief and pleasure.” Inmates learned that labor was more pleasant than idleness, developed “a voluntary habit of labor,” and became “inured to habits of industry,” thus permitting them to reenter society as productive members.3 While the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems assumed that inmates could be rehabilitated into industrious members of society, the southern criminal system functioned on a different level. Whites were worthy of rehabilitation and generally found it in state penitentiaries. (In South Carolina, local jails and lockups rehabilitated white criminals.) Considered indolent and innately depraved, blacks were beyond true rehabilitation. They could however, be forced to embrace habits of industry, order, and time discipline.4 For some slaves, the inculcation of these values came with incarceration in state penitentiaries. On May 13, 1848, a slave identified only as Louis was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Another slave, Lucinda, received a life sentence at the same institution on May 9, 1852, for the crime of attempted poisoning. Still another slave, Lewis, received life for the crime of arson and began his sentence on September [3.88.185.100] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:28 GMT) Doing Time 91 27, 1852. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, slaves, like other inmates nationwide, lived life according to the clock.5 The majority of slaves, however, did not serve jail time. Because slaves did not own their time, any incarceration cost masters valuable labor. Consequently , most slaves remained, were punished, and were forced to inculcate habits of industry on southern plantations, where clock-regulated horns and bells measured time and where planters punished slaves who violated the clock’s aural authority. “Planters preferred whipping to incarceration because the lash did not generally lead to an extended loss of the slave’s labor.” In short, “whipping persisted in the South because the cost of substituting hunger and incarceration for...