The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America

CHAPTER 4. The Furnace at Sing Sing, 1828–1839

103 4 The Furnace at Sing Sing, 1828–1839 In 1829 Sing Sing Prison’s agent assaulted the resident chaplain and threw him out of the prison. The institution had no minister until a year later when a new head administrator took over. The new agent, Robert Wiltse, was also dubious about prison chaplains. In a report presented to the state legislature in 1834, Wiltse questioned the claims of inmate reformation boasted by prison ministers. “How much risk do they run of being deceived by hypocritical protestations?” he asked. Wiltse assured the legislature that “the hope once entertained of producing a general and radical reformation of offenders through a penitentiary system, is abandoned by the most intelligent philanthropists, who now think its chief benefit is the prevention of crime.” In order to suppress lawbreaking, Wiltse argued, “criminals must be made to submit through corporal punishment.” But chaplains’ support for this new approach could not be counted on. Ministers, with their naive notions of redeemable human nature, hoped for inmate reformation. With their unrealistic perspective on criminals, Wiltse argued, chaplains underestimated inmate depravity and therefore endangered institutional security.1 In the Auburn discipline—at least as its originators theorized it in the 1820s—chaplains played a vital role in maintaining prison order and encouraging inmate reformation. To be sure, some observers had expressed concerns about the details of this partnership between state officials and 104 The Furnace at Sing Sing Protestant ministers. Even those with hesitations, however, agreed that the Auburn system had a reforming aim and that religion was vital to achieving it. In the 1830s, especially at Sing Sing, this partnership fell apart. The new prison’s administrators, prompted by a host of new cultural concerns, recognized only two goals: prison order and profit were now the state’s highest interests. Inmate reformation, they argued, was neither possible nor an appropriate goal for the state to pursue. Sing Sing’s first chaplain was thrown out after he questioned the agent’s methods for achieving order and profit. The two men also disagreed about the possibility of inmate reformation. The chaplain’s dismissal, however, did not mean state officials no longer employed religion in their prison disciplines. Robert Wiltse’s career reveals that Sing Sing’s agents, instead, promoted a different sort of religion inside prison walls. The 1830s witnessed a debate over just what kind of religion—and therefore what sort of chaplains and forms of Protestant piety—would be welcomed in New York’s state prisons. It marked the beginning of a prison religion stripped of its Protestant particulars and focused on characteristics of American citizenship. Why Sing Sing? In the 1830s Sing Sing Prison served as a key site for debating American Protestantism’s public character. Several practical concerns and cultural factors shaped the contours of this debate. Built to replace the increasingly decrepit and constantly overcrowded Newgate, Sing Sing rivaled Philadelphia ’s newest institution, the massive Eastern State Penitentiary. They were the flagship institutions representing two sides in the ongoing prison discipline debate. Sing Sing represented the Auburn system of congregate labor, whereas Eastern embodied the Pennsylvania ideal of separate confinement. Other states modeled themselves on these East Coast examples. The institutional building spree stretched across the young nation. In the late 1820s, Maryland built a new prison on the Auburn plan, while Massachusetts reorganized its institution along similar lines. In the 1830s New Jersey, Ohio, Missouri, Vermont, and Michigan also built prisons. States officials as far away as Louisiana and Mississippi had plans for prison construction.2 Historians at least partly attribute this wave of prison construction to rising concerns about crime and disorder. Scholars disagree about what constituted crime in this period and whether it increased or declined. Certainly , the general public perceived that lawbreaking, whether perpetrated The Furnace at Sing Sing 105 by professional outlaws or the desperate poor, constituted a serious problem . Newspapers fueled the popular imagination, particularly the New York Sun, which ran a wildly popular column of “Police Reports” in the 1830s. Religious periodicals followed these trends closely, reminding readers that crime threatened the nation’s moral fabric. “Crimes and criminals multiply,” read an article in New York Evangelist. The editors supported prison construction but echoed a common Protestant refrain, “Religion alone, changing the fountain of human conduct, can effect real reform in the state of society.”3 Citizens increasingly fixated on a particular sort of lawbreaking, namely...