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Conclusion: THe Haning of John M'Kean and the Perils of Sinning in an Age of Reason
- Michigan State University Press
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206 Chapter Four shrieks pierce the skies—they tear their hair—the powers of nature are exhausted—they faint. And must he suffer? Rise, Humanity! Rise, Justice ! Rise, Policy! Rescue the unhappy man from destruction. Complete with dashes, exclamation points, crying babes, bereaved wives, shrieks of terror, a man begging for mercy, appeals to Humanity! Justice! and Policy! and the presumed ending of it all in a twitching body dangling from a rope, this dynamic passage amounts to a primer in sentimental prose. Foregoing high philosophical and theological reasoning, the passage drags readers into the subject position I characterized earlier as “spectatorial sympathy,” asking them not so much to think about hangings as to imagine themselves being hanged, or as watching a loved one being turned off. It would be many years before this sentimental strategy became culturally dominant, yet it is not difficult to imagine readers reeling from this emotional imagery.41 But the debate was not yet exhausted, for even while Rush, Annan, and the Maryland citizen may have had their fill, 1793 found Pennsylvania ’s attorney general, William Bradford, leaping into the fray with An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania. Bradford came from one of Philadelphia’s elite families; his father was a well-known printer and public figure in the city’s lively pre-Revolutionary intellectual community. As a side venture to his printing duties, in 1754 he opened the London Coffee House at Front and Market Streets, described by the Bridenbaughs as “a general clearinghouse for business, news and gossip.” Bradford’s coffeehouse “had for sale tickets for concerts, plays, lectures and public events of all kinds”; when the Stamp Act crisis unfolded in 1765, Philadelphia’s newly formed Sons of Liberty met to discuss action in Bradford’s venue. William Bradford’s father was thus at the heart of the production of the public spaces and political movements required for Enlightenment culture to flourish (and which his son’s interlocutor, Annan, would later oppose). The younger Bradford sought his education at Princeton, where he befriended such future Revolutionary luminaries as James Madison, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Philip Freneau, and Aaron Burr; within a few semesters of Bradford’s graduation in 1772, Princeton was “popping with revolutionary ardor.” Bradford enlisted and saw action in the war, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before resigning in 1779 for reasons of health. By 1780 he had been named Pennsylvania’s attorney general (a position he would assume for Enlightenment, Republicanism, and Executions 207 President Washington in 1794, thus becoming the nation’s second attorney general, after Edmund Randolph). When the Rush and Annan debate hit the papers, Governor Thomas Mifflin asked Bradford to weigh in on the subject; as a longtime Philadelphian from the right class, the holder of impeccable revolutionary credentials, a powerful lawyer, and a leading member of the city’s Enlightenment literati, Bradford was the perfect choice for the job.42 Whereas Rush favored the Enlightenment line taken by Beccaria and Montesquieu, and hammered the idea that executions supported monarchy , he also spent considerable space addressing religious arguments; and whereas the Maryland citizen writes in often frantic sentences laden with emotions, Bradford makes it clear from as early as his title page and preface that he will not engage in such gestures. Indeed, while the title page includes an epigraph from Montesquieu, the second leaf of the preface (i.e., the “Advertisement”) announces that the pamphlet is an attempt “to collect the scattered rays which the juridical history of our own and other countries affords—and to examine how far the maxims of philosophy abide the test of experiment.” Bradford thus announces his high-minded political intentions by introducing his work with words coded with Enlightenment overtones, including rays (of understanding, knowledge, the light of reason, etc.), juridical history, examine, philosophy, and experiment, all of which suggest the progressive revelation of truth at the hands of science and law. The absence of religion is conspicuous; the avoidance of sentimental prose suggests what Philadelphia’s men of ruffles must have thought of the Maryland citizen’s emotional lines.43 Readers who skip the preface’s pointed declaration of principles are treated in the first paragraph to an even more explicit statement of Bradford ’s uncompromising allegiance to the Enlightenment. Blithely ignoring hundreds of years of controversy and debate, Bradford declares in the first sentence that “the general principles upon which penal laws ought to be...