In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

270 Notes The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 135–161. 37. Scott, From Office to Profession, 38; Scott observes that by 1800 “the overwhelming majority of the established clergy, especially in Connecticut and Massachusetts, was a Federalist clergy” (p. 24)—before serving in Philadelphia, Annan had been stationed in Boston, where, given the evidence considered here, he likely supported this linkage between Calvinism and Federalism. 38. PHILOCHORAS, no title, Pennsylvania Mercury, and Universal Advertiser (2 October 1788): 2–3, quotation from 2; Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, & the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 49, 48, 32; on the philosophical background to Jefferson’s use of the phrase, see Wills, Inventing America, 181–192. 39. John Trumbull, M’Fingal: A Modern Epic Poem in Four Cantos (1776), as reprinted in The Satiric Poems of John Trumbull, ed. Edwin T. Bowden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 155. 40. Rush to Belknap, 7 October 1788, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1:490; along with the King James version that Rush quotes, similar passages occur in the New Standard Revised Edition in John 3:17, Mathew 20:28, and Mark 10:45, which may be found in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, pages 132, 38, and 78 of the New Testament (thanks to Martin Medhurst, Bob Ivie, and Jennifer Mercieca for helping me locate these passages); see pages 190–191 for a timeline of the give-and-take between Rush and Annan; all citations herein indicate page numbers from the pamphlet version of Rush’s 1792 Considerations. 41. A citizen of Maryland, “An Oration Intended to Have Been Spoken at a Late Commencement, on the Unlawfulness and Impolicy of Capital Punishments, and the Proper Means of Reforming Criminals,” American Museum (January 1790): 7–8; (February 1790), 69–71; (March 1790), 135–137; and (April 1790), 135– 137; quotations from Jan., p. 7. Feb., pp. 70, 71, and April, p. 195—I wonder if this was Rush, for the title is similar to his later works, and the prose is consistent with his earlier essay on slavery. The paper followed this series of essays by reprinting an October 1791 letter from a “faithful friend” to Rush, wherein the author (my colleague Greg Goodale believes it is Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson) says that she has “often read, with congenial feelings of humanity, many of your tracts, and others, on the abolishing of sanguinary punishments” (“Letter from a Lady in Montgomery County,” American Museum [November 1791]: 215). 42. On the senior Bradford’s coffeehouse see Carl Bridenbaugh and Jessica Bridenbaugh , Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin (New York: Galaxy Books, 1965), 22, and Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and Notes 271 the Origins of the American Revolution (1979; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 194; the list of the younger Bradford’s classmates and the “popping” quotation are from Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early Republic, 1788–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 81 and 673. 43. William Bradford, An Enquiry How Far the Punishment of Death is Necessary in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1793); and see Davidson, Revolution and the Word, regarding these tensions between different modes of argument. 44. Bradford repeats his celebrations of Beccaria and Montesquieu on pages 20, 44, 51, 53, 54, and 69. 45. Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, 67; see my comments on Barlow’s speech and “The Grand Constitution” above; Zdzislaw Mach, “National Anthems: The Case of Chopin as a National Composer,” in Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (New York: Berg, 1997), 61–62; on this relationship between nationalism and nations, see Branham and Hartnett, Sweet Freedom’s Song, 16–27, and (for a later period) Eric Hobsbawm’s chapter “Building Nations” in The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975; New York: Vintage, 1996), 82–97. 46. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on The Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7; as numerous observers have argued, this “magic” is often toxic, as seen in my Democratic Dissent, 93–131, where antebellum nationalism underwrites war and the expansion of slavery; for an overview, see Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); for an exception to this argument, see Thomas Paine’s “Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet” (1793), where he argues that...

Share