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Antebellum American Literature and Capital Punishment Haunted by the Gallows One 1 The gallows haunted American literature during the 1840s, looming horri fically as a sinister presence in the pages of a wide spectrum of texts. From ominous gothic tales to sentimental didactic stories, from doggerel lines of popular ballad verse to the refined prose of the sermons of the nation’s esteemed ministers, from cheap pamphlet fiction produced by newspaper publishers and editors to multivolume novels crafted by the most reputable of authors, the terrifying wooden structure used to execute condemned criminals by hanging cast its long shadow over American literary works regardless of genre, quality, and forms of production. Two starkly different tales, both published in 1843, are useful initial illustrations of this literary haunting. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s postapocalyptic fantasy “The New Adam and Eve” imagines a new beginning for civilization, wherein a new Adam and Eve survey the ruins of antebellum Boston. When the couple comes across a prison and strolls about the yard, Adam finds himself standing “beneath a structure of the simplest contrivance, yet altogether unaccountable to him.” The narrator describes the structure further: “It consists merely of two upright posts, supporting a transverse beam, from which dangles a cord.” Neither Adam nor Eve can fathom the device’s use, but it affects them nonetheless; Adam “shudder[s] with a nameless horror,” and Eve announces that her “heart is sick.” Their world is diminished by the existence of this object: “There 2 c h a p t e r o n e seems to be no more sky!—no more sunshine!” (752). The gallows makes a similarly startling appearance in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” when the maddened narrator tells readers of his discovery that the white mark upon his pet cat is “the representation of an object that I shudder to name . . . the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the Gallows!” (Poetry 603). While this narrator is motivated by quite different feelings from Hawthorne’s innocents, namely, the fear that his crimes will doom him to hanging, it is notable that the characters in each tale, both the pure and the corrupt, “shudder” at the sight of the gallows, the official mode of capital punishment in antebellum America. In these tales, Hawthorne and Poe, considered by twenty-first-century readers to be among the major writers of the nineteenth century, evoke the gallows as a figure of terror rather than a reassuring symbol of state justice, social order, or righteous punishment. This emphasis reflects a larger cultural anxiety in the United States about the institution of capital punishment in the 1840s, its employment , and its potentially negative effects on society that was the product of a burgeoning reform movement that sought ultimately to abolish the practice of capital punishment in the nation. Opposition to capital punishment had existed in the American colonies in the eighteenth century, but an organized movement grew in the decades following the Revolution as many Americans began to perceive the death penalty as a relic more appropriate to monarchical systems than to the new republic.1 The early voices against the use of the gallows in the new nation included such prominent figures as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and William Penn. During the first four decades of the nineteenth century, reformers became more organized, founding state and national associations that pursued various reforms in the practice of capital punishment, including decreasing the number of crimes that were considered capital and establishing penitentiaries so that long-term imprisonment could replace execution in many circumstances . By the middle of the 1830s, the anti-gallows activists began to achieve some of their greatest victories, as New England and the Middle Atlantic states began to end the practice of public execution and moved hangings behind prison walls. By the beginning of the 1840s, the reformers set their sights on the ultimate abolition of capital punishment in the United States and waged a full-fledged campaign, in state legislatures, in newspaper and periodical pages, and in church pulpits, to turn the public Haunted by the Gallows 3 against the practice of hanging criminals. Their arguments made a number of cases against capital punishment, including arguing that it failed as a deterrent to crime, that it was responsible for the execution of innocent people, that it was not biblically sanctioned, and that it was abused by oppressive governments. Amidst this debate between reformers and more conservative...

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