• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1821 0

Bodenhamer, The Pursuit of Justice: Crime and Law in Antebellum Indiana (1986), pp. 13-14. According to Bodenhamer, local courts and juries, even before this, refused to allow whipping in some instances; and in one case, where a local court in southwest Indiana ordered it, the citizens (so it was reported in the press) were “shocked by the shameful spectacle of a fellow citizen tied to a sign post and flogged like a dog.”

52 See, in general, Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (1984).

53 Glenn, Campaigns, p. 117.

54 Ibid., pp. 144-45.

55 Laws Del. 1820-1826, pp. 719, 720, 722.

56 John D. Lawson, ed., American State Trials, Vol. 2 (1914), p. 199.

57 Mackey, Hanging in the Balance, pp. 108-9.

58 Laws N.Y. 1835, chap. 258, p. 299.

59 Masur, Rites of Executions, p. 96.

60 Ibid., p. 100.

61 In one sense, executions did not go private at all. Later in the century, they were covered blow-by-blow by such organs as the National Police Gazette; and later still, by the “yellow journals.” On capital punishment toward the end of the century, see chapter 7.

62 Livingston, Complete Works, p. 34.

63 See Adam J. Hirsch, “From Pillory to Penitentiary: The Rise of Penal Incarceration in Early Massachusetts,” Michigan Law Review 80:1179 (1982); and The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (1992), especially chapter 3.

64 Code Va. 1849, Title 56, chap. 213, sec. 22, pp. 792-93.

65 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971), p. 71. For an account of the English experience, which was parallel to the American experience, see the fine study by Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1978).

66 Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary, p. 66.

67 Hindus, Prison and Plantation, p. 101; Massachusetts had abolished whipping, branding, the stocks, and the pillory in 1804. Recidivists were tattooed in prison; but this pratice was eliminated in 1829.

68 Quoted in Zebulon R. Brockway, Fifty Years of Prison Service: An Autobiography (1912; reprint ed., 1969), pp. 24-25.

69 Walker, Popular Justice, p. 49.

70 Dallas, Laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Vol. 2, 1781-1790, p. 802 (act of April 5, 1790); Bradley Chapin, “Felony Law Reform,” at 178.

71 Dallas, Laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Vol. 3, p. 773.

72 Hindus, Prison and Plantation, p. 163.

73 See Negley K. Teeters and John D. Shearer, The Prison at Philadelphia: Cherry Hill (1957).

74 Ibid., pp. 76-79

75 Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France (1833; reprint ed., 1964), p. 65.

76 Quoted in Francis C. Gray, Prison Discipline in America (1847; reprint ed., 1973), p. 40.

77 Report of William Crawford, Esq., on the Penitentiaries of the United States (1834; reprint ed., 1968), appendix, p. 2. This report was delivered to the House of Commons in England.

78 Report of William Crawford, appendix, p. 31.

79 Ibid., appendix, p. 24.

80 Laws Mass. 1828, chap. 118, sec. 14, 15.

81 Report of William Crawford, appendix, p. 31.

82 Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; Penguin ed., 1972), pp. 146, 148.

83 Beaumont and De Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System, pp. 48-49.

84 Report of William Crawford, appendix, p. 126.

85 Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (1984), chap. 2.

86 Jack K. Williams, Vogues in Villainy (1959), p. 118; Acts So. Car., 1828, chap. 10, p. 22; 1831, chap. 21, p. 45.

87 Hindus, Prison and Plantation, p. 101.

88 On this point, see Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, chap. 1.

89 Ibid., p. 73.

90 Hindus, Prison and Plantation, p. 203.

91 Ibid., 169.

92 Dickens, American Notes, p. 150.

CHAPTER 4. POWER AND ITS VICTIMS

1 See Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967); Vt. Const. 1777, chap. 1, sec. 244; Alexander Dallas, Laws of the