Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [47]
Yet, as Myra Glenn has pointed out, whipping had its defenders; and they sometimes claimed it was anything but humiliating. Jefferson Davis insisted that sailors preferred to be whipped; it was a “manly” form of punishment; it tested a sailor’s power to grit his teeth and take pain.53 In 1839, naval officer Uriah P. Levy, commanding the Vandalia, tried to get rid of corporal punishment. Instead, he made drunken seamen wear a black wooden bottle around their necks; petty thieves wore a badge proclaiming their crime. One sixteen-year-old mess boy was strapped to a gun, and tar and parrot feathers were applied to his rear end. For these throwbacks to colonialism, Levy was charged with “scandalous and cruel conduct” and court-martialed.54
Whipping survived, then, in these small private despotism, and wherever the alternative (imprisonment) was inefficient or disruptive. After all, a sailor locked in the brig was of no use to the ship. It survived also in the more feudal, backward areas—the South, very notably. A slave in jail picked no cotton. It survived also, for some reason, in the tiny border state of Delaware—along with the ancient shaming modes of punishment. Thus, in the 1820s, a person found guilty of stealing a check or a bill of exchange in Delaware had to make restitution, suffer a public whipping, and, in addition, wear for six months a “Roman T, not less than four inches long and one inch wide, of a scarlet colour, on the outside of the outermost garment, upon the back, between the shoulders, so as at all times to be fully exposed to view, for a badge of his or her crime.” A robber had to wear a scarlet R; and a forger, a scarlet F, “at least six inches long and two inches wide.”55 But where corporal punishment lacked support from the social context, it was denounced as barbaric and replaced by more impersonal, scientific, “modern” forms—notably, the great penitentiaries.
PRIVATIZING DEATH
In the nineteenth century, corrections went private. The walled-off penitentiary replaced the pillory and the whipping post; and most states abolished the public festival of hanging. The ideas that brought about this change were probably not unrelated to the ideas that, consciously or unconsciously, underlay the attack upon whipping.
Hanging, at the time of the Revolution, was a major spectacle, a dramatic show. When Bathsheba Spooner was hung in July 1778 in the town of Worcester, Massachusetts (she may have been the only woman ever executed in the state after independence), an “immense throng of people” gathered, “many of whom had come a great distance.” The Reverend Thaddeus McCarty delivered a sermon in the presence of Mrs. Spooner and her fellow conspirators, who were also about to die. Mrs. Spooner was “carried in a chaise,” in a solemn procession. A terrific thunderstorm “darkened the heavens.” An “awful” half hour followed: “The loud shouts of the officers ... ‘make way, make way,’ the horses pressing upon those in front, the shrieks of women in the confusion and tumult; the malefactors slowly advancing to the fatal tree, preceded by the dismal coffins ... fierce corruscations [sic] of lightning ... loud peals of thunder ... a dreadful scene of horror.”56 The crowd at an execution in Cooperstown, New York, in 1827 was so dense that a viewing stand gave way; two people were killed. In the same year, when Jesse Strang was hung in Albany, the crowd was estimated at between thirty and forty thousand.57
These spectacles were not, however, destined to last. Hangings, starting in the middle 1830s, were gradually withdrawn from the bloodshot eyes of the vulgar. The New York law of 1835 ordered executions to be “inflicted